obituary
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Pablo Milanés, the Latin Grammy-winning balladeer who helped found Cuba’s “nueva trova” movement and toured the world as a cultural ambassador for Fidel Castro’s revolution, has died in Spain, where he had been under treatment for blood cancer. He was 79.
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One of the most internationally famous Cuban singer-songwriters, he recorded dozens of albums and hits like “Yolanda,” “Yo Me Quedo” (I’m Staying) and “Amo Esta Isla” (I Love This Island) during a career that lasted more than five decades.
“The culture in Cuba is in mourning for the death of Pablo Milanes,” Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz tweeted Monday night (Nov. 21). Milanés’ representatives issued a statement saying he had died early Tuesday in Madrid. In early November, he announced he was being hospitalized and canceled concerts.
Pablo Milanés was born Feb. 24, 1943, in the eastern city of Bayamo, in what was then Oriente province, the youngest of five siblings born to working-class parents. His musical career began with him singing in, and often winning, local TV and radio contests. His family moved to the capital and he studied for a time at the Havana Musical Conservatory during the 1950s, but he credited neighborhood musicians rather than formal training for his early inspiration, along with trends from the United States and other countries.
In the early ’60s he was in several groups including Cuarteto del Rey (the King’s Quartet), composing his first song in 1963: “Tu Mi Desengano,” (You, My Disillusion), which spoke of moving on from a lost love. “Your kisses don’t matter to me because I have a new love/to whom I promise you I will give my life,” the tune goes.
In 1970 he wrote the seminal Latin American love song “Yolanda,” which is still an enduring favorite everywhere from Old Havana’s tourist cafes to Mexico City cantinas. Spanish newspaper El Pais asked Milanés in 2003 how many women he had flirted with by saying they inspired the song. “None,” he responded, laughing. “But many have told me: ‘My child is the product of ‘Yolanda.’”
Milanés supported the 1959 Cuban Revolution but was nevertheless targeted by authorities during the early years of Fidel Castro’s government, when all manner of “alternative” expression was highly suspect. Milanés was reportedly harassed for wearing his hair in an afro, and was given compulsory work detail for his interest in foreign music.
Those experiences did not dampen his revolutionary fervor, however, and he began to incorporate politics into his songwriting, collaborating with musicians such as Silvio Rodríguez and Noel Nicola. The three are considered the founders of the Cuban “nueva trova,” a usually guitar-based musical style tracing to the ballads that troubadours composed during the island’s wars of independence. Infused with the spirit of 1960s American protest songs, the nueva trova uses musical storytelling to highlight social problems.
Milanés and Rodríguez in particular became close, touring the world’s stages as cultural ambassadors for the Cuban Revolution, and bonding during boozy sessions. “If Silvio Rodríguez and I got together, the rum was always there,” Milanés told El Pais in 2003. “We were always three, not two.”
Milanés was friendly with Castro, critical of U.S. foreign policy and for a time even a member of the communist government’s parliament. He considered himself loyal to the revolution and spoke of his pride at serving Cuba.
“I am a worker who labors with songs, doing in my own way what I know best, like any other Cuban worker,” Milanés once said, according to The New York Times. “I am faithful to my reality, to my revolution and the way in which I have been brought up.”
In 1973, Milanés recorded “Versos Sencillos,” which turned poems by Cuban Independence hero José Martí into songs. Another composition became a kind of rallying call for the political left of the Americas: “Song for Latin American Unity,” which praised Castro as the heir of Martí and South American liberation hero Simon Bolívar, and cast the Cuban Revolution as a model for other nations.
In 2006, when Castro stepped down as president due to a life-threatening illness, Milanés joined other prominent artists and intellectuals in voicing their support for the government. He promised to represent Castro and Cuba “as this moment deserves: with unity and courage in the presence of any threat or provocation.”
Yet he was unafraid to speak his mind and occasionally advocated publicly for more freedom on the island. In 2010 he backed a dissident hunger striker who was demanding the release of political prisoners. Cuba’s aging leaders “are stuck in time,” Milanés told Spanish newspaper El Mundo. “History should advance with new ideas and new men.”
The following year, as the island was enacting economic changes that would allow greater free-market activity, he lobbied for President Raul Castro to do more. “These freedoms have been seen in small doses, and we hope that with time they will grow,” Milanés told The Associated Press.
Milanés disagreed without dissenting, prodded without pushing, hewing to Fidel Castro’s notorious 1961 warning to Cuba’s intellectual class: “Within the Revolution, everything; outside the Revolution, nothing.”
“I disagree with many things in Cuba, and everyone knows it,” Milanés once said.
Ever political even when his bushy afro had given way to more conservatively trimmed, gray, thinning locks, in 2006 he contributed the song “Exodo” (Exodus), about missing friends who have departed for other lands, to the album “Somos Americans” (We Are Americans), a compilation of U.S. and Latin American artists’ songs about immigration.
Rodríguez and Milanés had a falling out in the 1980s for reasons that were unclear and were barely on speaking terms, though they maintained a mutual respect and Rodríguez collaborated musically with Milanés’ daughter. Milanés sang in the 1980′s album Amo esta isla that “I am from the Caribbean and could never walk on terra firma;” nevertheless, he divided most of his time between Spain and Mexico in later years.
By his own count he underwent more than 20 leg surgeries.
Milanés won two Latin Grammys in 2006 — best singer-songwriter album for “Como un Campo de Maiz” (Like a Cornfield) and best traditional tropical album for AM/PM, Lineas Paralelas (AM/PM, Parallel lines), a collaboration with Puerto Rican salsa singer Andy Montanez.
He also won numerous Cuban honors including the Alejo Carpentier medal in 1982 and the National Music Prize in 2005, and the 2007 Haydee Santamaria medal from the Casa de las Americas for his contributions to Latin American culture.
George Lois, the hard-selling, charismatic advertising man and designer who fashioned some of the most daring magazine images of the 1960s and popularized such catchphrases and brand names as “I Want My MTV” and “Lean Cuisine,” has died. He was 91.
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Lois’ son, the photographer Luke Lois, said he died “peacefully” Friday (Nov. 18) at his home in Manhattan.
Nicknamed the “Golden Greek” and later (to his displeasure) an “Original Mad Man,” George Lois was among a wave of advertisers who launched the “Creative Revolution” that jolted Madison Avenue and the world beyond in the late 1950s and ’60s. He was boastful and provocative, willing and able to offend, and was a master of finding just the right image or words to capture a moment or create a demand.
His Esquire magazine covers, from Muhammad Ali posing as the martyr Saint Sebastian to Andy Warhol sinking in a sea of Campbell’s tomato soup, defined the hyper spirit of the ’60s as much as Norman Rockwell’s idealized drawings for the Saturday Evening Post summoned an earlier era. As an ad man, he devised breakthrough strategies for Xerox and Stouffer’s and helped an emerging music video channel in the 1980s by suggesting ads featuring Mick Jagger and other rock stars demanding, with mock-petulance, “I Want My MTV!”
Lois boiled it down to what he called the “Big Idea,” crystallizing “the unique virtues of a product and searing it into people’s minds.” He was inducted into numerous advertising and visual arts halls of fame, and in 2008 his Esquire work was added to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Martin Scorsese, Tina Brown and Graydon Carter were among his admirers.
His legacy was vast, although the actual dimensions are disputed. His claims to developing the 1960s “I Want My Maypo” breakfast ads and to inspiring the creation of New York magazine have been widely contradicted. Some former Esquire colleagues would allege that he exaggerated his role at the expense of other contributors, such as Carl Fischer, who photographed many of the magazine’s famous covers. But his overpowering energy and confidence were well recorded.
In her memoir Basic Black, former USA Today publisher Cathie Black recalled bringing in Lois in the early 1980s to propose a new advertising approach for a publication that struggled at first over how to identify itself. Lois’ idea was to champion USA Today’s dual appeal as a newspaper and magazine, proposing the slogan, “A lot of people are saying USA Today is neither fish nor fowl. They’re right!” Before a gathering of the publication’s, including founder Al Neuharth, Lois gave an Oscar-worthy performance, Black wrote, “bounding in like a 6-foot-3 teenager hopped up on Red Bull.”
“He flung his jacket to the floor, tore off his tie, then flashed one prototype ad after another, prancing around the room and keeping up a running monologue sprinkled with jokes and profanity. It was epic, almost scary. I was thrilled. When he was finished, the room sat absolutely silent.” All eyes turned to Neuharth, who sat “absolutely still, his expression hidden behind his dark aviator glasses.” Neuharth paused, removed his glasses and smiled. “We’ve got it,” he said.
Lois’ longtime wife, Rosemary Lewandowski Lois, died in September. A son, Harry Joseph Lois, died in 1978.
Lois, the son of Greek immigrants, was born in New York City in 1931 and would cite the racism of his Irish neighborhood for his drive “to awaken, to disturb, to protest.” He liked to say that a successful advertiser absorbed as many influences as possible, and he prided himself on his knowledge of everything from sports to ballet. He was a compulsive drawer and for much of his life made weekly visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
He enrolled in Pratt Institute, soon met his future wife and eloped with her before either had graduated. After serving in the Army during the Korean War, he joined the advertising and promotion department of CBS and in 1960 helped found the advertising agency Papert Koenig Lois. Two years later he was recruited by Esquire editor Harold Hayes and remained until 1972, the same year Hayes left.
Esquire was a prime venue for the so-called New Journalism of the 1960s, nonfiction stories with a literary approach, and the magazine would publish such celebrated pieces as Gay Talese’s portrait of Frank Sinatra and Tom Wolfe’s “The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!” But to read the words, you had to buy the magazine, and Lois’ covers launched countless conversations.
For a cover story on “The New American Woman,” he featured a naked model folded into a garbage can. A notorious 1970 cover showed a grinning Lt. William Calley, the serviceman later found guilty of murdering unarmed civilians in the My Lai Massacre, with his arms around a pair of Vietnamese children, two other kids behind him.
In the mid-1970s, Lois was among the public figures who led efforts to free the boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter from prison. Carter’s conviction for murder was later overturned, and he was released in 1985. Lois also wrote several books and was featured in the 2014 documentary about Esquire titled Smiling Through the Apocalypse.
Interest in Lois was renewed through the popularity of the AMC series Mad Men, but he was not flattered, writing in his book Damn Good Advice that the show was “nothing more than a soap opera set in a glamorous office where stylish fools hump their appreciative, coiffured secretaries, suck up martinis, and smoke themselves to death as they produce dumb, lifeless advertising.”
“Besides,” he added, “when I was in my 30s, I was better-looking than Don Draper.”
Ned Rorem, the prolific Pulitzer- and Grammy-winning musician known for his vast output of compositions and for his barbed and sometimes scandalous prose, died Friday (Nov. 18) at 99.
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The news was confirmed by a publicist for his longtime music publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, who said he died of natural causes at his home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
The handsome, energetic artist produced a thousand-work catalog ranging from symphonies and operas to solo instrumental, chamber and vocal music, in addition to 16 books. He also contributed to the score for the Al Pacino-starring film Panic in Needle Park.
Time magazine once called Rorem “the world’s best composer of art songs,” and he was notable for his hundreds of compositions for the solo human voice. The poet and librettist J.D. McClatchy, writing in The Paris Review, described him as “an untortured artist and dashing narcissist.”
His music was mostly tonal, though very much modern, and Rorem didn’t hesitate to aim his printed words at other prominent contemporaries who espoused the dissonant avant-garde, like Pierre Boulez.
“If Russia had Stalin and Germany had Hitler, France still has Pierre Boulez,” Rorem once wrote.
He had a basic motto for songwriting: “Write gracefully for the voice — that is, make the voice line as seen on paper have the arched flow which singers like to interpret.”
Rorem won the 1976 Pulitzer for his “Air Music: Ten Etudes for Orchestra.” The 1989 Grammy for outstanding orchestral recording went to The Atlanta Symphony for Rorem’s “String Symphony, Sunday Morning, and Eagles.”
His 1962 “Poems of Love and the Rain” is a 17-song cycle set to texts by American poets; the same text is set twice, in a contrasting way.
Born in Richmond, Indiana, Rorem was the son of C. Rufus Rorem, whose ideas in the 1930s were the basis for the Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurance plans and who turned to Quaker philosophy, raising his son as a pacifist.
The younger Rorem went to day school at the elite University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. By the time he was 10, his piano teacher introduced him to Debussy and Ravel, which “changed my life forever,” said the composer whose music was tinged with French lyricism.
He went on to study at the American Conservatory of Music in Hammond, Indiana, and Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, then the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and the Juilliard School in New York.
As a young composer in the 1950s, he lived abroad for eight years, mostly in Paris but with two years in Morocco.
The Paris Diary covers his stay there and is filled with famous names of people he met — Jean Cocteau, Francis Poulenc, Balthus, Salvador Dali, Paul Bowles, John Cage, Man Ray, and James Baldwin. The late writer Janet Flanner called it “worldly, intelligent, licentious, highly indiscreet.” Rorem himself said his text was “filled with drunkenness, sex, and the talk of my betters.”
His literary self-portrait continued through 1985, contained in The New York Diary, The Later Diaries and The Nantucket Diary.
“His essays are composed like scores,” McClatchy once wrote of him. “The same hallmarks we listen for in Rorem’s music will be found in his essays a well: indirection, instinctive grace, intellectual aplomb, a lyrical line.”
Some were appalled by Rorem’s notorious accounting of his relationships with four big-name men in music: Leonard Bernstein, Noel Coward, Samuel Barber, and Virgil Thomson. He also outed a few others.
But most of his private life was centered around James Holmes, an organist and choir director with whom he lived for three decades in New York City. Holmes died in 1999. A statement from Boosey & Hawkes said Rorem died surrounded by friends and family and is survived by six nieces and nephews and eleven grandnieces and grandnephews.
Drawing on his upbringing, Rorem based his Quaker Reader — a collection of pieces for organ — on Quaker texts.
As for his non-musical writings, he said: “My music is a diary no less compromising than my prose. A diary nevertheless differs from a musical composition in that it depicts the moment, the writer’s present mood which, were it inscribed an hour later, could emerge quite otherwise.”
Rorem’s essays on music appear in anthologies titled Setting the Tone, Music from the Inside Out, and Music and People.
“Why do I write music?” he once asked. “Because I want to hear it — it’s as simple as that.”
Keith Levene, the innovative guitarist who was a founding member of the Clash and Public Image Ltd, has died in Norfolk, U.K. He was 65.
His death was announced through social media on Saturday (Nov. 12) by former Public Image Ltd bandmates Martin Atkins and Jah Wobble. Levene passed away following a battle with liver cancer, The Guardian reports.
Billboard has reached out to Public Image Ltd’s representatives for comment.
“A sad time to learn of the passing of guitar giant Keith Levene,” Atkins wrote on Twitter. “We had our ups and downs that had mellowed over time. My respect for his unique talent never will.”
“RIP KEITH LEVENE,” Wobble said.
Author Adam Hammond, a friend of Levene, wrote on Twitter that he died on Friday (Nov. 11) and noted, “There is no doubt that Keith was one of the most innovative, audacious and influential guitarists of all time.”
Levene, who was born in London in 1957 and as a teenager was a roadie for Yes, was a co-founder of the Clash but left the band before their first album was even released.
He teamed up with guitarist Mick Jones in the mid-1970s to form an early version of the Clash. Along with the band’s manager Bernard Rhodes, Levene convinced Joe Strummer to join the group. Levene departed before the act started recording, but co-wrote the song “What’s My Name,” which appears on the Clash’s 1977 debut album.
After leaving the Clash, Levene briefly formed the band the Flowers of Romance with Sid Vicious, who later left to join the Sex Pistols. When the Sex Pistols disbanded in 1978, Levene and singer John Lydon joined forces with bass player John Wardle (aka Jah Wobble) and drummer Jim Walker to form Public Image Ltd.
Levene contributed to Public Image Ltd’s earliest albums — First Issue (1978), Metal Box (1979) and Flowers of Romance (1981) — and left the group in the mid-1983.
Later in his career, Levene worked on a handful of solo projects, including 1989’s Violent Opposition, featuring members of Red Hot Chili Peppers.
“Music is important to me because I’m a composer. It turns out that I really am a good musician and composer. I can’t read music, I’m self-taught … I was never really enamoured with punk, it just came at the right time,” Levene said in an interview with the publication Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie Zine.
He recalled his early years as a musician: “When I came off tour with Yes I realized I wanted to be in a band. Having a band was a big f—ing thing for a 15-year-old. I’m looking at this cherry red guitar in my little bedroom, I remember like it was yesterday, I’m looking at this thing and thought I had to get a real Gibson. I knew me well enough by then to know that I wasn’t going to allow myself to have a Gibson unless I could play really, really well, proper.”
Gallagher, the long-haired, smash-’em-up comedian who left a trail of laughter, anger and shattered watermelons over a decadeslong career, has died at age 76.
Craig Marquardo, in a statement identifying himself as Gallagher’s “longtime former manager,” said that he died Friday (Nov. 11) at his home in Palm Springs, California, after a brief illness. Gallagher had numerous heart attacks over the years, including one right before a scheduled show in Texas in 2012.
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With a beret on his head and a few simple props, from a can of oil to a bull whip, the man born Leo Anthony Gallagher Jr. built a nationwide following in the 1970s and ’80s, appearing on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and starring in numerous Showtime specials. His act included observational humor (“What about Easter? Whose idea was it to give eggs to an animal that hops?”), political commentary (“They don’t call a tax a tax. They call it a revenue enhancer”), invented sports (synchronized Ping-Pong) and his trademark Sledge-O-Matic destruction.
“Ladies and gentlemen! I did not come here tonight just to make you laugh. I came here to sell you something, and I want you to pay particular attention!” he would call out in his best rapid-fire impersonation of a late-night television pitchman. “The amazing Master Tool Corporation, a subsidiary of Fly-By-Night Industries, has entrusted who? Me! To show you! The handiest and the dandiest kitchen tool you’ve ever seen.”
Sledgehammer in hand, he would then apply his full muscle to apples, grapes, lettuce and other produce, most famously the inevitable watermelon, with audience members in front showered in food bits.
Gallagher was a Fort Bragg, North Carolina, native who started out in 1960 as road manager for the comedian/musician Jim Stafford and soon began performing himself, honing his act at the Comedy Store and other clubs. He was not the only funnyman in the family: His younger brother Ron became a comedian, received Leo’s initial blessing and looked and acted enough like his better-known sibling that some audiences were unsure who they had come to see. Leo Gallagher eventually secured a court injunction barring his brother from using his routines.
The elder Gallagher became increasingly controversial in recent years, chastised for racist and homophobic remarks. Gallagher even cut short an interview in 2011 with Marc Maron after the WTF podcast host confronted him about his statements.
“I’m the problem?!” Gallagher said at one point. “Do you think when I’m dead, gays will finally have an opportunity in America? Have I really been holding them down?”
In 2003, Gallagher was among more than 100 candidates running in the recall election for California governor, won by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Over the past decade, Gallagher appeared in a Geico commercial and in the movie The Book of Daniel.
Singer Gal Costa, an icon in the Tropicalia and Brazilian popular music movements who enjoyed a nearly six-decade career, died on Wednesday. She was 77.
Her death was confirmed by a press representative, who provided no further information.
The soprano with wild curls of dark hair was best known for lending her unique voice to compositions such as Ary Barroso’s “Aquarela do Brasil” (Watercolor of Brazil), Tom Jobim’s “Dindi,” Jorge Ben Jor’s “Que Pena” (What a Shame) and Caetano Veloso’s “Baby.”
“Gal Costa was among the world’s best singers, among our principal artists to carry the name and sounds of Brazil to the whole planet,” President-elect Luiz Inácio da Silva wrote on Twitter alongside a photo of him hugging her. “Her talent, technique and courage enriched and renewed our culture, cradled and marked the lives of millions of Brazilians.”
Gal Costa foi das maiores cantoras do mundo, das nossas principais artistas a levar o nome e os sons do Brasil para todo o planeta. Seu talento, técnica e ousadia enriqueceu e renovou nossa cultura, embalou e marcou a vida de milhões de brasileiros.📸 @ricardostuckert pic.twitter.com/4jU2SBcHuq— Lula (@LulaOficial) November 9, 2022
Costa was born Maria da Graça Penna Burgos in the northeastern state of Bahia and came onto the scene alongside future legends Veloso, Gilberto Gil, and Maria Bethânia.
All were already successful solo artists when they formed the band Doces Bárbaros. Their joint side project became an important counterculture reference during Brazil’s two-decade military dictatorship, inspiring a record, tour and documentary.
In 2011, Costa was awarded a Latin Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
She remained an active performer until nearly the end, having recently suspended shows to undergo a surgery on one of her nostrils. Her next concert had been scheduled for Dec. 17, in Sao Paulo.
Dan McCafferty, original lead singer for Scottish hard rockers Nazareth, has died at age 76. The vocalist’s passing was announced by founding bassist/backing vocalist Pete Agnew, who revealed in an Instagram post that McCafferty died on Tuesday afternoon; at press time no cause of death had been announced.
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“This is the saddest announcement I ever had to make,” Agnew wrote. “Maryann and the family have lost a wonderful loving husband and father, I have lost my best friend and the world has lost one of the greatest singers who ever lived. Too upset to say anything more at this time.”
McCafferty, born on Oct. 14, 1946 in Dunfermline, Scotland was a co-founder of Nazareth, which came together in 1968 with guitarist Manny Charlton and drummer Darrell Sweet joining McCafferty and Agnew. The band released their self-titled debut in 1971, which was followed by 1972’s Exercises and 1973’s Razamanaz.
But it wasn’t until their sixth album, 1975s Hair of the Dog, that the group broke out beyond their European success, thanks to their rocked-up cover of the Everly Brothers’ 1960 song “Love Hurts.” The showcase for McCafferty’s muscular vocals rose to No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100. Hair of the Dog also marked the band’s highest charting album on the Billboard 200 charts, where it rose to No. 17 in March 1976, according to data provided by Luminate.
Nazareth’s “Love Hurts” was the highest-charting version of the tune — also famously covered by Cher as the title track of her 1991 album of the same name — and it has become a go-to power ballad in dozens of movies, including Wayne’s World, This is Spinal Tap, Dazed and Confused, Rock Star, Empire Records, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and many more.
McCafferty fronted the band until his retirement from touring in 2013 due to unspecified health issues and appeared on 23 studio albums through 2014’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Telephone; he was replaced by Linton Osborne in 2014, who in turn was swapped out for current singer Carl Sentance. McCafferty also released a pair of solo albums during his time with the group, a self-titled 1975 collection and 1987’s Into the Ring, as well as his final solo effort, 2019’s Last Testament.
See Agnew’s tribute and watch a live version of “Love Hurts” below.
Tyrone Downie, a keyboardist and producer who is best known for his work as a member of Bob Marley & The Wailers, died Saturday (Nov. 5) in Kingston, Jamaica after a brief illness. He was 66.
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Born May 20, 1956 in the capital, Downie was drawn to music from a young age. He went on to study at the Kingston College and often sang with the chapel choir.
Downie carved his name in music history when he joined Marley’s band in 1973, making his recording debut on Rastaman Vibration, and contributing keys and backup vocals to some of legendary reggae act’s recordings into the 1980s.
“Reflecting on brother Tyrone Downie, Bob’s keyboardist, who made his transition yesterday,” reads a statement on the late Marley’s official social accounts. “Rest in peace brother.”
Across his career, Downie also played with The Abyssinians, Beenie Man, Black Uhuru, Buju Banton, Peter Tosh, Junior Reid, Tom Tom Club, Ian Dury, Burning Spear, Steel Pulse, Alpha Blondy, Tiken Jah Fakoly and Sly & Robbie, and, prior to the Wailers, was a member of the Impact All Stars.
A statement from Tuff Gong studio in Kingston, founded by Marley, reads: “We are saddened to learn of the passing of Wailers keyboardist, Tyrone Downie. Tyrone joined The Wailers just before the age of 20, making his recording debut with the band on Rastaman Vibration. We are blessed to count him as a member of the Tuff Gong Family.”
We are saddened to learn of the passing of Wailers keyboardist, Tyrone Downie. Tyrone joined The Wailers just before the age of 20, making his recording début with the band on Rastaman Vibration. We are blessed to count him as a member of the Tuff Gong Family. pic.twitter.com/RFhmSJXGHb— Tuff Gong (@TuffGongINTL) November 7, 2022
Several of Downie’s compositions appeared on the big screen, including 1989’s Slaves of New York and The Mighty Quinn.
Downie settled in France in the mid-to-late 1990s, during which time he focused on production and worked closely with Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour.
The multi-instrumentalist also had an impact on Grace Jones, the iconic Jamaica-born singer and actor. Jones penned the 1983 song “My Jamaican Guy,” which she later revealed was written about Downie.
Downie went on to released the solo album Organ-D — his nickname — in 2001.
He is survived by nine children, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, The Gleaner reports.
Guitarist Jeff Cook, who co-founded the mega-successful country group Alabama and steered them up the charts with such hits as “Song of the South” and “Dixieland Delight,” has died. He was 73.
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Cook had Parkinson’s disease and disclosed his diagnosis in 2017. He died Tuesday (Nov. 8) at his home in Destin, Florida, said Don Murry Grubbs, a representative for the band.
Tributes poured in from country stars, including Travis Tritt who called Cook “a great guy and one heckuva bass fisherman” and Charlie Daniels, who tweeted that “Heaven gained another guitar/fiddle player today.”
As a guitarist, fiddle player and vocalist, Cook — alongside cousins Randy Owen and Teddy Gentry — landed 33 No. 1 songs on Billboard‘s Hot Country Songs chart, including the pop crossover hits “Love in the First Degree” and “Feels So Right,” as well as “Tennessee River” and “Mountain Music.”
“Jeff Cook, and all of the guys in Alabama, were so generous with wisdom and fun when I got to tour with them as a young artist,” Kenny Chesney said in a statement. “They showed a kid in a T-shirt that country music could be rock, could be real, could be someone who looked like me. Growing up in East Tennessee, that gave me the heart to chase this dream.”
The band had a three-year run as CMA entertainer of the year from 1982-85 and received five ACM Awards trophies in that same category from 1981-85. The band was the first three-time winner and the first five-time winner of that top award at the respective shows. Cook stopped touring with Alabama in 2018.
Cook released a handful of solo projects and toured with his Allstar Goodtime Band. He also released collaborations with Charlie Daniels and Star Trek star William Shatner. He entered the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2005 as a member of Alabama.
Survivors include his wife, Lisa.
Tame One, veteran New Jersey rapper and member of hip-hop groups Artifacts and The Weathermen, has died. He was 52.
His death was confirmed by Pitchfork and on Facebook by the late rapper’s mother, Darlene Brown Harris. “What’s on my mind….I cant express this any other way. My son, Rahem Brown, Tamer Dizzle Is Dead,” she wrote on Sunday. “The medical examiner says the six pharmaceutical drugs … prescribed to him last Friday, combined with the weed he smoked over this weekend … his heart simply gave out. He will know better after the autopsy. I will not be responding to all the posts for a bit, but the hardest words I will ever post or say is, my son, my heart, is dead.”
Tame One, born Rahem Brown, expressed himself as a teenager by way of music and graffiti. Tame One’s 1994 debut alongside Artifacts groupmate El Da Sensei, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, was an ode to the influential art form and broke the duo into the mainstream. The album appeared on both the Billboard 200 and R&B/Hip-Hop Albums charts. Despite their collective success, Artifacts only went on to release one more album together, That’s Them, in 1997 before moving on to solo careers.
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After the group’s initial split, New York hip-hop group The Weathermen, founded by a handful of East Coast producers and rappers, was formed. Tame One rapped alongside a number of co-members, including Cage Kennylz, Masai Bey, Aesop Rock, Yak Ballz, El-P, Jakki Tha Motamouth, Vast Aire and Breeze Brewin. The group released one mixtape in 2003, titled Conspiracy.
After 25 years, El Da Sensei and Tame One came together with producer Buckwild for their third album as Artifacts, No Expiration Date, which released on Aug. 20. “[In 1979], we would walk miles with markers and cans, taggin’ up everywhere,” he said in his final interview before his death. “I was influenced by my surroundings, I’m a product of my environment, and I capitalized upon what I saw. It’s a blessing to transform that energy and give back.”