BY DAVID CORBO Byard Lancaster, a Philadelphia jazz icon and a champion of the city’s jazz and blues scene, died Thursday night from complications related to pancreatic cancer. An internationally respected avant garde multi-instrumentalist who was accomplished on saxophone, flute, clarinet and piano, Lancaster performed with Sunny Murray, Albert Ayler, Kahn Jamal, McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, Archie Shepp, Odean Pope, Sun Ra and others over the course of his long career and released nine recordings as a band leader. Lancaster named John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and James Brown as major influences and wanted to bring jazz, reggae, blues, R&B […]
RIP: David Rakoff, Gen. X’s Oscar Wilde, Dead @ 47
Photo by DAVID DENTON NEW YORK TIMES: Born in Montreal and raised in Toronto, Mr. Rakoff worked in the New York book publishing industry after studying at Columbia University. He wrote for numerous publications, including The New York Times Magazine, and in the early 1990s connected with fellow humorist David Sedaris, whose essay about the yuletide trials and tribulations of playing Crumpet the elf at Macy’s he had heard him read on the radio. Mr. Sedaris and Ira Glass, the future host and producer of “This American Life,” encouraged Mr. Rakoff to produce and perform more of his material, leading […]
RIP: Gore Vidal, Sickle In The Garden Of Idiocy
NEW YORK TIMES: Mr. Vidal was, at the end of his life, an Augustan figure who believed himself to be the last of a breed, and he was probably right. Few American writers have been more versatile or gotten more mileage from their talent. He published some 25 novels, two memoirs and several volumes of stylish essays. He also wrote plays, television dramas and screenplays. For a while he was even a contract writer at MGM. And he could always be counted on for a spur-of-the-moment aphorism, putdown or sharply worded critique of American foreign policy. Perhaps more than […]
RIP: Encyclopedia Brown Creator Donald J. Sobol
WIRED: Donald Sobol, the creator of the best-selling Encyclopedia Brown series of mysteries, has passed away at the age of 87. The news of his death was made public this morning; Sobol died last week of natural causes in Miami, according to reports. Sobol’s famous chronicles of 10-year-old Leroy “Encyclopedia” Brown launched nearly 50 years ago with Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective in 1963. Encyclopedia Brown was a proto-hacker, a bad-ass in the style of Buckaroo Banzai and MacGyver, who could sleuth a complicated crime, break it down, and solve it in the span of three pages. In addition to […]
RIP: Ernest Borgnine, Oscar-Winning Big-Hearted Everyman With A Face For Radio, Dead At 95
NEW YORK TIMES: Ernest Borgnine, the rough-hewn actor who seemed destined for tough-guy characters but won an Academy Award for embodying the gentlest of souls, a lonely Bronx butcher, in the 1955 film “Marty,“ died on Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 95. Mr. Borgnine, who later starred on “McHale’s Navy” on television, made his first memorable impression in films at age 37, appearing in “From Here to Eternity” (1953) as Fatso Judson, the sadistic stockade sergeant who beats Frank Sinatra’s character, Private Maggio, to death. But Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote “Marty” as a television play, and Delbert Mann, […]
RIP: Andy Griffith, Folksy Sheriff Of Mayberry RFD, Gone To The Great Fishin’ Hole In The Sky
NEW YORK TIMES: His fame was never as great as it was in the 1960s, when he starred for eight years as Andy Taylor, the sagacious sheriff of the make-believe Southern town of Mayberry, running weekly herd on a collection of eccentrics like his ineffectual deputy, Barney Fife, and the simple-minded gas station attendant Gomer Pyle while, as a widower, patiently raising a young son, Opie. “The Andy Griffith Show,” seen Monday nights on CBS, was No. 4 in the Nielsen ratings its first year and never fell below the Top 10. It was No. 1 in 1968, its last […]
RIP: Ray Bradbury, Atomic Age Fabulist, Dead At 91
BY DAVID CORBO Ray Bradbury, one of America’s most prolific and talented literary figures, died Tuesday at the age of 91. In a writing career that spanned more than 70 years and birthed nearly 50 novels and 600 short stories as well as countless poems and essays, television and theatrical productions, Bradbury entertained the world with tales that plumbed the depths of human experience. He was the master of a writing style that was both literary and speculative but never short on popular appeal. Bradbury haunted us with the shades of lost civilizations in The Martian Chronicles. He warned us […]
RIP: Richard Dawson, Professional Brit, Dead @ 79
LOS ANGELES TIMES: The career of Richard Dawson, who died Sunday at age 79, breaks down, broadly speaking, into two not unrelated parts, each of which displayed and depended upon a certain roguish, vaguely foreign charm. American audiences first got to know him as Cpl. Peter Newkirk on the prisoners-of-war sitcom“Hogan’s Heroes”; later we grew to love him as the first and still most famous host of “Family Feud”for the entirety of its first run (1976-85) and for the final season of its second (1994-95), after which he retired from show business. The mid-1960s was a good time to be English in […]
RIP: Robin Gibb, The Man Who Started The Joke That Started The Whole World Crying, Dead At 62
BY JONATHAN VALANIA To rock boys coming of age in the late ’70s and early ’80s, the brothers Gibb were known primarily as the fey, toothy, Members Only-jacketed target of the Disco Sucks backlash that greeted the blockbuster sales and grating ubiquity of their Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. But unbeknownst to many, the Bee Gees also had an amazing career in the ’60s, creating deathless psychedelic-pop singles and ambitious album-length statements that explored complex themes and experimented with all manner of instrumentation and orchestral arrangements. Even back then, it was their harmonizing – as rich and distinct as the […]
RIP: Author/Illustrator Maurice Sendak, Chronicler Of The Dark Side Of Childhood’s Moon, Dead At 83
PHAWKER: Where The Wild Things Are creator Maurice Sendak is, in many ways, the dark side Doppelganger of Dr. Seuss and taken together they represent the twin titans of 20th Century children’s literature. If Dr. Seuss’ work vibes like a drug-free acid trip for children aged 8 to 80, then Sendak’s oeuvre is, to extend the metaphor, like Vicodin for the soul, numbing tender-aged psyches from the pain of growing up in a desultory world of de-saturated colors and unrelieved melancholia where adults do monstrous things to each other, and sometimes to children, too. There were two formative experiences […]
RIP: MCA, Fighter For The Right To Party, Is KIA
ROLLING STONE: Adam Yauch, one-third of the pioneering hip-hop group the Beastie Boys, has died at the age of 47, Rolling Stone has learned. Yauch, also known as MCA, had been in treatment for cancer since 2009. The rapper was diagnosed in 2009 after discovering a tumor in his salivary gland.Yauch sat out the Beastie Boys’ induction to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in April, and his treatments delayed the release of the group’s most recent album, Hot Sauce Committee, Pt. 2. The Beastie Boys had not performed live since the summer of 2009, and Yauch’s illness prevented […]
RIP: Dick Clark, ‘America’s Oldest Living Teenager’, Dead At 82
VARIETY: Dick Clark, known to several generations as the host of “American Bandstand,” died of a heart attack today. He was 82. Though he was most closely associated with the TV dance show, Clark was a shrewd entrepreneur in radio, television and music, creating a production empire that elevated his net worth to more than $100 million. During his career he won five Emmy awards, including one for “American Bandstand.” Attempts to act in front of the camera, however, proved virtually fruitless despite Clark’s wholesome American good looks and his predisposition for remaining youthful looking well into his later years. […]
RIP: Mike Wallace Had Ways Of Making You Talk
CBS NEWS: Each week, “60 Minutes” viewers could expect the master interviewer to ask the questions they wanted answered by the world’s leaders and headliners. Wallace did not disappoint them, often revealing more than the public ever hoped to see. He got the stoic Ayatollah Khomeini to smile during the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979 when he asked him what he thought about being called “a lunatic” by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. The Ayatollah answered by correctly predicting that Sadat would be assassinated. The same year, Johnny Carson called Wallace “cruel” during an interview after Wallace asked, “It takes one […]