Celebrity deaths, illness, divorce and remembrance
* Thank you Tinpan Chuck
Helen Wagner (September 3, 1918 – May 1, 2010) was an American actress. She was born in Lubbock, Texas. She is best known for her long running role as Nancy Hughes on the soap opera As the World Turns. Wagner also played the role of Trudy Bauer during the first few television years of Guiding Light in the early 1950s. Wagner died on May 1, 2010, at the age of 91.
Hi! I’m a new member myself as of today, Wednesday, 21 April 2010. I’m an avid reader, music and cinema buff, specializing in Hitchcock and film noirs. I also love vintage movies and TV shows of the fifties and early sixties. Does anyone remember the TV show, “One Step Beyond”?
So “hello” to everyone in this community.
Take care, stay blessed and be a blessing…
eenie
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Dorothy Height, a leader of the African-American and women’s rights movements who was considered both the grande dame of the civil rights era and its unsung heroine, died on Tuesday in Washington. She was 98.
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Guru, the pioneering hip-hop legend who united jazz and hip-hop as a solo artist and half of the influential duo Gang Starr, has died. He was 43.
Guru, whose real name was Keith Elam, died Monday after a battle with cancer, his producer, Solar, told MTV. Guru was hospitalized late February after suffering cardiac arrest and was briefly in a coma.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2939240/Boxer-Edwin-Valero-kills-himself-after-arrest-for-wifes-murder.html
Published: Today
A BOXER arrested for allegedly murdering his wife hanged himself in a police cell yesterday.
Ex-lightweight champ Edwin Valero – famed for winning all 27 of his fights by knockouts – used his own jogging bottoms as a rope.
Valero, 28, was said to have admitted stabbing his wife in their native Venezuela.
He was known as El Dinamita for explosive punching and had his national flag tattooed on his chest.
Petrus T. Ratajczyk (January 4, 1962 – April 14, 2010) better known by his stage name Peter Steele, was the lead singer, bassist, and composer for the gothic metal band Type O Negative. Before joining Type O Negative, he played for the metal group Fallout and the thrash band Carnivore.
As the front-man for Type O Negative, Steele was known for his vampiric looks, rich bass-baritone vocals, and a dark, often self-deprecating sense of humor. His lyrics were often intensely personal, dealing with subjects including love, loss and addiction. Steele credited Black Sabbath and The Beatles as his key musical inspirations.
Death of Peter Steele
Peter Steele died of heart failure. Prior to his death, Steele had been enjoying a long period of sobriety and improved health and was imminently due to begin writing and recording new music.
Peter Steele was 48 years old at the time of his death
Type O Negative – Love You To Death (Live)
Peter Steele – Lead Singer & Bass
http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/news.php?id=53832
Posted: 2010-04-14
Steve Reid: 1944-2010
On Monday night, drumming great Steve Reid died at the age of sixty-six after a battle with cancer. He leaves behind a legacy that’s explicitly known by few but surely felt by many. A couple of years ago we profiled what is sadly now his last record released in his lifetime, the superb Daxaar, the result of an inspired collaboration with Kieren Hebden (Four Tet). Below is a reprint of that original review, which also sheds light on his amazing background and why his passing is a great loss in the music world:
For both the man and the music, it’s a story of three continents.
Bronx native drummer Steve Reid has been everywhere and played for nearly everyone. He grew up across the street from Thelonius Monk and three blocks from John Coltrane. As a teenager he drummed for Martha Reeves and the Vandellas–that’s his distinctive backbeat on “Dancing In The Street"— and eventually worked with a staggering array of artists ranging from Fats Domino to James Brown to Miles Davis to Henry Threadgill and everyone in between.
To escape the draft and the Vietnam War in the late sixties, Reid hopped on a cargo ship to Africa and lived there for three years. Upon returning to the States, he was tried and convicted of draft evasion and was sentenced to four years in a federal pen. Even then, he made music connections, meeting jazz legend Jimmy Heath while in the clink. At some point after release, Reid moved to Switzerland.
Except for a spurt of activity in the mid-seventies, it’s only recently in his long and colorful career that Reid had earnestly begun to record his own albums. Even more recently, Reid has taken on electronica guru Four Tet aka Kieren Hebden as his collaborator (Spirit Walk (2005), The Exchange Session, Vols. 1 & 2 (2006) and Tongues (2007)).
Now, Reid has come full circle in a sense by going back to Africa, a continent he hadn’t set foot in for decades, and recording a set of tracks in the city in Senegal called Dakar but was formally spelled Daxaar. The product of these Janaury, 2007 sessions was released this past February 5th.
Reid took Hebden with him there to be the producer as well as his Russian keyboardist Boris Netsvetaev and they hooked up with African musicians Jimi Mbaye (guitar), Dembel Diop (bass), Roger Ongolo (cornet/trumpet) and Khadim Badji (percussion). His ensemble for this release is truly a multi-continental one. And the music?
Well, the first track “Welcome" is decidedly African. Isa Kouyate guests on it and the piece features his kora (West Africa harp) as well as his vocals sung in a local language. It’s a pleasant, fairly short tune but isn’t indicative at all of the rest of the album.
For the remainder of the recordings, Reid set the rhythms and asked his band to just play around it. As he put it, “when you can improvise on the rhythms you can’t go wrong." The results are five, 6-10 minutes tracks that are soul-jazz jams, with subdued improvising and little in the way of changes.
These jams’ blues-based chords set by Netsvetaev’s organ and Mbaye’s Les Paul, and underscored by a strong percussion section, make the music sound more like early Santana than anything straight out of Africa. Mbaye even goes as far as aping Carlos a bit in “Big G’s Family." Unlike most of the San Francisco area jam-based bands of the late-sixties and early-seventies, however, Reid’s ensemble is more steadfastly dedicated to the groove. You’d sometimes like to hear the soloists stretch out a bit more, though, as Ongolo and Mbaye in particular hint of being able to do much more. On “Dabronxxar," for example, they begin to suggest of their abilities before they fade back into the mlange.
In addition to handling the production chores, Hebden supplies the odd electronic sounds on some of the tracks, but without making it too intrusive. It’s perhaps the only hint that these otherwise-organic sounds were made in the 21st century.
Make no mistake; this isn’t the heavy, avant garde ethereal jazz of Spirit Walk, Reid’s last record. Daxaar is exactly what Steve Reid described it as: “regular groovy, happy music." On those more modest terms, Reid succeeded and succeeded well.
Below is a short documentary on the making of this album in Dakar, Senegal, including snippets from a few of the tracks:
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20340040,00.html
Author J.D. Salinger Dies at 91
Thursday January 28, 2010
J.D. Salinger, whose iconic novel Catcher in the Rye is considered a cultural high point of the middle 20th century, died Wednesday. He was 91.
The reclusive author died of natural causes at his home in Cornish, N.H., his son said in a statement released by Salinger’s literary representative. The Manhattan-born and raised Salinger had lived for more than 50 years in self-imposed isolation in New England.
Jerome David Salinger earned his lofty reputation with his 1951 novel about iconoclastic teenager Holden Caulfield. The writer also became something of a legend for, among many things, turning down decades’ worth of requests from Hollywood to turn his most famous work into a movie.
Besides Catcher, Salinger also wrote the collection Nine Stories and two compilations, each with two long stories about the fictional Glass family. They were Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20341624,00.html
Days of Our Lives Matriarch Dies at 95
Thursday February 04, 2010
Days of Our Lives matriarch Frances Reid, who played Alice Horton on the long-running soap, died Wednesday at the age of 95.
Reid appeared last on NBC’s hit show in December of 2007. She also had roles on As the World Turns and The Edge of Night.
"I’m so sad to hear the news about Frances Reid," Tweeted actress Alison Sweeney, who plays Sami on Days. "She was a truly talented actress and we are all lucky and proud to have known her."
Reid played the silver-haired, mild-mannered matriarch of the show’s Horton clan since 1965 – a role she initially turned down.
Born in Wichita Falls, Texas, Reid was raised in Berkeley, Calif., and later moved to New York to pursue her acting career on the stage. She landed roles in Cyrano de Bergerac, Hamlet and Twelfth Night.
Her character on Days was seemingly killed off by the show’s Salem Stalker in 2004, but it turned out to be a hoax and she returned later the same year.
Reid won the Daytime Emmy’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004 and was married to late actor Philip Bourneuf for 43 years. She had no children.
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