Daniel E. Slotnik

His daughter Rhynna Santos said the cause was complications of congestive heart failure.

In the 1950s and ’60s, if you were at the Palladium or one of the other nightclubs in New York where Latin jazz was played and elegant dancers tried the newest Cuban-inspired steps, there’s a decent chance that you heard Santos. He was a mainstay in bands led by luminaries like Tito Puente, Machito and Tito Rodriguez, often called mambo’s Big Three.

In an interview with the blog Jazz Wax in 2009, Santos said that all three of those bandleaders “could go off the deep end” when they felt musicians were not playing their best. “Machito was low key when he was angry,” he said. “But Puente and Rodriguez would pull out the whip. The whole band would get it.”

As an arranger, conductor and teacher — he earned the nickname El Maestro — Santos took a more measured approach.

Wynton Marsalis, the managing and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, who invited Santos to conduct concerts there in the 1990s, described him in an interview as an “extremely astute musician” who was able to catch the smallest error in an ensemble, but who was “collegial” in his approach to musicians.

“He was a great conductor of improvised musicians,” Marsalis said. “He’s not strict; he wants to hear the freedom.”

He added, “He just represented the quality, the insight and the dignity of a whole idiom, and by that idiom I don’t mean Afro-Latin music, I mean American music.”

Santos wrote arrangements for Chico O’Farrill, Mario Bauzá, Noro Morales, Celia Cruz and Eddie Palmieri. He played tenor saxophone on Machito’s seminal Afro-Cuban jazz album “Kenya” (1958), which featured Cannonball Adderley on alto.

In 1992, he arranged many of the songs for the soundtrack of the film “The Mambo Kings” and arranged Linda Ronstadt’s album of Latin pop songs, “Frenesi" (1992), which won a Grammy Award for best tropical Latin album.

For nearly three decades Santos taught at the City College of New York, leading the Latin band there and imparting his long experience to new generations of musicians.

One of them was Arturo O’Farrill, the pianist, composer and director of the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra. O’Farrill, the son of Santos’ old colleague Chico O’Farrill, said in an interview that Santos “never overplayed or overwrote” and that “his contribution to the body of work is this distinct clarity and singleness of purpose.”

“Playing his piano parts, for instance, didn’t require a degree in physics,” O’Farrill continued. “They played themselves. His music played itself; it was so well written, so clear that it couldn’t help but swing.”

Raymond Santos was born in Manhattan on Dec. 28, 1928. His parents, Carmen and Ramon Santos, were from Puerto Rico. His mother was a doll-maker and homemaker, his father a doorman. He grew up, first in East Harlem and later the Bronx, immersed in Puerto Rican music and in big-band jazz, particularly as played by Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller and Count Basie.

He began studying the saxophone as a teenager and graduated from Haaren High School in Manhattan before studying classical music at the Juilliard School, where his contemporaries included saxophonist Teo Macero, who would later become an acclaimed record producer, and soprano Leontyne Price. He graduated in the early 1950s.

“I was exposed to classical music and became amazed at how much jazz harmony came from Stravinsky and Ravel,” Santos said in 2009. “We’d analyze the scores of classical works, which got me into arranging. Eventually I was devoting as much time to music theory and writing as I was to practicing the saxophone.”

Santos’ marriage to Maria Santos ended in divorce.

In addition to his daughter Rhynna, he is survived by three other daughters, Virna Santos, Cynthia Santos-DeCure and Carmen Santos-Robson, a mezzo-soprano; a son, Raymond Jr.; and eight grandchildren.

In 2011, the Latin Recording Academy honored Santos with a Trustees Award for lifetime achievement. In 2016, the Berklee College of Music in Boston granted him an honorary doctorate.

He continued working almost until the end. His last published project was writing arrangements for Eddie Palmieri’s 2018 album, “Mi Luz Amor.”

This article originally appeared in

Ray Santos, a Pillar of Latin Jazz, Is Dead at 90

NEW YORK — Ray Santos, who played saxophone with the biggest stars in Latin jazz and went on to write arrangements renowned for their economy and clarity, died on Oct. 17 at a hospital near his home in the Bronx. He was 90.

The cause was a heart attack, his brother Douglas said.

March’s career as a designer began in earnest during a decade with “Beach Blanket Babylon,” a long-running musical revue in San Francisco known for its elaborate costumes. March’s contributions included a towering Martha Stewart-themed headpiece complete with a pie, a lobster, a pot of sunflowers and a copy of Martha Stewart Living.

That over-the-top drag show aesthetic characterized much of March’s work. He dressed Lady Gaga in a studded ankle-length motorcycle jacket with jutting shoulder pads for a concert in Las Vegas in 2011. He helped realize Thierry Mugler’s superhero designs for Beyoncé’s 2009-10 world tour, including a golden outfit that resembled a futuristic one-piece bathing suit.

But those costumes, eye-catching as they were, were almost pedestrian by March’s standards. His other designs included “a Mr. Potato Head, a palm tree, a lobster and a 10-foot martini,” The New York Times reported in 2006.

The occasion for the Times article was a commission that March had accepted from Wish-Bone, the salad dressing maker, to construct outfits using real and artificial vegetables — lettuce, cabbage, tomatoes, green onions — for a promotional fashion show of sorts at Grand Central Terminal.

“They said, ‘You know, we don’t really know anyone who could do this, but do you think you could make a line of clothing made out of salad and food?’” March was quoted as saying in the article. “I said, sure, it’s one of the easier things I’ve done. I once made a giant 6-foot can of Crisco that a person had to dance in, and that had an Elvis wig on top.”

March’s designs for “Project Runway,” during the show’s 2007-08 season, its fourth, incorporated human hair in some cases; another entry was a strappy leopard-print halter top with matching hood and sleeves for the WWE wrestler Maria Kanellis. He became a fan favorite, even though, under the show’s competition format, he finished in fourth place at the season’s end.

March was not afraid to model his more extreme designs himself, proudly appearing beneath colossal wigs as drag versions of Princess Leia or Wonder Woman.

Christopher Andrew March was born on Feb. 25, 1963, in Alameda, California, to Carl Allen and Dolores March. He grew up mostly in Northern California, where he liked to design elaborate Halloween costumes before graduating from high school.

A biography on his website said that he had lived in San Francisco for years before settling in New York City. In addition to his brother Douglas, he is survived by three other brothers, David, Steven and Michael, and his mother.

In 2018, March said in a statement to his fans that he had been put into a medically induced coma after falling and hitting his head in 2017 and emerged partly paralyzed, necessitating physical therapy.

March designed costumes for Cirque du Soleil and spectacular drag outfits for “Christmas With the Crawfords,” a 2001 show at the Chelsea Playhouse in Manhattan in which he appeared onstage as Shirley Temple. He created, designed, produced and starred in another holiday show, “Chris March’s The Butt-Cracker Suite!,” a rethinking of Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker,” which ran for a month in 2009 at the Lower Manhattan arts center Here. It was billed as a “trailer park ballet.”

In 2011 he hosted his own short-lived reality show on Bravo, “Mad Fashion,” on which he dressed celebrities like Jennifer Coolidge and Chrissy Teigen. He designed a series of Halloween wigs for Target in 2013.

Though his designs were often studies in overstatement, March could also make elegant clothing, like a slouchy, belted black evening gown that Meryl Streep wore to the Golden Globes ceremony in 2010, and a sleek white one she wore to the Academy Awards the same year.

Anne Bratskeir, a fashion reporter for Newsday, wrote that Streep “looked good, fresh and crisp” in the Oscars gown.

Chris March, Over-the-Top Fashion Designer, Dies at 56

Chris March, a fashion and costume designer whose outrageous outfits caught the eye of audiences on Bravo’s hit reality show “Project Runway,” and who went on to create striking clothes for Lady Gaga, Beyoncé and other stars, died Thursday at a care facility in Stockton, California. He was 56.

The death was confirmed by his manager, Alan Somers, who did not specify the cause.

Fonda was practically Hollywood royalty — the son of Henry Fonda and the younger brother of Jane Fonda — but pursued his own, unconventional course.

He and another Hollywood rebel, Dennis Hopper, teamed up with Terry Southern to write “Easy Rider” (1969), earning an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay.

“Easy Rider,” which was directed by Hopper and featured Jack Nicholson in one of his earliest film roles, was seen as encapsulation of the freewheeling, anti-establishment spirit of the 1960s and cemented Fonda’s reputation as an actor.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/16/arts/peter-fonda-dead.html" id="9363eae9-cbaa-3ef9-ac9f-d01c644d0e0e">The New York Times</a>.

Peter Fonda, 'Easy Rider' Actor and Screenwriter, Is Dead at 79

Peter Fonda, the writer, director and actor best remembered for playing a motorcycle-riding avatar of the counterculture in “Easy Rider,” an emblematic film of the 1960s that he helped write, died Friday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 79.

A family member said the cause was lung cancer, but added that Azria’s family did not want to release other details about his life. News media accounts said he was 70.

Azria created BCBG Max Azria in Los Angeles in 1989 as a practical alternative to the expensive, ornate styles that had proliferated during the conspicuous consumption of the 1980s. He later said that one of his goals was to democratize runway-quality fashion.

“I was wondering why designers were selling products at $1,000 that we can make a good profit and good living by selling at $500,” Azria told The Los Angeles Times in 2014. “I wanted to give fashion to more people.”

He also designed for celebrities like Beyoncé, Kim Kardashian, Halle Berry and Viola Davis.

But the bulk of his business was aimed at ordinary consumers, who sought his ready-to-wear pieces even if some critics were lukewarm about them. BCBG stands for “bon chic, bon genre,” a French slang phrase that roughly translates as “good style, good attitude,” a philosophy Azria liked to live by in the face of criticism.

Writing in 2008 about designers like Azria, Ruth La Ferla of The New York Times said his “collections may not break new ground, but as he likes to point out, they sell at several hundred BCBG boutiques in the United States, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, as well as at department stores like Bloomingdale’s and Saks.”

She added, “To call them commercial is no insult, he said. ‘It’s a fact.’”

In 1996, BCBG became one of a handful of commercial brands to introduce collections at New York Fashion Week. Critics were concerned that such clothing would not measure up to more expensive competitors, but, as Constance C.R. White wrote in a review in The Times, “BCBG, by Max Azria, displayed enough muscle to turn back the naysayers.”

“He made his point,” she continued, “with a sweeping gray maxi-coat with epaulets, flat-front pants and mélange turtleneck; a brown and beige wide-lapel jacket with black fur collar; a black suede belted shirt jacket and black denim bell-bottom pants with white topstitching tracing a line down the back of the leg; and languid jersey evening dresses, including a plunging V-neck topped with a fur-collared greatcoat.”

Azria expanded into new brands, like BCBGeneration and Max Azria Atelier, and he designed a collection for Walmart with Miley Cyrus in 2009. In 1998 he acquired Hervé Léger, the French couture label famous for its form-fitting bandage dresses. A year later Azria fell out with Léger, but he kept the rights to his name and released clothing under the label Hervé Léger by Max Azria. (Léger, who died in 2017, changed his name to Hervé L. Leroux and opened an independent house under the new name.)

At its peak, BCBG Max Azria Group operated more than 550 stores around the world and was said to generate more than $1 billion a year in retail sales.

But in recent years the company suffered, as online ordering threatened retail and more affordable fast fashion brands like H&amp;M; and Zara crowded the marketplace. It also struggled to deal with more than $400 million in debt, which it had accrued over many years of acquisitions.

BCBG Max Azria filed for bankruptcy protection in 2017 and closed 120 stores. Marquee Brands bought the company for more than $100 million later that year. Azria had already left, as had his wife, Lubov, who joined BCBG in the early 1990s and for many years was the company’s creative director, and his daughter, Joyce Azria, formerly the creative director for BCBGeneration.

Complete information on survivors, who include his wife and daughter, was not immediately available.

Azria was born in Sfax, Tunisia, in the late 1940s. When he was a teenager his family moved to France, where he acted in the theater and later sold imported American jeans.

He moved to Los Angeles in the early 1980s and opened Jess, a chain of retail clothing stores there, before starting BCBG. He lived for many years in a 17-bedroom home in the Holmby Hills neighborhood, where he often hosted Shabbat dinners for his family, friends and celebrities.

After leaving BCBG, Azria became the chief executive of Zapplight, a company that makes lightbulbs that also function as bug zappers, and founded a housing design venture, Azria Home.

Azria acknowledged that shopping online was convenient. But, he said, it robbed consumers of enjoyment.

“You can buy a TV online, OK, but to buy a dress or shoes? Ugh,” he said in 2014. “The customer has to go back to the store and breathe and smell and have a good time. Because shopping is a good time — like going to a nice restaurant.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/obituaries/max-azria-dies.html" id="4d2ca013-3f2e-3a86-af2d-118fb35d18c0">The New York Times</a>.

Max Azria, a fashion designer whose BCBG Max Azria line became a global powerhouse by offering chic apparel for considerably less than many of his competitors, died Monday in Houston.

Max Azria, Designer Who Sold Couture for Less, Has Died

Hussle, who was 33 when he was shot and killed in Los Angeles on Sunday in what police said appeared to be a personal dispute, was born Ermias Joseph Asghedom in Los Angeles on Aug. 15, 1985, to Dawit Asghedom and Angelique Smith. His father is Eritrean, and Hussle had said that his name means “God will rise.”

Hussle said in a 2018 interview with Dallas radio station KBFB that he had visited Eritrea and met his relatives there in recent years and considered his African heritage an important part of his identity.

“As much as I’m a black person from America, I’m a black person from Africa, too,” he said.

He said he dropped out of high school after the 10th grade to focus on music. He rapped about his background, and his hope for the future, on “Blue Laces 2”:

Third generation, South Central gang banging

Had lived long enough to see it changing

Think it’s time we make arrangements

Finally wiggle out they mazes

Find me out in different places

But he never entirely left the streets behind, and he said he had never entirely meant to.

Hussle was a member of the Rollin’ 60s Crips gang, and in the Dallas radio interview he said: “You don’t get out of a gang, truthfully. You just redirect your energy.”

At the time of the interview, he was on a promotional tour after the release of his debut album, the Grammy-nominated “Victory Lap,” that February. The album was his first major-label release after he had spent years as a recognizable mixtape rapper who had not quite broken into the mainstream. He sold one mixtape for $100 to gin up publicity; Jay-Z was reported to have bought 100 copies.

While he worked to come up as a rapper, he pursued other ventures that kept him tied to his neighborhood and allowed him to give back to it, like a shared workspace and the Marathon Clothing, his store off Crenshaw Boulevard, where he was shot. Entrepreneurship and self-actualization were a part of his message, along with swagger and braggadocio.

“I ain’t in cars going on missions no more, I ain’t in the spot,” he said in 2018. “I’m on a radio run, dropping my album, you know what I mean, building businesses, employing my homeboys, you know what I mean, and paying taxes.”

His death prompted widespread mourning in South Los Angeles, as well as calls to address the violent crime that still plagues the community.

“I think young people that’s really identified themselves as gang members, when you look at yourself outside of the gang, you don’t really got an identity,” Hussle said, adding that he had decided to focus on music after several of what he described as “wake-up calls.”

In addition to his father and mother, his survivors include his partner, Lauren London, an actress and model; their son, Kross; a daughter from a previous relationship, Emani Asghedom; a brother, Semiel; and a sister, Samantha Smith.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/obituaries/a-rapper-who-came-back-for-his-neighborhood.html" id="c119699d-908f-352f-aaa0-81cecb3a1fea">The New York Times</a>.

Nipsey Hussle’s raps boasted of his exploits as a young man in South Central Los Angeles and the perils of becoming a gang member. But his music was also a path to a more legitimate life for him and an inspiration and exhortation to others in his situation.

A Rapper Who Came Back for His Neighborhood

Danielle Boiardi, the curator and manager of the Lyle Tuttle Collection, said Tuttle had been in hospice care after an inoperable growth was discovered in his throat about two weeks before he died.

These days tattoos are commonplace, inspiring clothing lines and museum shows and adorning people from all walks of life, most publicly actors, athletes and musicians. But when Tuttle first took up the needle in the late 1940s, tattoos were practically unheard-of in polite society, more associated with sailors, criminals and sideshow freaks.

Tuttle had been a tattoo enthusiast — both as an artist and as a recipient — since he was a teenager. He was mentored in the 1950s by storied tattooists like Bert Grimm, and he worked in the trade in California and in Alaska before he opened his own shop in San Francisco in 1960, wanting “to get tattooing out of the back alley,” as he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2002.

His shop became a popular destination for members of the San Francisco counterculture during the 1960s, and by the end of the decade he was being sought out by the likes of Janis Joplin, Joan Baez, the Allman Brothers, Peter Fonda and Cher.

“Janis was a wild and crazy girl — I put a bracelet and a little heart on her breast,” he recalled in 2006 in an interview with The Columbus Dispatch in Ohio. He said he had given Baez “a small blue flower on her back.”

His tattooing of rock stars drew the news media’s interest, as did the elaborate designs covering his own body (except for his face, hands and feet). Dozens of well-known tattooists, like Tahiti Felix Lynch and Painless Nell, did the inking. Some of Grimm’s standout designs could be found on Tuttle, including a full back tattoo that showed two eagles squaring off over the title “Duel in the Sun,” and a coat of arms on his torso that featured a chicken and a feather with a Latin version of the phrase “Chicken today, feathers tomorrow.”

Photographs of Tuttle, with the scruffy hair and sideburns of a rock star, appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone and inside Life magazine accompanying an article about the growing popularity of tattoos among women. At one point the elaborate tattoos on his back, arms and torso were reproduced for a long-sleeved shirt, which was said to have sold in the hundreds of thousands.

Spider Webb, another renowned tattooist, said in a telephone interview that he saw Tuttle as an eloquent “spokesman for tattooing.”

“The breakthrough that he made was in people’s minds,” he said, “tearing down prejudice, and that’s kind of a beautiful thing to do with your life.”

Lyle Gilbert Tuttle was born in Chariton, Iowa, on Oct. 7, 1931. His parents, Howard and Opal (Castor) Tuttle, were farmers who later moved to Ukiah to escape drought. His father became a contractor there.

Lyle got his first tattoo at 14, a heart emblazoned with the word “Mother,” after seeing similar tattoos on servicemen returning from World War II. He paid $3.50 for it in a San Francisco parlor.

“For me, guys with tattoos had been someplace — or at least out of the valley,” he said in 2006, referring to the Ukiah Valley in Northern California.

The tattooist who inked him for the first time was Ralph Kaufman, widely known in San Francisco as Duke. By the late 1940s, having dropped out of high school in Ukiah, Tuttle was working with him.

After a stint in the Marines during the Korean War, Tuttle went on to work with Grimm in Long Beach in the mid-1950s. From there, in 1957, he moved to Alaska, where tattoo artists were rare, and worked for a time in Anchorage and Fairbanks.

Returning to the Bay Area, he worked in Oakland before opening Lyle Tuttle Tattooing in San Francisco. A version of the store, called Lyle Tuttle Tattoo Shop, continues to operate in North Beach.

Tuttle is survived by his wife, Judy (Aurre) Tuttle, and a daughter, Suzanne Tuttle, from an earlier marriage, to Betty Lawson.

Tuttle retired for the most part in the early 1990s. But he remained a celebrity to aficionados, appearing at tattoo conventions around the world and sometimes inking fans with a stylized version of his autograph. He signed the last one a week before he died.

He said he had tattooed at least one person on each continent, including Antarctica, and amassed what many enthusiasts consider the world’s largest collection of tattoo-related artifacts and artwork, like versions of tattoo designs on paper. He drew on that collection to open a small museum in San Francisco dedicated to tattoo history. (It has since closed.)

Tuttle frequently said that he never regretted his own copious tattoos. But he did advise restraint, especially with face and head tattoos, which have become increasingly common.

“It’s a matter of privacy,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 2004. “Hey, I look civilized with my clothes on.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/obituaries/lyle-tuttle-dies.html" id="fa4d34dd-b4c5-34e3-adee-b04f7de88669">The New York Times</a>.

Lyle Tuttle, a tattoo artist who found his own kind of international fame by catering to celebrities while helping to move tattooing, as he put it, from the “back alley” into mainstream acceptability, died on March 26 at his home in Ukiah, California, where he had grown up. He was 87 (and practically covered in tattoos himself).

Lyle Tuttle, Who Recast Tattooing's Image Pore by Pore, Dies at 87

Her early childhood resembled a fairy tale. She grew up in Carinhall, an estate in the countryside replete with priceless works of art and a child-size play palace. Hitler was her godfather, and her birthday inspired national celebrations.

Her youthful idyll ended when the Allies defeated the Nazis in 1945. Hermann Goering, who had been convicted of war crimes and other charges at Nuremberg, committed suicide with a cyanide capsule in his cell hours before he was to be executed in 1946, when Edda was 8.

Edda Goering, who defended her father’s legacy for the rest of her life, died Dec. 21 in Munich. She was 80.

A spokesman for the municipal administrative authority for the city of Munich confirmed the death this week but provided no other details. German news reports said that only a few close associates had been informed of her death.

Children of Nazi officials can have complicated relationships with their parents. Goering’s feelings for her father, who doted on her, were straightforward.

“I loved him very much, and it was obvious how much he loved me,” she told journalist Gerald Posner for his book “Hitler’s Children: Sons and Daughters of Third Reich Leaders (1991).”

“My only memories of him are such loving ones,” she told Posner in a rare interview, “I cannot see him any other way.”

In the same interview, Goering played down her father’s part in the Holocaust, even though most historians say he was instrumental in implementing plans to systematically murder millions of people, including about 6 million Jews.

“My father’s problem was his loyalty to Hitler,” she said. “He had sworn personal fealty to him and would never abandon it, even when Hitler had gone too far. The things that happened to the Jews were horrible, but quite separate from my father.”

During her father’s trial, Goering and her mother, actress Emmy Sonnemann, Hermann Goering’s second wife, spent time in prison. They were living in a cottage without electricity and running water in the Bavarian countryside when her father killed himself; they eventually moved to Munich, where Edda Goering worked as a law clerk and later worked for a surgeon.

Hermann Goering, who was known for his lavish lifestyle, accumulated a vast collection of looted jewelry, furniture and artwork during the war. The German government seized most of his collection — property that Edda Goering said rightfully belonged to her and her mother. “It was all profit for the government,” she said, “and of course I did not receive anything.”

She unsuccessfully petitioned the Bavarian state government to return some of her father’s art collection. Her request was most recently denied in 2015, after a hearing that lasted only a few minutes.

Edda Goering was born June 2, 1938. Hitler became her godfather when she was baptized later that year.

Information on her survivors was not immediately available, but German news media outlets reported that she lived alone. Posner wrote in 1991 that her apartment contained a Goering family crest and many portraits of her mother and father.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/obituaries/edda-goering-dies.html" id="7e9a1fa5-7b36-3dd6-a29a-11dede4ef91b">The New York Times</a>.

Edda Goering was practically a princess of the Third Reich. As the only daughter of Hermann Goering, the leader of the Luftwaffe and Adolf Hitler’s right-hand man and potential successor, Goering was a national celebrity from the day she was born.

Edda Goering, Unrepentant Daughter of Hermann, Dies at 80

His death was confirmed by his daughter, Hélène Loussier Oziouls Toulouse. His son Julien said the cause was complications of a degenerative disease.

Loussier was classically trained, but he had dabbled in jazz improvisation for years when he formed the Jacques Loussier Trio in 1959. The other members were drummer Christian Garros, who had played with Django Reinhardt, and bassist Pierre Michelot, who had recorded with Miles Davis.

The trio played recognizable Bach melodies or pieces, like “Air on a G String” and the Prelude No. 1 in C, then took flight into bebop improvisations. They quickly found a devoted audience and released a popular series of albums on Decca under the overall title “Play Bach” beginning in the early 1960s.

Many critics bridled at the idea of jazzing up the work of Bach. John Rockwell of The New York Times, reviewing a performance at Carnegie Hall in 1975, wrote that he was “actively appalled by the very notion of ‘popularizing’ Bach — or any classical composer, for that matter.”

“Mostly,” Rockwell continued, the trio “stuck too close to Bach for jazz and too close to cocktail/salon jazz for satisfaction.”

In 2002, Loussier told the British newspaper The Independent that such criticism did not bother him. “Bach himself,” he noted, “was improvising on these pieces for many years.”

Other critics were more positive about Loussier’s playful style, including Robert Sherman, who reviewed another Carnegie Hall performance by the trio in The Times in 1966.

“Mr. Loussier is a man with a fertile imagination, excellent musical instincts (given the basic premise of his transcriptions) and a powerhouse technique,” Sherman wrote. “The snippets he played ‘straight,’ or reasonably so, showed flair and intelligence, and even when poor old Bach was left far behind, Mr. Loussier’s volatile pianism was never less than compelling.”

The Jacques Loussier Trio broke up in the late 1970s, and Loussier went on to compose original works, including music for French films and television.

In 1985, the 300th anniversary of Bach’s birth, Loussier rebuilt the trio with André Arpino on percussion and Vincent Charbonnier on bass. The new trio embraced other composers in its jazz adaptations, including Satie, Debussy, Ravel, Vivaldi and Beethoven, and released more albums. His last new release, on the Telarc label, was a version of Schumann’s “Kinderszenen,” in 2011.

Loussier was born Oct. 26, 1934, in Angers, in western France, to Rene Loussier, who worked in a bank, and Marguerite (Duvat) Loussier, a homemaker. He started playing the piano at 10, and later said that his distinctive approach to Bach developed while he practiced the Prelude in G Minor.

“I played it 100 times or so,” he said. “Then one day I started to change the melody, then the left-hand harmonies. It was a natural instinct.”

He studied for a time at the National Conservatory of Paris.

“My fellow students would always ask me to play some Bach with my improvisations,” he said. “At that time, the Modern Jazz Quartet was doing this thing already: I heard them, and that gave me the idea to transform it with bass and drums.”

In 1959, the year the Jacques Loussier Trio released its first album, he married Sylvie de Tournemire. Their marriage ended in divorce. In 1998, he married Elizabeth Note.

In addition to his wife, with whom he lived in Cour-sur-Loire, France, and his son and daughter, Loussier is survived by three other sons, Thomas, Jean-Baptiste and Pierre; 13 grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.

In a case that brought Loussier renewed attention, he sued Eminem and Dr. Dre for $10 million in 2002, charging that they had used his music without credit. He asserted that “Kill You,” the first song on Eminem’s album “The Marshall Mathers LP” (2000), was suspiciously similar to one of his compositions, “Pulsion.”

Loussier said that he thought Eminem or Dr. Dre, who produced most of “The Marshall Mathers LP,” had heard a snippet of “Pulsion” that he had played on one of his Bach recordings and “thought it was Bach’s music, not mine.”

“So they used it without asking permission,” he continued. “If they had come to me, I would have accepted, and allowed them to use it for nothing, but they didn’t, which is not nice.”

The case was settled out of court.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/obituaries/jacques-loussier-dies.html" id="2ade0a16-3633-3e32-a29e-9fced3d454fe">The New York Times</a>.

Jacques Loussier, a French pianist who led a trio that performed jazzy interpretations of Johann Sebastian Bach, selling millions of albums and touring the world, died March 5 at a hospital in Blois, in France’s Loire Valley. He was 84.

Jacques Loussier, Pianist Who Jazzed Up Bach, Dies at 84

The cause was cardiac arrest, according to a death certificate released by the Buncombe County Register of Deeds. His death was not widely reported until Friday.

Vincent, who had electric blue eyes and a taut surfer’s physique, began acting in the late 1960s, appearing on television shows including “Bonanza,” “Lassie” and “Gunsmoke.” He later had lead roles in films like “The World’s Greatest Athlete” (1973) and “Buster and Billie” (1974).

He had a particularly nuanced turn in “White Line Fever” (1975), an action movie in which he played a truck driver who battles corruption.

“The rarity in an action picture of this kind is the quiet and sensitive acting of the two principals, Jan-Michael Vincent as the rebellious driver and Kay Lenz as his wife,” Richard Eder wrote in a review in The New York Times. “They manage tenderness, quarreling and weariness as these things really are managed.”

Vincent’s most recognizable part was the pilot Stringfellow Hawke on “Airwolf,” a CBS show built around a cutting-edge combat helicopter that made its debut in 1984. It was produced by Donald P. Bellisario, known for hit shows like “Magnum, P.I.,” and featured Ernest Borgnine as a veteran aviator and flight engineer who was Hawke’s surrogate father.

“Airwolf” was expensive to produce, and many critics received it coolly, but it found an audience and stayed on CBS for three seasons. Later news reports said Vincent was one of the most highly paid actors working at the time, making around $200,000 an episode.

Scandal dogged Vincent in the 1980s. He was known to abuse alcohol and cocaine and was accused of getting into bar fights; he narrowly avoided jail in 1986 by entering a monthlong drug rehabilitation program after breaking probation related to an earlier drunken-driving conviction. CBS canceled “Airwolf” that year.

Vincent’s career declined after that, although he continued to appear in TV movies like “Alienator” (1990) and “Deadly Heroes” (1993). His substance abuse worsened, and he broke his neck in 1996 after rear-ending his girlfriend’s car, permanently damaging his vocal cords in the process.

In 2000 Vincent told Bill Ritter of the ABC News program “20/20” that he had been sober for a time, but that remaining so was a struggle.

“I’m hanging on by my white knuckles,” Vincent said.

Vincent was also involved in another crash in 2008, and in 2012 an infection led doctors to amputate part of his right leg. At his death he had not been credited for acting in a movie or TV show since the early 2000s.

Vincent was born on July 15, 1945, in Denver to Lloyd and Doris (Pace) Vincent. He grew up in Hanford, California, attended Ventura College and became an avid surfer before his acting career began.

Vincent appeared in movies with some of the biggest stars of the 1960s and ‘70s. He supported Rock Hudson and John Wayne in the Western “The Undefeated” (1969); played an eager participant in a long-distance horserace opposite Candice Bergen and Gene Hackman in another Western, “Bite the Bullet” (1975); and was an up-and-coming stuntman in “Hooper” (1978), with Burt Reynolds and Sally Field.

He drew on his surfing skills in “Big Wednesday” (1978), directed by John Milius, which also starred Gary Busey and William Katt and has since become a favorite of surfers. He played Robert Mitchum’s son in “The Winds of War,” the popular ABC miniseries based on the Herman Wouk novel.

Survivors include his wife, Patricia Vincent.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/obituaries/jan-michael-vincent-dies.html" id="76fc9438-e68c-3c09-a94e-cf0cac9c1e11">The New York Times</a>.

Jan-Michael Vincent, who became nationally recognizable on the 1980s television series “Airwolf,” but whose career later foundered, in part because of problems with drugs and alcohol, died Feb. 10 at a hospital near his home in Asheville, North Carolina. He was 73.

Jan-Michael Vincent, Troubled Star of 'Airwolf,' Dies at 73

Hollis, about whom personal details are scarce, was widely reported to have been 64.

A Facebook page devoted to the group confirmed the death, citing Keith Aspden, Hollis’ former manager, but provided no further details.

Talk Talk was formed in London in 1981, when new wave and synth-pop groups like A Flock of Seagulls and Duran Duran were beginning to receive heavy airplay. Talk Talk’s biggest hits, among them “It’s My Life” and “Such a Shame,” were typical of the style: buoyant songs built on catchy, danceable beats and Hollis’ plaintive lyrics.

The band at first consisted of Hollis on vocals, guitar and piano, Lee Harris on drums, Paul Webb on bass and Simon Brenner on keyboards. Brenner left after the group released its first album, “The Party’s Over,” on EMI in 1982, and Tim Friese-Greene became the band’s producer and unofficial fourth member.

Talk Talk toured with Duran Duran and broadened its American audience with videos on MTV. But its songs never quite attained the mainstream popularity of other synth-pop groups. “It’s My Life,” the group’s highest-charting single in America, peaked at No. 31 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1984.

The success of the album, also titled “It’s My Life,” that featured that song gave Talk Talk free rein to experiment.

On its next albums, “The Colour of Spring” (1986) and “Spirit of Eden” (1988), the band drifted away from synth-pop into music that defied easy description. The languid songs on “Spirit of Eden” included elements of free jazz, blues, contemporary classical, industrial and ambient music as well as rock, with Hollis’ quavering vocals floating over it all. Later critics hailed the album as a precursor of post-rock, which became widespread in the 1990s.

In a video interview, Hollis said of “Spirit of Eden”: “Everyone who comes and plays on this album is given absolute freedom, has no direction at all in what they play.” He added, “And then you assemble an arrangement from that so you end up with something which is very tightly constrained.”

The new sound was groundbreaking, and some critics were enthusiastic about it, but it was far from the marketable pop that EMI wanted, and the label eventually dropped the band. Talk Talk released another album, “Laughing Stock” (1991), on Polydor, then disbanded.

Hollis largely receded from view after that. His last album was “Mark Hollis” (1998), an intimate, mostly acoustic offering that ended with nearly two minutes of silence.

Nigel Reeve, a record executive and friend of Hollis’, told The Guardian in 2012 that Hollis had no regrets about walking away from his rock star life. “In all the conversations I have with him, he says: ‘I did it. Full stop.’ He got to where he wanted to go,” Reeve said.

Talk Talk’s influence outlasted the band: Aspects of its sound are echoed in music by groups like Radiohead and Sigur Rós. No Doubt reached No.5 on the Billboard chart in 2004 with a cover of “It’s My Life,” and Sean Carey of the popular indie group Bon Iver described Hollis as “a hero of ours.”

Hollis said little about his past, but the music website Pitchfork and other outlets reported that he was born in London in 1955. No information about his survivors was available.

By most accounts he studied to become a child psychologist, then worked as a laboratory technician. His brother Ed, a disc jockey who managed punk groups, helped Mark get the attention of record labels after Mark formed a short-lived band called the Reaction in the 1970s.

The group broke up when Hollis met the musicians who would join him as Talk Talk.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/obituaries/mark-hollis-dies.html" id="dd37d98f-70c8-365e-ab1b-0e851b92980e">The New York Times</a>.

Mark Hollis, the frontman for the British band Talk Talk, which had synth-pop hits in the early 1980s before veering into a more experimental sound that influenced a generation of musicians, has died.

Mark Hollis, Leader of ′80s band Talk Talk, Is Dead

His son Roger confirmed the death by email.

Paul Royle, the second-to-last surviving prisoner to escape from Stalag Luft III in 1944, died in 2015 at 101. Many British news media outlets and other sources called Churchill the last surviving airman who took part in the escape.

The Germans captured Churchill, a squadron leader at the time, after they shot down the bomber he was flying over the Netherlands in 1940. In 1942 he was transferred to Stalag III, a camp in what is now Zagan, Poland, a little more than 100 miles southeast of Berlin and then a part of Germany, where a few hundred prisoners soon began excavating escape tunnels.

Churchill later recalled that the inmates felt they had to do something, even though it probably would have been safer to try to wait out the war.

“Were you going to sit and enjoy the very few delights of a barbed-wire prison camp until you were rescued by your comrades, if you were rescued, or were you going to try and get out of the place and rejoin, and drop something on them?” Churchill asked in a BBC interview in 2018.

Churchill helped dig the three main tunnels, which the prisoners called Tom, Dick and Harry. It was arduous, nerve-wracking work, conducted with improvised tools and the constant risk of discovery or a cave-in.

“You didn’t have any air,” Churchill said, “and you had a little fat lump lamp which was Reich margarine, which spluttered, with a bit of pajama cord or something similar, which sucked up the oil and gave you a little bit of a light. And you hacked away at your sand, pushed it behind you where another fool took it further back.”

The tunnels were cleverly concealed, but Tom was discovered by the Germans in 1943 and Dick proved unusable. On a frigid night in March 1944, Churchill was one of 76 prisoners to make their way through the tunnel called Harry and out of Stalag III.

The escape was delayed for more than an hour, and the tunnel ended yards away from the forest the escapees hoped would conceal them, so they had to scramble over open ground for cover. Churchill, who had spent months studying Romanian and dressed in improvised clothing he hoped would allow him to pass for a Romanian woodcutter, fled with Flight Lt. Bob Nelson and spent two days hiding in the woods as the Germans began a thorough search of the area. He and Nelson hid in a hayloft, where they were discovered on the third morning.

Paul Brickhill, an Australian POW who took part in the jailbreak, wrote a book about it called “The Great Escape” (1950). That book was the basis for the film, which starred Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Richard Attenborough and James Garner and added embellishments, most memorably when McQueen’s character vaulted a barbed-wire fence on a motorcycle.

Most of the escapees were recaptured in days — only three made it to freedom — and 50 were killed for the attempt. Churchill said he thought he was spared because his captors believed he might be related to Prime Minister Winston Churchill and could be a useful bargaining chip. (After he made it back to England he said that they were not related as far as he knew).

Churchill told The Telegraph in 2014 that he thought the escape “a worthwhile venture” despite its terrible cost.

“If nothing else, you are doing something towards the target of getting out and getting back to what you were doing before, whether it’s flying fighters or dropping bombs” instead of giving in to despair, he said.

Dick Churchill, the last living participant in a daring breakout from a German prisoner-of-war camp that inspired the 1963 movie “The Great Escape,” died Feb. 12 at his home near Crediton, Devon, England. He was 99.

Daniel E. Slotnik

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