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Michael Kerpan wrote:

Saturnome wrote:Isao Takahata

Devastated...

Variety

Japan Times

Just found about this and am utterly heartbroken. An incomparable giant of the art form.

The Willisau Concert is one of the very few Cecil Taylor albums that seem to have got lost in my listening kevyip before I had a chance to listen to it. Need to fix that.

fdm wrote:The Willisau Concert is one of the very few Cecil Taylor albums that seem to have got lost in my listening kevyip before I had a chance to listen to it. Need to fix that.

Yes, you do. It may be the culmination of his art. I got the date wrong, though: it was recorded in 2000.

Apparently the musical side of the kevyip still needs some work, no sign of it or the other three in what I thought was pretty much all of it. Curses.

WKCR, Columbia University's jazz and classical station, is playing Billie Holiday all day for her birthday.
And after midnight EST, they'll continue with a Cecil Taylor Memorial program, which should run at least a full day, I'd guess. Should be interesting and insightful. Tune in on line.

Anna Chenault, 92.
Her Flying Tiger husband died 60 years ago.
She became a staunch anti-communist and GOP operative.
Rumored to have scotched the Vietnamese peace talks to help Nixon get elected.

Aside:
I was an extra in a film in Shanghai once. It was a film about some great Chinese train pioneer, and I was a train porter, though my friends thought I looked more like a bellhop. There was a scene in which Anna Chen Xiangmei meets Gen. Chenault for the first time. And bizarrely they had the actress playing her dressed up exactly as Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, in a blue-and-white gingham dress with braids that came over her shoulders. Weird.

That's not just a rumor.

Juraj Herz, best known around here for having directed The Cremator

Damn, that's a great movie. Second Run released Morgiana too, which is equally dark.

Ralph Woolsey, cinematographer, at the age of 104.

Here's a longer more detailed obit for Yvonne Staples.
It was hard to find an obit that was any good.
About half the short obits I saw mainly mentioned the Staples Singers and didn't even note that Yvonne was the business manager. While some of them disagreed on details: Yvonne joined the family group after brother Pervis Staples left to either join the Army or become a nightclub owner, in 1970 or perhaps '71.
It's probably a symptom of the state of today's journalism, but doesn't seem too much to ask for a little research and accuracy.

I should have posted this earlier.

The best places to get an obit is usually a local reporter from the deceased's home turf. (For example, the better-known news sources in Pittsburgh had much better stories and anecdotes about George Romero when he passed.) This is true for any story really. (Just look at the Baltimore Sun's Pulitzer Prize winning coverage of the Baltimore riots from several years ago - you really need journalists who know the area and the people better than anyone from the outside.)

Greg Kot wrote a book on Mavis Staples and has followed her career in recent years more closely than anyone else, so not surprisingly his obituary was one of the few to publish a lot of "new" reporting rather than regurgitating a newswire.

Alex Beckett, at just 35

Thirty five year olds don't just drop dead. I imagine it was probably an undiagnosed heart issue. Terrible loss.

dwk wrote:Art Bell

I'm sure his listeners will accept this as natural causes

Apologies. Did a quick scan and didn’t see it mentioned.