Former SNL-er Charles Rocket
Dropping Like Flies
'Little Rascals' Actor Gordon Lee Dies
4 minutes ago
Gordon Lee, the chubby child actor who played Spanky McFarland's little brother Porky in the "Little Rascals" comedies, has died. He was 71.
Lee died Sunday in a Minneapolis nursing home after battling lung and brain cancer, said Janice McClain, his partner of 13 years.
Lee played one of the younger members in the "Our Gang" shorts in the 1930s, appearing in more than 40 of them from 1935 to 1939. The comedies, produced by Hal Roach, became known as "The Little Rascals" when shown on TV in the 1950s.
Among the films Lee appeared in were "Bored of Education," which won the Oscar for best one-reel short subject in 1937; "Our Gang Follies of 1936"; "The Awful Tooth"; and "Roamin' Holiday."
In a 1998 interview with the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, the Texas-born Lee said he was 2 years old when his mother sent his picture to studio executives who were seeking an actor to play McFarland's brother.
"We were on the next train to L.A. and I had a contract within a few days," Lee said. "Fat kid got lucky."
"My memories are not about making movies. We played with our toys and the adults played with theirs (the cameras)," he said.
He and Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas teamed up against older boys Spanky and Alfalfa in many of the comedies. The Porky character is credited with originating the catchphrase "otay."
In the interview, Lee recalled a warm friendship with his black costar when they were kids and praised their interracial relationship on screen, saying, "Buckwheat played an absolute equal part in the Gang."
Lee told friends his career ended when a growth spurt made him thinner. "They wanted Porky to be a chunky fellow, so they looked for someone else," McClain said.
He was born Eugene Lee in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1933. His adoptive parents began calling him Gordon after Gordon Douglas, who directed many of the films Lee appeared in. He kept the first name as an adult.
Lee was a schoolteacher, living in Colorado for a time. He moved to Minnesota after he retired to be closer to his only son, Douglas, said a friend, Tracy Tolzmann. In recent years, Lee sold autographed photos of himself as Porky, Tolzmann and McClain said.
"Before that he felt like he was forgotten," McClain said. "It really made him feel good about himself."
4 minutes ago
Gordon Lee, the chubby child actor who played Spanky McFarland's little brother Porky in the "Little Rascals" comedies, has died. He was 71.
Lee died Sunday in a Minneapolis nursing home after battling lung and brain cancer, said Janice McClain, his partner of 13 years.
Lee played one of the younger members in the "Our Gang" shorts in the 1930s, appearing in more than 40 of them from 1935 to 1939. The comedies, produced by Hal Roach, became known as "The Little Rascals" when shown on TV in the 1950s.
Among the films Lee appeared in were "Bored of Education," which won the Oscar for best one-reel short subject in 1937; "Our Gang Follies of 1936"; "The Awful Tooth"; and "Roamin' Holiday."
In a 1998 interview with the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, the Texas-born Lee said he was 2 years old when his mother sent his picture to studio executives who were seeking an actor to play McFarland's brother.
"We were on the next train to L.A. and I had a contract within a few days," Lee said. "Fat kid got lucky."
"My memories are not about making movies. We played with our toys and the adults played with theirs (the cameras)," he said.
He and Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas teamed up against older boys Spanky and Alfalfa in many of the comedies. The Porky character is credited with originating the catchphrase "otay."
In the interview, Lee recalled a warm friendship with his black costar when they were kids and praised their interracial relationship on screen, saying, "Buckwheat played an absolute equal part in the Gang."
Lee told friends his career ended when a growth spurt made him thinner. "They wanted Porky to be a chunky fellow, so they looked for someone else," McClain said.
He was born Eugene Lee in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1933. His adoptive parents began calling him Gordon after Gordon Douglas, who directed many of the films Lee appeared in. He kept the first name as an adult.
Lee was a schoolteacher, living in Colorado for a time. He moved to Minnesota after he retired to be closer to his only son, Douglas, said a friend, Tracy Tolzmann. In recent years, Lee sold autographed photos of himself as Porky, Tolzmann and McClain said.
"Before that he felt like he was forgotten," McClain said. "It really made him feel good about himself."
A local legend passes on.
Jazz Singer Shirley Horn Dead At 71
Jazz singer and native Washingtonian Shirley Horn has died at the age of 71.
A family member has told 9 News that Horn passed away Thursday night.
Born May 1, 1934, in Washington, D.C., Horn attended Howard University's Junior School of Music as a teenager, where she studied classical piano. She later began playing piano gigs at local nightclubs and restaurants.
One day, after a gentleman with a giant teddy bear walked in a dining room where she was performing and promised to give her the bear if she would sing "Melancholy Baby" for him, it launched her career as a vocalist.
A superior ballad singer and a talented pianist, Horn put off potential success until finally becoming a major attraction while in her 50s. She put together her first trio in 1954 and was encouraged in the early '60s by Miles Davis and Quincy Jones.
She recorded three albums during 1963-65 for Mercury and ABC-Paramount but chose to stick around Washington D.C. and raise a family instead of pursuing her career.
In the early '80s she began recording for SteepleChase but Shirley Horn really had her breakthrough in 1987 when she started making records for Verve, an association that continues to the present day.
In recent years, complications from diabetes led to the amputation of her right foot and later Horn lost much of her right leg. She was forced to give up the piano bench for the first time in more than six decades, changing a major aspect of her performances; the ability to sing and play the piano at once.
Jazz Singer Shirley Horn Dead At 71
Jazz singer and native Washingtonian Shirley Horn has died at the age of 71.
A family member has told 9 News that Horn passed away Thursday night.
Born May 1, 1934, in Washington, D.C., Horn attended Howard University's Junior School of Music as a teenager, where she studied classical piano. She later began playing piano gigs at local nightclubs and restaurants.
One day, after a gentleman with a giant teddy bear walked in a dining room where she was performing and promised to give her the bear if she would sing "Melancholy Baby" for him, it launched her career as a vocalist.
A superior ballad singer and a talented pianist, Horn put off potential success until finally becoming a major attraction while in her 50s. She put together her first trio in 1954 and was encouraged in the early '60s by Miles Davis and Quincy Jones.
She recorded three albums during 1963-65 for Mercury and ABC-Paramount but chose to stick around Washington D.C. and raise a family instead of pursuing her career.
In the early '80s she began recording for SteepleChase but Shirley Horn really had her breakthrough in 1987 when she started making records for Verve, an association that continues to the present day.
In recent years, complications from diabetes led to the amputation of her right foot and later Horn lost much of her right leg. She was forced to give up the piano bench for the first time in more than six decades, changing a major aspect of her performances; the ability to sing and play the piano at once.
Wellington Mara – a hundred times the man Dan Snyder will ever be.
NFL pioneer Mara dies
Giants owner was last of NFL's founding generation
Updated: Tuesday October 25, 2005 12:16PM
NEW YORK (AP) – Wellington Mara of the New York Giants, one of the NFL's most influential owners for more than a half century and the last of the league's founding generation, died Tuesday. He was 89.
Mara, who was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1997, died of cancer at his home in Rye, the team said.
Mara's influence went far beyond the Giants. He clearly was one of the most important figures in NFL history.
"Wellington Mara represented the heart and soul of the National Football League," NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue said. "He was a man of deep conviction who stood as a beacon of integrity."
One of Mara's greatest contributions came in the early 1960s. He and brother Jack, owners of the biggest team in the biggest market, agreed to share television revenue on a leaguewide basis, dividing the huge amounts of money available in cities like New York with smaller markets from Pittsburgh to Green Bay.
Part of that agreement meant that the Giants ceded the right to sell their own games to television for a leaguewide contract, in those days with CBS. That concept of revenue sharing allowed the NFL to thrive and remains in place today.
He also served during the 1970s as chairman of the NFL's Management Council, which negotiated labor contracts, and as a member of the competition committee.
In 1989, he and group of older owners wanted Pete Rozelle's successor to be Jim Finks, then the New Orleans general manager, rather than Tagliabue, then a league lawyer. Mara thought the league should be run by a football man.
But Mara and several other old-guard owners finally agreed to break a stalemate of four months by throwing their votes to Tagliabue and he became one of the new commissioner's staunchest supporters, a man Tagliabue often leaned on for advice.
Tagliabue wasn't the only one who sought out Mara. His advice also was invaluable to other owners, league officials, media and even fans.
"When Well Mara stood to speak at a league meeting, the room would become silent with anticipation because all of us knew we were going to hear profound insights born of eight decades of league experience," Tagliabue said.
Mara became a Giants' ballboy at age 9 on Oct. 18, 1925 after his father, Timothy J. Mara, bought the team. He stayed fully involved in its operation for almost 80 years, except for three years while in the Navy during World War II. Until he became ill last spring, he attended most practices and every game.
In 1930, at 14, his father made him co-owner with older brother Jack, and he ran the club until several years ago when son John took over day-to-day operations.
But from 1979 on, while the team was run by general managers George Young and Ernie Accorsi, Mara had final say on football decisions. He was the one who decided to fire Jim Fassel after the 2003 season and replace him with Tom Coughlin.
"I've never had more respect for anybody in this business, or in any business, or in any walk of life, than Wellington Mara," said Coughlin, an assistant on earlier Giants teams. "To say Wellington Mara is one of a kind, I would endorse that wholeheartedly."
Before last Sunday's game against Denver, Coughlin told his players of Mara's condition. The Giants won on a touchdown pass from Eli Manning to Amani Toomer with 5 seconds left. In the locker room after the game, the players chanted "Duke, Duke, Duke" – Mara's nickname.
Manning later said he had been told by one of Mara's grandsons that the owner awakened in time to see the winning play, then smiled and went back to sleep.
"Wellington Mara is the face of not only the New York Giants but the NFL," tight end Jeremy Shockey said. "He's a pioneer and the guy that everybody looks up to."
When former players became ill, Mara would find them doctors, pay their medical expenses and arrange help for their families. Many old-timers were on the payroll as scouts or advisers. Even in this era of sophisticated scouting, it wasn't unusual for Young or Accorsi to get a call from a former player recommending the Giants look at some prospect.
In most cases, the team was well aware of the prospect, but Mara never dropped any of those old "scouts" from the payroll.
Mara always considered himself a football man first, running the on-field operations through the 1950s until 1979 while Jack and then Jack's son Tim ran the business end. The team was successful during the '50s and early '60s with such stars as Frank Gifford, Y.A. Tittle, Sam Huff and Roosevelt Brown and a coaching staff that included Tom Landry and Vince Lombardi as assistants.
But after losing to Chicago in the 1963 NFL championship game, the Giants began a long slide, failing to make the playoffs again until 1981 as Wellington and Tim, by then the co-owner, feuded.
In 1979, on the commissioner's recommendation, the Maras agreed to hire Young as general manager and the team again became a power.
It won Super Bowls in 1986 and 1990 with Bill Parcells coaching a team that starred Lawrence Taylor and Phil Simms and stout defenses. The 1990 team featured one of the best coaching staffs assembled: future head coaches Coughlin, Bill Belichick, Al Groh, Charlie Weis, Romeo Crennel and Ray Handley.
Parcells left after that season and the Giants slipped into the middle of the pack.
They made the Super Bowl again after the 2000 season, losing to the Baltimore Ravens, owned by Art Modell, Mara's close friend and longtime partner in league matters. Mara never openly criticized Modell's move of a team that had been the Giants' chief on-field rival during the '50s and '60s, and they celebrated getting to the Super Bowl together.
In 1991, Tim Mara and his family sold their share of the team to Robert Tisch. Tisch and Mara were officially co-owners and Tisch ran much of the business affairs. But it was always clear this was Wellington's team – for many years they were known by New York headline writers as "the Maramen."
Mara is survived by wife Ann, 11 children and 40 grandchildren.
There was no immediate word on funeral arrangements.
NFL pioneer Mara dies
Giants owner was last of NFL's founding generation
Updated: Tuesday October 25, 2005 12:16PM
NEW YORK (AP) – Wellington Mara of the New York Giants, one of the NFL's most influential owners for more than a half century and the last of the league's founding generation, died Tuesday. He was 89.
Mara, who was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1997, died of cancer at his home in Rye, the team said.
Mara's influence went far beyond the Giants. He clearly was one of the most important figures in NFL history.
"Wellington Mara represented the heart and soul of the National Football League," NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue said. "He was a man of deep conviction who stood as a beacon of integrity."
One of Mara's greatest contributions came in the early 1960s. He and brother Jack, owners of the biggest team in the biggest market, agreed to share television revenue on a leaguewide basis, dividing the huge amounts of money available in cities like New York with smaller markets from Pittsburgh to Green Bay.
Part of that agreement meant that the Giants ceded the right to sell their own games to television for a leaguewide contract, in those days with CBS. That concept of revenue sharing allowed the NFL to thrive and remains in place today.
He also served during the 1970s as chairman of the NFL's Management Council, which negotiated labor contracts, and as a member of the competition committee.
In 1989, he and group of older owners wanted Pete Rozelle's successor to be Jim Finks, then the New Orleans general manager, rather than Tagliabue, then a league lawyer. Mara thought the league should be run by a football man.
But Mara and several other old-guard owners finally agreed to break a stalemate of four months by throwing their votes to Tagliabue and he became one of the new commissioner's staunchest supporters, a man Tagliabue often leaned on for advice.
Tagliabue wasn't the only one who sought out Mara. His advice also was invaluable to other owners, league officials, media and even fans.
"When Well Mara stood to speak at a league meeting, the room would become silent with anticipation because all of us knew we were going to hear profound insights born of eight decades of league experience," Tagliabue said.
Mara became a Giants' ballboy at age 9 on Oct. 18, 1925 after his father, Timothy J. Mara, bought the team. He stayed fully involved in its operation for almost 80 years, except for three years while in the Navy during World War II. Until he became ill last spring, he attended most practices and every game.
In 1930, at 14, his father made him co-owner with older brother Jack, and he ran the club until several years ago when son John took over day-to-day operations.
But from 1979 on, while the team was run by general managers George Young and Ernie Accorsi, Mara had final say on football decisions. He was the one who decided to fire Jim Fassel after the 2003 season and replace him with Tom Coughlin.
"I've never had more respect for anybody in this business, or in any business, or in any walk of life, than Wellington Mara," said Coughlin, an assistant on earlier Giants teams. "To say Wellington Mara is one of a kind, I would endorse that wholeheartedly."
Before last Sunday's game against Denver, Coughlin told his players of Mara's condition. The Giants won on a touchdown pass from Eli Manning to Amani Toomer with 5 seconds left. In the locker room after the game, the players chanted "Duke, Duke, Duke" – Mara's nickname.
Manning later said he had been told by one of Mara's grandsons that the owner awakened in time to see the winning play, then smiled and went back to sleep.
"Wellington Mara is the face of not only the New York Giants but the NFL," tight end Jeremy Shockey said. "He's a pioneer and the guy that everybody looks up to."
When former players became ill, Mara would find them doctors, pay their medical expenses and arrange help for their families. Many old-timers were on the payroll as scouts or advisers. Even in this era of sophisticated scouting, it wasn't unusual for Young or Accorsi to get a call from a former player recommending the Giants look at some prospect.
In most cases, the team was well aware of the prospect, but Mara never dropped any of those old "scouts" from the payroll.
Mara always considered himself a football man first, running the on-field operations through the 1950s until 1979 while Jack and then Jack's son Tim ran the business end. The team was successful during the '50s and early '60s with such stars as Frank Gifford, Y.A. Tittle, Sam Huff and Roosevelt Brown and a coaching staff that included Tom Landry and Vince Lombardi as assistants.
But after losing to Chicago in the 1963 NFL championship game, the Giants began a long slide, failing to make the playoffs again until 1981 as Wellington and Tim, by then the co-owner, feuded.
In 1979, on the commissioner's recommendation, the Maras agreed to hire Young as general manager and the team again became a power.
It won Super Bowls in 1986 and 1990 with Bill Parcells coaching a team that starred Lawrence Taylor and Phil Simms and stout defenses. The 1990 team featured one of the best coaching staffs assembled: future head coaches Coughlin, Bill Belichick, Al Groh, Charlie Weis, Romeo Crennel and Ray Handley.
Parcells left after that season and the Giants slipped into the middle of the pack.
They made the Super Bowl again after the 2000 season, losing to the Baltimore Ravens, owned by Art Modell, Mara's close friend and longtime partner in league matters. Mara never openly criticized Modell's move of a team that had been the Giants' chief on-field rival during the '50s and '60s, and they celebrated getting to the Super Bowl together.
In 1991, Tim Mara and his family sold their share of the team to Robert Tisch. Tisch and Mara were officially co-owners and Tisch ran much of the business affairs. But it was always clear this was Wellington's team – for many years they were known by New York headline writers as "the Maramen."
Mara is survived by wife Ann, 11 children and 40 grandchildren.
There was no immediate word on funeral arrangements.
Link Wray
COPENHAGEN, Denmark - Guitar master Link Wray, the father of the power chord in rock 'n' roll who inspired legends such as Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie and Pete Townsend, has died.
Wray, 76, died at his home in Copenhagen Nov. 5, a statement from his wife and son on his Web site said. No cause of death was given, but his family said his heart was "getting tired." He was buried quietly after a service at Copenhagen's Christian Church Nov. 18.
"While playing his guitar he often told the audience, 'God is playing my guitar, I am with God when I play,'" his wife, Olive, and son, Oliver Christian, wrote. "We saw you go with God, you were smiling."
Wray developed a style considered the blueprint for heavy metal and punk music. Frequently seen playing in his trademark leather jacket, he is best known for his 1958 instrumental "Rumble," 1959 "Rawhide" and 1963's "Jack the Ripper." His music has been featured in movies including "Pulp Fiction," "Independence Day" and "Desperado."
Wray, who was three-quarters Shawnee Indian, is said to have inspired many other rock musicians, including Pete Townsend of the Who, but also David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Steve Van Zandt and Bruce Springsteen. All have been quoted as saying that Wray and "Rumble" inspired them to become musicians.
"He is the king; if it hadn't been for Link Wray and 'Rumble,' I would have never picked up a guitar,'" Townsend wrote on one of Wray's albums. Neil Young once said: "If I could go back in time and see any band, it would be Link Wray and the Raymen."
The power chord â?? a thundering sound created by playing fifths (two notes five notes apart, often with the lower note doubled an octave above) â?? became a favorite among rock players. Wray claimed because he was too slow to be a whiz on the guitar, he had to invent sounds.
When recording "Rumble," he created the fuzz tone by punching holes in his amplifiers to produce a dark, grumbling sound. It took off instantly, but it was banned by some deejays in big cities for seeming to suggest teen violence.
"I was looking for something that Chet Atkins wasn't doing, that all the jazz kings wasn't doing, that all the country pickers wasn't doing. I was looking for my own sound," Wray told The Associated Press in 2002.
He was born Frederick Lincoln Wray Jr. in 1929 in Dunn, N.C. His two brothers, Vernon and Doug, were also musicians. The three became a country hit as "Lucky Wray and the Palomino Ranch Hands." Later, after "Rumble," they became "Link Wray and the Raymen," or Wraymen, as it was sometimes spelled. Later, the brothers' relationship soured after a dispute about the rights to "Rumble."
In 1978, he moved to Denmark and married Olive Julie Povlsen. They raised their son in a three-story house on an island where Hans Christian Andersen once lived.
Though he went out of style in the '60s, he was rediscovered by later generations. He toured the United States and Canada since the mid-1990s, playing 40 shows this year. In 2002, Guitar World magazine elected Wray one of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time.
COPENHAGEN, Denmark - Guitar master Link Wray, the father of the power chord in rock 'n' roll who inspired legends such as Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie and Pete Townsend, has died.
Wray, 76, died at his home in Copenhagen Nov. 5, a statement from his wife and son on his Web site said. No cause of death was given, but his family said his heart was "getting tired." He was buried quietly after a service at Copenhagen's Christian Church Nov. 18.
"While playing his guitar he often told the audience, 'God is playing my guitar, I am with God when I play,'" his wife, Olive, and son, Oliver Christian, wrote. "We saw you go with God, you were smiling."
Wray developed a style considered the blueprint for heavy metal and punk music. Frequently seen playing in his trademark leather jacket, he is best known for his 1958 instrumental "Rumble," 1959 "Rawhide" and 1963's "Jack the Ripper." His music has been featured in movies including "Pulp Fiction," "Independence Day" and "Desperado."
Wray, who was three-quarters Shawnee Indian, is said to have inspired many other rock musicians, including Pete Townsend of the Who, but also David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Steve Van Zandt and Bruce Springsteen. All have been quoted as saying that Wray and "Rumble" inspired them to become musicians.
"He is the king; if it hadn't been for Link Wray and 'Rumble,' I would have never picked up a guitar,'" Townsend wrote on one of Wray's albums. Neil Young once said: "If I could go back in time and see any band, it would be Link Wray and the Raymen."
The power chord â?? a thundering sound created by playing fifths (two notes five notes apart, often with the lower note doubled an octave above) â?? became a favorite among rock players. Wray claimed because he was too slow to be a whiz on the guitar, he had to invent sounds.
When recording "Rumble," he created the fuzz tone by punching holes in his amplifiers to produce a dark, grumbling sound. It took off instantly, but it was banned by some deejays in big cities for seeming to suggest teen violence.
"I was looking for something that Chet Atkins wasn't doing, that all the jazz kings wasn't doing, that all the country pickers wasn't doing. I was looking for my own sound," Wray told The Associated Press in 2002.
He was born Frederick Lincoln Wray Jr. in 1929 in Dunn, N.C. His two brothers, Vernon and Doug, were also musicians. The three became a country hit as "Lucky Wray and the Palomino Ranch Hands." Later, after "Rumble," they became "Link Wray and the Raymen," or Wraymen, as it was sometimes spelled. Later, the brothers' relationship soured after a dispute about the rights to "Rumble."
In 1978, he moved to Denmark and married Olive Julie Povlsen. They raised their son in a three-story house on an island where Hans Christian Andersen once lived.
Though he went out of style in the '60s, he was rediscovered by later generations. He toured the United States and Canada since the mid-1990s, playing 40 shows this year. In 2002, Guitar World magazine elected Wray one of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time.
Giants owner Robert Tisch.
Originally posted by ggwâ?¢:<img src="http://bestsmileys.com/crying/13.gif" alt=" - " />
Link Wray
Chris Whitley…watch this space!
What's the odds he makes it through Christmas?
What's the odds he makes it through Christmas?
Resquiat in Pace:
<img src="http://samugliestdog.com/Sam162edited.jpg" alt=" - " />
Sam, the ugliest dog
<img src="http://samugliestdog.com/Sam162edited.jpg" alt=" - " />
Sam, the ugliest dog
Actor Pat Morita Dies at 73
LOS ANGELES - Actor
Pat Morita, whose portrayal of the wise and dry-witted Mr. Miyagi in "The Karate Kid" earned him an Oscar nomination, has died. He was 73.
LOS ANGELES - Actor
Pat Morita, whose portrayal of the wise and dry-witted Mr. Miyagi in "The Karate Kid" earned him an Oscar nomination, has died. He was 73.
Comedian Richard Pryor Dies at 65
Published: December 10, 2005
LOS ANGELES (AP) – Richard Pryor, the caustic yet perceptive actor-comedian who lived dangerously close to the edge both on stage and off, has died, his ex-wife said Saturday. He was 65.
Pryor died of a heart attack at his home in the San Fernando Valley sometime late Friday or early Saturday, Flyn Pryor said.
Published: December 10, 2005
LOS ANGELES (AP) – Richard Pryor, the caustic yet perceptive actor-comedian who lived dangerously close to the edge both on stage and off, has died, his ex-wife said Saturday. He was 65.
Pryor died of a heart attack at his home in the San Fernando Valley sometime late Friday or early Saturday, Flyn Pryor said.
McCarthy Dies: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,178341,00.html
Pulitzer-Winning Columnist Anderson Dies
By CONNIE CASS, Associated Press
59 minutes ago
Jack Anderson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning muckraking columnist who struck fear into the hearts of corrupt or secretive politicians, inspiring Nixon operatives to plot his murder, died Saturday. He was 83.
Anderson died at his home in Bethesda, Md., of complications from Parkinson's disease, said one of his daughters, Laurie Anderson-Bruch.
Anderson gave up his syndicated Washington Merry-Go-Round column at age 81 in July 2004, after Parkinson's disease left him too ill to continue. He had been hired by the column's founder, Drew Pearson, in 1947.
The column broke a string of big scandals, from Eisenhower assistant Sherman Adams taking a vicuna coat and other gifts from a wealthy industrialist in 1958 to the Reagan administration's secret arms-for-hostages deal with Iran in 1986.
It appeared in some 1,000 newspapers in its heyday. Anderson took over the column after Pearson's death in 1969, working with a changing cast of co-authors and staff over the years.
A devout Mormon, Anderson looked upon journalism as a calling. Considered one of the fathers of investigative reporting, Anderson was renowned for his tenacity, aggressive techniques and influence in the nation's capital.
"He was a bridge for the muckrakers of a century ago and the crop that came out of Watergate," said Mark Feldstein, Anderson's biographer and a journalism professor at George Washington University. "He held politicians to a level of accountability in an era where journalists were very deferential to those in power."
Anderson won a 1972 Pulitzer Prize for reporting that the Nixon administration secretly tilted toward Pakistan in its war with India. He also published the secret transcripts of the Watergate grand jury.
Such scoops earned him a spot on President Nixon's "enemies list." Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy has described how he and other Nixon political operatives planned ways to silence Anderson permanently â?? such as slipping him LSD or staging a fatal car crash â?? but the White House nixed the idea.
Over the years, Anderson was threatened by the Mafia and investigated by numerous government agencies trying to trace the sources of his leaks. In 1989, police investigated him for smuggling a gun into the U.S. Capitol to demonstrate security lapses.
Known for his toughness on the trail of a story, he was also praised for personal kindness. Anderson's son Kevin said that when his father's reporting led to the arrest of some involved in the Watergate scandal, he aided their families financially.
"I don't like to hurt people, I really don't like it at all," Anderson said in 1972. "But in order to get a red light at the intersection, you sometimes have to have an accident."
Anderson began his newspaper career as a 12-year-old writing about scouting activity and community fairs in the outskirts of Salt Lake City, Utah. His first investigative story exposed unlawful polygamy in his church. He was as a civilian war correspondent during World War II and later, while in the Army, wrote for the military paper Stars and Stripes.
After he went to work with Pearson, the team took on communist-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy, exposed Connecticut Sen. Thomas Dodd's misuse of campaign money, and revealed the CIA's attempt to use the Mafia to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
Anderson also wrote more than a dozen books.
He was diagnosed with Parkinson's in 1986. In a speech a decade later, he made light of the occasional, uncontrollable shaking the disease caused.
"The doctors tell me it's Parkinson's," he said. "I suspect that 52 years in Washington caused it."
He is survived by his wife, Olivia, and nine children.
By CONNIE CASS, Associated Press
59 minutes ago
Jack Anderson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning muckraking columnist who struck fear into the hearts of corrupt or secretive politicians, inspiring Nixon operatives to plot his murder, died Saturday. He was 83.
Anderson died at his home in Bethesda, Md., of complications from Parkinson's disease, said one of his daughters, Laurie Anderson-Bruch.
Anderson gave up his syndicated Washington Merry-Go-Round column at age 81 in July 2004, after Parkinson's disease left him too ill to continue. He had been hired by the column's founder, Drew Pearson, in 1947.
The column broke a string of big scandals, from Eisenhower assistant Sherman Adams taking a vicuna coat and other gifts from a wealthy industrialist in 1958 to the Reagan administration's secret arms-for-hostages deal with Iran in 1986.
It appeared in some 1,000 newspapers in its heyday. Anderson took over the column after Pearson's death in 1969, working with a changing cast of co-authors and staff over the years.
A devout Mormon, Anderson looked upon journalism as a calling. Considered one of the fathers of investigative reporting, Anderson was renowned for his tenacity, aggressive techniques and influence in the nation's capital.
"He was a bridge for the muckrakers of a century ago and the crop that came out of Watergate," said Mark Feldstein, Anderson's biographer and a journalism professor at George Washington University. "He held politicians to a level of accountability in an era where journalists were very deferential to those in power."
Anderson won a 1972 Pulitzer Prize for reporting that the Nixon administration secretly tilted toward Pakistan in its war with India. He also published the secret transcripts of the Watergate grand jury.
Such scoops earned him a spot on President Nixon's "enemies list." Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy has described how he and other Nixon political operatives planned ways to silence Anderson permanently â?? such as slipping him LSD or staging a fatal car crash â?? but the White House nixed the idea.
Over the years, Anderson was threatened by the Mafia and investigated by numerous government agencies trying to trace the sources of his leaks. In 1989, police investigated him for smuggling a gun into the U.S. Capitol to demonstrate security lapses.
Known for his toughness on the trail of a story, he was also praised for personal kindness. Anderson's son Kevin said that when his father's reporting led to the arrest of some involved in the Watergate scandal, he aided their families financially.
"I don't like to hurt people, I really don't like it at all," Anderson said in 1972. "But in order to get a red light at the intersection, you sometimes have to have an accident."
Anderson began his newspaper career as a 12-year-old writing about scouting activity and community fairs in the outskirts of Salt Lake City, Utah. His first investigative story exposed unlawful polygamy in his church. He was as a civilian war correspondent during World War II and later, while in the Army, wrote for the military paper Stars and Stripes.
After he went to work with Pearson, the team took on communist-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy, exposed Connecticut Sen. Thomas Dodd's misuse of campaign money, and revealed the CIA's attempt to use the Mafia to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
Anderson also wrote more than a dozen books.
He was diagnosed with Parkinson's in 1986. In a speech a decade later, he made light of the occasional, uncontrollable shaking the disease caused.
"The doctors tell me it's Parkinson's," he said. "I suspect that 52 years in Washington caused it."
He is survived by his wife, Olivia, and nine children.
"The Oddfather" - Vincent Gigante, Organized Crime Leader Who Feigned Insanity, Dies at 77
By SELWYN RAAB
Vincent Gigante, who feigned mental illness for decades to camouflage his position as one of the nation's most influential and dangerous Mafia leaders, died today in federal prison in Springfield, Mo., officials told The Associated Press. He was 77.
<img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/12/19/nyregion/19cnd-giga.184.jpg" alt=" - " />
Mr. Gigante died while serving a 12-year sentence imposed in 1997 after he was convicted of racketeering and conspiring to kill other mobsters. Officials at the prison medical center where he died did not provide the cause of death but noted that he suffered from heart disease.
Mr. Gigante, whose nickname was "Chin," painstakingly maintained the fiction that he was incompetent until April 2003, when he appeared before Judge I. Leo Glasser in Federal District Court in Brooklyn and pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice. Specifically, he acknowledged running a con on the legal system that delayed his racketeering trial from 1990 to 1997 while his sanity was being examined.
As part of the plea, three more years were added to his prison term, but he avoided a lengthy trial on the other charges, which amounted to an accusation - long denied or sidestepped by Mr. Gigante - that he headed the Genovese organized crime family.
His lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, offered the explanation that "I think you get to a point in life - I think everyone does - where you become too old and too sick and too tired to fight."
For Mr. Gigante, the guise that he adopted in the mid-1960's - behavior that won him the nickname Oddfather - took considerable effort to maintain. He could often be seen shuffling around his Greenwich Village neighborhood in pajamas, bathrobe and slippers, mumbling to himself and appearing to be a disturbed but harmless person. Law-enforcement agents, prosecutors and Mafia defectors described his behavior as a staged performance calculated to evade prosecution for his activities as head of a crime family that under his leadership became the wealthiest and most powerful in the nation.
Based on information from informers and electronic eavesdropping on gangsters, F.B.I. and New York City law-enforcement officials ranked Mr. Gigante as the pre-eminent Mafia leader in the early and mid-1990's, and prosecutors identified him as the dominant force in the early 1990's inside the Commission, the Mafia's ruling body, which resolves significant disputes among the five major families in the New York region. His reach, law-enforcement officials said, extended as well to Philadelphia and New England, where he exercised veto power over the appointments of mob bosses in those areas.
Salvatore Gravano, the No. 2 figure in the Gambino crime family before he defected in 1991, testified that even Mr. Gigante's archrival, John Gotti, grudgingly acknowledged Mr. Gigante's craftiness. "He's crazy like a fox," Mr. Gravano quoted Mr. Gotti as saying of Mr. Gigante after a summit meeting of New York City mob leaders in 1988. Mr. Gotti was the boss of the Gambino family until his own imprisonment forced him to relinquish undisputed control in the late 1990's. He, too, died in a prison hospital, of cancer in June 2002.
Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and federal and state prosecutors regarded Mr. Gigante as the most elusive Mafia leader of his era and the most difficult to bring to trial. "He was probably the most clever organized-crime figure I have ever seen," said John S. Pritchard 3rd, a former F.B.I. supervisor, who led a squad that investigated the Genovese family in the 1980's.
Disputing the government's contentions, Mr. Gigante's lawyers and relatives maintained that he had been mentally disabled since the late 1960's, with a below-normal I.Q. of 69 to 72. His defenders steadfastly denied that he was associated with the Mafia, asserting that it was ludicrous to believe that someone so mentally subpar was capable of heading a major crime organization.
The Rev. Louis Gigante, a Roman Catholic priest, former New York city councilman and a builder of low-income housing in the Bronx, characterized the relentless investigations of his older brother as persecution by agents and prosecutors who were biased against Italian- Americans.
Organized-crime experts and mob turncoats said that Mr. Gigante was apparently willing to humiliate himself publicly as the price for escaping the long prison sentences that were being meted out to other Mafia leaders.
According to federal and state investigators, each of the family's 200 "made" or inducted soldiers and about 1,000 associates - the name for others who voluntarily cooperate in illegal activities but who are not sworn members -were obligated to funnel part of their loot to Mr. Gigante, as much as $100 million a year in the early 1990's.
The family's fortune, the experts said, flowed largely from a vast network of bookmaking and loansharking rings and from extortions of construction companies in the New York City area seeking labor peace or sweetheart contracts from carpenters, teamsters and laborers' unions that were dominated by Mr. Gigante's lieutenants.
Mob deserters in the mid-1990's testified in criminal and civil cases that the Genovese gang's other lucrative enterprises included the control of cartels that rigged bids and inflated prices in the private garbage-hauling industries of New York City and Westchester County; kickbacks from shipping and trucking companies on the New Jersey waterfront in exchange for labor peace; protection payoffs from merchants at the Fulton Fish Market; and the control of many union jobs at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan.
Mr. Gigante's influence even extended over the San Gennaro Street Festival in Little Italy until a 1995 crackdown by New York City officials and federal prosecutors resulted in allegations that the Genovese family operated gambling games at the festival, extorted payoffs from venders and pocketed thousands of dollars donated to a neighborhood church.
In the 1980's, after the authorities said Mr. Gigante had assumed undisputed command of the Genovese family, he conducted his activities in a starkly unorthodox fashion for a Mafia leader.
Most days, in the early evening, Mr. Gigante, a hulking man who was about six feet tall and weighed 200 pounds, would emerge from his mother's walkup apartment building on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village. Sometimes dressed in a bathrobe and pajamas and sometimes wearing a windbreaker and shabby trousers and always accompanied by one or two bodyguards, he gingerly crossed the street to the Triangle Civic Improvement Association, a dingy storefront club that served as his headquarters. Inside, he played pinochle and held whispered conversations with men who agents said were his trusted confederates.
After midnight, according to F.B.I. surveillance reports, he would be driven to a townhouse near Park Avenue at East 77th Street, that was owned by Olympia Esposito, who was characterized by Mr. Gigante's lawyers as his common-law wife and the mother of three of his eight children, Vincent, Lucia and Carmella Esposito.
F.B.I. agents, who in 1986 observed the townhouse from a nearby rooftop post, said that soon after arriving, Mr. Gigante would change into more elegant clothes, carry on conversations with associates, and read or watch television before retiring. About 9 or 10 the next morning , he would reappear in his shabby downtown clothes and be driven back to Sullivan Street or a nearby apartment occupied by his relatives at 505 LaGuardia Place.
"It was hard to understand what enjoyment he got out of being a mob boss," said Ronald Goldstock, the former director of the New York State Organized Crime Task Force. "His only pleasure appeared to be the pure power he exercised."
Vincent Gigante (pronounced ji-GANT-tee) was born on March 29, 1928, in New York City and grew up on the same streets in Greenwich Village where he would spend most of his adult life. He was one of five sons of Salvatore Gigante, a watchmaker, and Yolanda Gigante, a seamstress, both of whom had immigrated from Naples. His mother usually addressed him as "Cincenzo," a diminutive of Vincente, and his boyhood friends shortened that into his lifelong nickname, "Chin."
A lackadaisical student, Mr. Gigante graduated from P.S. 3, an elementary school in Greenwich Village and dropped out of Textile High School in Manhattan in the ninth grade.
Police detectives said that as a teen-ager, he became a protégé of Vito Genovese, who was a potent Mafia leader in the United States and in Italy from the 1930's to the 1960's and whose name still describes the organized-crime group he headed until his death in 1969. The gang was founded in the 1930's by one of the nation's most notorious criminals, Charles (Lucky) Luciano, who was deported to Italy and who died in 1962.
Mr. Genovese is believed to have endeared himself to the Gigantes when Vincent was a boy with a loan to pay for surgery needed by Mrs. Gigante.
Between age 17 and 25, Mr. Gigante was arrested seven times on an array of charges: receiving stolen goods, possession of an unlicensed handgun, auto theft, arson and bookmaking. Most were dismissed or resolved by fines. His only jail sentence in that period was 60 days for a gambling conviction.
When arrested in his early 20's, he listed his occupation as a tailor. But as a strapping youth with quick fists, he was better known as a prize fighter. Mr. Gigante, from age 16 to 19, fought as a light heavyweight in clubs around town, winning 21 of 25 light-heavyweight bouts, according to Nat Fleischer's Ring Record Book. Club boxers in those days fought four- and six-round contests in neighborhood arenas, usually getting a percentage of the tickets they themselves sold. One of Mr. Gigante's managers was a Greenwich Village neighbor, Thomas (Tommy Ryan) Eboli, who later became the boss of the Genovese family.
Former New York City detectives who were assigned to organized-crime intelligence units said that Mr. Gigante earned his Mafia spurs as an enforcer in the 1950's. But his prominence in the underworld surged in 1957, when Mr. Genovese wrested control of a mob family from Frank Costello, who had been a close friend of Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky and was one of the best-known underworld figures in America.
Mr. Costello retired abruptly as a boss after a gunman grazed his scalp with a bullet in the vestibule of his apartment building on Central Park West. A doorman identified the 29-year-old Mr. Gigante as the shooter, but Mr. Costello testified that he was unable to recognize his assailant and Mr. Gigante was acquitted in 1958 on charges of attempted murder.
A year later, he was convicted with Mr. Genovese in Manhattan on federal charges of heroin trafficking. Mr. Gigante, who listed his profession as the superintendent of a tenement on Bleecker Street, was sentenced to seven years in prison. The sentencing judge said he would have imposed a longer sentence but was swayed by a flood of letters from residents of Greenwich Village and Little Italy attesting to Mr. Gigante's good character and his work on behalf of juveniles.
He was paroled after five years and detectives said that soon afterward he was promoted from soldier to the rank of capo, or captain, overseeing a group of Mafia gangsters known as a crew, in Greenwich Village.
Although his headquarters was in Lower Manhattan and he spent his nights farther uptown, Mr. Gigante had a home in Old Tappan, N.J., where he lived with his wife, the former Olympia Grippa, and their three daughters and two sons. They are Yolanda Fyfe, Roseanne D'Cola and Rita Gigante, and Salvatore and Andrew.
In 1969, he was indicted in New Jersey on a charge of conspiracy to bribe the entire five-member Old Tappan police force to alert him to surveillance operations by law enforcement agencies. The accusation was dropped after Mr. Gigante's lawyers presented reports from psychiatrists that he was mentally unfit to stand trial.
Mafia informers and defectors said that Mr. Gigante gained control of the Genovese family in a peaceful transition in the early 1980's when the group's acting boss, Philip Lombardo, stepped down because of ill health, and Mr. Gigante's main rival, Anthony Salerno, was imprisoned for life on racketeering charges. Mr. Salerno died in federal prison in 1992.
As a new godfather, Mr. Gigante quickly imposed extraordinary security measures. Genovese soldiers and associates were forbidden to utter his name or nickname in conversations or telephone calls. When references to him had to be made, capos and soldiers would silently point to their chins or form the letter "C" with their fingers.
Mr. Gigante was indicted in 1990 with 14 others on federal charges in Brooklyn that they had conspired to rig bids and extort payoffs from contractors on multimillion-dollar contracts with the New York City Housing Authority to install windows.
At his arraignment, he appeared in court in his familiar pajamas and bathrobe and a peaked cap. Because of defense contentions that he was mentally and physically impaired, his case was severed from the other defendants and legal battles ensued for seven years over his competence to stand trial.
A superseding indictment in 1993 brought more serious accusations against him. Mr. Gigante was charged with being the head of the Genovese family and sanctioning the murders of six mobsters and conspiring to kill three others, including John Gotti, the boss of the Gambino family.
Mr. Gigante, the indictment asserted, wanted Mr. Gotti eliminated because he had violated Mafia protocol by arranging the assassination of the previous Gambino boss, Paul Castellano, without seeking Mr. Gigante's approval.
The evidence in both indictments stemmed mainly from deserters from the Genovese and other mob families who entered the Government's Witness Protection Program.
At sanity hearings in March 1996, Mr. Gravano of the Gambino family, and Alphonse D'Arco, the former acting boss of another New York Mafia organization, the Lucchese crime family, testified that Mr. Gigante was lucid during top-level Mafia meetings and that he had acknowledged to other gangsters that his eccentric behavior was a pretense.
Mr. Gigante's lawyers elicited testimony and reports from psychiatrists and psychologists that from 1969 to 1995, he had been confined 28 times in hospitals for treatment of hallucinations and that he suffered from "dementia rooted in organic brain damage."
In August 1996, Judge Eugene H. Nickerson of Federal District Court in Brooklyn ruled that Mr. Gigante was mentally competent to stand trial on murder and racketeering charges. The judge found that at least until 1991, Mr. Gigante had engaged in an "elaborate deception" with the help of his relatives to deceive psychiatrists about his condition.
Before the trial began, Mr. Gigante, who had open-heart surgery in 1988, had another cardiac operation in December 1996, putting his fitness to stand trial in doubt once again. Mr. Gigante had pleaded not guilty and had been free for years on $1 million bond.
During the monthlong trial in 1997, a gaunt-looking Mr. Gigante sat in a wheelchair, looking blankly into space as witnesses testified and lawyers argued. He did not testify. After three days of deliberations, the jury on July 25, 1997, convicted him on charges of running multimillion-dollar rackets as the Genovese family chief and of conspiring unsuccessfully in the late 1980's to murder Mr. Gotti and a Genovese family defector.
But he was acquitted of ordering three other gangland slayings and the jury was deadlocked on accusations that he ordered four other murders.
Imposing a sentence of 12 years - instead of a possible maximum of 27 years -and a $1.25 million fine, Judge Jack B. Weinstein of Federal District Court in Brooklyn reflected in December 1997 on Mr. Gigante's career.
"He is a shadow of his former self," the judge said, "an old man finally brought to bay in his declining years after decades of vicious criminal tyranny."
By SELWYN RAAB
Vincent Gigante, who feigned mental illness for decades to camouflage his position as one of the nation's most influential and dangerous Mafia leaders, died today in federal prison in Springfield, Mo., officials told The Associated Press. He was 77.
<img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/12/19/nyregion/19cnd-giga.184.jpg" alt=" - " />
Mr. Gigante died while serving a 12-year sentence imposed in 1997 after he was convicted of racketeering and conspiring to kill other mobsters. Officials at the prison medical center where he died did not provide the cause of death but noted that he suffered from heart disease.
Mr. Gigante, whose nickname was "Chin," painstakingly maintained the fiction that he was incompetent until April 2003, when he appeared before Judge I. Leo Glasser in Federal District Court in Brooklyn and pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice. Specifically, he acknowledged running a con on the legal system that delayed his racketeering trial from 1990 to 1997 while his sanity was being examined.
As part of the plea, three more years were added to his prison term, but he avoided a lengthy trial on the other charges, which amounted to an accusation - long denied or sidestepped by Mr. Gigante - that he headed the Genovese organized crime family.
His lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, offered the explanation that "I think you get to a point in life - I think everyone does - where you become too old and too sick and too tired to fight."
For Mr. Gigante, the guise that he adopted in the mid-1960's - behavior that won him the nickname Oddfather - took considerable effort to maintain. He could often be seen shuffling around his Greenwich Village neighborhood in pajamas, bathrobe and slippers, mumbling to himself and appearing to be a disturbed but harmless person. Law-enforcement agents, prosecutors and Mafia defectors described his behavior as a staged performance calculated to evade prosecution for his activities as head of a crime family that under his leadership became the wealthiest and most powerful in the nation.
Based on information from informers and electronic eavesdropping on gangsters, F.B.I. and New York City law-enforcement officials ranked Mr. Gigante as the pre-eminent Mafia leader in the early and mid-1990's, and prosecutors identified him as the dominant force in the early 1990's inside the Commission, the Mafia's ruling body, which resolves significant disputes among the five major families in the New York region. His reach, law-enforcement officials said, extended as well to Philadelphia and New England, where he exercised veto power over the appointments of mob bosses in those areas.
Salvatore Gravano, the No. 2 figure in the Gambino crime family before he defected in 1991, testified that even Mr. Gigante's archrival, John Gotti, grudgingly acknowledged Mr. Gigante's craftiness. "He's crazy like a fox," Mr. Gravano quoted Mr. Gotti as saying of Mr. Gigante after a summit meeting of New York City mob leaders in 1988. Mr. Gotti was the boss of the Gambino family until his own imprisonment forced him to relinquish undisputed control in the late 1990's. He, too, died in a prison hospital, of cancer in June 2002.
Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and federal and state prosecutors regarded Mr. Gigante as the most elusive Mafia leader of his era and the most difficult to bring to trial. "He was probably the most clever organized-crime figure I have ever seen," said John S. Pritchard 3rd, a former F.B.I. supervisor, who led a squad that investigated the Genovese family in the 1980's.
Disputing the government's contentions, Mr. Gigante's lawyers and relatives maintained that he had been mentally disabled since the late 1960's, with a below-normal I.Q. of 69 to 72. His defenders steadfastly denied that he was associated with the Mafia, asserting that it was ludicrous to believe that someone so mentally subpar was capable of heading a major crime organization.
The Rev. Louis Gigante, a Roman Catholic priest, former New York city councilman and a builder of low-income housing in the Bronx, characterized the relentless investigations of his older brother as persecution by agents and prosecutors who were biased against Italian- Americans.
Organized-crime experts and mob turncoats said that Mr. Gigante was apparently willing to humiliate himself publicly as the price for escaping the long prison sentences that were being meted out to other Mafia leaders.
According to federal and state investigators, each of the family's 200 "made" or inducted soldiers and about 1,000 associates - the name for others who voluntarily cooperate in illegal activities but who are not sworn members -were obligated to funnel part of their loot to Mr. Gigante, as much as $100 million a year in the early 1990's.
The family's fortune, the experts said, flowed largely from a vast network of bookmaking and loansharking rings and from extortions of construction companies in the New York City area seeking labor peace or sweetheart contracts from carpenters, teamsters and laborers' unions that were dominated by Mr. Gigante's lieutenants.
Mob deserters in the mid-1990's testified in criminal and civil cases that the Genovese gang's other lucrative enterprises included the control of cartels that rigged bids and inflated prices in the private garbage-hauling industries of New York City and Westchester County; kickbacks from shipping and trucking companies on the New Jersey waterfront in exchange for labor peace; protection payoffs from merchants at the Fulton Fish Market; and the control of many union jobs at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan.
Mr. Gigante's influence even extended over the San Gennaro Street Festival in Little Italy until a 1995 crackdown by New York City officials and federal prosecutors resulted in allegations that the Genovese family operated gambling games at the festival, extorted payoffs from venders and pocketed thousands of dollars donated to a neighborhood church.
In the 1980's, after the authorities said Mr. Gigante had assumed undisputed command of the Genovese family, he conducted his activities in a starkly unorthodox fashion for a Mafia leader.
Most days, in the early evening, Mr. Gigante, a hulking man who was about six feet tall and weighed 200 pounds, would emerge from his mother's walkup apartment building on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village. Sometimes dressed in a bathrobe and pajamas and sometimes wearing a windbreaker and shabby trousers and always accompanied by one or two bodyguards, he gingerly crossed the street to the Triangle Civic Improvement Association, a dingy storefront club that served as his headquarters. Inside, he played pinochle and held whispered conversations with men who agents said were his trusted confederates.
After midnight, according to F.B.I. surveillance reports, he would be driven to a townhouse near Park Avenue at East 77th Street, that was owned by Olympia Esposito, who was characterized by Mr. Gigante's lawyers as his common-law wife and the mother of three of his eight children, Vincent, Lucia and Carmella Esposito.
F.B.I. agents, who in 1986 observed the townhouse from a nearby rooftop post, said that soon after arriving, Mr. Gigante would change into more elegant clothes, carry on conversations with associates, and read or watch television before retiring. About 9 or 10 the next morning , he would reappear in his shabby downtown clothes and be driven back to Sullivan Street or a nearby apartment occupied by his relatives at 505 LaGuardia Place.
"It was hard to understand what enjoyment he got out of being a mob boss," said Ronald Goldstock, the former director of the New York State Organized Crime Task Force. "His only pleasure appeared to be the pure power he exercised."
Vincent Gigante (pronounced ji-GANT-tee) was born on March 29, 1928, in New York City and grew up on the same streets in Greenwich Village where he would spend most of his adult life. He was one of five sons of Salvatore Gigante, a watchmaker, and Yolanda Gigante, a seamstress, both of whom had immigrated from Naples. His mother usually addressed him as "Cincenzo," a diminutive of Vincente, and his boyhood friends shortened that into his lifelong nickname, "Chin."
A lackadaisical student, Mr. Gigante graduated from P.S. 3, an elementary school in Greenwich Village and dropped out of Textile High School in Manhattan in the ninth grade.
Police detectives said that as a teen-ager, he became a protégé of Vito Genovese, who was a potent Mafia leader in the United States and in Italy from the 1930's to the 1960's and whose name still describes the organized-crime group he headed until his death in 1969. The gang was founded in the 1930's by one of the nation's most notorious criminals, Charles (Lucky) Luciano, who was deported to Italy and who died in 1962.
Mr. Genovese is believed to have endeared himself to the Gigantes when Vincent was a boy with a loan to pay for surgery needed by Mrs. Gigante.
Between age 17 and 25, Mr. Gigante was arrested seven times on an array of charges: receiving stolen goods, possession of an unlicensed handgun, auto theft, arson and bookmaking. Most were dismissed or resolved by fines. His only jail sentence in that period was 60 days for a gambling conviction.
When arrested in his early 20's, he listed his occupation as a tailor. But as a strapping youth with quick fists, he was better known as a prize fighter. Mr. Gigante, from age 16 to 19, fought as a light heavyweight in clubs around town, winning 21 of 25 light-heavyweight bouts, according to Nat Fleischer's Ring Record Book. Club boxers in those days fought four- and six-round contests in neighborhood arenas, usually getting a percentage of the tickets they themselves sold. One of Mr. Gigante's managers was a Greenwich Village neighbor, Thomas (Tommy Ryan) Eboli, who later became the boss of the Genovese family.
Former New York City detectives who were assigned to organized-crime intelligence units said that Mr. Gigante earned his Mafia spurs as an enforcer in the 1950's. But his prominence in the underworld surged in 1957, when Mr. Genovese wrested control of a mob family from Frank Costello, who had been a close friend of Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky and was one of the best-known underworld figures in America.
Mr. Costello retired abruptly as a boss after a gunman grazed his scalp with a bullet in the vestibule of his apartment building on Central Park West. A doorman identified the 29-year-old Mr. Gigante as the shooter, but Mr. Costello testified that he was unable to recognize his assailant and Mr. Gigante was acquitted in 1958 on charges of attempted murder.
A year later, he was convicted with Mr. Genovese in Manhattan on federal charges of heroin trafficking. Mr. Gigante, who listed his profession as the superintendent of a tenement on Bleecker Street, was sentenced to seven years in prison. The sentencing judge said he would have imposed a longer sentence but was swayed by a flood of letters from residents of Greenwich Village and Little Italy attesting to Mr. Gigante's good character and his work on behalf of juveniles.
He was paroled after five years and detectives said that soon afterward he was promoted from soldier to the rank of capo, or captain, overseeing a group of Mafia gangsters known as a crew, in Greenwich Village.
Although his headquarters was in Lower Manhattan and he spent his nights farther uptown, Mr. Gigante had a home in Old Tappan, N.J., where he lived with his wife, the former Olympia Grippa, and their three daughters and two sons. They are Yolanda Fyfe, Roseanne D'Cola and Rita Gigante, and Salvatore and Andrew.
In 1969, he was indicted in New Jersey on a charge of conspiracy to bribe the entire five-member Old Tappan police force to alert him to surveillance operations by law enforcement agencies. The accusation was dropped after Mr. Gigante's lawyers presented reports from psychiatrists that he was mentally unfit to stand trial.
Mafia informers and defectors said that Mr. Gigante gained control of the Genovese family in a peaceful transition in the early 1980's when the group's acting boss, Philip Lombardo, stepped down because of ill health, and Mr. Gigante's main rival, Anthony Salerno, was imprisoned for life on racketeering charges. Mr. Salerno died in federal prison in 1992.
As a new godfather, Mr. Gigante quickly imposed extraordinary security measures. Genovese soldiers and associates were forbidden to utter his name or nickname in conversations or telephone calls. When references to him had to be made, capos and soldiers would silently point to their chins or form the letter "C" with their fingers.
Mr. Gigante was indicted in 1990 with 14 others on federal charges in Brooklyn that they had conspired to rig bids and extort payoffs from contractors on multimillion-dollar contracts with the New York City Housing Authority to install windows.
At his arraignment, he appeared in court in his familiar pajamas and bathrobe and a peaked cap. Because of defense contentions that he was mentally and physically impaired, his case was severed from the other defendants and legal battles ensued for seven years over his competence to stand trial.
A superseding indictment in 1993 brought more serious accusations against him. Mr. Gigante was charged with being the head of the Genovese family and sanctioning the murders of six mobsters and conspiring to kill three others, including John Gotti, the boss of the Gambino family.
Mr. Gigante, the indictment asserted, wanted Mr. Gotti eliminated because he had violated Mafia protocol by arranging the assassination of the previous Gambino boss, Paul Castellano, without seeking Mr. Gigante's approval.
The evidence in both indictments stemmed mainly from deserters from the Genovese and other mob families who entered the Government's Witness Protection Program.
At sanity hearings in March 1996, Mr. Gravano of the Gambino family, and Alphonse D'Arco, the former acting boss of another New York Mafia organization, the Lucchese crime family, testified that Mr. Gigante was lucid during top-level Mafia meetings and that he had acknowledged to other gangsters that his eccentric behavior was a pretense.
Mr. Gigante's lawyers elicited testimony and reports from psychiatrists and psychologists that from 1969 to 1995, he had been confined 28 times in hospitals for treatment of hallucinations and that he suffered from "dementia rooted in organic brain damage."
In August 1996, Judge Eugene H. Nickerson of Federal District Court in Brooklyn ruled that Mr. Gigante was mentally competent to stand trial on murder and racketeering charges. The judge found that at least until 1991, Mr. Gigante had engaged in an "elaborate deception" with the help of his relatives to deceive psychiatrists about his condition.
Before the trial began, Mr. Gigante, who had open-heart surgery in 1988, had another cardiac operation in December 1996, putting his fitness to stand trial in doubt once again. Mr. Gigante had pleaded not guilty and had been free for years on $1 million bond.
During the monthlong trial in 1997, a gaunt-looking Mr. Gigante sat in a wheelchair, looking blankly into space as witnesses testified and lawyers argued. He did not testify. After three days of deliberations, the jury on July 25, 1997, convicted him on charges of running multimillion-dollar rackets as the Genovese family chief and of conspiring unsuccessfully in the late 1980's to murder Mr. Gotti and a Genovese family defector.
But he was acquitted of ordering three other gangland slayings and the jury was deadlocked on accusations that he ordered four other murders.
Imposing a sentence of 12 years - instead of a possible maximum of 27 years -and a $1.25 million fine, Judge Jack B. Weinstein of Federal District Court in Brooklyn reflected in December 1997 on Mr. Gigante's career.
"He is a shadow of his former self," the judge said, "an old man finally brought to bay in his declining years after decades of vicious criminal tyranny."
NEW YORK - Michael Vale, the actor best known for portraying sleepy-eyed Fred the Baker in Dunkin' Donuts commercials, has died at age 83.
Vale died Saturday in New York City of complications from diabetes, son-in law Rick Reil said.
Ads featuring Fred, who uttered the trademark line "Time to make the doughnuts," ran for 15 years until Vale retired in 1997.
Canton, Mass.-based Dunkin' Donuts said in a statement that Vale's character "became a beloved American icon that permeated our culture and touched millions with his sense of humor and humble nature."
Vale was born in Brooklyn and studied acting at the Dramatic Workshop in New York City with classmates Tony Curtis, Ben Gazzara and Rod Steiger.
A veteran of the Broadway stage, film and television, Vale appeared in more than 1,300 TV commercials. His movie roles included a jewelry salesman in "Marathon Man." He also appeared in "Guerrilla Girl," a 1953 movie starring Helmut Dantine, and "A Hatful of Rain" (1957), starring Don Murray and Eve Marie Saint.
Vale died Saturday in New York City of complications from diabetes, son-in law Rick Reil said.
Ads featuring Fred, who uttered the trademark line "Time to make the doughnuts," ran for 15 years until Vale retired in 1997.
Canton, Mass.-based Dunkin' Donuts said in a statement that Vale's character "became a beloved American icon that permeated our culture and touched millions with his sense of humor and humble nature."
Vale was born in Brooklyn and studied acting at the Dramatic Workshop in New York City with classmates Tony Curtis, Ben Gazzara and Rod Steiger.
A veteran of the Broadway stage, film and television, Vale appeared in more than 1,300 TV commercials. His movie roles included a jewelry salesman in "Marathon Man." He also appeared in "Guerrilla Girl," a 1953 movie starring Helmut Dantine, and "A Hatful of Rain" (1957), starring Don Murray and Eve Marie Saint.
Vincent Schiavelli, actor who appeared in Better Off Dead... & The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The Eighth Dimension.
Joseph L. Owades, Inventor of Light Beer, Is Dead at 86
Joseph L. Owades, a biochemist whose recipe for a light beer, among other contributions to the science of brewing, made him a leader in the industry, died Friday at his home in Sonoma, Calif. He was 86 and also had a home in San Francisco.
The cause was heart failure, his family said.
Dr. Owades (pronounced oh-WAY-dees) became involved with brewing by way of his research into the properties of yeast and the starches found in malt. He was looking for and found an enzyme that prompted yeast to digest all of the starch.
His discovery resulted in a beer without residual carbohydrates and with fewer calories, or what became known as light beer. Such a brew using his enzyme was first mass-produced by Rheingold Brewing, his employer at the time, which marketed the low-calorie brew under the Gablinger's label. Years later, after the Miller Brewing Company bought Gablinger's, it became Miller Lite.
His process for making low-calorie beer gave rise to many successful specialty brands from new and independent smaller breweries. In 1975, he became a consultant to this growing part of the business as the founder and director of the Center for Brewing Studies in Sonoma, Calif.
Joseph Lawrence Owades was born July 9, 1919, to immigrant parents on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He graduated in 1939 from City College.
An early interest in chemistry led him to Polytechnic Institute, now Polytechnic University, in Brooklyn and a master's degree in 1944 and a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1950. His dissertation was on cholesterol.
After serving in the Navy during World War II, he began as a research chemist working on fermentation for Fleischmann's Yeast in 1948. From 1951 to 1969 he was a vice president and technical director at Rheingold in Brooklyn.
He held similar positions at Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis until 1972 and at the Carling Brewing Company in Boston until 1975, when he founded the Center for Brewing Studies, originally in San Francisco.
As a consultant, he advised clients like New Amsterdam Brewing in New York, Anchor Brewing in San Francisco and Boston Brewing, where he assisted in the introduction of Samuel Adams Lager.
He also advised Rheingold, once No. 1 in New York but absent since the mid-1970's, when it staged a comeback in the New York area in the late 1990's.
Dr. Owades is survived by his wife of 36 years, Ruth Markowitz Owades; two sons, Stephen H., of Cambridge, Mass., and William, of Rochester; and a brother, Henry M., of Norwalk, Conn.
Joseph L. Owades, a biochemist whose recipe for a light beer, among other contributions to the science of brewing, made him a leader in the industry, died Friday at his home in Sonoma, Calif. He was 86 and also had a home in San Francisco.
The cause was heart failure, his family said.
Dr. Owades (pronounced oh-WAY-dees) became involved with brewing by way of his research into the properties of yeast and the starches found in malt. He was looking for and found an enzyme that prompted yeast to digest all of the starch.
His discovery resulted in a beer without residual carbohydrates and with fewer calories, or what became known as light beer. Such a brew using his enzyme was first mass-produced by Rheingold Brewing, his employer at the time, which marketed the low-calorie brew under the Gablinger's label. Years later, after the Miller Brewing Company bought Gablinger's, it became Miller Lite.
His process for making low-calorie beer gave rise to many successful specialty brands from new and independent smaller breweries. In 1975, he became a consultant to this growing part of the business as the founder and director of the Center for Brewing Studies in Sonoma, Calif.
Joseph Lawrence Owades was born July 9, 1919, to immigrant parents on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He graduated in 1939 from City College.
An early interest in chemistry led him to Polytechnic Institute, now Polytechnic University, in Brooklyn and a master's degree in 1944 and a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1950. His dissertation was on cholesterol.
After serving in the Navy during World War II, he began as a research chemist working on fermentation for Fleischmann's Yeast in 1948. From 1951 to 1969 he was a vice president and technical director at Rheingold in Brooklyn.
He held similar positions at Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis until 1972 and at the Carling Brewing Company in Boston until 1975, when he founded the Center for Brewing Studies, originally in San Francisco.
As a consultant, he advised clients like New Amsterdam Brewing in New York, Anchor Brewing in San Francisco and Boston Brewing, where he assisted in the introduction of Samuel Adams Lager.
He also advised Rheingold, once No. 1 in New York but absent since the mid-1970's, when it staged a comeback in the New York area in the late 1990's.
Dr. Owades is survived by his wife of 36 years, Ruth Markowitz Owades; two sons, Stephen H., of Cambridge, Mass., and William, of Rochester; and a brother, Henry M., of Norwalk, Conn.
'Old School' Actor Cranshaw Dies at 86
From This website:
Dec 31, 11:04 PM (ET)
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Patrick Cranshaw, who achieved cult-like status as fraternity brother "Blue" in the 2003 comedy "Old School," has died. He was 86.
The veteran character actor died of natural causes Wednesday at his home in Fort Worth, Texas, his personal manager, Jeff Ross, told the Los Angeles Times.
During a career that spanned nearly 50 years, Cranshaw had dozens of roles, including a bank teller in "Bonnie and Clyde" and a demolition derby owner in "Herbie: Fully Loaded" (2005). Other credits included "Bandolero" (1968), "Best in Show" (2000) and "The Hudsucker Proxy" (1994), as well as television series "Mork & Mindy" and "The Dukes of Hazzard."
But he was probably best known for his role as elderly frat boy Joseph "Blue" Palasky in "Old School," starring Luke Wilson, Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn.
In the hit comedy, he was about to wrestle two topless girls but dies of an apparent heart attack from overexcitment. After singing "Dust in the Wind" at Blue's funeral, Ferrell's character calls out in agony: "You're my boy, Blue!"
Fans would yell the signature line whenever they saw the actor. He was even invited to meet with the Texas Rangers when they played the Angels in Anaheim.
"It was a great experience and an acknowledgment for him," Ross said. "He loved the recognition and would turn back and say, 'I'm your boy Blue.'"
Cranshaw was born in Bartlesville, Okla., in 1919 and became interested in acting while entertaining American troops before World War II.
He is survived by three children, Jan Ragland, Joe Cranshaw and Beverly Trautschold.
From This website:
Dec 31, 11:04 PM (ET)
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Patrick Cranshaw, who achieved cult-like status as fraternity brother "Blue" in the 2003 comedy "Old School," has died. He was 86.
The veteran character actor died of natural causes Wednesday at his home in Fort Worth, Texas, his personal manager, Jeff Ross, told the Los Angeles Times.
During a career that spanned nearly 50 years, Cranshaw had dozens of roles, including a bank teller in "Bonnie and Clyde" and a demolition derby owner in "Herbie: Fully Loaded" (2005). Other credits included "Bandolero" (1968), "Best in Show" (2000) and "The Hudsucker Proxy" (1994), as well as television series "Mork & Mindy" and "The Dukes of Hazzard."
But he was probably best known for his role as elderly frat boy Joseph "Blue" Palasky in "Old School," starring Luke Wilson, Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn.
In the hit comedy, he was about to wrestle two topless girls but dies of an apparent heart attack from overexcitment. After singing "Dust in the Wind" at Blue's funeral, Ferrell's character calls out in agony: "You're my boy, Blue!"
Fans would yell the signature line whenever they saw the actor. He was even invited to meet with the Texas Rangers when they played the Angels in Anaheim.
"It was a great experience and an acknowledgment for him," Ross said. "He loved the recognition and would turn back and say, 'I'm your boy Blue.'"
Cranshaw was born in Bartlesville, Okla., in 1919 and became interested in acting while entertaining American troops before World War II.
He is survived by three children, Jan Ragland, Joe Cranshaw and Beverly Trautschold.
Derek Bailey
Restlessly creative guitarist forever pushing at the boundaries of music
John Fordham
Thursday December 29, 2005
The Guardian
On and off over the past decade, I would meet Derek Bailey in the same Chinese restaurant in Dalston, north London. As well as being a wonderful raconteur, the Yorkshire-born guitarist regularly blew holes in convenient wisdoms sitting smugly on some shelf in my head. His provocativeness was not oneupmanship, or a parade of erudition; it was the way his brain was wired. He had done the same for musicians and listeners all over the world for 40 years or more as a free-player and a freethinker, a Frank Zappa for the world of spontaneous performance.
Bailey, who has died aged 75 of complications from motor neurone disease, was a guru without self-importance, a teacher without a rulebook, a guitar-hero without hot licks and a one-man counterculture without ever believing he knew all the answers - or maybe any at all. With his passing, the world has lost an inimitable musician and an implacable enemy of commercialised art.
Bailey once described his friend John Zorn, the American avant-garde composer and improviser, as "a Diaghilev of contemporary music" for his catalytic influence. But he could as easily have been describing himself. He worked with performers as different as free-jazz piano legend Cecil Taylor, cool school saxist Lee Konitz, Harlem bop-and-swing hoofer Will Gaines, naked Japanese improvising dancer Min Tanaka, fusion guitar star Pat Metheny and the drum virtuoso Tony Williams. In later years, he collaborated with Japanese art-of-noise rock band the Ruins, and - when he had already passed 70 - with young drum and bass DJs.
Singlemindedly devoted to unpremeditated improvisation, Bailey published a book on the subject in 1980 called Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music. Twelve years later, it led to Jeremy Marre's revealing Channel 4 four-parter On the Edge: Improvisation in Music, an ambitious venture that Bailey both scripted and presented. The project tracked the improvising impulse through the most radical interpreters of Mozart, the methods of the organist at the Sacré Coeur, Paris, in baroque music or the blues, and in locations from the Hebrides to the Ganges.
Bailey was born to George and Lily Bailey, in the Abbeydale district of Sheffield. His father was a barber, his uncle a professional guitarist who gave the boy his first instrument and some haphazard lessons. By a process of osmosis from musicians he met, sustenance from odd jobs, record-listening (bebop guitar pioneer Charlie Christian was his early model) and some later self-education in theory and arranging, Bailey became a pro on the UK dance-band and studio circuit in the early 1950s. By 1965, he was playing Blackpool seasons for Morecambe and Wise.
By that time, he had begun rehearsing regularly with two adventurous younger players in Sheffield - classical percussionist turned jazz drummer Tony Oxley and bassist (later to become classical composer) Gavin Bryars. The three formed the group Joseph Holbrooke (named after an obscure British composer whose work they never played), and, from 1963 to 1966, its jazz beginnings in John Coltrane and the Bill Evans Trio were crossbred with ideas from John Cage, Stockhausen, serialism, Oxley's labyrinthine rhythm variations, and much more. Gradually, the group moved from jazz into a non-idiomatic approach - free-improvisation.
From 1966, Bailey began visiting the Little Theatre Club, a West End bolthole where the drummer John Stevens ran all-comers' sessions and young improvisers (including Evan Parker, Trevor Watts and Paul Rutherford), jazz virtuosi (Dave Holland, Kenny Wheeler) and contemporary classical players like Barry Guy gathered. With various versions of Stevens' Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Oxley's sextet, the Music Improvisation Company (electronics, percussion and Parker's sax) and the trio Iskra 1903 (with trombonist Rutherford and bassist Guy), Bailey began to build a completely new vocabulary for the guitar.
Though he never abandoned the conventional instrument, he was mixing warped chordal ideas, serialism's lateral melodies, Cage's elevation of silence, pedal-operated electronics and a brittle attack borrowed from percussionists. From 1970, he also ran the Incus Records label, first with Oxley and Parker, then with his partner (and later third wife) Karen Brookman - their Hackney flat is still the Incus HQ.
Bailey's Diaghilev qualities came to the fore in 1976, when he began his Company project, an improvisers' festival that involved 400 players each year up to 1994 in Britain, the US and Japan, with Zorn, Lee Konitz, saxist Steve Lacy, classical violinist Alexander Balanescu, bassoonist Lindsey Cooper and composer/saxist Anthony Braxton among those taking part. He also invited dancers, performance-artists, electronica-specialists and avant-rockers to join in, with the artists deciding who would improvise with who.
He likened improvisation to spontaneous relationships and conversation - full of accidental harmonies, misunderstandings, passion and indifference. Though a sophisticated instrumentalist himself, he did not mind playing with people who had comparatively few skills; something interesting might always happen. He worked with bassist Bill Laswell and drummer Tony Williams in the trio Arcana in 1995, and collaborated with Pat Metheny and two percussionists on The Sign Of Four in 1996.
He described that encounter to me thus: "The equipment I use I bought in Canal Street 15 years ago. Pat's sitting in the middle of what looks like the console of a 747, with four guitars and a distortion unit that could be used for dispersing mobs. There were two guys with huge percussion kits, and I'm making a lot of noise, and then he switches this thing on, and it's like there's three dogs playing around a little, and suddenly an elephant lands on top of them."
Yet for all that raw-noise energy, Bailey continued to be a delicate acoustic improviser, often unaccompanied or in duets. Just in time, he was caught by the ideal biographer, Ben Watson, in the book Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation. And, though his combativeness never left him, he seemed to take heart from the musical eclecticism and dissolution of idiomatic differences he had done so much to encourage.
"The kids don't mind whatever it is these days," he told me once. "Maybe there's a lot of stuff out there now that is by its nature odd. But they seem to be able to take anything. Which is great to somebody like me. I find it very comfortable. In an uncomfortable sort of way." Karen survives him, as does Simon, the son of his second marriage.
Richard Williams writes: The least typical recording Derek Bailey ever made also turned out (not that he would have appreciated the compliment) to be one of the great jazz recordings of the last 40 years. Titled simply Ballads, and recorded in 2002 for John Zorn's Tzadik label, it consisted of solo guitar meditations on 14 songs from the standard repertoire, including Laura, Body and Soul, What's New, Stella by Starlight and You Go to My Head.
Although this was the last project one might have expected from a professed enemy of composed music, it was no surprise to discover that in these songs - their musical and emotional contours long since flattened by overuse - Bailey found brand new angles and meanings, thanks to the application of his highly personal imagination and unique instrumental language. Extraordinary renditions, indeed, and utterly spellbinding.
By the time he recorded another solo CD for Tzadik, entitled Carpal Tunnel, three years later, his refined technique had all but disappeared. No longer able to grasp a plectrum with his right hand, he adapted by striking the strings with his thumb. The album's title came from the condition, carpal tunnel syndrome, that was said by doctors to explain his reduced dexterity. In fact, it marked the onset of the motor neurone disease from which he died.
In these pieces, the spiky elegance of Ballads is replaced by a halting delicacy reminiscent both of Japanese koto music and of the last paintings of Willem de Kooning, when illness had robbed the great abstract expressionist of the power to do anything other than trace a haunting shadow of the shapes and colours that had once burst from the canvas.
· Derek Bailey, improvising guitarist, born January 29 1930; died December 25 2005
Restlessly creative guitarist forever pushing at the boundaries of music
John Fordham
Thursday December 29, 2005
The Guardian
On and off over the past decade, I would meet Derek Bailey in the same Chinese restaurant in Dalston, north London. As well as being a wonderful raconteur, the Yorkshire-born guitarist regularly blew holes in convenient wisdoms sitting smugly on some shelf in my head. His provocativeness was not oneupmanship, or a parade of erudition; it was the way his brain was wired. He had done the same for musicians and listeners all over the world for 40 years or more as a free-player and a freethinker, a Frank Zappa for the world of spontaneous performance.
Bailey, who has died aged 75 of complications from motor neurone disease, was a guru without self-importance, a teacher without a rulebook, a guitar-hero without hot licks and a one-man counterculture without ever believing he knew all the answers - or maybe any at all. With his passing, the world has lost an inimitable musician and an implacable enemy of commercialised art.
Bailey once described his friend John Zorn, the American avant-garde composer and improviser, as "a Diaghilev of contemporary music" for his catalytic influence. But he could as easily have been describing himself. He worked with performers as different as free-jazz piano legend Cecil Taylor, cool school saxist Lee Konitz, Harlem bop-and-swing hoofer Will Gaines, naked Japanese improvising dancer Min Tanaka, fusion guitar star Pat Metheny and the drum virtuoso Tony Williams. In later years, he collaborated with Japanese art-of-noise rock band the Ruins, and - when he had already passed 70 - with young drum and bass DJs.
Singlemindedly devoted to unpremeditated improvisation, Bailey published a book on the subject in 1980 called Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music. Twelve years later, it led to Jeremy Marre's revealing Channel 4 four-parter On the Edge: Improvisation in Music, an ambitious venture that Bailey both scripted and presented. The project tracked the improvising impulse through the most radical interpreters of Mozart, the methods of the organist at the Sacré Coeur, Paris, in baroque music or the blues, and in locations from the Hebrides to the Ganges.
Bailey was born to George and Lily Bailey, in the Abbeydale district of Sheffield. His father was a barber, his uncle a professional guitarist who gave the boy his first instrument and some haphazard lessons. By a process of osmosis from musicians he met, sustenance from odd jobs, record-listening (bebop guitar pioneer Charlie Christian was his early model) and some later self-education in theory and arranging, Bailey became a pro on the UK dance-band and studio circuit in the early 1950s. By 1965, he was playing Blackpool seasons for Morecambe and Wise.
By that time, he had begun rehearsing regularly with two adventurous younger players in Sheffield - classical percussionist turned jazz drummer Tony Oxley and bassist (later to become classical composer) Gavin Bryars. The three formed the group Joseph Holbrooke (named after an obscure British composer whose work they never played), and, from 1963 to 1966, its jazz beginnings in John Coltrane and the Bill Evans Trio were crossbred with ideas from John Cage, Stockhausen, serialism, Oxley's labyrinthine rhythm variations, and much more. Gradually, the group moved from jazz into a non-idiomatic approach - free-improvisation.
From 1966, Bailey began visiting the Little Theatre Club, a West End bolthole where the drummer John Stevens ran all-comers' sessions and young improvisers (including Evan Parker, Trevor Watts and Paul Rutherford), jazz virtuosi (Dave Holland, Kenny Wheeler) and contemporary classical players like Barry Guy gathered. With various versions of Stevens' Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Oxley's sextet, the Music Improvisation Company (electronics, percussion and Parker's sax) and the trio Iskra 1903 (with trombonist Rutherford and bassist Guy), Bailey began to build a completely new vocabulary for the guitar.
Though he never abandoned the conventional instrument, he was mixing warped chordal ideas, serialism's lateral melodies, Cage's elevation of silence, pedal-operated electronics and a brittle attack borrowed from percussionists. From 1970, he also ran the Incus Records label, first with Oxley and Parker, then with his partner (and later third wife) Karen Brookman - their Hackney flat is still the Incus HQ.
Bailey's Diaghilev qualities came to the fore in 1976, when he began his Company project, an improvisers' festival that involved 400 players each year up to 1994 in Britain, the US and Japan, with Zorn, Lee Konitz, saxist Steve Lacy, classical violinist Alexander Balanescu, bassoonist Lindsey Cooper and composer/saxist Anthony Braxton among those taking part. He also invited dancers, performance-artists, electronica-specialists and avant-rockers to join in, with the artists deciding who would improvise with who.
He likened improvisation to spontaneous relationships and conversation - full of accidental harmonies, misunderstandings, passion and indifference. Though a sophisticated instrumentalist himself, he did not mind playing with people who had comparatively few skills; something interesting might always happen. He worked with bassist Bill Laswell and drummer Tony Williams in the trio Arcana in 1995, and collaborated with Pat Metheny and two percussionists on The Sign Of Four in 1996.
He described that encounter to me thus: "The equipment I use I bought in Canal Street 15 years ago. Pat's sitting in the middle of what looks like the console of a 747, with four guitars and a distortion unit that could be used for dispersing mobs. There were two guys with huge percussion kits, and I'm making a lot of noise, and then he switches this thing on, and it's like there's three dogs playing around a little, and suddenly an elephant lands on top of them."
Yet for all that raw-noise energy, Bailey continued to be a delicate acoustic improviser, often unaccompanied or in duets. Just in time, he was caught by the ideal biographer, Ben Watson, in the book Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation. And, though his combativeness never left him, he seemed to take heart from the musical eclecticism and dissolution of idiomatic differences he had done so much to encourage.
"The kids don't mind whatever it is these days," he told me once. "Maybe there's a lot of stuff out there now that is by its nature odd. But they seem to be able to take anything. Which is great to somebody like me. I find it very comfortable. In an uncomfortable sort of way." Karen survives him, as does Simon, the son of his second marriage.
Richard Williams writes: The least typical recording Derek Bailey ever made also turned out (not that he would have appreciated the compliment) to be one of the great jazz recordings of the last 40 years. Titled simply Ballads, and recorded in 2002 for John Zorn's Tzadik label, it consisted of solo guitar meditations on 14 songs from the standard repertoire, including Laura, Body and Soul, What's New, Stella by Starlight and You Go to My Head.
Although this was the last project one might have expected from a professed enemy of composed music, it was no surprise to discover that in these songs - their musical and emotional contours long since flattened by overuse - Bailey found brand new angles and meanings, thanks to the application of his highly personal imagination and unique instrumental language. Extraordinary renditions, indeed, and utterly spellbinding.
By the time he recorded another solo CD for Tzadik, entitled Carpal Tunnel, three years later, his refined technique had all but disappeared. No longer able to grasp a plectrum with his right hand, he adapted by striking the strings with his thumb. The album's title came from the condition, carpal tunnel syndrome, that was said by doctors to explain his reduced dexterity. In fact, it marked the onset of the motor neurone disease from which he died.
In these pieces, the spiky elegance of Ballads is replaced by a halting delicacy reminiscent both of Japanese koto music and of the last paintings of Willem de Kooning, when illness had robbed the great abstract expressionist of the power to do anything other than trace a haunting shadow of the shapes and colours that had once burst from the canvas.
· Derek Bailey, improvising guitarist, born January 29 1930; died December 25 2005