Tuesday, January 31, 2017

A00665 - Miguel Ferrer, Film and Television Tough Guy

Miguel Ferrer, Celebrated as a Film and TV Tough Guy, Dies at 61

By RICHARD SANDOMIR
Miguel Ferrer in his role as Owen Granger on “NCIS: Los Angeles.” He also appeared in “Crossing Jordan.” Neil Jacobs/CBS, via Associated Press
Miguel Ferrer, who followed his mother, Rosemary Clooney, and his Academy Award-winning father, Jose, into acting and often portrayed lawmen and tough guys, died on Thursday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 61.
CBS said the cause was cancer.
At his death Mr. Ferrer had been playing Owen Granger, the assistant director of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, on the CBS crime series “NCIS: Los Angeles.”
He had also recently reprised his role as the abrasive F.B.I. forensics expert Albert Rosenfield in a revival of the quirky “Twin Peaks” series, which is to start in May on Showtime.
In a career whose breakout role was Bob Morton, a cocaine-sniffing executive in “RoboCop,” Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 film about an armored cyborg in a dystopian Detroit, Mr. Ferrer often embraced nefarious characters and imbued decent ones with mystery.
“I think villainy just comes naturally to me,” he said in an interview with OK!TV. “I get to work it out naturally so I can be a nice person in life.”
Mr. Ferrer joined “NCIS: Los Angeles” — whose cast includes Linda Hunt, LL Cool J and Chris O’Donnell — during its third season, in 2012. In an episode this season, his character underwent tests for an undisclosed illness; in another, he was stabbed.
“Miguel was as man of tremendous talent who had a powerful dramatic presence onscreen, a wicked sense of humor and a huge heart,” said R. Scott Gemmill, the showrunner for “NCIS: Los Angeles,” a spinoff of “NCIS.”
He had previously worked for six seasons on “Crossing Jordan,” an NBC series in which he played the chief medical examiner to Jill Hennessy, a crime-solving doctor.
“He was an embraceable scene-stealer,” Ms. Hennessy said in an interview. “He could command the screen by saying nothing, or with a sigh.” She added, “He really was a joyous, warm, relatable human being who was adept at playing these dark characters.”
Miguel Jose Ferrer was born into a show-business family in Santa Monica on Feb. 7, 1955. His father won the Academy Award for best actor in 1951 in the title role in “Cyrano de Bergerac.” His mother, Ms. Clooney, was one of the great popular singers of the second half of the 20th century. George Clooney is a cousin.
Jose Ferrer and Ms. Clooney, who were divorced twice, had two other sons, Gabriel and Rafael, and two daughters, Maria and Monsita.
Miguel Ferrer said that as a child he had been unaware of how accomplished his parents were or who their famous friends were.
“I just knew they were older and boring and always drunk and smoking a lot of cigarettes,” he told the Hallmark Channel. “They were kind of a drag.”
Mr. Ferrer was a drummer, not an actor, until his early 20s, playing behind his mother and Bing Crosby.
Eventually, though, he found his path to acting.
“Maybe I was intimidated by my father’s talent and success,” he told the website A.V. Club in 2009. “I made an enjoyable living as a very young man, but I think as I became more comfortable and knowledgeable about myself and what I wanted, I moved into acting.”
He credited his “RoboCop” role for turning his career around. He remembered the thrill of its release. “I think I drove around to every theater in Los Angeles in which it was playing and kind of stood in the back and watched the reaction,” he said.
His many roles since then have included appearances on “Desperate Housewives” and “Psych” on television and in the films “Iron Man 3” and Jonathan Demme’s 2004 remake of “The Manchurian Candidate.” He also provided the voice of animated characters in “Mulan” and “Rio 2.” Occasionally he detoured into comedies like “Will and Grace.”
He is survived by his wife, Lori Weintraub; two sons, Rafael and Lukas, from an earlier marriage, to Leilani Sarelle; two stepsons, Dan and Charlie Veytia, and four siblings.
David Lynch, the co-creator of “Twin Peaks,” said in an in interview on Friday, “I fell deeply in love with Miguel on the latest `Twin Peaks.’ I liked him before, but it wasn’t deep love. I just didn’t know him that well. This time I fell in love.”
He said that he had almost always called him Albert, the name of his character in the show, not Miguel.
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Monday, January 30, 2017

A00664 - Charles Bobo Shaw, Avant-Garde Jazz Drummer

Charles Bobo Shaw, Avant-Garde Jazz Drummer, Dies at 69

By JON PARELES
Charles Bobo Shaw in a photograph from 1976. Raymond Ross Archives/CTSIMAGES
Charles Bobo Shaw, a jazz drummer from St. Louis who worked with major figures of the 1960s and ’70s jazz avant-garde, died on Jan. 16 in St. Louis. He was 69.
His death, at a hospice, was confirmed by the trumpeter George R. Sams, a friend and frequent collaborator, who said that Mr. Shaw was hospitalized last month with multiple ailments.
Mr. Shaw was equally adept at generating straightforward swing and funk or plunging into the coloristic flow of free jazz. As a founder of the Black Artists’ Group and the Human Artists Association in St. Louis, he was also an organizer in an era when forward-looking jazz musicians were creating their own infrastructure.
Charles Wesley Shaw Jr., nicknamed Bobo by his mother, was born in Pope, Miss., on Sept. 5, 1947, and moved with his family to St. Louis as a child. He learned his fundamentals in the American Woodsman drum and bugle corps, which nurtured notable St. Louis musicians; he also studied with members of the St. Louis Symphony.
Mr. Shaw helped found the Black Artists’ Group in 1968. A do-it-yourself cooperative of musicians, visual artists, writers, dancers and actors in St. Louis, it lasted until 1972. Among the musicians were Oliver Lake, Hamiet Bluiett and Julius Hemphill, who would go on to form the World Saxophone Quartet with David Murray. Others became major participants in the 1970s avant-garde in New York City.
Alongside the Black Artists’ Group, Mr. Shaw helped form the Human Artists Association, which allowed white collaborators, and an associated musical group, the Human Arts Ensemble, a name he continued to use for his own groups.
He was a founder of a short-lived independent jazz label, Universal Justice, which vowed in a mission statement to bypass “the gangsters, mind molders and soul destroyers in the offices in New York,” according to Benjamin Looker’s book “‘Point From Which Creation Begins’: The Black Artists’ Group of St. Louis” (2004). The label released six albums, including one by the Human Arts Ensemble.
In 1972, Mr. Shaw moved to Paris as part of a quartet led by Mr. Lake. Performing with fellow expatriates and working the European jazz festival circuit, the St. Louis musicians forged connections with better-known performers, spreading their reputation.
Returning to the United States, Mr. Shaw settled in New York. In 1974, Ellen Stewart, the founder of La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in the East Village in Manhattan, gave him the use of her Children’s Workshop Theater, which became a hive of classes for children, jazz-group rehearsals, concerts and Sunday morning free-jazz church services.
Mr. Shaw was also active in the 1970s on the downtown loft-jazz circuit, where experimentation was encouraged in spaces run by musicians. The Black Artists’ Group had found kindred spirits in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in Chicago, whose members were also migrating to New York City. These Midwestern musicians became a vital part of the city’s jazz vanguard.
Mr. Shaw led a changing lineup of his Human Arts Ensemble during the 1970s and ’80s. He also performed and recorded with Mr. Lake, Cecil Taylor, Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy, Lester Bowie, Frank Lowe, Billy Bang and others. His discography consists of some two dozen albums as leader and sideman.
Mr. Shaw moved back to St. Louis in 1986 and continued to perform frequently there in various ensembles. He appeared in 2015 at the Vision Festival in New York City with Hamiet Bluiett’s Telepathic Orchestra.
Mr. Shaw is survived by his sister, Marian Shaw Matthews; six daughters, Concere, Antasiah, Myah, Erica, Tracy Shaw and Loreene Sebbane; and a grandchild.
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A00663 - William Hilliard, Pioneering Black Journalist

William A. Hilliard, 89, Pioneering Black Journalist, Dies

By SAM ROBERTS
William A. Hilliard in the newsroom of The Oregonian in 1993. Among other accomplishments, he was known for promoting civility in news. Don Ryan
Growing up in Portland, Ore., William A. Hilliard was denied a newspaper delivery route by The Oregonian, which figured its readers would rebuff an 11-year-old black child at their doorsteps.
After seeking an education at three colleges, he finally graduated, but the best job he could immediately get was as a railroad redcap, or porter.
Still, he persisted, pursuing the advice of a neighbor who, he said, had urged him to “get good grades in school, go to college and don’t pay attention to what anyone else says.”
Years later, with a bachelor’s degree in journalism in hand, Mr. Hilliard approached The Oregonian again and this time was hired, as a copy boy. He was 25. He became the newspaper’s only black employee.
It was the first in a series of firsts. He became the paper’s first black reporter; its first black executive editor, in 1982; and its first black editor in chief, in 1987, overseeing the news and editorial departments.
In 1993, he became the first black person to be elected president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (now the American Society of News Editors).
Mr. Hilliard, who retired in 1994, died on Monday in Portland. He was 89. The cause was congestive heart failure, a son-in-law, Lou Gellos, said.
During his 42-year career in journalism, Mr. Hilliard championed diversity in hiring and civility in news coverage.
“The thing that bothers me more than anything else is what I see as more and more racial divisions in the country today,” he said after he was elected to lead the editors’ association. “And I think newspapers are the ideal educational tool to correct it.”
As editor of The Oregonian, a statewide daily paper, he generally deleted racial references in descriptions of people charged with crimes, arguing that they rarely helped in identifying suspects and mostly perpetuated negative stereotypes.
His paper also banned using names of sports teams that he said might offend ethnic or religious groups, especially Native Americans. Names like Redskins, he said, “tend to perpetuate stereotypes that damage the dignity and self-respect of many people in our society,” adding that “this harm far transcends any innocent entertainment or promotional value these names may have.”
William Arthur Hilliard was born on May 28, 1927, in Chicago to Felix Hilliard, a mortuary worker, and the former Ruth Jackson, a maid. They divorced when he was a baby. He and his three sisters were raised by his grandparents in Arkansas until he was 8, when his mother, who had remarried and moved to Portland, sent for them.
When he was 13, after his mother and stepfather had moved elsewhere in the city, he went to live with a neighbor, Stephen Wright, a black businessman who owned the only hotel in Portland that catered to blacks. Mr. Wright became his mentor.
It was a truck driver responsible for hiring paperboys for The Oregonian who turned down the young William for the job, but the rejection did not dim his desire to be a journalist. He was hired to deliver The Saturday Evening Post, a magazine, as a teenager; worked on his high school newspaper; and, after being drafted and serving in the Navy, studied journalism at Vanport Extension Center (now Portland State University) and the University of Oregon.
At the University of Oregon, he said, a white professor tried to discourage him from pursuing a career in a profession that had not welcomed minorities. But Mr. Hilliard was not deterred.
After transferring to Pacific University in Forest Grove, Ore., he was elected editor of the campus paper. After graduating, he began publishing The Portland Challenger, aimed at black readers, until he was hired at The Oregonian.
As a reporter there, he initially covered sports, although he was the only reporter in the department never to be assigned to cover a game. He went on to be a general assignment reporter, a religion reporter and city editor.
As the paper’s top editor, he presided over the merger of the Oregonian’s staff with that of The Oregon Journal. He was also in charge when, in an embarrassing lapse in 1992, The Washington Post broke the news that a number of women had accused Senator Bob Packwood, a Republican from Oregon, of sexual harassment and that he had kissed an Oregonian reporter on the lips.
Mr. Hilliard said he had been unaware of the allegations, but he took the criticism in stride. “As much as we dish it out,” he said, “we have to take it.”
In 1980, he was among four reporters who questioned Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter in their first presidential debate.
In addition to his wife, the former Dian Lamb, Mr. Hilliard is survived by three children from an earlier marriage, Abdur-Razzaque, Linda Hilliard and Sandra Gunder; two stepdaughters, Danielle Yoder and Angie Foster; two granddaughters; two step-grandchildren; and two sisters, Dorothy Fatheree and Juliet Banks.
In 1993, the National Association of Black Journalists gave Mr. Hilliard its presidential award, crediting him as a role model who had quietly but persistently sought to integrate the mainstream media.
“I want to believe,” he once said, “that over the years, scores of young people of color have looked at me and said, ‘It can happen.’”
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A00662 - Chuck Stewart, Jazz Photographer

Chuck Stewart, Jazz Photographer, Dies at 89; You’ve Seen His Album Covers

By RICHARD SANDOMIR
Chuck Stewart created an archive of some 800,000 negatives, and by his count his photographs appeared on the covers of at least 2,000 albums.Chester Higgins Jr.
Chuck Stewart, who could not master the piano but succeeded indelibly with a camera, becoming a fixture in the jazz world with his photographs of John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Dinah Washington and many others, died on Jan. 20 in Teaneck, N.J. He was 89.
His death was confirmed by Kim Stewart, his daughter-in-law.
Mr. Stewart often framed his subjects in black, as if to prevent the eye from being distracted by anything but the singer or musician.
“There was a certain warmth and intimacy to his work,” the jazz historian Dan Morgenstern said in an interview. “Photographers weren’t always welcome in recording studios, but he was.
“Producers and engineers accepted him,” Mr. Morgenstern continued. “He was not the least bit intrusive. He would never snap a shutter in the middle of a take. He was the extreme opposite of the paparazzi.”
Mr. Stewart created an archive of some 800,000 negatives, and by his count his photographs appeared on the covers of at least 2,000 albums.
In 1964, he joined Coltrane as he recorded the album “A Love Supreme” at the Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, N.J. With a Rolleiflex camera, he photographed the rehearsal as Coltrane, with his saxophone, led the pianist McCoy Tyner, the drummer Elvin Jones and the bassist Jimmy Garrison through his four-movement composition.
Seventy-two pictures from that session went undeveloped for 50 years. Looking at a sheet of the rediscovered work with a reporter for Smithsonian magazine in 2014, Mr. Stewart singled out one that showed Coltrane sitting at a piano, lost in thought.
SLIDE SHOW

Chuck Stewart, Jazz World Fixture

Chuck Stewart, All Rights Reserved
“I was looking for a decisive moment,” he said.
He was seeking not only decisive moments in studios and nightclubs, but also images that were undeniably his.
“If you say Count Basie, a thousand photographers might have photographed him,” Mr. Stewart said in an interview with the Newark radio station WBGO in 2016. “I want my pictures to say, ‘These pictures are by Chuck Stewart.’”
He did not find it easy, perhaps out of modesty, to describe how he had created his most distinctive work. But Carol Friedman, a friend and fellow photographer, said he had distinguished himself through his relationships with the artists.
“If you look through Chuck’s images,” Ms. Friedman said in an interview, “what is immediately apparent is that his subjects have let him into their inner sanctum. They like him and they trust him. Whether he’s documenting them at a recording session or capturing them in the privacy of his own studio, he knew how to defer to the moment in time that unfolded before him.”
Charles Hugh Stewart was born on May 21, 1927, in Henrietta, Tex., to Hugh Paris Stewart, a chef, and the former Anne Harris, a domestic worker. The family later moved to Tucson, Ariz.
He used a Box Brownie Six-16 camera, which he had received for his 13th birthday, to take pictures of Marian Anderson, the African-American contralto, when she visited his school. A year earlier she had sung at the Lincoln Memorial after being denied use of Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution, which owned the hall.
“When I got the pictures back from the drugstore, everybody wanted some,” Mr. Stewart told WBGO. “I made $2. That was during the Depression. I got a quarter-a-week allowance. So $2 was a lot of money.”
He took piano lessons for eight years, at his mother’s insistence, but the only thing he could successfully play, he said, was Bach’s Minuet in G.
Bill EvansChuck Stewart, All Rights Reserved
Mr. Stewart graduated from Ohio University in 1949 and became an assistant to his fellow student, Herman Leonard, at his studio in Manhattan. Mr. Leonard, who would become known for his haunting, noirish images of musicians, introduced him to the jazz clubs in Harlem and on 52nd Street that would become his artistic stamping ground. Mr. Leonard died in 2010.
Drafted into the Army, Mr. Stewart found work as a military photographer. He was in the Nevada desert in 1952 to shoot atomic bomb tests and documented the effect of the tests on tanks positioned in the desert.
“I can’t prove that,” he told WBGO, “because all the pictures belong to the government.”
He returned to work for Mr. Leonard after his discharge and took over the studio in 1956 when Mr. Leonard went overseas to photograph Marlon Brando, who was shooting “The Teahouse of the August Moon” in Japan, and later when Mr. Leonard moved to Paris.
Mr. Stewart’s specialty was jazz, but he also worked in other genres, photographing musical stars like Frank Sinatra, the Beatles, James Brown, Janis Joplin, Bo Diddley, Judy Garland, Led Zeppelin and Tito Puente for album covers and back covers, as well as for magazines and books. He shot sports stars, fashion models, actors, comedians and quiet street scenes. He also published a book of nudes, “Nus de Harlem,” in 1961.
He is survived by his daughter, Marsha Stewart; two sons, David and Christopher; seven grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter. His wife, Mae Bailey, a social worker, died in 1986.
Mr. Stewart’s decades of photographing jazz stars brought him a wealth of stories, like the one he told WBGO about photographing Miles Davis at a show in Italy with a band that included the saxophonist James Moody.
“Miles used to call me James Moody,” he said, because the two looked somewhat alike, at least to Mr. Davis. When the show ended, he and Mr. Moody went to Mr. Davis’s dressing room. “O.K., Miles can you tell us apart?” Mr. Stewart said he asked.
“I can always tell you all apart,” Mr. Stewart recalled Mr. Davis as saying, imitating his raspy voice. “You’re the James Moody with the camera and you’re the James Moody with the horn.”

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