A Taste of honey

Shelagh Delaney, a British playwright and screenwriter who reached the height of her literary fame at 19 as an “angry young woman” — a characterization she detested — with the premiere of her play “A Taste of Honey,” died on Sunday (24 november) at her daughter’s home in Suffolk, England. She was 72 and lived near Filey, a village in Yorkshire. The cause was heart failure and breast cancer, her daughter, Charlotte Jo Delaney, said.
A precocious young woman with a keen eye for detail and a gift for naturalistic dialogue, Ms. Delaney — her first name is pronounced Sheila — said she wrote “A Taste of Honey” in just two weeks in 1958. She had been spurred by her dislike of the genteel stage writing of Terence Rattigan, specifically the play “Variation on a Theme,” which Rattigan intended to be socially bold but which dealt only covertly with its themes of homosexuality, promiscuity and bisexuality.
“A Taste of Honey,” which was revived on Broadway in 1981 with Amanda Plummer as Jo, was the pinnacle of Ms. Delaney’s playwriting career. But though she is often listed among one-hit wonders, she wrote several screenplays, including “The White Bus” (1967), directed by Lindsay Anderson, which she adapted from one of her short stories; “Charlie Bubbles” (1967), with Albert Finney (who also directed) and Liza Minnelli, about a successful young writer who returns home from London to Manchester and struggles to cope with his good fortune in the world of commonplace deprivation he encounters there; and “Dance With a Stranger,” Mike Newell’s 1985 film, starring Miranda Richardson and Rupert Everett, about Ruth Ellis, who murdered her lover and in 1955 became the last woman to be executed in Britain.
In addition to her daughter, Ms. Delaney, who never married (and who always said that “A Taste of Honey” was not autobiographical), is survived by three grandchildren.

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"Winter Wonderland" by The Golden Sandpipers and Jmimmy Caroll Orchestra

A Taste of Honey

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Pete Rugolo die - arranger of Stan Kenton

Pete Rugolo, the chief arranger for the Stan Kenton Orchestra in its late-1940s heyday and a prolific composer and arranger for television and film, including the series “Richard Diamond, Private Detective,” “The Fugitive” and “Run for Your Life,” died on Sunday in Sherman Oaks, Calif. He was 95.

[Portrait of Stan Kenton, Pete Rugolo, and Bob Graettinger, Richmond, Va.(?), 1947 or 1948] (LOC)

His death was confirmed by his daughter, Gina Rugolo Judd.

Mr. Rugolo (pronounced ROO-guh-lo) was still in uniform, leading the Army band at Fort Scott in San Francisco, when he handed a half-dozen arrangements to his idol Stan Kenton at the Golden Gate Theater. When he left the service, he was hired by Kenton and went on to write more than a hundred arrangements for that big band, helping establish the progressive sound of its peak years.

After Kenton dissolved the group in 1949, Mr. Rugolo became the music director of Capitol Records in New York. There, in addition to producing Harry Belafonte’s early pop records and the Four Freshmen, he signed the Miles Davis Nonet, which played arrangements by Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan and others.

In three days of sessions, he helped produce a dozen 78s by the group that introduced a cooled-down interpretation of bebop. The records sold poorly at the time, but Mr. Rugolo lobbied Capitol to release nearly all of them in 1957 on a 12-inch LP, “Birth of the Cool,” one of the landmark albums in jazz.

Mr. Rugolo also recorded dozens of his own albums and wrote arrangements for a long list of singers that included Nat King Cole, June Christy, Dinah Washington and Mel Tormé. He later became a highly sought-after composer and arranger for television and film.

He made his mark in television at a time when noirish urban detective series and Henry Mancini’s groundbreaking music for “Peter Gunn” opened the way for jazzy big-band scores. He wrote the theme music for “The Thin Man,” “Richard Diamond, Private Detective,” “The Fugitive” and “Run for Your Life,” and the scores for many episodes of shows as varied as “Leave It to Beaver,” “The Bold Ones: The Lawyers,” “Alias Smith and Jones” and “M*A*S*H.”

Pietro Rugolo was born on Dec. 25, 1915, in San Piero Patti, Sicily. His father, who played the baritone horn, took the family to the United States five years later and settled in Santa Rosa, Calif., where his son learned to play French horn and classical piano and listened intently to the big bands of Duke Ellington, Gene Krupa and Ray Noble on the radio.

Mr. Rugolo earned a bachelor’s degree in music education from San Francisco State College in 1939 and planned to become a teacher, but pursued graduate work at Mills College in Oakland when he found out that the avant-garde composer Darius Milhaud would be teaching there.

After receiving a master’s degree from Mills and working as a composer and arranger for a band led by the guitarist Johnny Richards, he was drafted into the Army, where the band members at Fort Scott included Paul Desmond, later the saxophonist in the Dave Brubeck Quartet.

The first Stan Kenton records came out while Mr. Rugolo was in the service. “When I heard them, I just loved the sound of the band,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1993. “I started copying the music down from the records and began writing that way; my band sounded like a young Stan Kenton Orchestra.” Mr. Rugolo’s arrangements, building on the orchestra’s aggressive, blasting style, moved into the complex harmonic and rhythmic territory that defined the Kenton sound of those years.

In the early 1950s, Mr. Rugolo was a staff composer and arranger for MGM studios and the West Coast musical director of Mercury Records. While at Mercury, he recorded several albums under his own name using unusual combinations of instruments, including “Reeds in Hi-Fi,” “Ten Trumpets and Two Guitars” and “Ten Saxophones and Two Basses.”

In the 1960 film “Where the Boys Are,” an experimental combo plays several compositions by Mr. Rugolo, which the group’s way-out leader, Frank Gorshin, dubs “dialectic jazz.” The readers of Down Beat magazine voted Mr. Rugolo best arranger five times between 1947 and 1954.

In addition to his daughter, Gina, of Beverly Hills, Calif., he is survived by his wife, the former Edye Gaffney; two sons, Peter Rugolo Jr. and Tony Rugolo, both of Sherman Oaks; and three grandchildren.

Lawrence Welk - The Green Hornet Theme

Mr. Roger Williams - goodbye to the great pianist

Pianista Roger Williams morre de cancro aos 87 anos

Conhecido como o «pianista dos presidentes» por se ter apresentado para nove chefes de Governo americanos, o músico Roger Williams morreu no sábado (08/10/2011), aos 87 anos, vítima de um cancro no pâncreas, informou o seu assessor.

Além das exibições na Casa Branca, o pianista também obteve vários sucessos na sua carreira, como o álbum «Autumn Leaves», de 1958, que vendeu 2 milhões de cópias. O disco foi o único de caráter instrumental que chegou ao topo da lista da Billboard.

Williams, que começou a tocar piano aos três anos de idade, lançou em 1966 o álbum «Born Free», banda sonora do filme homónimo, e chegou novamente ao 1º lugar.

O músico também era um veterano da Segunda Guerra Mundial. Em 1942, aos 18 anos, teve que deixar o piano de lado para servir na Marinha. Após a guerra, o artista obteve um título de mestrado em música da Universidade de Drake.

O «pianista dos presidentes» também estudou jazz na conceituada Julliard School of Music de Nova Iorque antes de iniciar a sua bem-sucedida carreira e consolidar-se com os seus aclamados concertos e temas musicais como «The Impossible Dream», «Yellow Bird» e «Theme from Somewhere in Time».

Roger Williams, the pianist whose lush versions of familiar tunes like “Autumn Leaves” and “Born Free” became hit recordings in the 1950s and ’60s and who continued to perform into his 80s, died on Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 87.

The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, his secretary and personal assistant, Jacque Heebner, said.

Seven singles by Mr. Williams made it onto the Billboard Top 40, perhaps the best known of which — and the one that brought him stardom — was “Autumn Leaves.” Over his long career he recorded more than 100 albums, among them “Roger Williams Plays Your All-Time Favorites” and “The Greatest Popular Pianist.”

Mr. Williams “virtually transformed the piano into a harp,” Joseph Lanza, a music historian, wrote in 1994 in his book, “Elevator Music,” adding that he “cultivated a flair for making dramatic sweeps from classical to jazz to country to soft rock-and-roll.”

He performed on stages across the United States, from Carnegie Hall to the Hollywood Bowl, and headlined for many years at the MGM Grand and the Tropicana in Las Vegas. Nine presidents, including Harry S. Truman and George W. Bush, brought him to the White House to provide soothing sounds for dinner guests.

Certainly “Autumn Leaves” was among his most soothing, with its cascading arpeggios evoking falling leaves. Mr. Williams’s instrumental version of that song, written in 1945 and originally known as “Les Feuilles Mortes” (“The Dead Leaves”), with music by Joseph Kosma and French lyrics by Jacques Prévert (Johnny Mercer wrote the English lyrics), was No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart for four weeks in 1955 and stayed in the Top 40 for 26 weeks.

Accompanied by orchestra and chorus, Mr. Williams captured the expanse of the African savanna with his version of the theme from the 1966 movie “Born Free,” about a lioness raised as a pet in Kenya, and the No. 7 spot during the record’s 14 weeks in the Top 40 in 1966. His other Top 40 hits were “Wanting You” (1956); “La Mer,” or “Beyond the Sea” (1956); “Almost Paradise” (1957); “Till” (1957); and “Near You,” which reached the Top 10 in 1958.

In 1960, Mr. Williams was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Many critics were less than enamored with the kind of “easy listening” Mr. Williams embodied, deriding his approach as bland and unchallenging. But audiences all over the world embraced his music enthusiastically.

Though his musicality was apparent even when he was a toddler, Roger Williams was not always Roger Williams.

He was born Louis Jacob Weertz in Omaha on Oct. 1, 1924, and grew up in Des Moines, the only child of Frederick and Dorothea Weertz. His father was a Lutheran minister who had once been a professional boxer; his mother was a music teacher. (It was only after the founder of Kapp Records, David Kapp, signed him to a contract in 1954 that he changed his name, at Mr. Kapp’s insistence.)

“I could play ‘Home Sweet Home’ on the harmonica when I was 3,” Mr. Williams told The Daily Mirror in 1955. By the time he was in high school he was proficient on 12 other instruments. “Everything but the oboe and bassoon,” he said, “but I finally settled for what I liked best — the piano.”

Mr. Williams graduated from Idaho State University in 1949, earned a master’s degree in music from Drake University in Des Moines a year later and then came to New York to study at the Juilliard School, where the renowned jazz pianist Teddy Wilson took him under his wing.

At Mr. Wilson’s urging, he competed on Arthur Godfrey’s “Talent Scouts” in 1952, and won. That led to many nightclub bookings and his first album for Kapp, which did not sell very well. Then came “Autumn Leaves.”

What followed was a meandering path through many of the most nostalgia-inducing melodies of the last half of the 20th century, among them “A Time for Us,” “The Impossible Dream,” “On a Clear Day,” “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” and “Lara’s Theme” from “Dr. Zhivago.”

Mr. Williams is survived by two daughters, Laura Fisher of Carmel, Calif., and Alice Jung of New York, and five grandchildren.

Throughout his career, Mr. Williams was unabashed about his inclination for sentimentality.

“If a song’s lyrics say ‘I love you,’ then I mean just that when I play the notes,” he told The Christian Science Monitor in 1970. “The audience, live or at home, can sense if an artist really means what he plays. I purposely choose music which is warm and which I know I can get across. I know myself.”