Category: people

Back in 1939 Solomon Linda wrote the song that would later be called “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” “Some 150 artists eventually recorded the song. It was translated into languages from Dutch to Japanese. It had a role in more than 13 movies. By all rights, Mr. Linda should have been a rich man. Instead, he lived in Soweto with barely a stick of furniture, sleeping on a dirt floor carpeted with cow dung. Mr. Linda received 10 shillings — about 87 cents today — when he signed over the copyright of “Mbube” in 1952 to Gallo Studios, the company that produced his record. He also got a job sweeping floors and serving tea in the company’s packing house.”

Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg got an early reputation for being impetuous, and maybe undisciplined. “Did the world have her wrong? Or, at age 45, has Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg cooled down? In the 25th year since her debut, the latter scenario isn’t true. Last week, before sciatica forced her to cancel her Lincoln Center Brahms recital, she was still trying to rehearse while loaded up on Vicodin, and her recital partner, pianist Anne-Marie McDermott, barely noticed a difference.”

After 28 years, age 71, Lewis Lapham is about to step down as the editor of Harper’s magazine…

Playwright Peter Shaffer is 80. “Shaffer hasn’t had a play open at the National for 21 years. But during the 1960s and 1970s he was responsible for four of the theatre’s biggest successes: The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Black Comedy, Equus and Amadeus. Hits were his department. It is said that during the dark days of the early ’80s, revenue from his plays kept the National in business.”

The complaint alleges “intentional emotional distress arising out of the hostile environment and harassment … over a long and extended period of time.” The violinist, who has an anxiety disorder that developed in his late teens, said in his suit that he has suffered “persistent and severe discrimination.”

Jerry Lewis was awarded the French Legion of Honor this week. “Lewis received the honorary title of ‘Legion Commander’ in a raucous ceremony in Paris – hamming it up for the cameras, winking, sticking out his tongue and making his trademark funny faces. True to form, the comedian turned what is generally a sober event – set in a gilded hall of the Ministry of Culture – into a virtual slapstick routine.”

Annie Proulx hoped that “Brokeback Mountain” would scoop her up the Best Picture Oscar. But it didn’t, of course, and Proulx isn’t happy. “It was a safe pick of ‘controversial film’ for the heffalumps,” she writes in an essay for The Guardian. Is she bitter? You judge: “For those who call this little piece a Sour Grapes Rant, play it as it lays.”

Conductor James Levine says he’ll use the next several months in rehab from his rotator cuff injury to exercise and improve his diet. “I’ve got three months to recover from this,” he said. “I’ve never had a period in which I’ve had to do rehab and put my mind to correcting this, in my diet and exercise.” He said his busy schedule of rehearsing and leading performances meant he never had a base line with which to judge his physical state.

More than 1000 friends and admirers of playwright Wendy Wasserstein attended a memorial for her. “The memorial, which was also broadcast via closed circuit to an audience assembled nearby at the Juilliard School, drew scores of Broadway’s biggest stars and backstage players, many of whom counted Ms. Wasserstein — whose social calendar might include everything from nights at the opera to days at the mall — as an old, and close, friend.”

“This seems provocative for a second, and then a little meaningless. It is not some sort of timely argument for underappreciated work; adventurous musicians like those in the Black Rock Coalition have been claiming Davis’s electric period as an inspiration for decades. There are some jazz adherents who never liked Davis’s long electric phase and will be mildly outraged. But after all the jagged turns of his career, and its thorough box-set gilding, most of us have long since let Davis’s body of work just assume its own meaning.”