Category: people

For Ella’s upcoming 100th birthday (April 25), Amy Henderson recounts the story of that fateful Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater, Ella’s original plan for it, and why she changed her mind just before going on.

“The content of the contribution, which was part purchase and part gift, is massive: about 1,000 sketches, more than 120,000 working drawings, more than 100,000 slides, 168 working models, 112 presentation models and hundreds of boxes of office records, personal papers and correspondence.”

The author of the “diagram- and recipe-filled manifesto that is believed to have been used as a source in heinous acts of violence since its publication in 1971” (as William Sandomir puts it here) actually died last July, though word didn’t make it to the media until a documentary about him was released in theaters last week.

Nate Chinen: “Blythe was a commanding figure whose music connected jazz’s root system with its freer outgrowths, seemingly without a second thought. It was implicit in his broad-shouldered tone – ’round as Benny Carter, ardent as John Coltrane,’ in the words of Gary Giddins – and through the vibrato that often amplified the sensation of fervency.”

He freelanced, but bad investment decisions and health reversals shriveled his savings. To considerable attention, he wrote a self-lacerating essay in 2014 about his slide into what he called the “upper edge of poverty” — not quite destitution but where “a roof over your head and a wardrobe that doesn’t look as if it came from the Salvation Army is as good as it gets.”

“She is the first ever centenarian to chart in Britain. Dame Vera beats her own record from 2014, when she became the oldest living artist to reach the Top 20 with her National Treasure album. She still holds the record for the oldest living artist to score a No. 1 album, when her Very Best Of collection hit the top in 2009, at the age of 93.”

In 1941 he was pulled out of a group of Jewish inmates who were digging their own mass grave by a guard who recognized him as a violinist and thus useful. Arben made his way to the U.S. after the war and ended up playing in the Philadelphia Orchestra for 34 years, retiring as associate concertmaster.

She was known particularly for her performances of Brünnhilde (including at Bayreuth) and Isolde (opposite Jon Vickers at the Met). She had to give up performing in 1991 when her retinas began to detach from the sheer force of the vibrations from her larynx.

“Not long after I moved to New York, Michael Jackson died. O had no idea who Michael Jackson was. ‘What is Michael Jackson?’ he asked me the day after the news – not who but what – which seemed both a very odd and a very apt way of putting it, given how much the brilliant singer had transmuted from a human into an alien being. O often said he had no knowledge of popular culture after 1955, and this was not an exaggeration. He did not know popular music, rarely watched anything on TV but the news, did not enjoy contemporary fiction, and had zero interest in celebrities or fame (including his own). He didn’t possess a computer, had never used email or texted; he wrote with a fountain pen. This wasn’t pretentiousness; he wasn’t proud of it; indeed, this feeling of “not being with it” contributed to his extreme shyness. But there was no denying that his tastes, his habits, his ways – all were irreversibly, fixedly, not of our time.”

“It got so demoralizing. I’d gone to NYU and I’d trained with some of the great acting teachers and I was constantly doing Murderer No. 2 or Janitor No. 3 and it was just like, ‘Am I always going to have a number next to my name?'”