Category: people

“Joe Beck, a jazz guitarist who collaborated with artists such as Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis and James Brown, has died at a local hospice after battling lung cancer… Beck got his start as a teenager in the 1960s playing in a jazz trio in New York. By 1968, he was working with Miles Davis and other top jazz stars.”

“Toni Morrison has said that her acclaimed novel “Beloved,” which features the ghost of a baby killed by her enslaved black mother, came out of the need for a literature to commemorate slaves and their history.” She once famously said that there was no memorial, no “bench by the road,” to mark slavery’s place in American history. There is now.

“Egyptian film director Youssef Chahine has died in Cairo aged 82, four weeks after suffering a brain haemorrhage. One of Arab cinema’s most admired figures, he made his first film in 1950 and tackled authoritarianism and religious fundamentalism in his work.”

Mr. Dello Joio won awards throughout his career, gathering a Pulitzer Prize in 1957 for his piece “Meditations on Ecclesiastes” for string orchestra and an Emmy in 1965 for a TV series, “The Louvre,” on NBC. He also wrote works for ballet; Martha Graham choreographed a number of them. The jazz clarinetist Artie Shaw commissioned a concerto from him.

“Scientists want to remove the heart for DNA tests to see if Chopin actually died from cystic fibrosis and not tuberculosis as his death certificate stated. But the government says that’s not a good reason to disturb the remains of a revered native son.”

I have run out of energy completely. I have ideas that I will probably never write now. You know, I have written quite a lot, so it is not really enough to weep over.

“Barbara Ann Teer, who gave up a promising career in commercial entertainment to concentrate on developing African-American culture in Harlem and who founded the National Black Theater there, died on Monday in Harlem.”

Like his close collaborator, Leo Fender, Les Paul is best known for the electric guitar he created. If the Fender Stratocaster is the edgy workhorse of the rock industry, the Gibson Les Paul was and remains its elegant rival, its richly varnished mahogany body and oyster-shell fingerboard adding a touch of class to a rough-hewn affair. But there’s much more to Paul than a lump of wood with a cherry-burst finish: he’s also a consummate musician

“The album has generated massive interest because it is the first by the Italian-born former model turned pop star since her whirlwind romance with President Nicolas Sarkozy, whom she married in February less than three months after they met.”

“About 778 of the famous pink stars, which are embedded in a stretch of pavement in and around Hollywood Boulevard, need replacing. Many, including that of Dynasty actress Joan Collins, have been deemed unsafe.”