Tag: 01.02.18

Record Producer Rick Hall, Father Of ‘Muscle Shoals Sound’, Dead At 85

By the mid-1960s, Fame Studios, the recording company Hall set up in a tiny Alabama town, had become a hotbed for pop musicians of various stripes, including the Rolling Stones, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Clarence Carter, Solomon Burke and Percy Sledge. Because of the reputation for greatness Hall had established, others continued to come calling through the decades, among them Duane Allman, Etta James, Rod Stewart and the Osmonds and more recently pop-R&B singer-songwriter Alicia Keys, alt-country group Drive-By Truckers and avant-bluegrass band the SteelDrivers.”

Could Peter Martins’s Departure Change How New York City Ballet Is Run?

George Balanchine set up a uniquely concentrated model of artistic leadership at his company: he choreographed, taught, coached roles, and controlled artistic policy. Peter Martins continued that model (even if he ultimately delegated choreographing duties after his own efforts fell flat). Now that Martins has resigned, Alastair Macaulay wonders if it’s time to change that model and split Martins’s job.

Costa Book Award Winners Include Poet Who Died Last June

Helen Dunmore’s collection Inside the Wave, which took the poetry prize, is about the diagnosis and treatment of the cancer that ended her life at age 64. Other category winners are Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 (novel), Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine (first novel), Rebecca Stott’s In the Days of Rain (biography), and Katherine Rundell’s The Explorer (children’s literature). Each category winner receives £5,000; the Costa Book of the Year prize, worth £30,000, will be revealed on January 30.

Violinist Robert Mann, 97, Founder Of Juilliard String Quartet

“Conceived in 1946, the Juilliard quartet gave its first official performance the next year. Besides Mr. Mann, the original roster included the second violinist Robert Koff, the violist Raphael Hillyer and the cellist Arthur Winograd. Mr. Mann – for decades the quartet’s de facto spokesman, institutional memory and ‘resident spark plug,’ as the Chicago Tribune called him in 1997 – remained with the ensemble for 51 years.”