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NYT

November 22, 2007

Singing ’Bout a New Generation ...

NYT

22.11.2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/22/opinion/l22brooks.html

Blues Artist 'Weepin' Willie

Dies at 81

December 31, 2007
Filed at 12:01 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

BOSTON (AP) -- ''Weepin''' Willie Robinson, a blues singer who performed with Steven Tyler and Bonnie Raitt but also spent time homeless, has died at age 81.

Robinson had been a sharecropper, an Army veteran and a friend of performers, including B.B. King.

''He was truly the elder statesman of the (Boston) blues. He was our godfather. He was the most dear man,'' Holly Harris, host of ''Blues on Sunday'' on WBOS radio, told The Boston Globe for Monday's editions.

When he sang, ''you knew he meant it because he had passion,'' Harris said.

Robinson died Sunday in a fire started by a cigarette he was smoking in bed, the Boston Fire Department said.

He had worked a benefit concert with Tyler and two Boston Music Awards shows, in 2005 and again earlier this month.

Robinson was born in Atlanta and picked cotton and fruit with his family up and down the East Coast. After spending time in the Army in the 1940s, he became a master of ceremonies and doorman at blues clubs in Trenton, N.J., where he met King and other legends and eventually sang with King's 21-piece orchestra.

His daughter, Lorraine Robinson, told the Globe her father found his place on stage.

''A great smile would come on his face and he would be in his own little world, like he'd tune everything out,'' she said. ''He just, like, felt the music. It was so much in his soul.''

Robinson settled in Boston in 1959 and played in clubs, but by 2005 he was living on the street and out of touch with his family. Blues performers learned of his situation, held a benefit concert and made sure he was fed and clothed.

Robinson later performed everywhere from local clubs to the hallways of the rest home where he lived.

His wife, Alice, died four decades ago.

    Blues Artist 'Weepin' Willie Dies at 81, NYT, 31.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Obit-Robinson.html

Jazz Great Oscar Peterson Dies at 82

December 25, 2007
Filed at 8:23 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

TORONTO (AP) -- Oscar Peterson, whose flying fingers, hard-driving swing and melodic improvisations made him one of the world's most famous and influential jazz pianists in a career that spanned seven decades, has died. He was 82.

Peterson died at his home in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga on Sunday, said Oliver Jones, a family friend and jazz musician. He said Peterson's wife and daughter were with him during his final moments. The cause of death was kidney failure, said Mississauga's mayor, Hazel McCallion.

''He's been going downhill in the last few months,'' McCallion said, calling Peterson a ''very close friend.''

During his illustrious career, Peterson played with some of the biggest names in jazz, including Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. He is also remembered for the trio he led with bassist Ray Brown and guitarist Herb Ellis in the 1950s.

Peterson's impressive collection of awards include all of Canada's highest honors, such as the Order of Canada, as well as seven Grammys and a Grammy for lifetime achievement in 1997.

''I've always thought of him as Canada's national treasure. All of Canada mourns for him and his family,'' said Jones. ''He had 60 full years of being considered the top jazz pianist in the world.''

''A jazz player is an instant composer,'' Peterson once said in a CBC interview. ''You have to think about it, it's an intellectual form.''

Peterson's stature was reflected in the admiration of his peers. Duke Ellington referred to him as the ''Maharajah of the keyboard,'' while Count Basie once said ''Oscar Peterson plays the best ivory box I've ever heard.''

Herbie Hancock, another legendary jazz pianist, said Peterson's impact was profound.

''Oscar Peterson redefined swing for modern jazz pianists for the latter half of the 20th century up until today,'' Hancock said in an e-mail message. ''I consider him the major influence that formed my roots in jazz piano playing. He mastered the balance between technique, hard blues grooving, and tenderness. ... No one will ever be able to take his place.''

Peterson's death also brought tributes from notable figures outside the jazz world.

In a statement, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said ''one of the bright lights of jazz has gone out.''

''He was a regular on the French stage, where the public adored his luminous style,'' Sarkozy said. ''It is a great loss for us.''

Peterson was often invited to perform for heads of state, including Queen Elizabeth II and U.S. President Richard M. Nixon. He wrote ''A Royal Wedding Suite'' for the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer.

Former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, a fan and friend of the pianist for decades, reminisced about a 2001 Ottawa event when the pianist met South African leader Nelson Mandela.

''It was very emotional,'' said Chretien. ''They were both moved to meet each other. These were two men with humble beginnings who rose to very illustrious levels.''

Born on Aug. 15, 1925, in a poor neighborhood of Montreal, Peterson got his passion for music from his father. Daniel Peterson, a railway porter and self-taught pianist, bestowed his love of music to his children, offering them a means to escape from poverty.

At 5 years old, Oscar Peterson learned to play trumpet and piano, but after a bout with tuberculosis, he chose to concentrate on the keyboards. He studied with a Hungarian-born classical pianist, Paul de Marky, who helped develop his technique and ''speedy fingers.''

He became a teen sensation in his native Canada, playing in dance bands and recording in the late 1930s and 1940s.

He quickly made a name for himself as a jazz virtuoso, often earning comparisons to jazz piano great Art Tatum, his childhood idol, for his speed and technical skill. He was also influenced by Nat King Cole, whose piano trio recordings he considered ''a complete musical thesaurus for any aspiring jazz pianist.''

American jazz impresario Norman Granz was so impressed after hearing Peterson at a Montreal club that he invited the pianist to come to New York for a Jazz at the Philharmonic concert at Carnegie Hall in 1949 that launched his international career.

Peterson was brought up from the audience as a surprise guest to play a duet with bassist Brown, overwhelming everyone with his dazzling technique and mastery of different jazz styles from boogie woogie to bebop.

Granz, who became the pianist's longtime manager, signed him to the Verve record label and made Peterson part of his touring Jazz at the Philharmonic package which featured the top jazz headliners.

''One of my biggest memories was hearing that Jazz at the Philharmonic ... had signed a young pianist from Canada who played like he ate fire and iron for breakfast,'' recalled music impresario and record producer Quincy Jones. ''Oscar more than lived up to the description. It was a blessing to have known and worked with him. He was one of the last of the giants, but his music and contributions will be eternal.''

In 1951, the pianist formed the Oscar Peterson Trio with a guitarist and bassist. When Ellis left the group in 1958, he replaced the guitarist with a series of drummers. Peterson would often release four or five albums a year and became a mainstay at jazz festivals around the world.

But Peterson never stopped calling Canada home, and probably his best known major composition is the 1964 ''Canadiana Suite'' with jazz themes inspired by the cities and regions of his native country.

In 2005, he became the first living person other than a reigning monarch to be honored with a commemorative stamp in Canada, where streets, squares, concert halls and schools have been named after him.

Peterson suffered a stroke in 1993 that weakened his left hand. But after a two-year recuperation, he gradually resumed performances, and made a series of recordings for the U.S. Telarc label.

He kept playing despite worsening arthritis and difficulties walking, saying in a 2001 interview that ''the love I have of the instrument and my group and the medium itself works as a sort of a rejuvenating factor for me.''

Peterson's survivors include his fourth wife, Kelly, and their daughter, Celine, and six children from his previous marriages.

------

Associated Press writers Charles J. Gans and Lily Hindy contributed to this story from New York.

------

On the Net:

Oscar Peterson home page: www.oscarpeterson.com

Canadian Broadcasting Corp. interview: www.cbc.ca/news/background/peterson--oscar

    Jazz Great Oscar Peterson Dies at 82, NYT, 25.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Obit-Oscar-Peterson.html

Obituary

Ike Turner

Tina Turner's infamous ex-husband,
he also played a key creative role
in rock'n'roll and blues history

Friday December 14, 2007
Guardian
Adam Sweeting

The transformation of his ex-wife Tina into a superstar inevitably overshadowed the career of Ike Turner, who has died after suffering from emphysema, aged 76. In addition, the movie biography of Tina, What's Love Got to Do With It, permanently damaged his reputation with its depiction of him as a drug-crazed wifebeater. Even so, his own contribution to the history of soul and R&B was significant.

Turner, the son of a preacher, said he believed his name was Izear Luster Turner Jr until on applying for a passport, he found it was Ike Wister Turner. He was born in Clarksdale, in the Mississippi delta. Widely regarded as the "home of the blues" (and now the site of the Delta Blues Museum), Clarksdale worked its magic on him from a very young age. At eight years old, he began dabbling as a DJ at the radio station WROX. Then he learned to play piano in the boogie-woogie style with local musician Pinetop Perkins, and soon found himself rubbing shoulders with more famous bluesmen, playing piano behind Sonny Boy Williamson when he was 11.

In 1951, Turner earned his first footnote in musical history when he masterminded the creation of Rocket 88, cited by many, including Sun owner Sam Phillips, as the very first rock'n'roll record. Although it was credited to Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, the band on the track was Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm. Recorded at Sun Studios in Memphis, where Elvis Presley would make his early hits, the song's raucous instrumental arrangement, capped with Brenston's debauched vocals, was evidence of Turner's instinctive grasp of the new musical medium. He began to learn the guitar soon afterwards, and featured regularly on recording sessions at Sun throughout the early 1950s, backing such eminences of the blues as Elmore James, Howlin' Wolf and Buddy Guy.

Turner possessed a powerful entrepreneurial streak, and doubled up as a talent scout for the Los Angeles-based Modern records, bringing to the label Howlin' Wolf, Junior Parker and BB King, among others. He moved his band to East St Louis in the mid-1950s and began to develop a revue-style show featuring several vocalists. One of these was the teenager Anna Mae Bullock, who first met Turner in 1956. By 1958 they were married and in 1964 had a son, Ronald (Ike already had two sons from his first marriage to Lorraine Taylor). At Ike's urging, Anna renamed herself Tina and cut her first disc as lead vocalist on A Fool in Love, in 1960. Its chart success announced Tina's huge untapped potential, prompting Ike to rebuild his act around her and rename it the Ike and Tina Turner Revue.

They pumped out a string of R&B hits over the next few years, mostly written by Ike, including I Idolise You, Poor Fool and Tra La La La La, and built a reputation as a powerful live attraction on the so-called chitlin' circuit (named after a soul food item) of the eastern and southern US. However, Ike developed an outsized cocaine habit, which exaggerated his already overbearing personality traits. In her 1986 autobiography I, Tina, his wife would later describe how he beat her regularly and burned her with cigarettes. Ike tried to suggest that her claims were exaggerated, and offered his own version in his 2001 autobiography Takin' Back My Name. He argued: "There have been times when I punched [Tina] to the ground without thinking. But I never beat her" - a distinction possibly too subtle for many readers.

None the less, the partnership continued to be one of the hottest in show business, albeit one based more on their tumultuous live performances than on chart-busting records. Though Ike created a top 20 hit by recording I'm Blue (the Gong Gong Song) with their backing singers, the Ikettes, in 1962, hit singles featuring Tina would be thin on the ground for the next few years. However, the 1965 album Live! The Ike and Tina Turner Show, caught the revue at full blast in Texas.

In 1966 producer Phil Spector masterminded one of Tina's finest moments, the stupendous single River Deep, Mountain High, but to Ike's disgust Spector refused to allow him anywhere near the recording sessions. In September that year, Ike and Tina were invited to join a Rolling Stones tour in the UK, and in 1969 the Stones contacted them again to offer them the opening slot on their American tour. Ike noted the audience's enthusiasm for their pumped-up R&B, and cashed in by recording Turner-ised covers of rock songs including the Beatles' Come Together and, especially, Creedence Clearwater Revival's Proud Mary. The latter became Ike and Tina's first US top 10 hit and their first million-selling single.

In July 1976, Tina walked out of their band and their marriage. They were divorced two years later. Ike found it difficult to cope. He stopped touring in order to run his LA studio, Bolic, then went back on the road with a new band which had difficulty in recreating the glories of the Tina years.

In 1982 his studio burned down, and he lapsed into a dismal period of drug-related offences during which he was arrested 11 times. In 1990 he was jailed for four years in California for driving under the influence of cocaine, thus missing his and Tina's joint induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991. He was released from prison that September into the custody of Twanna Melby, a daughter from one of his many unspecified relationships (Ike claimed to have been married as many as a dozen times, but was only verifiably wedded to two further wives, Ann Thomas and Jeanette Bazell). In an interview with Variety magazine, he claimed to have spent $11m on cocaine before kicking the habit in prison.

Released in 1993, the film What's Love Got to Do With It was badly timed for Ike, hampering his efforts to reassemble his life and career. He later claimed he had been coerced into selling the rights over how he was portrayed on screen for $45,000. "You have to have a villain and you have to have a hero, so I was the villain," he argued.

But he would not quit. He rebuilt his Kings of Rhythm band, and in 1999 published Takin' Back My Name: The Confessions of Ike Turner, which included such sensational episodes as an account of being sexually molested by a woman as a child, and watching his father's lynching. His album Here and Now was nominated for a Grammy in 2001 - the same year in which he was inducted into the St Louis Walk of Fame - and in 2007 Risin' with the Blues won Ike the Grammy for best traditional blues release. In an unexpected reversal of fortune, Los Angeles police had to apologise to him in May 2007 after an expired drugs-related warrant prompted his wrongful arrest.

He is survived by girlfriend Audrey Madison, three sons and two daughters.

Garth Cartwright writes: I interviewed Ike Turner in 1999 when he was promoting his autobiography. Turner, his appearance remarkably unweathered, was both gregarious and suspicious - the week before Richard & Judy had ambushed him on television with questions not about his autobiography but about treating Tina awfully - yet what surprised me most was how little interest (or value) he held in his past musical achievements: having helped invent rock'n'roll and got some of the greatest blues singers record deals meant little to him. Then again, his autobiography demonstrated that self-examination and reflection were never Turner's strengths. Across the interview, he dismissed past acquaintances and his musical breakthroughs with a hustler's shrug, expressing enthusiasm only for what the future held.

Back in 1999 his future appeared bleak yet across the last three years he headlined a powerful show at London's Barbican Centre, played as part of Damon Albarn's Gorillaz pop collective and received a Mojo icon award. Thus I imagine he died happy.
 

· Izear "Ike" Luster Turner, singer, songwriter and rock entrepreneur, born November 5 1931; died December 12 2007

    Ike Turner, G, 14.12.2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,2227324,00.html

Ike Turner, legendary soul singer, dies aged 76

Published: 13 December 2007
The Independent
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles

Ike Turner, the legendary blues and soul artist whose career – and infamy – were defined by his stormy relationship with his wife, Tina Turner, died in his sleep early yesterday at his home in the suburbs of San Diego. He was 76.

Turner was present at the creation of rock'*'roll – he performed on the first rock record, "Rocket 88", in 1951 – and kept working to the very end of his life, winning a Grammy award earlier this year for his album Risin' With The Blues.

But it was his partnership with Anna Mae Bullock, the raspy-voiced teenager from Nutbush, Tennessee who married him and changed her name to Tina, that moulded both the best and the worst of his public reputation. Between 1959, when they recorded their first hit, "A Fool In Love", until 1976, when Tina walked out on him following a vicious fight on the backseat of a car en route to a concert venue, they electrified American popular music.

First they produced mere hits – "I Idolize You" and "It's Gonna Work Out Fine" – then began to revolutionise music itself, most notably in a collaboration with Phil Spector, then an up-and-coming producer, on "River Deep, Mountain High" in 1965. A sizzling cover of "Proud Mary", the Creedence Clearwater Revival hit, became their signature song and a perennial crowd favourite on the concert circuit. Ike always had a reputation as a womaniser – legend has credited him with as many as 14 wives, although the public record accords him just four – and a man with a tendency to substance abuse.

But Tina turned that image several shades darker with the publication of her autobiography I, Tina in 1976, depicting her ex as a vicious, unstable wife-beater. She was so afraid of him that she walked out of the marriage with nothing but her name, relinquishing her share of everything they had earned together over the previous 17 years.

Turner made several attempts to defend himself over the years, none of them especially convincing. "Sure, I've slapped Tina," he wrote in his own autobiography, Takin' Back My Name (2001). "There have been times when I punched her to the ground without thinking. But I never beat her."

While Tina enjoyed a renaissance as a solo artist in the 1980s, Turner slipped ever deeper into drug and alcohol addiction and ended up going to prison for four years in 1989 on drug-related charges. He was still behind bars when he was inducted into the Rock'*'Roll Hall of Fame. Tina, intriguingly, represented him at the ceremony.

Turner was born in to poverty in Clarksdale, Mississippi, earning his first entrée into the music business as an eight-year-old elevator boy at the offices of his local radio station. Over time he developed into a fine session musician, mastering both the guitar and keyboards.

The pair had met in 1958 when Tina, as a pushy teenager, grabbed a microphone at a St Louis nightclub and performed a B B King song for him. He invited her on the spot to become an Ikette – one of his back-up singers. A year later she pushed again, laying down a vocal track on "A Fool In Love" even though Ike had imagined a man singing it. The result proved to be hit-parade gold.

The couple married in 1962 and had two children together. Ike was flagrant in his infidelities, though, including an affair with former Ikette Ann Thomas, with whom he fathered a child and later married.

In her book, Tina portrayed him as a sadist and a monster who hit her and, on one occasion, broke her nose. That image became cemented in the public imagination when Tina's book was made into the movie What's Love Got To Do With It, with Angela Bassett playing Tina and Lawrence Fishburne playing Ike.

Turner's story is, in the end, a classic American tale of transgression and redemption – with his work providing the redemption. "I know what I am in my heart," he once told the Associated Press. "And I know regardless of what I've done, good and bad, it took it all to make me what I am today."

    Ike Turner, legendary soul singer, dies aged 76, I, 13.12.2007, http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article3247591.ece

Ike Turner, Musician and Songwriter in Duo With Tina Turner, Dies at 76

December 13, 2007
The New York Times
By JON PARELES

Ike Turner, the R&B musician, songwriter, bandleader, producer, talent scout and ex-husband of Tina Turner, died on Wednesday at his home in San Marcos, Calif., a San Diego suburb. He was 76.

His death was announced by Jeanette Bazzell Turner, who married Mr. Turner in 1995. She gave no cause of death, but said he had had emphysema.

Mr. Turner was best known for discovering Anna Mae Bullock, a teenage singer from Nutbush, Tenn., whom he renamed Tina Turner. The Ike and Tina Turner Revue made a string of hits in the 1960s before the Turners broke up in 1975.

Tina Turner described the relationship as abusive in her autobiography, “I, Tina,” which was adapted for the 1993 film “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” and made Mr. Turner’s name synonymous with domestic abuse.

“I got a temper,” he admitted in 1999 in his autobiography, “Takin’ Back My Name: The Confessions of Ike Turner.” But he maintained that the film had “overstated” it.

Mr. Turner’s career extended back to the 1950s, when he played with pioneering Mississippi Delta bluesmen and helped shape early rock ’n’ roll as well as soul and rhythm-and-blues. “Rocket 88,” a song his band released in 1951 under the name Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, is regularly cited as a contender for the first rock-’n’-roll record for its beat, its distorted guitar and its honking saxophone.

Ike and Tina Turner were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991.

Ike Turner, whose full name is variously given as Izear Luster Turner Jr. and Ike Wister Turner, was born in Clarksdale, Miss., and was brought up there by his mother after his father, a minister, was beaten to death by a white mob.

As a child Ike spent time at the local radio station, WROX, a hub for Delta blues performances. According to Mr. Turner’s autobiography, the D.J.s taught him how to cue up and segue records, sometimes leaving him alone on the air when he was 8 years old.

He grew up around Delta musicians like the bluesman Robert Nighthawk Jr. and the pianist Pinetop Perkins, who gave him boogie-woogie lessons, and he learned to play guitar.

In high school he formed a group called the Kings of Rhythm. B. B. King helped that band get a steady weekend gig and recommended it to Sam Phillips at Sun Studios in Memphis. The band had been performing jukebox hits, but on the drive from Mississippi to Memphis, its members decided to write something of their own.

Their saxophonist, Jackie Brenston, suggested a song about the new Rocket 88 Oldsmobile. The piano-pounding intro and the first verse were by Mr. Turner, and the band collaborated on the rest; Mr. Brenston sang.

Sun was not yet its own record label, so Mr. Phillips sent the song to Chess Records. It went on to sell a half-million copies. “I was playing rhythm and blues,” Mr. Turner wrote. “That’s all I was playing.” His book says he was paid $20 for the record.

Mr. Turner became a session guitarist, known for his flamboyant, note-bending use of his guitar’s whammy bar. He was also a producer, songwriter and talent scout for Sun and for RPM/Modern Records. He worked with Mr. King, Bobby (Blue) Bland, Howlin’ Wolf, Johnny Ace, Otis Rush, Elmore James and many other blues and R&B musicians.

In 1954 he moved up the Mississippi River to East St. Louis, Ill., where his disciplined and dynamic band became a major draw at local clubs. There, in 1958, he heard Anna Mae Bullock, who joined the group and quickly became its focal point as Tina Turner. The band was soon renamed the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. Her lead vocal on “A Fool in Love” started a streak of Top 10 R&B hits for the revue and also reached the pop Top 40. It was followed by “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine” in 1961. The duo became stars on the grueling so-called chitlin’ circuit of African-American clubs.

Ike and Tina Turner had a wedding ceremony in Tijuana, Mexico, in 1962; Mr. Turner’s book said they were never actually married. They had a son, Ronald, who survives him, along with Jeanette Bazzell Turner and four other children: Mia, Twanna, Michael and Ike Jr.

The Rolling Stones chose the Ike and Tina Turner Revue as its opening act on a 1969 tour, introducing it to many rock fans. In 1971 the revue reached the pop Top 10 with its version of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary,” with Ike’s deep vocal counterpoint and Tina’s memorable spoken-word interlude. “We never do anything nice and easy,” Ms. Turner says in the song. “We always do it nice and rough.” That song won a Grammy Award for best R&B performance by a group.

Ms. Turner’s account of the couple’s years together describes domestic violence, infidelity and drug use; his version does not deny that, although he wrote in his book, “Tina and me, we had our fights, but we ain’t had no more fights than anybody else.”

Tina walked out on him in 1975. Mr. Turner, already abusing cocaine and alcohol, spiraled further downward during the 1980s while Ms. Turner became a multimillion-selling star on her own. A recording studio he had built in Los Angeles burned down in 1982, and he was arrested repeatedly on drug charges. In 1989 he went to prison for various cocaine-possession offenses and was in jail when he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

But he had a windfall when the hip-hop duo Salt ’N’ Pepa used a sample of his song “I’m Blue” for their 1993 hit “Shoop,” which reached No. 4 on the Billboard pop chart.

Mr. Turner set out to reclaim his place in rock history. He wrote his autobiography with a British writer, Nigel Cawthorne. At the 2001 Chicago Blues Festival he performed with Pinetop Perkins in a set filmed for the Martin Scorsese PBS series “The Blues.” He renamed his band the Kings of Rhythm and re-recorded “Rocket 88” for the 2001 album “Here and Now.” He toured internationally, recording a live album and DVD, “The Resurrection,” at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2002. He visited high schools during Black History Month with an antidrug message. He recorded a song with the British band Gorillaz in 2005.

In the end, the music business embraced him: Mr. Turner’s 2006 album, “Risin’ With the Blues,” won the Grammy this year as best traditional blues album.

Ben Sisario contributed reporting.

    Ike Turner, Musician and Songwriter in Duo With Tina Turner, Dies at 76, NYT, 13.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/13/arts/music/13turner.html

Rock Pioneer Ike Turner Dies at Age 76

December 13, 2007
Filed at 4:51 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

SAN DIEGO (AP) -- Ike Turner managed to rehabilitate his image somewhat in the past few years, touring around the globe and drawing acclaim that included his first solo Grammy earlier this year.

But the 76-year-old's prodigious musical legacy was forever tarnished by his image as the drug-addicted, brutally abusive former husband of Tina Turner.

Turner, known with his ex-wife for such songs as ''River Deep, Mountain High'' and ''Proud Mary,'' died Wednesday at his suburban home. No cause of death was immediately given.

In interviews toward the end of his life, Turner acknowledged many mistakes, but said he still carried himself with pride.

''I know what I am in my heart. And I know regardless of what I've done, good and bad, it took it all to make me what I am today,'' he once told The Associated Press.

In her 1987 autobiography, ''I, Tina,'' Tina Turner narrated a harrowing tale of abuse, including suffering a broken nose.

Ike Turner was hauntingly portrayed by Laurence Fishburne in the movie ''What's Love Got To Do With It,'' based on Tina Turner's autobiography.

In a 2001 AP interview, he denied his ex-wife's claims of abuse and expressed frustration that he had been demonized in the media while his historic role in rock's beginnings had been ignored.

''You can go ask Snoop Dogg or Eminem, you can ask the Rolling Stones or (Eric) Clapton, or you can ask anybody -- anybody, they all know my contribution to music, but it hasn't been in print about what I've done or what I've contributed until now,'' he said.

Turner, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, is credited by many rock historians with making the first rock 'n' roll record, ''Rocket 88,'' in 1951. Produced by the legendary Sam Phillips, it was groundbreaking for its use of distorted electric guitar.

''I see Ike Turner in the company of James Brown and Count Basie as being supremely gifted band leaders, and I say that with no sense of exaggeration,'' said Tom ''Papa'' Ray, who co-owns an independent music store in St. Louis and for 20 years has hosted a local blues and soul radio show.

Turner's profile grew after he met 18-year-old Anna Mae Bullock in 1959. He quickly made the husky-voiced woman the lead singer of his group, refashioning her into the sexy Tina Turner.

Tina Turner declined to comment on her ex-husband's death.

''Tina is aware that Ike passed away earlier today. She has not had any contact with him in 35 years. No further comment will be made,'' her spokeswoman, Michele Schweitzer, said Wednesday.

The pair, who had two sons, produced a string of hits with Ike Turner on guitar or piano. The first, ''A Fool In Love,'' was a top R&B song in 1959. Others included ''I Idolize You'' and ''It's Gonna Work Out Fine.''

Rolling Stone executive editor Joe Levy said such songs acted as musical representations of their personal relationship. ''He's the big, ominous voice. She's the passionate, emotional voice.''

Their densely layered hit ''River Deep, Mountain High'' was one of producer Phil Spector's proudest creations. A rousing version of ''Proud Mary,'' a cover of the Creedence Clearwater Revival hit, became their signature song and won them a Grammy for best R&B vocal performance by a group.

Though they were known publicly as a powerful, dynamic duo, Tina Turner later said her husband was secretly an overbearing wife abuser and cocaine addict.

She said the cycle ended after a vicious fight between the pair in the back seat of a car in Las Vegas, where they were scheduled to perform. It was the only time she ever fought back against her husband, she said.

Ike Turner denied his ex-wife's claims of abuse, despite acknowledging in his 1999 autobiography, ''Takin' Back My Name,'' that he hit Tina. He denied in the book that the hitting amounted to beating.

After Tina and Ike Turner broke up, both fell into obscurity and endured money woes for years before Tina Turner made a dramatic comeback in 1984 with the release of the album ''Private Dancer,'' a multiplatinum success with hits such as ''Let's Stay Together'' and ''What's Love Got To Do With It.''

Ike Turner never again had the success he enjoyed with his former wife. After years of drug abuse, he was jailed in 1989 and served 17 months.

His career finally began to revive in 2001 when he released the album ''Here and Now.'' The recording won rave reviews and a Grammy nomination and finally helped shift some of the public's attention away from his troubled past and onto his musical legacy.

''His last chapter in life shouldn't be drug abuse and the problems he had with Tina,'' said Rob Johnson, the producer of ''Here and Now.''

Turner spent his later years making more music and touring, even while he battled emphysema. His songs were sampled by a variety of rap acts and he won a Grammy for ''Risin' With the Blues.''

Robbie Montgomery -- one of the ''Ikettes,'' backup singers who worked with Ike and Tina Turner -- said Turner's death was ''devastating'' to her. ''He gave me my start. He gave a million people their start,'' Montgomery said.

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Associated Press Music Writer Nekesa Mumbi Moody in New York and writers Robert Jablon in Los Angeles and Cheryl Wittenauer in St. Louis contributed to this story.

------

On the Net:

http://www.iketurner.com

    Rock Pioneer Ike Turner Dies at Age 76, NYT, 13.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Obit-Turner.html

Rock

Led Zeppelin

5 stars London 02 Arena.

Tuesday December 11, 2007
Guardian
Alexis Petridis

In his musical memoir 31 Songs, the author Nick Hornby recalls seeing Led Zeppelin live in 1975, during their legendary five-night residency at Earls Court.

At the time, Led Zeppelin were unequivocally the biggest band in the world: two years previously, they had smashed attendance records set by the Beatles across America - but according to Hornby at least, the experience was so unedifying, so preposterously self-indulgent that he felt compelled to "nip out" of the show during one extended instrumental interlude, went to a nearby pub, enjoyed a pint and a game of pool and returned to find Led Zeppelin still soloing away.

Hornby's tale offers a salutary reminder that the band's return to live performance after 27 years might not necessarily be a source of unalloyed delight, the phrase he uses to describe their performance is "a bit boring" - but it would be brave soul indeed who dared offer such an opinion tonight.

Depending on whose estimate you believe, somewhere between 20 million and 200 million people attempted to avail themselves of tickets for this show: the 18,000 who succeeded are understandably not in the mood for anything more complicated than worship.

The three remaining members and Jason Bonham, deputising on drums for his late father, take the stage to a reception so ecstatic that a cynical voice might suggest they may as well immediately turn round and go home, their performance having clearly been taken as read.

That cynical voice might belong to singer Robert Plant, whose own career is positively blooming: his recent album with country singer Alison Krauss is the most acclaimed of his post-Zeppelin works and who has given every impression of taking part in the reunion solely because it commemorates the band's former label boss and mentor, the late Ahmet Ertegun, and much against his better judgment.

Resolutely downbeat amid the frenzy, he has described the show as a chance "to go out there and say look, we're not immortal, this is how it could be. This is it, do you really want this?"

If nothing else, you could never accuse him of adding to the mountain of hype surrounding the band's re-formation. He certainly doesn't perform like a man entertaining serious doubts about anything - for all the pre-emptive discussion in the media about his inability to hit the notes he once could, Plant sounds fantastic, and retains an utterly magnetic and startlingly lithe presence on stage, kicking his microphone stand to the ground, dancing with a rather cheering abandon, even setting aside his celebrated distaste for the band's most famous and overblown song and having a stab at Stairway to Heaven.

But watching Led Zeppelin, it's hard not to wonder if the frontman's reticence isn't fuelling the other members of the band. Their previous reunions have been brief and shambolic: a rotten set at Live Aid, an under-rehearsed appearance at a record label birthday party.

Tonight, however, after a tentative, feedback-scarred opener of Good Times Bad Times, it's difficult to believe this is a band who have barely played together for the best part of three decades. They sound awesomely tight.

The riff that powers In My Time Of Dying is authentically churning and queasy, Ramble On sounds not like a song that's been brought out of mothballs for a benefit concert but wrigglingly, obscenely alive; Trampled Underfoot's conjunction of jittering funk and squealing, metallic guitar seems more bizarre and beguiling than ever.

Page in particular has been open about his desire to make the reunion more than a one-off arrangement and you rather get the feeling they're attempting to bring Plant round to the idea by the sheer force of their playing: even Dazed And Confused's lengthy passages of feedback seem less like the po-faced indulgence of a self-important guitar god than something rather thrilling and experimental.

Whether Plant is won round in the long term remains to be seen, but for last night at least, it seems to do the trick. His between song-patter remains self-deprecating: "this is a song we first heard in about 1932", but at particularly intense moments, the three of them huddle together before Jason Bonham's drum riser. There's even an argument to suggest that the reformed Led Zeppelin might be slightly leaner. The kind of excesses that once sent Hornby scuttling off in search of a nearby solo-free hostelry have been trimmed out of necessity: as Page has pointed out, it's almost physically impossible for men in their 60s to play three and a half hour sets. Depending on your perspective, that's a pity or an unexpected bonus of old age. Either way, anyone nipping out last night would have missed something faintly remarkable.

    Led Zeppelin, G, 11.12.2007, http://music.guardian.co.uk/rock/livereviews/story/0,,2225612,00.html

Rapper Pimp C Dead at 33

December 5, 2007
Filed at 8:57 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Pimp C, who spun searing tales of Texas street life into a key role in the rise of Southern hip-hop, was found dead in an upscale hotel on Tuesday. He was 33.

The rapper formed Underground Kingz with partner-in-rhyme Bun B while the pair were in high school, and their often laconic delivery paired with wittily dangerous lyrics influenced a generation of current superstars like Lil' Wayne. T.I. had the group on as guests when he remade their 1994 song ''Front, Back and Side to Side'' for his ''King'' album.

To a mainstream audience, Pimp C was best known for UGK's cameo on the Jay-Z hit ''Big Pimpin','' and for ''Free Pimp C'' T-shirts and shout-outs, ubiquitous in rap several years ago while he was jailed on gun charges. On Tuesday, his MySpace page had been changed to read: ''C the Pimp is FREE at last.''

Born Chad Butler, Pimp C was found dead in a room at the Mondrian hotel, a longtime music industry hangout not far from the House of Blues on Sunset Strip, where he had performed Saturday night alongside rap veteran Too $hort. Capt. Ed Winter of the Los Angeles County coroner's office said Butler had apparently died in bed.

''At this time there's no signs of foul play,'' Winter said. ''It appears to be possibly natural, but pending autopsy and toxicology we can't say the cause.''

Butler had been in Los Angeles to work on his next solo album for Rap-A-Lot Records, according to James Prince, the Houston-based label's CEO. Manager Rick Martin identified Butler's body, and said in a statement, ''He was my best friend and I will always love him.''

Though they never enjoyed massive pop chart success, UGK's early CDs are considered landmarks for the then-burgeoning Texas hip-hop scene, which also featured the Geto Boys. Signed to a deal with Jive Records, they released ''Too Hard to Swallow'' in 1992, ''Super Tight'' two years later, and ''Ridin' Dirty'' in 1996, considered a rap classic.

Over laid-back beats, they laid out incisive details that remain Southern rap mainstays: descriptions of sex and conspicuous consumption, wood-grain steering wheels and triple-beam scales used to weigh drugs.

Butler led off Three 6 Mafia's 2000 ode to drinking cough syrup to get high, ''Sippin' on Syrup,'' with the lines: ''I'm trill working the wheel. A pimp, not a simp. Keep the dope fiends higher than the Goodyear blimp. We eat so many shrimp I got iodine poisoning.''

Butler was jailed for three years in 2002; he had plead no contest to aggravated assault for brandishing a gun during an argument with a woman at a mall, then fell behind on required community service. UGK's rise was derailed, but the ''Free Pimp C'' slogan caught on and an unauthorized album of Pimp C's freestyle rhymes was released while he was in prison.

When Pimp C and Bun B finally put out an album this year, they felt such a need to re-establish themselves they titled their album ''Underground Kingz,'' as if to underscore a new start.

Critics praised the CD, which included the hit ''International Player's Anthem (I Choose You),'' featuring OutKast. Pimp C's verse riffs on high-class women and cars: ''I'm pullin' Bentleys off the lot. Smashed up the gray one, bought me a red. Every time we hit the parking lot we turn heads,'' he raps.

Barry Weiss, CEO of Jive, said in a statement: ''We mourn the unexpected loss of Chad. He was truly a thoughtful and kindhearted person. He will be remembered for his talent and profound influence as a pioneer in bringing southern rap to the forefront.''

Butler, who grew up in Port Arthur, Texas, came from a musical lineage. His father was a professional trumpet player, and the rapper studied classical music in high school. He even received a Division I rating on a tenor solo at a University Interscholastic League choir competition.

''That's how I came up listening to everything,'' he told The Associated Press in a 2005 interview. ''Music don't have no color or no face. It's a universal language. I think being exposed to all that kind of stuff influences the way I make records.''

Butler is survived by a wife and three children.

------

Associated Press writer Kristie Rieken in Houston contributed to this report.

(This version CORRECTS that members of group are from Port Arthur, not Houston. )

    Rapper Pimp C Dead at 33, NYT, 5.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Obit-Pimp-C.html

Letters

Singing ’Bout a New Generation ...

November 22, 2007
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “The Segmented Society,” by David Brooks (column, Nov. 20):

Being of Mr. Brooks’s generation, I agree entirely about both the fragmentation and lost intergenerational message of music today.

Every new niche and genre of music falls on the ears of fewer people; within each group is an unhealthy homogenization that sets up higher barriers than already exist between us.

Choice in everyday life is becoming greater each day, and music is certainly no exception.

Nearly everyone loved the Stones or the Beatles. Who can say that about any one band today?

The message is no longer universal but, pardon the pun, earmarked for a specific type of person.

Either way, the only benefit I derive is the great variety of choices I have when searching out new material. I have found some hidden gems, just no major veins of gold. Lawrence Mayer

Staten Island, Nov. 20, 2007

•

To the Editor:

David Brooks is right about one thing: American music today is increasingly fragmented. But he seems to have missed the real reasons why.

Modern recording technologies allow virtually anyone to record music and make it available to listeners worldwide, a privilege once enjoyed exclusively by large record companies. As a result, major record companies have increasingly less control over what gets heard, while consumers have increasingly more.

It should surprise no one that in an environment of almost unlimited consumer freedom we would end up with a wider variety of preferences than those prearranged by a few record executives.

As a guitar teacher, I see teenage kids today who have more artists in their iPods than I would have ever known to exist when I was their age.

It’s strange that Mr. Brooks, the individualist, would be bemoan the triumph of individual preferences and choices over the centralized control of a few.

D. A. Siegel

Hoboken, N.J., Nov. 20, 2007

•

To the Editor:

I was in that audience of “The Ed Sullivan Show” on Feb. 9, 1964. Those were heady days when music and youth culture soothed the psychic wounds of war and assassinations.

As a college teacher, I set aside lectures in art history to demonstrate how America created some of its greatest music — not just rock, jazz and blues but big band, twang, singing cowboys, labor songs, Broadway, Tin Pan Alley and others.

There is a beautiful blend of African, English, Eastern European and Jewish culture that could happen only here. By engaging the popular arts, particularly music, back to the magic of vaudeville and even the difficult subjects of minstrel and slave songs, we honor the same roots that fed the imaginations of artists of the 1960s while reconnecting to a common history, moving beyond the mind-set that this is a merely popular culture. Tim Jackson

Brookline, Mass., Nov. 20, 2007

•

To the Editor:

David Brooks tried to support the hackneyed thesis of the middle-aged “You kids and your music! It’s terrible!” The current music scene is more democratic than the monolith Mr. Brooks looks back upon fondly.

Is he really lamenting the end of the days when smaller musical voices were ignored and cultural power was in the hands of a select few artists and producers?

The indie rock movement is not a result of purposeful fragmentation by large labels, but by individuals making music, sending it to their friends, creating a network and taking their music on the road. No current music consumers I know limit themselves to one genre of music or would depend on one artist to synthesize their cultural experience.

Each generation has a cultural conversation about media, and for the music listeners of today, the element of diversity is featured prominently.

Marylee Murphy

Minneapolis, Nov. 20, 2007

•

To the Editor:

I am heartened by David Brooks’s column about the significant contribution that Steven Van Zandt is making to the music education of our young people. Mr. Brooks accurately describes the fragmentation of our contemporary youth culture.

As a community college music instructor of the next generation of musicians and music listeners, I have been acutely aware of the students’ lack of knowledge about the great legacy of American musical traditions that include folk, blues, gospel, R&B and rock.

At our college, we believe that teaching students about the world’s diverse musical traditions results in both artistic achievement and global citizenship.

In a conversation I had with Pete Seeger a few years ago, he expressed the hope that music would be a powerful healing force in an unstable world. I applaud Steven Van Zandt’s efforts in helping to realize that vision.

Andy Krikun

Upper Nyack, N.Y., Nov. 20, 2007

The writer is an assistant professor of music at Bergen Community College.

    Singing ’Bout a New Generation ..., NYT, 22.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/22/opinion/l22brooks.html

Op-Ed Columnist

The Segmented Society

November 20, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID BROOKS

On Feb. 9, 1964, the Beatles played on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Or as Steven Van Zandt remembers the moment: “It was the beginning of my life.”

Van Zandt fell for the Beatles and discovered the blues and early rock music that inspired them. He played in a series of bands on the Jersey shore, and when a friend wanted to draw on his encyclopedic blues knowledge for a song called “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” Van Zandt wound up as a guitarist for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

The 1970s were a great moment for musical integration. Artists like the Rolling Stones and Springsteen drew on a range of musical influences and produced songs that might be country-influenced, soul-influenced, blues-influenced or a combination of all three. These mega-groups attracted gigantic followings and can still fill huge arenas.

But cultural history has pivot moments, and at some point toward the end of the 1970s or the early 1980s, the era of integration gave way to the era of fragmentation. There are now dozens of niche musical genres where there used to be this thing called rock. There are many bands that can fill 5,000-seat theaters, but there are almost no new groups with the broad following or longevity of the Rolling Stones, Springsteen or U2.

People have been writing about the fragmentation of American music for decades. Back in the Feb. 18, 1982, issue of Time, Jay Cocks wrote that American music was in splinters. But year after year, the segmentation builds.

Last month, for example, Sasha Frere-Jones wrote an essay in The New Yorker noting that indie rock is now almost completely white, lacking even the motifs of African-American popular music. Carl Wilson countered in Slate that indie rock’s real wall is social; it’s the genre for the liberal-arts-college upper-middle class.

Technology drives some of the fragmentation. Computers allow musicians to produce a broader range of sounds. Top 40 radio no longer serves as the gateway for the listening public. Music industry executives can use market research to divide consumers into narrower and narrower slices.

But other causes flow from the temper of the times. It’s considered inappropriate or even immoral for white musicians to appropriate African-American styles. And there’s the rise of the mass educated class.

People who have built up cultural capital and pride themselves on their superior discernment are naturally going to cultivate ever more obscure musical tastes. I’m not sure they enjoy music more than the throngs who sat around listening to Led Zeppelin, but they can certainly feel more individualistic and special.

Van Zandt grew up in one era and now thrives in the other, but how long can mega-groups like the E Street Band still tour?

“This could be the last time,” he says.

He argues that if the Rolling Stones came along now, they wouldn’t be able to get mass airtime because there is no broadcast vehicle for all-purpose rock. And he says that most young musicians don’t know the roots and traditions of their music. They don’t have broad musical vocabularies to draw on when they are writing songs.

As a result, much of their music (and here I’m bowdlerizing his language) stinks.

He describes a musical culture that has lost touch with its common roots. And as he speaks, I hear the echoes of thousands of other interviews concerning dozens of other spheres.

It seems that whatever story I cover, people are anxious about fragmentation and longing for cohesion. This is the driving fear behind the inequality and immigration debates, behind worries of polarization and behind the entire Obama candidacy.

If you go to marketing conferences, you realize we really are in the era of the long tail. In any given industry, companies are dividing the marketplace into narrower and more segmented lifestyle niches.

Van Zandt has a way to counter all this, at least where music is concerned. He’s drawn up a high school music curriculum that tells American history through music. It would introduce students to Muddy Waters, the Mississippi Sheiks, Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers. He’s trying to use music to motivate and engage students, but most of all, he is trying to establish a canon, a common tradition that reminds students that they are inheritors of a long conversation.

And Van Zandt is doing something that is going to be increasingly necessary for foundations and civic groups. We live in an age in which the technological and commercial momentum drives fragmentation. It’s going to be necessary to set up countervailing forces — institutions that span social, class and ethnic lines.

Music used to do this. Not so much anymore.

    The Segmented Society, NYT, 20.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/opinion/20brooks.html?ref=opinion

1950s Singer Teresa Brewer Dies at 76

October 17, 2007
Filed at 11:29 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

NEW YORK (AP) -- Singer Teresa Brewer, who topped the charts in the 1950s with such hits as ''Till I Waltz Again with You'' and performed with jazz legends Count Basie and Duke Ellington, died Wednesday. She was 76.

Brewer died at her home in New Rochelle of a neuromuscular disease, family spokesman Bill Munroe said. Her four daughters were at her bedside.

Brewer had scores of hits in the 1950s and a burgeoning film career but pared down her public life to raise her children. She re-emerged a decade later to perform with jazz greats Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and Wynton Marsalis.

''She was just a wonderful, lovely lady,'' said Munroe, a longtime family friend. ''Her career was always a hobby with her; her family always came first. She always considered her legacy not to be the gold records and the TV appearances, but her loving family.''

Brewer had close to 40 songs that topped the charts, Munroe said, including ''Dancin' with Someone,'' ''Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall,'' ''Ricochet'' and ''Let Me Go Lover.''

Throughout her decades-long career, Brewer performed on TV with Mel Torme, sang with Tony Bennett and guest-hosted several variety shows, including ''The Ed Sullivan Show,'' according to her Web site.

She was born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1931, and her mother took her to her first audition at age 2 -- for a radio show called ''Uncle August's Kiddie Show.'' Brewer sang ''Take Me Out to The Ball Game'' and performed for pay consisting of cupcakes and cookies from the show's sponsor.

Brewer continued appearing on radio shows off and on until high school, when she quit and moved to New York. There, she started performing in a string of talent shows, which eventually led to a recording career.

By 1952 she had her first hit, the single ''Gonna Get Along Without Ya Now,'' on Coral Records, and her first child.

In 1953, ''Till I Waltz Again With You'' sold more than 1.4 million copies. That year she also won a poll conducted by Paramount Pictures to select the country's most popular female singer to cast in the studio's 3-D Technicolor movie, ''Those Redheads from Seattle.''

She landed one of the title roles, and reviews were rave. Paramount offered her a seven-year contract, but she declined, choosing instead to stay in New Rochelle.

Brewer continued to record and make TV appearances, but she had four girls by then and spent most of her time raising them, Munroe said. Her popularity waned until the 1970s, when she became reacquainted with jazz producer Bob Thiele and began recording jazz standards with jazz greats. The two eventually married after she and her first husband divorced.

Funeral arrangements weren't complete, Munroe said. Brewer's survivors include her four daughters, four grandsons and five great-grandchildren. Thiele died in 1996.

1950s Singer Teresa Brewer Dies at 76, NYT, 17.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Obit-Brewer.html