Page 536 of 540
Re: Passages
Posted: Mon Jun 15, 2026 7:12 pm
by Lowry_Sam
Gregory wrote: Mon Jun 15, 2026 4:17 pm
Abdullah Ibrahim, 91. He lived a long life and stayed musically active till the end. This is up there with Sonny Rollins's recent passing as a loss
Agreed. I picked up The Children Of Africa in the early 80s sight unseen mistakenly thinking it was an ECM release (similar minimalist artwork) and discovered a new label (enja) and artist to collect in the process. Probably still my favorite album by him.
This is a shocker. I used to deliver his records while he was dj'ing in his bedroom @ his parents house & before he moved to LA. Really nice & unassuming kid, I had no idea he became a pop star or had music videos with over 100M views until someone else on my route pointed it out fairly recently.
Re: Passages
Posted: Mon Jun 15, 2026 7:31 pm
by domino harvey
Wow. Tree was an interesting figure, I really like a few of his earlier songs (
here’s a somewhat bitter one given the current news) and he certainly committed to some consistent and wild looks in his now brief career
Re: Passages
Posted: Mon Jun 15, 2026 8:13 pm
by Gregory
Lowry_Sam wrote: Mon Jun 15, 2026 7:12 pm
Gregory wrote: Mon Jun 15, 2026 4:17 pm
Abdullah Ibrahim, 91. He lived a long life and stayed musically active till the end. This is up there with Sonny Rollins's recent passing as a loss
Agreed. I picked up The Children Of Africa in the early 80s sight unseen mistakenly thinking it was an ECM release (similar minimalist artwork) and discovered a new label (enja) and artist to collect in the process. Probably still my favorite album by him.
You may already be aware but two of his earlier albums were released by ECM Records' sister label JAPO (Jazz by Post):
African Piano and
Ancient Africa. I'm going to listen to at least one of those today.
Re: Passages
Posted: Tue Jun 16, 2026 12:04 am
by hearthesilence
Nick Doob, even if you don't recognize the name, there's a good chance you've seen something he filmed. IMDb continues to make the same bizarre error, mixing him up with his late colleague Jim Desmond, but he began a lifelong friendship with D A Pennebaker on
Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and was involved in nearly everything he made after that. (The Criterion edition of
The War Room includes an interview with Doob where he discusses working on that.) As the Yale Film Archive mentioned, he maintained a close relationship with the school after graduating from there, going back to teach and mentor students in their film program. He was still making non-fiction films for HBO as late as last year's
Country Doctor.
Re: Passages
Posted: Tue Jun 16, 2026 4:04 am
by hearthesilence
Abdullah Ibrahim gave a farewell concert last year - I couldn't make it, and I knew I would regret it, but that's my fault for discovering his music too late. He had come through NYC before, even recording the essential live album
Yarona at a jazz venue that no longer exists (albeit over a decade before I finally visited NYC).
His catalog in the CD era was a bit overwhelming for a variety of reasons - he was very prolific on smaller labels that weren't likely to have stable or broad distribution in the U.S. As a result, it can be a mixed bag of endless compilations that go in and out of print.
One I'd highly recommend is
Voice of Africa, which should be easy to find on an inexpensive (and well-mastered) CD. It's possibly the best introduction you can find for his music, partly because it includes the original, definitive version of "Mannenberg."
Strangely, Spotify in the U.S. does not have the original version of "Mannenberg," only later interpretations that to be fair are wonderful to hear.
As you can see from the cover art used for this YouTube upload, the recording was also the title track to an album released under his former name, Dollar Brand.
Water from an Ancient Well is another album I would highly recommend, likely the best one he made when he was performing and recording with flautist Carlos Ward. A few years later he released
African River with a completely different group that has some overlap in repertoire, but they're great interpretations as well.
Re: Passages
Posted: Wed Jun 17, 2026 3:02 pm
by Gregory
The great microhistorian Carlo Ginzburg. I didn't know that there was a
Japanese documentary based on his book The Cheese and the Worms.
hearthesilence wrote: Tue Jun 16, 2026 4:04 am
Abdullah Ibrahim gave a farewell concert last year - I couldn't make it, and I knew I would regret it, but that's my fault for discovering his music too late. He had come through NYC before, even recording the essential live album
Yarona at a jazz venue that no longer exists (albeit over a decade before I finally visited NYC).
His catalog in the CD era was a bit overwhelming for a variety of reasons - he was very prolific on smaller labels that weren't likely to have stable or broad distribution in the U.S. As a result, it can be a mixed bag of endless compilations that go in and out of print.
One I'd highly recommend is
Voice of Africa, which should be easy to find on an inexpensive (and well-mastered) CD. It's possibly the best introduction you can find for his music, partly because it includes the original, definitive version of "Mannenberg."
Strangely, Spotify in the U.S. does not have the original version of "Mannenberg," only later interpretations that to be fair are wonderful to hear.
As you can see from the cover art used for this YouTube upload, the recording was also the title track to an album released under his former name, Dollar Brand.
Water from an Ancient Well is another album I would highly recommend, likely the best one he made when he was performing and recording with flautist Carlos Ward. A few years later he released
African River with a completely different group that has some overlap in repertoire, but they're great interpretations as well.
He also lived in NYC, at the Chelsea Hotel, for quite a few years. His daughter, the former rapper and multihyphenate who goes by the name Jean Grae, wrote an excellent memoir,
In My Remaining Years, one early chapter of which is an evocative and entertaining remembrance of what it was like to grow up as a kid in the Chelsea Hotel.
Water from an Ancient Well, Yarona, and
Voice of Africa are two great choices. I also really enjoy his albums with bassist Johnny Dyani, especially
Echoes from Africa.
Re: Passages
Posted: Wed Jun 17, 2026 5:39 pm
by cdnchris
Daveigh Chase (voice of Lilo, Samera from
The Ring remake, and Donnie Darko's sister among a number of other things from that period), possibly from meningitis and a blood infection.
Re: Passages
Posted: Wed Jun 17, 2026 6:16 pm
by colinr0380
cdnchris wrote: Wed Jun 17, 2026 5:39 pm
Daveigh Chase (voice of Lilo, Samera from
The Ring remake, and Donnie Darko's sister among a number of other things from that period), possibly from meningitis and a blood infection.
It seems that her final credit was voicing the Insurance Saleslady, offering the opportunity to resurrect your character and keep all your gear (if you pay a hefty and escalating fee to do so) in the English language version of the videogame
Let It Die
And she voiced the main character in the English dub of Spirited Away.
Re: Passages
Posted: Wed Jun 17, 2026 6:19 pm
by flyonthewall2983
35, damn
Re: Passages
Posted: Wed Jun 17, 2026 6:47 pm
by mfunk9786
cdnchris wrote: Wed Jun 17, 2026 5:39 pm
Daveigh Chase (voice of Lilo, Samera from
The Ring remake, and Donnie Darko's sister among a number of other things from that period), possibly from meningitis and a blood infection.
Really fucking excellent in
The Ring (child actor or not), the primary reason the film works so well at points. RIP, that's just awful.
Re: Passages
Posted: Wed Jun 17, 2026 7:52 pm
by okcmaxk
Tom Dreesen
Oddly enough, his final appearance was last week on
Comics Unleashed. Another one of Letterman’s close friends gone—protect Jeff Altman at all costs.
Re: Passages
Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2026 1:50 am
by hearthesilence
Re: Passages
Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2026 2:41 am
by Lowry_Sam
Judy Wyler Sheldon, chairman of the board of SF Silent Film Festival and daughter of William Wyler, and her husband were found dead in their car along the side of I-5.
Re: Passages
Posted: Fri Jun 19, 2026 9:32 pm
by dwk
Re: Passages
Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2026 4:35 am
by hearthesilence
James Bradley, whose nonfiction book
Flags Of Our Fathers purportedly documented his father's role in the iconic WWII photograph of American soldiers raising the stars-and-stripes flag on Iwo Jima became a bestseller and was adapted into the 2006 film directed by Clint Eastwood.
Passages
Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2026 9:51 am
by jazzo
A giant.
As a kid of the 70s and 80s, I don’t think there’s another end credit name I associate more with the delight of experiencing whatever adult sitcoms my parents were letting me watch with them at the time.
I recently began showing my own kids Cheers, and we got two seasons through before they became restless and wanted to move onto something else. Whether or not two young teenagers in 2026 can handle the rhythms and repetitions of 22 laugh-tracked half-hour episodes a season in a show from four decades before they were born is another discussion entirely, but they liked it until they wanted something different. What struck me with this (probably) fifth or sixth rewatch of the series was how much I still loved those early seasons of that show, and that is, in no small part, thanks to James Burrows.
Even more impressive was the sheer perfection of the pilot episode. It truly is a work of sitcom art, as fully formed a series and character tuning fork as you can get, and so much of that is because of James Burrows’ impeccable sense of timing and his direction of the actors.
Re: Passages
Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2026 10:05 am
by MichaelB
Giorgia Moll, Italian actress who's perhaps most famous for a French film; she's the assistant producer in Jean-Luc Godard's
Le Mépris.
Re: Passages
Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2026 11:50 am
by domino harvey
And cast in that because of her role in Mankiewicz’ the Quiet American, which Godard was obsessed with
Re: Passages
Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2026 2:59 pm
by clownmeat
Re: Passages
Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2026 3:28 pm
by domino harvey
Alan Greenspan at 100
Re: Passages
Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2026 3:40 pm
by beamish14
The Neverending Story has some of the most sublime VFX ever created. What a career
Re: Passages
Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2026 3:54 pm
by beamish14
Clive Davis, who had astronomical success at Columbia Records before founding Arista and launching/re-launching the careers of Whitney Houston, Patti Smith, Carlos Santana, and scores of others
Re: Passages
Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2026 4:13 pm
by MichaelB
There's a reason why Miles Davis stuck with Columbia for decades, and Clive Davis (no relation) was a major part of it.
Re: Passages
Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2026 4:44 pm
by beamish14
MichaelB wrote: Mon Jun 22, 2026 4:13 pm
There's a reason why Miles Davis stuck with Columbia for decades, and Clive Davis (no relation) was a major part of it.
Columbia/CBS is very unique in how they retained artists like Bryce Springsteen and Bob Dylan for virtually their entire careers. Davis was probably the most visible and famous record executive to ever live
Re: Passages
Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2026 4:59 pm
by hearthesilence
Signing Patti Smith alone was huge - he didn't just give her a major record deal, he allowed her to do whatever she wanted. Remarkable given the criticism over the way he handled big acts during Arista's mid-'80s and '90s heyday (an approach he later applied to Santana), all to great commercial success but to dubious artistic merit. But it's not unusual for entertainment executives to take very different approaches to different acts, for better or for worse.