Maurice Evans

Maurice Herbert Evans was an English actor, noted for his interpretations of Shakespearean characters. His best-known screen roles are Dr. Zaius in the 1968 film Planet of the Apes and Samantha Stephens's father, Maurice, on Bewitched.

Evans was born at 28 Icen Way in Dorchester, Dorset. He was the son of Laura (Turner) and Alfred Herbert Evans, a Welsh dispensing chemist and keen amateur actor who made adaptations of novels by Thomas Hardy for the local amateur company. Young Maurice made his first stage appearance as a small boy in Far from the Madding Crowd.

He first appeared on the stage in 1926 at the Cambridge Festival Theatre and joined the Old Vic Company in 1934, playing Hamlet, Richard II, and Iago. He was selected by Terence Gray to appear in the opening production in November 1926 at the Festival Theatre, taking the part of Orestes in two parts of the sensational production of the Oresteia of Aeschylus. This was followed by Lord Belvoir in The Man Who Ate the Popomack by W. J. Turner, and Saint Anthony in Maeterlinck's The Miracle of Saint Anthony.

In 1927, Evans played a poet in The Pleasure Garden by Beatrice Mayor followed by Young Man in On Baile's Strand by W. B. Yeats, Midir in The Immortal Hour by Fiona Macleod, the Hon. Algernon Moodie in The Rumour by C.K. Munro, Mark Ingestire in Sweeney Todd by Dibdin Pitt, the poet in The Lost Silk Hat by Lord Dunsany, the Captain in Androcles and the Lion by George Bernard Shaw, Mister Four and Young Man in The Adding Machine by Elmer Rice, Don Juan in the play of the same title by James Elroy Flecker, two parts in Terence Gray's own play The Red Nights of the Tcheka, the Stage Manager in The Player Queen (also by Yeats), the Second Engineer in The Insect Play by the Čapek brothers, Prince Kamose in another Gray play called And in the Tomb, and finally in June 1927, Don Pelegari in Pirandello's Each In His Own Way. Both Yeats and Shaw attended performances of their own plays.

In 1927, he was one of a group of out-of-work actors including Laurence Olivier, chosen to perform in a "tryout" of R. C. Sherriff's Journey's End directed by James Whale at the Apollo Theatre in London, and later in 1929 at the Savoy Theatre which had been leased by the Chicago theatre manager Maurice Browne. It was a huge success, running for two years and making Maurice's name. He played the young officer Raleigh, who dies at the end of the play. In 1934, he went to the Old Vic Theatre where his interpretation of Shakespeare's Richard II was highly praised. It was as a result of this that he was invited to join Katharine Cornell in the United States. His first appearance on Broadway was in Romeo and Juliet opposite Katharine Cornell in 1936, but he made his biggest impact in Shakespeare's Richard II, a production whose unexpected success was the surprise of the 1937 theatre season and allowed Evans to play Hamlet (1938) (the first time that the play was performed uncut on the New York stage), Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 1 (1939), Macbeth (1941) and Malvolio in Twelfth Night (1942) opposite the Viola of Helen Hayes, under the direction of Margaret Webster. He also starred opposite Cornell in the 1935 production of George Bernard Shaw's St. Joan.

Evans reprised his Broadway role in Dial M for Murder for a 1958 Hallmark Hall of Fame television presentation. Also pictured are John Williams and Rosemary Harris.

When the U.S. entered the Second World War, he enlisted in the United States Army and he later was in charge of an Army Entertainment Section in the Central Pacific. He arranged for the transfer of Carl Reiner from the Signal Corps to the entertainment unit in Hawaii, where Major Evans was his commanding officer. The unit produced dozens of shows for the troops in the Pacific. Reiner later hired Evans for the part of Hobart the butler in The Jerk, as Evans's agent had indicated that the part would enable Evans to maintain his union benefits.

Evans produced his famous "G.I. version" of Hamlet that cut the text of the play to make the title character more appealing to the troops, an interpretation so popular that he later took it to Broadway in 1945. Evans rose to the rank of Major by the end of the war. He shifted his attention to the works of Shaw, notably as John Tanner in Man and Superman and as King Magnus in The Apple Cart. In 1952, he starred as the murderous husband in the original Broadway stage production of Dial M for Murder. He also successfully produced Broadway productions in which he did not appear, notably The Teahouse of the August Moon.

In 1956, Evans recorded an LP of stories from Winnie-the-Pooh. American television audiences of the 1960s will remember Evans as Samantha's father, Maurice, on the sitcom Bewitched. His real-life insistence that his first name be pronounced "Morris" was ironically at odds with his Bewitched character's contrasting stance that it be pronounced "Maw-REESE". Evans also appeared in the fourth season of Daniel Boone starring Fess Parker playing a French impresario "Beaumarchais." He also played The Puzzler on Batman in a double episode storyline (which was common for that series) in December 1966. Continuing his American TV appearances, he guest starred in The Big Valley from the latter part of the fourth and final season of that western series in April 1969, an episode entitled "Danger Road."

Evans had great impact on the big screen as well. He played a diabolical villain in Kind Lady (1951; co-starring Ethel Barrymore, Keenan Wynn, and Angela Lansbury); Emperor Antoninus in Androcles and the Lion (1952); and Sir Arthur Sullivan in The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan (1953). Evans appeared memorably in two 1968 films: as the evolved orangutan, Dr. Zaius in Planet of the Apes (and the 1970 sequel Beneath the Planet of the Apes) and as the doomed "Hutch", who attempts to warn his friend, the title character, Rosemary Woodhouse, in the thriller Rosemary's Baby, of the true Satanic nature of her neighbours, Roman and Minnie Castavet (played by Sidney Blackmer and Ruth Gordon).

Evans appeared in more American television productions of Shakespeare than any other actor. Beginning in 1953, for the famous television anthology, Hallmark Hall of Fame, he starred in the first feature-length (i.e., longer than an hour) dramatisations of the plays to be presented on American television. 

In bringing so much Shakespeare to American television in such a short span of time (between 1953 and 1960), Evans was a true pioneer. This had never been tried before – at least, not in the U.S. He firmly believed that it was an actor's job to "lead public taste, not to play to public taste".

Evans brought his Shakespeare productions to Broadway many times, playing Hamlet on the Great White Way in four separate productions for a record grand total of 283 performances. He and Dame Judith Anderson starred on Broadway several times in Macbeth. Their performances were widely regarded as the definitive portrayals of these characters, although one notable dissenter was Orson Welles, who stated that Evans, as an actor, was "worse than bad – he was poor."

Evans appeared on Broadway as Hamlet four times, but the productions of the play that he appeared in were consecutive revivals of it – no other actor played Hamlet on Broadway between 1938, when Evans first played him there, and 1946, which marked Evans's last Broadway Hamlet. He is very likely the only actor to have accomplished this, so far.

Although he had taken U.S. citizenship in 1941, Evans had returned to Britain by the end of the 1960s. Aside from an infrequent trip to the United States and occasional visits to retired actors in financial need (as a representative of the Actors' Fund, of which he was a longtime trustee), he lived quietly near Brighton. He never married, and was survived by a brother, Hugh, of London.

Evans died, aged 87, in Rottingdean, East Sussex, England,

Jimmy Hill

James William Thomas Hill was an English footballer and later a television personality. His career included almost every role in the sport, including player, trade union leader, coach, manager, director, chairman, television executive, presenter, pundit, analyst and assistant referee.

He began his playing career at Brentford in 1949 and moved to Fulham three years later. As chairman of the Professional Footballers' Association, he successfully campaigned for an end to The Football League's maximum wage in 1961. After retiring as a player, he took over as manager of Coventry City, modernizing the team's image and guiding them from the Third to the First Division. In 1967, he began a career in football broadcasting, and from 1973 to 1988 was host of the BBC's Match of the Day.

Hill was born in Balham, London, the son of William Thomas Hill, a World War I veteran, milkman, and bread delivery worker and Alice Beatrice Hill née Wyatt. He was a pupil at Henry Thornton Grammar School, Clapham (1939–45), and later became President of the Old Boys' Association. He did national service as a clerk in the Royal Army Service Corps in which he attained the rank of Corporal and was considered a potential candidate for officer training.

Hill first came into football as a fan, regularly watching football at local club Crystal Palace. During his national service, Hill played three trial games for Folkestone Town before suffering a serious cartilage injury. However, he was recommended to Reading who he joined as an amateur, playing mainly for their 3rd team before being told they would not offer him a professional contract. In 1949, he joined Brentford, making 87 appearances before moving to Fulham in March 1952, for whom he played nearly 300 games, scoring 52 goals. He set up a club record by scoring five goals for Fulham in an away match against Doncaster Rovers in 1958 and was part of the team that gained promotion to the First Division.

In 1957, he became chairman of the Professional Footballers' Association (PFA) and campaigned to have the Football League's £20 maximum wage scrapped, which he achieved in January 1961, when Fulham teammate Johnny Haynes became the first £100-a-week player.

He was one of many signatories in a letter to The Times on 17 July 1958 opposing 'the policy of apartheid' in international sport and defending 'the principle of racial equality which is embodied in the Declaration of the Olympic Games'.

In November 1961, after retiring as a player aged 33, Hill became manager of Coventry City. His time at Coventry was marked by great changes to the club, nicknamed "The Sky Blue Revolution". He changed the home kit's colours to sky blue, coining the nickname "The Sky Blues". Alongside journalist John Camkin, he also penned the club song "The Sky Blue Song", sung to the tune of the "Eton Boating Song". Among his other innovations were the first fully fledged match programme in English football, and organising pre-match entertainment to encourage fans to arrive early. His partnership with the chairman, Derrick Robins, also led to a redevelopment of the stadium, Highfield Road, with two new stands being built.

After winning the Division Three championship in 1963–64, and the Division Two title in 1966–67, Hill left the club shortly before the start of the 1967–68 season as they entered the top flight for the first time.

After leaving Coventry in 1967, Hill moved into broadcasting, acting as technical adviser to the BBC's football-based drama series United! before becoming Head of Sport at London's co-ITV region, London Weekend Television, from 1968 to 1972. He also co-hosted their World Cup 1970 coverage which, at his suggestion, used the first panel of football pundits.

Along with his role in the abolition of the £20 per week maximum wage for players in English football in 1961, Hill was also instrumental in two other big rule changes in English football. The first of these was in August 1976, when the English Football League agreed to Hill's suggestion to replace goal average with goal difference, with Hill explaining that goal average over the decades had favoured fewer goals conceded over more goals scored, which he believed shouldn't be the case, with goal difference a way to ensure that more goals scored would be more rewarded over fewer goals conceded. And then five years later in August 1981, the English Football League agreed to Hill's suggestion of introducing 3 points for winning a match instead of 2 points for winning a match, with Hill saying that 3 points for a win would encourage teams to go for the win more rather than settle for a draw, with a win worth 3 times what a draw was worth instead of 2 times what a draw was worth.

He was briefly LWT's Deputy Controller of Programmes, before joining the BBC to present Match of the Day. Hill racked up 600 appearances on the show, and became a television icon, instantly recognisable and often caricatured for his long chin and distinctive beard. As a presenter or analyst, he worked on every major international championship from 1966 to 1998. As a broadcaster with the BBC he was present at the Hillsborough disaster in 1989, whilst covering the game for Match of the Day.

In 1999, Hill moved from the BBC to Sky Sports, where he featured on Jimmy Hill's Sunday Supplement, a weekly discussion show between Hill and three football journalists. In 2007, he was replaced by his co-presenter Brian Woolnough and the programme was renamed Sunday Supplement.

In 2004, Hill defended fellow pundit Ron Atkinson over racist comments Atkinson had made, believing his microphone was off, which were broadcast live in the Middle East. Hill was asked whether he thought Atkinson should resign for describing a Chelsea player as a "lazy, fucking thick nigger", to which he said it was the "language of the football field". Hill went on to say: "In that context, you wouldn't think that words like nigger were particularly insulting: it would be funny. Without meaning to insult any black men, it's us having fun ... I mean, nigger is black – so we have jokes where we call them niggers because they're black. Why should that be any more of an offence than someone calling me chinny?" (Hill, famously, had a prominent chin). Hill's comments were described as "mind-boggling" by the then director of Kick it Out, football's anti-racism group. He went on to say: "Jimmy Hill's comments are as offensive as Ron Atkinson's".

Despite his departure as manager in 1967, Hill returned to Coventry City as managing director in April 1975 before becoming the chairman.

When Coventry played their last match at Highfield Road in 2005, Hill received a post-match hero's welcome from the capacity crowd, and led them in a rousing chorus of "The Sky Blue Song". In 2007, fans voted for a bar at the new Ricoh Arena to be named "Jimmy's" in his honour.

Following a spell as chairman of Charlton Athletic, Hill made a return to Fulham in 1987 to become chairman, helping his old club survive near-bankruptcy and blocking an attempted merger with Queens Park Rangers.

Hill was a trustee of the Stable Lads' Association, and a patron of Labrador Rescue South East and Central.

As chairman, at a crucial relegation match at home to Bristol City at the end of the 1976–77 season, Hill was advised to delay the kick off by 10 minutes for fans still outside caught in the heavy traffic. Relegation rivals Sunderland, playing at Everton, kicked off on time, Sunderland eventually losing the game 2–0. The Sunderland result was announced over the PA at Highfield Road, reportedly at Hill's insistence, and Coventry City and Bristol City played out the last ten minutes of the game apparently without any intent to attack each other's half, thereby ensuring that both avoided relegation. (Coventry's game with Bristol City stood at 2–2, and a goal for either team would have led to the other side being relegated and Sunderland staying up.) A Football League inquiry was held subsequently, but the result stood. Sunderland fans had still not forgotten the incident more than 30 years later; in 2008 they gave Hill a hostile reception when he appeared near the Sunderland end during a match against Fulham.

Hill married three times, having three children by his first wife, Gloria, and two by his second, Heather. Hill published his autobiography, The Jimmy Hill Story, in 1998. He also wrote Striking for Soccer in 1963 and Tips from the Top, a football coaching book, in 1970. In September 2013 it was revealed that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2008. His children by his second wife expressed concern that they had no role in determining his care, as Hill had assigned power of attorney in 2005 to his third wife, Bryony, and a solicitor. Bryony Hill published a memoir in 2015, My Gentleman Jim, detailing her husband's illness. Hill died on 19 December 2015, aged 87.

Vassar Clements

Vassar Carlton Clements was an American jazz, swing, and bluegrass fiddler. Clements has been dubbed the Father of Hillbilly Jazz, an improvisational style that blends and borrows from swing, hot jazz, and bluegrass along with roots also in country and other musical traditions.

Clements was born in Kinard, Florida and grew up in Kissimmee. He taught himself to play the fiddle at age 7, learning "There's an Old Spinning Wheel in the Parlor" as his first song. Soon, he joined with two first cousins, Red and Gerald, to form a local string band. In his early teens Clements met Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys when they came to Florida to visit Clements' stepfather, a friend of fiddler Chubby Wise. Clements was impressed with his playing.

In late 1949, Wise left Monroe's group, and the 21 year-old Clements traveled by bus to ask for an audition. When told he would have to return the next day, Clements was crestfallen, lacking the money for either a hotel room or return bus trip. Monroe gave him some money to a night's lodging, and the next day Clements auditioned and was hired. He remained with Monroe for seven years, recording with the band in 1950 and 1951.

Between 1957 and 1962, he was a member of the bluegrass band Jim and Jesse & the Virginia Boys. He also gained recognition joining with the popular bluegrass duo of Flatt and Scruggs on the popular theme to the hit television sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies. Earl Scruggs' path-breaking banjo style had premiered with Bill Monroe in the late 1940s, and thereafter gained widespread renown with Lester Flatt and the Foggy Mountain Boys.

By the mid-1960s, however, his struggles with alcohol left him making his living in blue-collar trades, being employed briefly at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida as a plumber, in a Georgia paper mill, and as switchman for Atlantic Coast Line Railroad. He even sold insurance and once operated a convenience store while owning a potato chip franchise in Huntsville, Alabama. Sobering up, he returned to Nashville in 1967, where he became a much sought-after studio musician.

After a brief touring stint with Faron Young he joined John Hartford's Dobrolic Plectral Society in 1971, when he met guitarist Norman Blake and Dobro player Tut Taylor, and recorded Aereo-Plain, a widely acclaimed "newgrass" album that helped broaden the bluegrass market and sound. After less than a year he joined up with Earl Scruggs.

His 1972 work with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on their album Will the Circle be Unbroken earned even wider acclaim, and he later worked on the Grateful Dead's Wake of the Flood and Jimmy Buffett's A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean. Within the next two years, Clements would cut his first solo album.

In 1973, he joined and toured with the bluegrass supergroup Old & In the Way with Jerry Garcia, David Grisman, Peter Rowan, and John Kahn; their self-titled live album Old & In the Way was released in 1975.

In 1974 he lent his talents to Highway Call, a solo album by former Allman Brothers Band guitarist Dickey Betts.

He was considered by many to be an outstanding fiddle virtuoso and he described his talent saying,

It was God's gift, something born in me. I was too dumb to learn it any other way. I listened to the Grand Ole Opry some. I'd pick it up one note at a time. I was young, with plenty of time and I didn't give up. You'd come home from school, do your lessons and that's it. No other distractions. I don't read music. I play what I hear.

In his 50-year career he played with artists ranging from Woody Herman and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band to the Grateful Dead, Linda Ronstadt, and Paul McCartney, and earned at least five Grammy Award nominations and numerous professional accolades. He once recorded with the pop group the Monkees by happenstance, when he stayed behind after an earlier recording session. He also appeared in Robert Altman's 1975 film Nashville and Alan Rudolph's 1976 film, Welcome to L.A.. He made a duet album with Stéphane Grappelli Together at Last in 1987.

In 2004, he performed in concert with jazz quartet Third Stream – in which a video documentary of the concert was done with Jim Easton (guitar), Tom Strohman (sax), Jim Miller (bass), and John Peifer (drums).

Though he played numerous instruments, Clements indicated that he chose the fiddle over guitar recalling that, "I picked up a guitar and fiddle and tried them both out. The guitar was pretty easy, but I couldn't get nothing out of the fiddle. So every time I'd see those instruments sitting side by side, I'd grab that fiddle."

Big band and swing music were considerable influences upon his style and musical development, and he said that, "Bands like Glenn Miller, Les Brown, Tommy Dorsey, Harry James and Artie Shaw were very popular when I was a kid. I always loved rhythm, so I guess in the back of my mind the swing and jazz subconsciously comes out when I play, because when I was learning I was always trying to emulate the big-band sounds I heard on my fiddle."

Vassar Clements played on over 200 albums, including nearly 40 on which he starred or was featured. His albums often featured newgrass style music and what Clements called "Hillbilly Jazz". His last album, Livin' With the Blues, released in 2004, was his only blues recording; it featured guest appearances by Elvin Bishop, Norton Buffalo, Maria Muldaur, and others.

His 2005 Grammy Award for Best Country Instrumental Performance was for "Earl's Breakdown," by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and featured Clements, Earl Scruggs, Randy Scruggs, and Jerry Douglas.

Clements, whose last performance was February 4, 2005 in Jamestown, New York, died on August 16, 2005, aged 77.

Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze

Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze was a German painter and photographer predominantly active in France. Though broadly unrecognized in his lifetime, he is considered a pioneer of lyrical abstraction, one of the most influential artists of the Tachisme movement. He is the author of a book on art theory entitled Aphorismes de Wols.

Schulze was born in Berlin in 1913 into a wealthy family; his father was a high-ranking civil servant and patron of the arts who maintained friendships with many prominent artists of the period, including Otto Dix. In 1919, the family moved to Dresden, where consequently he found his love for art in 1927. In 1924, Schulze was given a still camera, an event that, along with the death of his father in 1929, became one of the defining moments of his life. In 1930 he began to pursue an apprenticeship with his camera at the Reiman-Schule, the Berlin school of applied art. He was a multifaceted man who was capable of teaching German, painting, and capturing photographs of portrait landscape.

After abandoning school, Schulze pursued several interests, including ethnography before moving to Paris in 1932 on the advice of László Moholy-Nagy. After visiting Germany in 1933, he decided not to return, instead traveling to Barcelona, Majorca, and Ibiza, where he worked odd jobs, including a stint as a taxicab driver and a German tutor.

In 1936, he received official permission to live in Paris with the help of Fernand Léger; as an army deserter, Schulze had to report to the Paris police on a monthly basis. Beginning in 1937, he actively worked on his photographs, which were shown in many of Paris's most prestigious galleries. He befriended luminaries of the period, including Max Ernst and Jacques Prévert. As a German national, Schulze (like Ernst) was interned at the start of World War II, but he managed to escape and hide in Cassis near Marseilles, where he passed the time drawing and painting in watercolor. In 1942 he fled from the Germans to the safety of Montelimar.

He spent most of the war trying to emigrate to the United States, an unsuccessful and costly enterprise that may have driven him to alcoholism. Upon his return to Paris, after the hype from the war had died down, he had his first exhibition of watercolors in December 1945 at the Galerie René Drouin, where despite the lack of commercial success he made an impression on the circle of intellectuals around the gallery. These included Jean Paulhan, Francis Ponge, Georges Limbour and André Malraux. The small works were displayed in light boxes. A second exhibition in the same gallery two years later saw greater recognition. His paintings represented a rejection of figuration and abstraction, and a projection into a metaphysical plane.

In the years following the war, Schulze concentrated on painting and etching. His health declined severely towards the end of the 1940s; in 1951 he died of food poisoning at the Hotel Montalembert in Paris, after releasing himself from hospital against medical advice. After his death his works were shown at the Kassel documenta (1955), documenta II (1959) and documenta III (1964).

George Russell

George Allen Russell was an American jazz pianist, composer, arranger and theorist. He is considered one of the first jazz musicians to contribute to general music theory with a theory of harmony based on jazz rather than European music, in his book Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization (1953).

Russell was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on June 23, 1923, He was adopted by a nurse and a chef on the B & O Railroad, Bessie and Joseph Russell. Young Russell sang in the choir of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and listened to the Kentucky Riverboat music of Fate Marable. He made his stage debut at age seven, singing "Moon Over Miami" with Fats Waller.

Surrounded by the music of the black church and the big bands which played on the Ohio Riverboats, and with a father who was a music educator at Oberlin College, he began playing drums with the Boy Scouts and Bugle Corps, receiving a scholarship to Wilberforce University, where he joined the Collegians, a band noted as a breeding ground for jazz musicians including Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Charles Freeman Lee, Frank Foster, and Benny Carter. Russell served in that band at the same time as another noted jazz composer, Ernie Wilkins. When called up for the draft at the beginning of World War II, he was hospitalized with tuberculosis, during which he was taught the fundamentals of music theory by a fellow patient.

After his release from the hospital, he played drums with Benny Carter's band, but decided to give up drumming as a vocation after hearing Max Roach, who replaced him in the orchestra. Inspired by hearing Thelonious Monk's "'Round Midnight", Russell moved to New York in the early 1940s, where he became a member of a coterie of young innovators who frequented the 55th Street apartment of Gil Evans, a clique which included Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Gerry Mulligan, and John Lewis, later the music director of the Modern Jazz Quartet.

In 1945–46, Russell was again hospitalized for tuberculosis for 16 months. Forced to turn down work as Charlie Parker's drummer, during that time he worked out the basic tenets of what was to become his Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, a theory encompassing all equal-tempered music which has been influential well beyond the boundaries of jazz. During this period, he also studied composition with Stefan Wolpe. The first edition of his book was published by Russell in 1953, while he worked as a salesclerk at Macy's. At that time, Russell's ideas were a crucial step into the modal music of John Coltrane and Miles Davis on his classic recording, Kind of Blue, and served as a beacon for other modernists such as Eric Dolphy and Art Farmer.

While working on the theory, Russell was also applying its principles to composition. His first famous composition was for the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra, the two-part "Cubano Be, Cubano Bop" (1947) and part of that band's pioneering experiments in fusing bebop and Cuban jazz elements; "A Bird in Igor's Yard" (a tribute to both Charlie Parker and Igor Stravinsky) was recorded in a session led by Buddy DeFranco the next year. Also, a lesser known but pivotal work arranged by Russell was recorded in January 1950 by Artie Shaw entitled "Similau" that employed techniques of both the works done for Gillespie and DeFranco.

Russell began playing piano, leading a series of groups which included Bill Evans, Art Farmer, Hal McKusick, Barry Galbraith, Milt Hinton, Paul Motian, and others. Jazz Workshop was his first album as leader, and one where he played relatively little, as opposed to masterminding the events (rather like his colleague Gil Evans). He was to record a number of impressive albums over the next several years, sometimes as primary pianist.

In 1957, Russell was one of several composers commissioned by Brandeis University to write a piece for their jazz festival. He wrote a suite for orchestra, All About Rosie, which featured Bill Evans among other soloists, and has been cited as one of the few convincing examples of composed polyphony in jazz.

Members of the orchestra on his 1958 extended work, New York, N.Y., included Bill Evans, John Coltrane, Art Farmer, Milt Hinton, Bob Brookmeyer, and Max Roach, among others, and featured wrap-around raps by singer/lyricist Jon Hendricks. Jazz in the Space Age (1960) was an even more ambitious big band album, featuring the unusual dual piano voicings of Bill Evans and Paul Bley. Russell formed his own sextet in which he played piano. Between 1960 and 1963, the Russell Sextet featured musicians like Dave Baker and Steve Swallow and memorable sessions with Eric Dolphy (on Ezz-thetics) and singer Sheila Jordan.

In 1964, Russell, who as a half black man was dismayed by race relations in the United States, moved to Scandinavia. He toured Europe with his sextet and lived in Scandinavia for five years, teaching at Lund University. In 1966, he was part of the first Pori Jazz festival. Through the early 1970s, Russell did most of his work in Norway and Sweden. He played there with young musicians who would go on to international fame: guitarist Terje Rypdal, saxophonist Jan Garbarek and drummer Jon Christensen.

This Scandinavian period also provided opportunities to write for larger groupings, and Russell's larger-scale compositions of this time pursue his idea of "vertical form", which he described as "layers or strata of divergent modes of rhythmic behaviour". The Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature, commissioned by Bosse Broberg of Swedish Radio for the Radio Orchestra, was first recorded in 1968, as an extended work recorded with electronic tape. It continued Russell's continuing exploration of new approaches and new instrumentation.

Russell returned to America in 1969, when Gunther Schuller assumed the presidency of the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and appointed Russell to teach the Lydian Concept in the newly created jazz studies department, a position he held for many years. As Russell toured with his own groups, he was persistent in developing the Lydian Concept. He played the Bottom Line, Newport, Wolftrap, The Village Vanguard, Carnegie Hall, Sweet Basil and more with his 14-member orchestra.

In the 1970s Russell was commissioned to write and record 3 major works: Listen to the Silence, a mass for orchestra and chorus for the Norwegian Cultural Fund; Living Time, commissioned by Bill Evans for Columbia Records; and Vertical Form VI for the Swedish Radio.

With Living Time (1972), Russell reunited with Bill Evans to offer a suite of compositions which represent the stages of human life. His Live in an American Time Spiral featured many young New York players who would go on to greatness, including Tom Harrell and Ray Anderson. When he was able to form an orchestra for his 1985 work The African Game, he dubbed it the Living Time Orchestra. This 14-member ensemble toured Europe and the U.S., doing frequent weeks at the Village Vanguard, and was praised by New York magazine as "the most exciting orchestra to hit the city in years."

The work The African Game, a 45-minute opus for 25 musicians, was described by Robert Palmer of The New York Times as "one of the most important new releases of the past several decades" and earned Russell two Grammy nominations in 1985.

Russell wrote 9 extended pieces after 1984, among them: Timeline for symphonic orchestra, jazz orchestra, chorus, klezmer band and soloists, composed for the New England Conservatory's 125th anniversary; a re-orchestration of Living Time for Russell's orchestra and additional musicians, commissioned by the Cité de la Musique in Paris in 1994; and It's About Time, co-commissioned by The Arts Council of England and the Swedish Concert Bureau in 1995.

In 1986, Russell toured with a group of American and British musicians, resulting in The International Living Time Orchestra. He played with Dave Bargeron, Steve Lodder, Tiger Okoshi, Mike Walker, Brad Hatfield, and Andy Sheppard.

Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization re-conceptualized the matching of scales with chords. While the conventional approach to the diatonic major scale is founded on the tones of the Ionian major scale in accordance with classical theory (C, D, E, F, G, A, B for the C major scale, etc.) the LCC derives the scales based on the series of fifths stacked from the root tones of chords with a major third. In the key of C, the stacked fifth series includes C, G, D, A, E, B, and F♯, which provide an alternate seven tone division for the C major scale with a raised, or augmented, fourth tone. The resulting scale, with an augmented fourth (F♯) instead of a perfect fourth (F), has more consonance than the conventional Ionian diatonic major scale over chords, avoiding the dissonant half-step from the major third (E). With the conventional major scale, dissonance is avoided by omitting the perfect fourth; by using the Lydian mode with the more consonant augmented fourth, the player or composer gains the tonal freedom that facilitates modal playing over chords with a major third. Lydian major-third chords are specified with a ♯11, which is equivalent to the ♯4 in the scale.

It was a remark made by Miles Davis in 1944 when Russell asked him his musical aim that led Russell on a quest which was to lead to his theoretical breakthrough. Davis answered that his musical aim was "to learn all the changes." Knowing that Davis already knew how to arpeggiate each chord, Russell reasoned that he really meant that he wanted to find a new and broader way to relate to chords. As musician and scholar Darius Brubeck wrote:

Russell codified the modal approach to harmony ... inspired by a casual remark the eighteen-year-old Miles Davis made to him in 1944: Miles said he wanted to learn all the changes and I reasoned he might try to find the closest scale for every chord ... Davis popularized those liberating ideas in recordings like Kind of Blue, undermining the entire harmonic foundation of bop that had inspired him and Russell in the first place.

Miles reportedly summarized the LCC succinctly by saying, "F should be where middle C is on the piano" [white notes: F-F = Lydian major, rather than Ionian major = C-C].

The Lydian Chromatic Concept was the first codified original theory to come from jazz. Musicians who assimilated Russell's ideas expanded their harmonic language beyond that of bebop, into the realm of post-bop. Russell's ideas influenced the development of modal jazz, notably in the album Jazz Workshop (1957, with Bill Evans and featuring the "Concerto for Billy the Kid") as well as his writings. Miles Davis also pushed into modal playing with the composition Miles on his 1957 album Milestones. Davis and Evans later collaborated on the 1959 album Kind of Blue, which featured modal composition and playing. John Coltrane explored modal playing for several years after playing on Kind of Blue.

His Lydian Concept has been described as making available resources rather than imposing constraints on musicians. According to the influential 20th century composer Toru Takemitsu, "The Lydian Chromatic Concept is one of the two most splendid books about music; the other is My Musical Language by Messiaen. Though I'm considered a contemporary music composer, if I dare categorize myself as an artist, I've been strongly influenced by the Lydian Concept, which is not simply a musical method—we might call it a philosophy of music, or we might call it poetry."

The major scale probably emerged as the predominating scale of Western music, because within its seven tones lies the most fundamental harmonic progression of the classical era ... thus, the major scale resolves to its tonic major chord. The Lydian scale is the sound of its tonic major chord.

George Russell died of complications from Alzheimer's disease in Boston, Massachusetts, on July 27, 2009.

Dr. E. Cuyler Hammond

E. Cuyler Hammond was an American biologist and epidemiologist who was one of the first researchers to establish a link between smoking and lung cancer.

Hammond was a native of Baltimore, Maryland and educated at the Gilman Country Day School. He studied biology at Yale (B.S. 1935) and earned a D.Sc. in biology from Johns Hopkins (1938).

From 1938 to 1942, he worked as a statistician in the Division of Industrial Hygiene at the National Institute of Health, and in 1941 and 1942 he was a consultant for medical research to the Navy. He then served in what became the Air Force from 1942 to 1946, rising to the rank of major.

From 1946 to 1966, he was director of the statistical research section of the American Cancer Society, becoming vice president for epidemiology and statistics until 1977. From 1953 to 1958 he was also a professor of biometry at Yale.

In 1952, Hammond published an early report linking cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Two years later he published the initial findings of a study of 180,000 men which confirmed the high risk of death from all causes as a result of smoking cigarettes. Later research demonstrated a link between smoking cigarettes and cancers other than lung cancer. The research also showed a decreased risk of cancer after people stopped smoking and a relationship between cigarette smoking and cancer in women. To develop on his 1952 conclusions, he helped to establish in 1959 a force of more than 60,000 volunteers who worked for the American Cancer Society to gather data on the smoking habits of more than 1 million Americans. He also published, in collaboration with Dr. Oscar Auerbach, a series of studies of the cellular changes caused by smoking. Other studies in the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated the carcinogenic effects of asbestos and vinyl chloride.

In 1976, he was awarded the prestigious Hodgkins Medal of the Smithsonian Institution for his contributions to the wellbeing of mankind.

He died in 1986. 

Sir William Worsley

Col. Sir William Arthington Worsley, 4th Baronet was an English landowner and amateur first-class cricketer.

Worsley was born at Hovingham Hall, Yorkshire, England, the son of Sir William Henry Arthington Worsley of Hovingham, 3rd Baronet (born 12 January 1861) and his wife, Lady Augusta Mary (née Chivers Bower; died 1913).

His paternal grandparents were Sir Arthington Worsley of Hovingham, 2nd Baronet (21 December 1830 – 3 June 1861) and Marianne Christina Isabella Hely-Hutchinson (5 May 1832 – 11 August 1893): his maternal grandparents were Edward Chivers Bower and Amelia Mary Bennett-Martin.

Worsley attended Ludgrove School and Eton College. He served as a lieutenant and subsequently captain with the Green Howards (now part of the Yorkshire Regiment) in World War I. He was wounded and taken prisoner.

Worsley was Lord Lieutenant of the North Riding of Yorkshire from 1951 to 1965.

In 1967, Worsley was awarded an honorary LLD by the University of Leeds. The degree was conferred on him by his daughter in her role as Chancellor of the university.

Worsley died on December 4, 1973.

Rufus Reid

Rufus Reid is an American jazz bassist, educator, and composer.

Reid was raised in Sacramento, California, where he played the trumpet through junior high and high school. Upon graduation from Sacramento High School, he entered the United States Air Force as a trumpet player. During that period he began to be seriously interested in the bass.

After fulfilling his duties in the military, Rufus had decided he wanted to pursue a career as a professional bassist. He moved to Seattle, Washington, where he began serious study with James Harnett of the Seattle Symphony. He continued his education at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where he studied with Warren Benfield and principal bassist, Joseph Guastefeste, both of the Chicago Symphony. He graduated in 1971 with a Bachelor of Music Degree as a Performance Major on the Double Bass.

Rufus Reid's major professional career began in Chicago and continues since 1976 in New York City. Playing with hundreds of the world's greatest musicians, he is famously the bassist that saxophonist Dexter Gordon chose when he returned to the states from his decade-long exile in Denmark. His colleagues include Thad Jones, Nancy Wilson, Eddie Harris, and Bob Berg.

Leason Adams

Leason Heberling Adams was an American geophysicist and researcher. His principal achievement was his research on the properties of materials exposed to very high pressures, which he used to derive information on the nature of the Earth's interior. He received the William Bowie Medal of the American Geophysical Union in 1950 for his work.

Born on 16 January 1887, Adams grew up in central Illinois, where he received his early education in a one-room school. At the age of fifteen he entered the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, graduating in 1906 with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering.

After completing his university studies, he worked for the Technology Branch of the United States Geological Survey, first as an industrial chemist and then as a physical chemist. In 1910 he began working at the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. In 1937 he became the director of the Laboratory, and during World War II he served as the director of Division I (ballistics) of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. He was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1943.

Adams retired from the Carnegie Institution in 1952 but continued to carry out research, first as a consultant to the director of the National Bureau of Standards and then from 1958 until 1965 as a professor of geophysics at the University of California, Los Angeles.

He died on 20 August 1969 in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Frank Singuineau

Francis Ethelbert Dominic Singuineau was a Trinidadian actor of stage and screen who worked in the United Kingdom, where he moved from Trinidad and Tobago in the 1940s.

Singuineau was born on 4 August 1913 in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. His stage career began in amateur dramatics while he was employed by the Shell Company. Just after the Second World War, he gave up his job with Shell, travelled to London and became a professional actor, appearing at the Unity Theatre and the Bristol Old Vic. His London stage debut was in 1948 in Richard Wright's Native Son (1948). His acting career spanned the subsequent decades until his last roles in Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine at the Royal National Theatre and Mustapha Matura's Playboy of the West Indies at the Tricycle Theatre in 1984.

Singuineau was also cast in several film roles, including in The Pumpkin Eater, Séance on a Wet Afternoon, Pressure and An American Werewolf in London. Among the television series to which he contributed were Z-Cars, Crane, and Doomwatch.

Singuineau retired in the mid-1980s. He died on 11 September 1992 in London

Harry Houck

Harry William Houck was an engineer and inventor in the field of radio. 

Houck was born on April 11, 1896 in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania and was brought up there. At the age of thirteen, in 1909, he built a crystal radio receiver set, a 3000 watt spark transmitter, and connected them to a high multiple wire antenna through a send-receiver switch. With this equipment he was in contact with a wide circle of other amateurs over considerable distance. The set, though silent now for over 50 years, is still one of Mr. Houck's treasured possessions

The amateur period came to an end with our entry into World War I. Mr. Houck's proficiency at radio had come to someone's attention in the military (the Navy had at times asked him to interrupt his transmission) and late in 1917 Sergeant Houck reported to Captain E. H. Armstrong who was in Paris to develop some of his radio ideas for the Signal Corps. Houck's trip to Paris involved being in a French hospital, escaping AWOL from the confinement, being reported dead, but making it to Paris very much alive. Armstrong was developing his superheterodyne method of radio reception and he found in Houck a collaborator whose drive, craftsmanship and originality were invaluable. They became life-long friends and frequent coworkers in after years.

After the war the association continued in Armstrong's laboratory at home and at Columbia University with the enthusiastic support of such men as Professors Pupin and Morecroft. Here, with Houck as co-inventor, an improved superheterodyne circuit was developed to serve the new broadcast radio field. This second harmonic superheterodyne circuit as designed by Houck was the basis of a large commercial production of broadcast receivers.

In the years 1923 to 1931 Houck was chief engineer of the Dubilier Condenser and Radio Company, and here his inventiveness and research on capacitors led to the "battery eliminator", enabling receivers to operate on straight A.C. house current. In this period, and through the 1930's, Houck was also associated as consultant for or other of a number of other organizations such as Federal Telephone and Telegraph Company and Micamold Radio Corp., and he maintained his close contact with Armstrong working with frequency modulation. By the age of 35 he had contributed widely to the radio field.

In 1940 Measurements Corporation was formed with Houck as president. The goal of this organization was to supply instruments of high accuracy for measurements in the high frequency field of radio. This started a long line of ever improved high quality instruments. In 1953 Measurements Corp. became a division of Thomas A. Edison Industries with Houck as Vice President and General Manager. The same arrangement was maintained when in 1958 a further merger made the McGraw-Edison Company the larger parent organization. Under Mr. Houck's supervision and his active participation in the design and developmcnt the line of instruments was always al the forefront of the art, with many original contributions by himself and his co-workers. The list of his patents grew towards 90. He retired from Measurements at the beginning of 1967.

Among the many awards given him he treasures the Armstrong Medal of the Radio Club of America (1941) and the Marconi Medal of Achievement of the Veteran Wireless Operators Association (1955). He was a Life Member and Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the Radio Club of America.

Mr. Houck died in 1989.