EeHH.CO.UK

Albert ‘Tootie’ Heath obituary

The drummer Albert “Tootie” Heath, who has died aged 88, was a member of one of the most distinguished American jazz families. Where the Detroit scene had its Joneses (the brothers Thad, Hank and Elvin) and New Orleans its Marsalises (Ellis and his sons Wynton, Branford, Jason and Delfeayo), Philadelphia had the Heaths.

Albert, universally known since childhood as Tootie, was the youngest of the three brothers who would each go on to be awarded the status of Jazz Master by the US National Endowment for the Arts.

The oldest, Percy, born in 1923, spent 40 years playing double bass with the celebrated Modern Jazz Quartet in concert halls around the world. Jimmy, born three years after Percy, played tenor saxophone in the bands of Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis before becoming a jazz educator and a bandleader in his own right.

Tootie, born in 1935, was the latecomer, and not until 1975, when all three had long since established their reputations, did they come together to form a band called the Heath Brothers, touring and recording for the next three decades.

Their father, Percy Heath Sr, was a motor mechanic who played the clarinet in a marching band at weekends. Their mother, Arlethia (nee Wall), sang in a Baptist church choir. Music was ever present in the household, with the records of Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson and Duke Ellington on the gramophone and instruments for the sons to play from an early age.

When 15-year-old Jimmy formed a big band, the parents welcomed their boys’ friends into the house for rehearsals. Some, such as John Coltrane and Benny Golson, Jimmy’s contemporaries, friends and fellow saxophonists, would become world-famous. The infant Albert would sit at his toy drum kit, listening to them and taking it all in.

His maternal grandfather gave him the nickname Tootie on account of his love of tutti-frutti ice cream. It stuck, along with the love of music. He began studying the trombone but took up the drums seriously at 11 years old, and before long he was able to sneak in to local clubs to hear such famous bebop drummers as Max Roach and Kenny Clarke. The drummer with his brother Jimmy’s band, Charles “Specs” Wright, became his teacher.

While still in his teens, Tootie was installed as the house drummer at the Blue Note club in Philadelphia, where he played with such visiting stars as Thelonious Monk and Lester Young. In New York, on his 22nd birthday, he made his recording debut on Coltrane’s first album as a leader. Later that year, accompanying the singer and pianist Nina Simone on her first studio album, the laconic slap of his wire brushes on a snare drum propelled the irresistible shuffle of My Baby Just Cares for Me to its enduring popularity.

Settled in New York, in 1960 he joined the Jazztet, a popular sextet co-led by Golson and the trumpeter Art Farmer, with whom he appeared at the Newport Jazz festival. Among the albums to which he contributed were The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery (1960), Kenny Dorham’s Trompeta Toccata (1964), Herbie Hancock’s The Prisoner (1970), Yusef Lateef’s The Gentle Giant (1972) and Anthony Braxton’s In the Tradition (1974).

A long and rewarding partnership with the great Catalan pianist Tete Montoliu began when he spent part of the late 1960s in Copenhagen, as the house drummer at the Café Montmartre, where his appearances with Sonny Rollins and Dexter Gordon were preserved on film by Danish TV.

The Jazztet reunited in the 80s, and after the death in 1994 of Connie Kay, the Modern Jazz Quartet’s drummer, Heath took his place until the group disbanded in 1997. Of the six albums released under his own name, the last two, recorded in 2013 and 2014, were by a trio including the pianist Ethan Iverson and the bassist Ben Street. 

Among modern jazz drummers, Tootie was neither a dominant player such as Art Blakey or Philly Joe Jones nor an innovator in the vein of Elvin Jones or Tony Williams. But he was a refined, quietly sparkling stylist who had absorbed the tradition, mastered the techniques, and practised alertness and discretion in his own work.

In his later years he gave many drum workshops and was on the jazz faculty of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, before moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he spent his last decade. “Drummers have a big responsibility to be happy,” he said in an interview with Iverson. “We think we need to make everything happen, but it’s not true: everything is already happening, all you need to do is find your place.”

Percy died in 2005, followed by Jimmy in 2020. Tootie is survived by his second wife, the former Beverley Flood (nee Collins); his son, Jens, from his first marriage, to Anita Petersson, which ended in divorce; another son, Jonas, from a relationship with Margaret Liedberg; four stepchildren from his second marriage; and his sister, Elizabeth.

• Albert Heath, drummer, born 31 May 1935, died 3 April 2024: Story by Richard Williams: The Guardian: 

Weight loss influencer Mila De Jesus dies age 35

esus, a Brazilian influencer who gained a large social media following documenting her weight loss journey, has died age 35.

Her family confirmed the news of her passing in multiple statements shared to social media. On 13 January, her Massachusetts-based husband George Kowszik wrote in a Facebook post: “I am not really good with words and talking here… I lost my beautiful wife and my best friend yesterday that I love so much for her. I don’t know what to say.”

Two days later, her daughter Anna Clara addressed her mother’s passing in a statement shared to De Jesus’ Instagram. She shared a black and white photo of her mother, along with the caption translated from Portuguese to English: “I, Anna Clara, am posting this condolence note. We are very sad to hear of the passing of our beautiful mother. We appreciate all the prayers and condolences. Continue to pray for us. Thank you.”

De Jesus’ cause of death has not yet been revealed. In addition to her daughter Anna Clara, the influencer leaves behind three other children. She and her husband were married in September 2023.

The 35-year-old - who was born in Brazil and lived in Boston, Massachusetts - rose to internet fame after undergoing bariatric surgery in October 2017. Since then, De Jesus has documented her weight loss journey with her 64.9k Instagram followers. She was also known for her YouTube channel, where she shared makeup tutorials to her 103,000 subscribers.

According to an Instagram post shared last October, De Jesus revealed that for the past three months she has been battling psoriasis - a skin disease that causes a rash with itchy, scaly patches, according to the Mayo Clinic. She explained in her caption that the skin condition has affected 80 per cent of her body, showing pictures and video of her psoriasis on her stomach.

In November 2023, De Jesus shared two side-by-side photos highlighting her weight loss transformation. The first photo - which was taken in 2010, when she was 22 years old - showed De Jesus before undergoing gastric bypass surgery, while the second image pictured De Jesus age 35.

“13 years between one picture... six years since a decision that changed my life in so many ways,” she captioned the post, per English translation. “On one side Mila aged 22 and on the other Mila aged 35, how much we change huh, how we grow and how we learn. Pride girl pride.”

Along with her caption, she included the hashtags: “#bypass #beforeandafter #bariatrica” 

American-Born former sumo champion Akebono dies aged 54

TOKYO (Reuters) - Akebono, an American-born sumo wrestler who became the first non-Japanese yokozuna grand champion, died of heart failure this month, the U.S. Forces in Japan said on Thursday. He was 54.

Born Chad George Ha'aheo Rowan in Hawaii, Akebono entered the sumo world in 1988 and rose to its highest yokozuna rank in January 1993. He later became a Japanese citizen.

As the 64th yokozuna, Akebono won 11 championships while garnering celebrity status as a talent on Japanese TV shows. He became a professional K-1 wrestling fighter after retiring from sumo in 2001.

Akebono is survived by his wife, daughter and two sons. 

(Reporting by Mariko Katsumura; Editing by Chang-Ran Kim)  Story by Reuters: 

Cynthia Weil obituary

Unusually, the lyricist Cynthia Weil’s husband, the composer Barry Mann, came up with the line – “You never close your eyes any more when I kiss your lips” – that began a song destined to become one of the most beloved of all 1960s pop classics. She completed the thought: “And there’s no tenderness like before in your fingertips.”

Intoned by the sonorous baritone voice of the Righteous Brothers’ Bill Medley at a dead-slow tempo over the echoing canyons of a Phil Spector production, that dramatic opening drew attention so effectively that You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic in February 1965, going on to become the most played song on US radio of the 20th century.

For Weil, who has died aged 82, and Mann, it was one of a string of hits that placed them among the hottest songwriting teams of the era. From their cubicle in the offices of a New York music publishing company came On Broadway for the Drifters, Walking in the Rain for the Ronettes, We’ve Gotta Get Out of This Place for the Animals, I’m Gonna Be Strong for Gene Pitney, Just a Little Lovin’ for Dusty Springfield, It’s Getting Better for Mama Cass, and I Just Can’t Help Believing, a hit for BJ Thomas before becoming a staple of Elvis Presley’s repertoire.

Weil and Mann were one of three young New York couples in competition to produce hits for the artists of the day. They and their friends Carole King and Gerry Goffin were located at 1650 Broadway, the office of Aldon Music, down the street from the Brill Building, where the third pair, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, were quartered. The Weil-Mann marriage was the only one to outlast the decade and would be lifelong, despite a two-year hiatus in the 1980s when the experience of living and working together became suffocating.

Weil was born into a comfortably off family living on the Upper West Side of New York, the daughter of Dorothy (nee Mendez) and Morris Weil, the owner of a furniture company. Educated at the private Walden school, she spent a year at the University of Michigan before transferring to Sarah Lawrence college, a liberal arts institution in Westchester County. There she studied theatre, hoping for a career in Broadway theatre.

A meeting with Frank Loesser, the composer of Guys and Dolls, gave her the chance to pursue an interest in writing lyrics. While supporting herself with a job at a fashionable midtown boutique, she collaborated with several young writers. Soon she was setting her cap at Barry Imberman, a talented and charismatic 22-year-old from Flatbush, who had already co-written I Love How You Love Me for the Paris Sisters, a gauzy Spector-produced ballad that reached the Top 5 in 1961. As Barry Mann, he enjoyed his own top 10 hit that year with Who Put the Bomp, a witty take-off – with a lyric by Goffin – of the doo-wop songs he had grown up performing.

“My whole career really started because I was stalking Barry,” Weil would tell an interviewer. They married in October 1961, the month that the first hit song they wrote together, Bless You, made the Top 20, sung by the 17-year-old Tony Orlando. Weil had accepted Goffin’s advice to favour a direct appeal to a teenage audience over the verbal sophistication of the Broadway wordsmiths she so admired. 

Nevertheless the words she put to Mann’s melodies often went further than might have seemed commercially necessary, telling stories about the yearnings and dissatisfactions of urban youth. While writing the lyric of On Broadway, she would have been looking out on the sidewalks of the Great White Way, where the protagonist of the song – originally a female, since it was first recorded by the Cookies before being adapted for the Drifters – contrasts her dreams of stardom with the reality of pockets containing just “one thin dime”.

In Uptown, written in 1962 for the Crystals, another Spector group, the singer mourns her boyfriend’s plight: “He gets up each morning and he goes downtown / Where everyone’s his boss and he’s lost in an angry land … ” In Magic Town, the Vogues examined a similar situation and asked: “Where’s the good life they said could be found?” 

You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ was created when Spector sequestered the couple in a suite in the Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Boulevard, needing a song for his newly signed duo of blue-eyed soul singers, Medley and Bobby Hatfield.

The writers came up with a ballad to which Spector added the features – slowing it right down from the medium tempo they had stipulated and adding an emotional call-and-response section – that made it so distinctive. Those additions stretched it out to almost four minutes, a risky length for a disc aimed at pop radio stations. Spector’s solution was to print labels for the copies sent to radio DJs giving the length as just over three minutes. Once it had been heard, no deception was needed.

Adapting to changing fashions, Mann and Weil would write for a wide variety of artists, including Dolly Parton, who won a Grammy for Here You Come Again in 1977. Weil occasionally teamed up with other composers, collaborating with Tom Snow on He’s So Shy for the Pointer Sisters in 1980 and with Lionel Richie on Running With the Night in 1983. 

Mann and Weil were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987 and in 2010 they received an award from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They contributed separately and together to many TV shows and films, and in 2007 they wrote and starred in a Broadway show based on their songs and called They Wrote That?

Although Mann continued to make records under his own name, Weil declined the opportunity to build a performing career of her own.

She and is survived by her husband, their daughter, Jenn, and two granddaughters.

• Cynthia Weil, songwriter, born 18 October 1940; died 1 June 2023