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      Dan Morgenstern, Chronicler and Friend of Jazz, Dies at 94

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      He wrote prolifically about the music and played an important role in documenting its history, especially in his many years with the Institute of Jazz Studies.Dan Morgenstern, a revered jazz journalist, teacher and historian and one of the last jazz scholars to have known the giants of jazz he wrote about as both a friend and a chronicler, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 94.His son Josh said his death, in a hospital, was caused by heart failure.Mr. Morgenstern was a jazz writer uniquely embraced by jazz musicians — a nonmusician who captured their sounds in unpretentious prose, amplified with sweeping and encyclopedic historical context.He was known for his low-key manner and humility, but his accomplishments as a jazz scholar were larger than life.He contributed thousands of articles to magazines, newspapers and journals, and he served the venerable Metronome magazine as its last editor in chief and Jazz magazine (later Jazz & Pop) as its first. He reviewed live jazz for The New York Post and records for The Chicago Sun-Times, as well as publishing 148 record reviews while an editor at DownBeat, including a stint from 1967 to 1973 as the magazine’s chief editor.His incisive liner-note essays won eight Grammy Awards. He was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2007 and received three Deems Taylor Awards for excellence in music writing from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, two of them for his books “Jazz People” (1976) and “Living With Jazz” (2004). He was involved — as a writer, adviser, music consultant and occasional onscreen authority — in more than a dozen jazz documentaries. Most decisively, he served from 1976 to 2011 as the director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University-Newark, elevating the institute into the largest repository of jazz documents, recordings and memorabilia in the world.“I don’t like the word ‘critic’ very much,” Mr. Morgenstern often maintained. “I look at myself more as an advocate for the music than as a critic,” he wrote in “Living With Jazz.” “My most enthusiastic early readers were my musician friends, and one thing led to another. What has served me best, I hope, is that I learned about the music not from books but from the people who created it.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hettie Jones, Poet and Author Who Nurtured the Beats, Dies at 90

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      She and her husband, LeRoi Jones, published works by their literary friends. After he left her and became Amiri Baraka, she found her own voice.Hettie Jones, a poet and author who with her husband, LeRoi Jones (who later became the incendiary poet and playwright Amiri Baraka), made her household a hub for Beat writers and other artists — but who was often described as a footnote in the rise of her famous spouse as “the white wife” he disavowed — died on Aug. 13 in Philadelphia. She was 90.Her daughter Kellie Jones confirmed the death.Raised in a conventional middle-class Jewish household in Queens, Ms. Jones was musical, rebellious and ambitious, uninterested in tweedy academia or suburban domesticity. She dropped out of graduate school at Columbia University, where she was studying drama, to work at The Record Changer, a jazz magazine, for $1 an hour. There she met a charismatic young poet named LeRoi Jones, and they fell in love.They hung out at the Five Spot on Cooper Square, listening to jazz musicians like Thelonious Monk. Though they were the rare mixed-race couple in Greenwich Village in the late 1950s, theirs was a mostly colorblind world, Ms. Jones thought — until it wasn’t.She recalled the day they were walking together and heard jeers and racial slurs from behind. She wheeled around to protest, but Mr. Jones held her back.Ms. Jones in the 1960s. She was musical, rebellious and ambitious, uninterested in tweedy academia or suburban domesticity despite her conventional upbringing.via Jones familyThe situation was more dangerous for him, she realized, struck by her own naïveté and ignorance. (At the time, more than half the country had laws criminalizing interracial marriage.) She also realized, as she later wrote, that “to live like this I would have to defer to his judgment.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Edna O’Brien: An Appreciation

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      Decades before Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, the Irish writer Edna O’Brien — who died at 93 on July 27 — provided her own searing portraits of an oppressive, violent society seen through the prism of female friendship.When we first meet them in 1960’s “The Country Girls,” Kate and Baba are teenagers, dreaming of a future beyond the confines of their rural Irish village and strict convent school. Its sequels — “Girl With Green Eyes” (1962), and the ironically-titled “Girls in Their Married Bliss” (1964) — follow them through their first taste of womanhood in Dublin, then to London, where they struggle to reconcile their romantic fantasies with the frustrations of real marital life.O’Brien was 29 when “The Country Girls” was published, living with two young sons and her then-husband, the writer Ernest Gébler, in a small house in a bleak south London suburb to which they’d moved, two years earlier, from Ireland. The novel took her only three weeks to write, the words having “tumbled out,” as she recalled in her 2012 memoir, “Country Girl,” “like the oats on threshing day that tumble down the shaft, the hard pellets of oats funneled into bags and the chaff flying everywhere, getting into the men’s eyes and their having to shout to be heard above the noise of the machine.”Although tame by today’s social mores, and praised on its publication by the English press, “The Country Girls” — with its candid portrayal of female sexuality and extramarital romance — sent shock waves through Ireland, where it was denounced by the church and banned by the Irish censorship board as “indecent.” Copies were even publicly burned.Overnight, O’Brien became Ireland’s most notorious exiled daughter, and its foremost chronicler of female experience. “No writer in English is so good at putting the reader inside the skin of a woman,” praised The Evening Standard of her fourth novel, “August Is a Wicked Month,” the story of a divorced mother aflame with desire. She “gave voice to a previously muzzled generation of Irish women,” declared the novelist Eimear McBride.O’Brien’s Ireland is “a land of shame, a land of murder and a land of strange sacrificial women,” as she describes it in her short story “A Scandalous Woman.” She describes how paternal violence — sanctioned by the misogynistic power of the Catholic Church — is woven into the fabric of life. Violence against women is an ordinary, everyday occurrence, as is their propensity to be punished for their sins.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gail Lumet Buckley, Chronicler of Black Family History, Dies at 86

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      She wrote two books about multiple generations of her forebears, including her mother, Lena Horne.Gail Lumet Buckley, who rather than follow her mother, Lena Horne, into show business, wrote two multigenerational books about their ambitious Black middle-class family, died on July 18 at her home in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 86.Her daughter Jenny Lumet, a screenwriter and film and television producer, said the cause was heart failure.Mrs. Buckley was inspired to chronicle her family history in the early 1980s, when her mother asked her to store an old trunk in her basement. It had belonged to Ms. Horne’s father, Edwin Jr., known as Teddy, and contained hundreds of artifacts that had belonged to relatives dating back six generations, to Sinai Reynolds, who had been born into slavery around 1777 and who in 1859 bought her freedom and that of members of her family.“There were photographs, letters, bills, notes,” Mrs. Buckley told The New York Times in a joint interview with her mother in 1986, as well as “speakeasy tickets, gambling receipts, college diplomas.”Those disparate paper fragments of history helped her structure “The Hornes: An American Family” (1986).Mrs. Buckley was inspired to chronicle her family history when she discovered, in an old trunk, hundreds of artifacts that had belonged to relatives dating back six generations.Alfred A. KnopfWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Robert Towne, Screenwriter of ‘Chinatown’ and More, Dies at 89

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      Celebrated for his mastery of dialogue, he also contributed (though without credit) to the scripts of “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Godfather.”Robert Towne, whose screenplay for Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” won an Oscar, and whose work on that and other important films established him as one of the leading screenwriters of the so-called New Hollywood, died on Monday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 89.His publicist, Carri McClure, confirmed his death on Tuesday. She did not cite a cause.Mr. Towne’s Academy Award was part of a phenomenal run. He was nominated for best-screenplay Oscars three years in a row; his “Chinatown” win, in 1974, came between nominations for “The Last Detail” and “Shampoo,” both directed by Hal Ashby. He had also worked as an uncredited script doctor on “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) and “The Godfather” (1972).He was widely regarded as a master at writing dialogue, though he was less gifted at meeting deadlines — he was notorious for delivering long, unshapely scripts way past their due dates. The film historian David Thomson called him “a fascinating contradiction: in many ways idealistic, sentimental and very talented; in others a devout compromiser, a delayer, so insecure that he can sometimes seem devious.”Mr. Towne speaking at the Writers Guild Awards in Los Angeles in 2016.Phillip Faraone/Getty Images North AmericaMr. Towne later directed a few movies, and occasionally appeared onscreen, but he left his most lasting mark as a writer. And although he remained active into the 21st century, his reputation is based largely on the work he did in the 1970s.Beginning in the late 1960s with cutting-edge movies like “Midnight Cowboy” and “Easy Rider” and running through “Raging Bull” in 1980, the New Hollywood was a pinnacle for American directors, who followed the French auteur model of making idiosyncratic, personal movies, and also for talented screenwriters like Mr. Towne and a small army of gifted actors, like Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman, who did not fit the old Hollywood mold.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Interview With the Poet Frederick Seidel, the Author of “So What”

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      Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).There isn’t one. The true answer is in a comfortable chair.What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?I’ve learned everything and not very much. Not recently, but when I began writing poetry the two poets who taught and influenced me the most were Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell. In the case of Pound, the incomprehensible music of it, the reach and the size of the ambition, and the way the poetry finds moments of great simplicity and sweetness. In the case of Lowell, so many different things I learned and imitated from him. And otherwise it’s been many poets, everybody. What books are on your night stand?I like that — “night stand” — old-fashioned. Right now: Yukio Mishima’s book “Patriotism,” a silly piece of work; “The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz”; the essays of Frank Kermode. Around as well are “Voyage in the Dark,” by Jean Rhys, and Joseph Roth’s novel “Flight Without End.” “The Little Auto,” a children’s book by Lois Lenski. “The Rest Is Noise,” by Alex Ross, and Louis Menand’s “The Free World.” “Skyfaring,” by Mark Vanhoenacker — I have a thing about speed, about flying, motorcycles, Formula 1, but especially motorcycles. I’ve written a lot of poems that I suppose are unusual for including motorcycles in them, with the emphasis on Italian ones, and a particular joy in the beauty and vast speed of them. I’ve spent a lot of time in Bologna near the Ducati factory, which made a racing motorcycle for me.Have you ever gotten in trouble for reading a book?I must have as a boy. I remember very much enjoying Maurice Girodias’s banned books in Paris that included Henry Miller and other distinguished authors. Girodias was himself a naughty delight. He printed the unprintable.What’s the last book you read that made you laugh?I suppose Philip Roth’s “Sabbath’s Theater.” My favorite of his novels, a work of genius. I’m not a big reader-laugher.The last book that made you furious?“The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz” made me furious, the thought of his tragic life. The first poems are marvelous, and how much trouble there is with the enormous rest of the book. Such a gifted man, and so terrible a life.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Real-Life Goosebumps: What Scares R.L. Stine, a Master of Fear?

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      This essay is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What do we fear? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page.It’s not common for someone’s career goals to include conjuring fear. But you could say that the definition of my life’s work as a writer of scary books has been to bring more fear into the world. I must admit I’m proud of the generations of people I’ve managed to frighten, providing a shiver, a chill, or perhaps a disturbing nightmare.As a result, people constantly ask me: What scares you? What are you afraid of?I don’t often talk about what scares me. But I’m going to tell you the two scariest moments of my life. (These are actual events, not fantasies from my “Goosebumps” series.)The first terrifying moment involves my son, Matt. When he was a little guy, maybe 4 or 5, I took him to the New York International Auto Show at the Javits Convention Center. There were thousands of people and hundreds of cars.And I lost him.I froze. Matt had vanished. I still remember my intense panic — something I’d never experienced. I spun around, staring from aisle to aisle. Finally, I spotted him standing beside a car. My heart pounding, I ran over to him. I shouted, “Matt! Matt! Are you OK?”And he said, “Where were you, Dad? I was about to call the manager!”I’d forgotten he was a New York City kid. I didn’t have to worry about him. If he had a problem, he’d call the manager.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More