Salon.com > Jody Rosen

Curtis Mayfield

Fri, 07 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

American popular music in the rock era has been dominated by cult of personality -- by "superstars," flamboyant charismatics, grandiose gestures. Curtis Mayfield, who died the day after Christmas, 1999, at the age of 57, was an exception to the rule: a popular music titan who was never a pop star. Few musicians who sold as many records and exerted as great an influence as Mayfield had as modest a public persona.

He began making hit songs in the late 1950s. For the better part of the next two decades, he was at the forefront of popular music, a pioneer of both '60s soul and '70s funk. And his gritty but never nihilistic excursions into black pop make him the spiritual forefather of the more positive and uplifting strains of '80s and '90s hip-hop. But even at the height of his fame as a million-selling solo artist, Mayfield was a self-effacing, unlikely star.

To the extent that he projected an "image" it was that of a hip intellectual: His scraggly beard and thin-framed eyeglasses gave him a professorial cast, a fitting look for a musician whose songs bristled with intelligence and unashamedly brought the didactic urgency of gospel to the secular airwaves.

Quentin Crisp

Fri, 03 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

"England," Quentin Crisp was fond of saying, "is a mistake." The writer, performer and self-proclaimed "stately homo of England" was capable of speaking almost entirely in aphorisms, and his arsenal was well-stocked with impish dismissals of his native country, which he fled for Manhattan at age 72. Crisp relished the idea that he would die as he lived -- unconventionally, and in self-imposed exile. He said he hoped to be dropped in "one of those black plastic bags" and put out with the trash on the streets of his adopted East Village. Crisp would have appreciated the irony that when death finally got him, on Nov. 21 at age 90, he was back in England: not even in London, where he lived for most of his first seven decades, but in gruff Manchester, the heart of England's industrial north, and one of the least fabulous places on earth -- a cosmic "mistake" if there ever was one.

Charles Aznavour

Thu, 15 Jul 1999 16:00:00 +0000

"My shortcomings are my voice, my height, my gestures, my lack of
culture and education, my frankness and my lack of personality." So wrote the
26-year-old French singer and songwriter Charles Aznavour one night in
1950, drunkenly brooding over his stalled career. Nothing, he concluded,
could be done about his unorthodox voice, whose rasp and keening "Oriental"
quality were so different from the smooth, insouciant style of that era's
popular chansonniers. Nor was there any solution to the 5-foot-3 Aznavour's height problem: His one attempt to rectify the situation, when he wore
elevator shoes for a New York nightclub performance, had been a tragedy of clubfooted
slapstick. His frankness: another hopeless case. "I am incorrigible ... I say 'merde' to anybody, however important he is, when I feel like it."

Mel Torme

Sat, 12 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Inevitably, and a bit ironically, Mel Torme has been remembered this week as "The Velvet Fog," a sobriquet a disk jockey gave him in
1946 that he spent much of the rest of his life trying to shake. Torme
hated the nickname: It was a remnant of the early postwar years when, along with a clutch of other, lesser crooners, he was marketed to bobby-soxers as a baby-faced sex symbol.
He made a career-defining shift in the mid-1950s, forsaking syrupy pop
music and pioneering an urbane, cool jazz vocal style, but the Velvet
Fog moniker stuck with him for the next four and a half decades.
Eventually, Torme would grudgingly embrace his "albatross" -- he had
license plates that read LE FOG and EL PHOG -- and the truth is, as
nicknames go, the Velvet Fog wasn't half bad: It captured the feel of Torme's startlingly pure vocal timbre, a resonant softness that seemed to envelop every room he ever sang in.