Leo Branton, Jr., Angela Davis' Lawyer

Leo Branton Jr., Activists’ Lawyer, Dies at 91

Associated Press

Leo Branton Jr. with Angela Davis during her 1972 trial on murder, kidnapping and conspiracy charges. She was acquitted.

By WILLIAM YARDLEY

Published: April 27, 2013

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Leo Branton Jr., a California lawyer whose moving closing argument in a racially and politically charged murder trial in 1972 helped persuade an all-white jury to acquit a black communist, the activist and academic Angela Davis, died on April 19 in Los Angeles. He was 91.

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His death was confirmed by Howard Moore Jr., another lawyer who represented Ms. Davis.

Mr. Branton, a black veteran of World War II who served in a segregated Army unit, represented prominent black performers, including Nat King Cole and Dorothy Dandridge, argued cases on behalf of the Black Panthers and the Communist Party, and filed numerous cases alleging police abuse. But the case with which he was most closely associated was that of Ms. Davis.

“Friends of mine said we couldn’t get a fair trial here in Santa Clara County,” Mr. Branton told jurors in his final remarks, on June 1, 1972, in a courtroom in San Jose, Calif. “They said that we could not get 12 white people who would be fair to a black woman charged with the crimes that are charged in this case.”

Ms. Davis, a 28-year-old former instructor at the University of California, Los Angeles, was accused of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy in the 1970 death of a state judge who was shot with one of several weapons she had bought. The year before, Ms. Davis had lost her teaching job after she expressed support for the Communist Party. After the charges were filed, she became a fugitive, one of the F.B.I.’s 10 most wanted. She said the weapons had been stolen from her.

Her flight had been an important part of the prosecution’s case. But Mr. Branton, who had argued numerous cases of police abuse in the 1950s, urged jurors to view her behavior in the context of centuries of slavery, racism and abuse against blacks.

At one point he showed jurors a drawing of Ms. Davis bound in chains. Then he removed the drawing to reveal another showing her freed.

“Pull away these chains,” he said, “as I have pulled away that piece of paper.“

Some jurors cried, and after she was acquitted, so did Ms. Davis. She also hugged the jurors.

“Angela Davis Found Not Guilty by White Jury on All Charges,” said a headline in The New York Times on June 5, 1972.

Decades later, Mr. Branton said the case stood out to him not just because of the verdict or the distinctiveness of his final appeal, but also because of the defense’s preparations. During jury selection, defense lawyers hired psychologists to help them determine who in the jury pool might favor their arguments, an uncommon practice at the time, he said. They also hired experts who undermined the reliability of eyewitness accounts, which were important to the prosecution.

Charles Ogletree, a Harvard law professor and defense lawyer who met Ms. Davis in 1970 when she was being detained before trial and he was an undergraduate at Stanford, said in an interview on Friday that Mr. Branton had emphasized to the jury “who she was as a person.”

“He didn’t want her convicted because of her race or her politics,” he said.

Mr. Branton was born on Feb. 17, 1922, in Pine Bluff, Ark., the oldest of five children. He received a bachelor’s degree from Tennessee State University in 1942 before serving in the Army. He earned his law degree at Northwestern University in 1948 and soon moved to California.

In 1952, Mr. Branton represented 14 members of the California Communist Party who were accused of advocating the overthrow of the government through force. They were convicted in lower courts, but the convictions were vacated by the United States Supreme Court in 1957.

His survivors include three sons, Leo L. Branton III, Tony Nicholas and Paul Nicholas; a brother; a sister; and five grandchildren. Geraldine Pate Nicholas, his wife of more than 50 years, died in 2006.

Mr. Branton began representing Nat King Cole in 1958 and eventually helped him secure ownership of his master recordings from Capitol Records, said Mr. Moore, his fellow lawyer in the Davis case. Many years later, Mr. Branton represented the estate of Jimi Hendrix until he and others were sued by members of the Hendrix family. The suit was dropped in 1995.

Mr. Moore said he first met Mr. Branton when they represented different clients in civil rights cases in Mississippi in the 1960s. Mr. Branton was already well known for his work in Hollywood and before the Supreme Court.

“Leo was good in his seat and on his feet,” Mr. Moore said. “He could perform in a courtroom in a trial, and then he could write an excellent brief. Then he could do transactional work. Many lawyers can do one but not the others.”

Donald Shirley, Classical and Jazz Pianist

Donald Shirley, a Pianist With His Own Genre, Dies at 86

By BRUCE WEBER

Published: April 28, 2013

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Donald Shirley, a pianist and composer who gathered classical music with jazz and other forms of popular music under a singular umbrella after being discouraged from pursuing a classical career because he was black, died on April 6 at his home in Manhattan. He was 86.

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Donald Shirley around 1985. His works melded American and European traditions and exhibited a vast musical erudition.

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His death, which was not widely reported at the time, was caused by complications of heart disease, said Michiel Kappeyne van de Coppello, a friend who studied piano with Mr. Shirley.

A son of Jamaican parents, Mr. Shirley was a musical prodigy who played much of the standard concert repertory by age 10 and made his professional debut with the Boston Pops at 18, performing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor.

But when he was in his 20s, he told his family and friends, the impresario Sol Hurok advised him to pursue a career in popular music and jazz, warning him that American audiences were not willing to accept a “colored” pianist on the concert stage.

Thus derailed, Mr. Shirley took to playing at nightclubs and invented what amounted to his own musical genre. First as part of a duo with a bassist and later as the leader of the Don Shirley Trio, featuring a bassist and a cellist — an unusual instrumentation suggesting the sonorities of an organ — he produced music that synthesized popular and classical sounds. He often melded American and European traditions by embedding a well-known melody within a traditional classical structure.

In his hands, Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies,” for example, became an elaborate set of variations on a theme. In his arrangement — he called his works transcriptions — of George Shearing’s “Lullaby of Birdland,” the famous melody abruptly became a fugue. His recording of Richard Rodgers’s “This Nearly Was Mine,”from “South Pacific,” was Chopinesque.

Mr. Shirley’s music exhibited a vast musical erudition. He was drawn to indigenous American forms, by which he meant the blues, the work song, the Negro spiritual and the show tune, and his compositions referred to those forms. He was not inclined to improvise and disliked being referred to as a jazz musician.

“He had a love-hate relationship with jazz,” Mr. Kappeyne van de Coppello said.

Still, he was close to many well-known jazz figures, including Duke Ellington, in whose honor he wrote “Divertimento for Duke by Don,” a symphonic work that had its premiere in 1974, performed by the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra of Ontario. His other orchestral works include a tone poem inspired by James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake.”

His playing was virtuosic and lush, and in performance he often impressed critics with both his sound and invention. (His admirers also included Igor Stravinsky and Sarah Vaughan.) He eventually did make it back to the concert stage, though rarely to perform the standard classical repertory. He played Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” at La Scala in Milan; he played at Carnegie Hall with Ellington; he played Gershwin’s Concerto in F, accompanying the Alvin Ailey dancers, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. In the late 1960s, he made unreleased recordings of Rachmaninoff with the New York Philharmonic and Khachaturian with the Minneapolis Symphony.

“The silky tone and supple rhythmic flow of Mr. Shirley’s playing is just as artful and ingratiating as ever,” Peter G. Davis wrote in The New York Times of a concert at Carnegie Hall in 1971. “ ‘I Can’t Get Started’ heard as a Chopin nocturne, or ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ as a Rachmaninoff étude, may strike some as a trifle odd, but these — and everything on the program, in fact — were beautifully tailored to spotlight Mr. Shirley’s easy lyrical style and bravura technique.”

Donald Walbridge Shirley was born in Pensacola, Fla., on Jan. 29, 1927. His father, Edwin, was an Episcopal priest, and family lore has it that young Donald was playing the organ in church at age 3. His mother, the former Stella Gertrude Young, a teacher, died when Donald was 9. He studied music at the Catholic University of America in Washington.

He was married once and divorced. He is survived by a brother, Maurice, and a half-sister, Edwina Shirley Nalchawee.

Mr. Shirley made a number of recordings in the 1950s and early ’60s for the Cadence label, including “Piano Perspectives,” “Don Shirley Plays Love Songs,” “Don Shirley Plays Gershwin” and “Don Shirley Plays Shirley.” Later in the 1960s, he recorded with Columbia.

It was the founder of Cadence Records, Archie Bleyer, who insisted that Mr. Shirley be called Don, an informality that stuck with him throughout his career as a nettlesome reminder that he was unable to be known as the concert player he had always wished to be.

Jazz piano players, Mr. Shirley told The Times in 1982, when he was appearing at the Cookery in Greenwich Village, “smoke while they’re playing, and they’ll put the glass of whisky on the piano, and then they’ll get mad when they’re not respected like Arthur Rubinstein. You don’t see Arthur Rubinstein smoking and putting a glass on the piano.”

He added: “I am not an entertainer. But I’m running the risk of being considered an entertainer by going into a nightclub because that’s what they have in there. I don’t want anybody to know me well enough to slap me on the back and say, ‘Hey, baby.’ The black experience through music, with a sense of dignity, that’s all I have ever tried to do.”

Richie Havens, Folk Singer Who Riveted Woodstock

Richie Havens, Folk Singer Who Riveted Woodstock, Dies at 72

Hulton Archive, via Getty Images

The singer and guitarist Richie Havens opening the Woodstock Festival on Aug. 15, 1969.

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: April 22, 2013

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Richie Havens, who marshaled a craggy voice, a percussive guitar and a soulful sensibility to play his way into musical immortality at Woodstock in 1969, improvising the song “Freedom” on the fly, died on Monday at his home in Jersey City. He was 72.

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Rahav Segev for The New York Times

Mr. Havens at Madison Square Garden in 2006.

The cause was a heart attack, his agent, Tim Drake, said.

Mr. Havens embodied the spirit of the ’60s — espousing peace and love, hanging out in Greenwich Village and playing gigs from the Isle of Wight to the Fillmore (both East and West) to Carnegie Hall. He surfaced only in the mid-1960s, but before the end of the decade many rock musicians were citing him as an influence. His rendition of “Handsome Johnny” became an anti-Vietnam War anthem.

He moved beyond his ’60s triumphs to record more than two dozen albums, act in movies, champion environmental education and perform in 1993 at the first inauguration of President Bill Clinton. In 2003, the National Music Council gave him its American Eagle Award for his place in the nation’s musical heritage. Kidney surgery forced him to stop touring last year.

For the baby-boomer generation, he will live forever on the stage of the Woodstock festival, which he had the honor to open because the folk-rock band Sweetwater, the scheduled opening act, was stuck in traffic. Mr. Havens and his guitarist and drummer arrived by helicopter. They had been scheduled to go on fifth.

Mr. Havens started with “Minstrel From Gault” a few minutes after 5 p.m. on Aug. 15, 1969. He was originally supposed to play four songs, but other performers were late, so he played on. He later said he thought he had played for two hours and 45 minutes, but two bands followed him before sunset, around 8 p.m., so that was impossible.

But Mr. Havens played 10 songs, including Beatles songs. His impassioned improvisation was pitch perfect for the generation watching him, most of whom saw it later in a documentary on the festival. His clarion encore “Freedom” — made up on the spot and interspersed with the spiritual “Motherless Child” — sounded a powerful if wistful note.

“ ‘Freedom’ came from a totally spontaneous place,” Mr. Havens said.

Richard Pierce Havens was born on Jan. 21, 1941, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, where he grew up. He was the eldest of nine children. His father made Formica tables for a living and played piano with various bands. His mother worked for a bookbindery.

He began singing with street-corner doo-wop groups when he was about 12. At 14 he joined the McCrea Gospel Singers. He was recruited by a street gang, and he dropped out of high school. He spent the rest of his life educating himself, and was proud of the results.

In his late teens Mr. Havens migrated to Greenwich Village, where he wandered the clubs working as a portrait artist. After a few years he discovered folk music, and he was soon playing several engagements a night at clubs like Why Not? and the Fat Black Pussycat.

His hands were very large, which made it difficult to play the guitar. He developed an unorthodox tuning so he could play chord patterns not possible with conventional tunings. The style was picked up by other folk and blues singers.

“A person looking at him might think he was just flailing about,” the guitarist Barry Oliver said in the magazine Guitar Player. “But the way he flailed about was so musical, and it went perfectly with what he was portraying. He’s a good example of not having to have to be a technically perfect guitarist in order to come across.”

Mr. Havens signed with the influential manager Albert Grossman and got a record deal with the Verve Forecast label. Verve released “Mixed Bag” in 1967, which featured “Handsome Johnny,” which he wrote with the actor Louis Gossett Jr.; “Follow,” which became one of his signature songs; and a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman.”

In 1971, he released the only single that would put him in the Top 20, a soulful rendition of George Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun.” His music had a new burst of popularity in the 1980s, and he found success as a jingle writer and performer for Amtrak, Maxwell House Coffee and the cotton industry (“The fabric of our lives”). He acted in a few movies, including “Hearts of Fire” (1987), which starred Bob Dylan.

Mr. Havens devoted considerable energy to educating young people on ecological issues. In the mid-1970s he founded the Northwind Undersea Institute, an oceanographic children’s museum on City Island in the Bronx. He later created the Natural Guard, an environmental organization for children, to use hands-on methods to teach about the environment.

This seriousness of purpose showed in many areas of his life. “I’m not in show business,” he said. “I’m in the communications business.”

Carrie Lombardi, Mr. Havens’s publicist, said his family wanted to keep information about survivors private, but she did say that they include four daughters and many grandchildren. He was married many years ago.

Mr. Havens played many songs written by Mr. Dylan, and he spent three days learning his epic “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” A man who heard him practicing it stopped him on the stairs as he headed for the dressing room of a nightclub, and told him it was the best he’d ever heard the song sung.

“That’s how I first met Bob Dylan,” Mr. Havens said.

Jimmy Dawkins, Chicago Blues Guitarist

Jimmy Dawkins, Chicago Blues Guitarist, Dies at 76

By PETER KEEPNEWS

Published: April 18, 2013

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Jimmy Dawkins, a Chicago blues guitarist whose prodigious technique earned him the nickname Fast Fingers, and whose admirers included a number of guitarists far more famous than he was, died on April 10 at his home in Chicago. He was 76.

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Jimmy Dawkins in 2007.

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His death was confirmed by Bob Koester, the owner of Delmark Records, the Chicago blues and jazz label for which Mr. Dawkins made his first albums. Mr. Koester did not specify a cause.

Mr. Dawkins said he disliked his nickname, taken from the title of his first album, because he felt it typecast him as a high-energy, showy kind of player and gave short shrift to his affinity for the slower kind of blues. But it stuck.

A practitioner of the so-called West Side brand of Chicago blues, slicker and somewhat less hard-edge than the South Side style of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, Mr. Dawkins was an unusual kind of bluesman. As a guitarist, he was intense without being dramatic; as a singer, he was expressive without shouting; as a performer, he was, by choice, not much of a showman.

He never had a large following in the United States, in part because he decided early on to do most of his touring in Europe and Japan, where he found audiences to be more receptive. But among his fans were fellow guitarists like Buddy Guy, Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Reviewing a rare New York performance by Mr. Dawkins in 1990, at the blues club Manny’s Car Wash, Peter Watrous of The New York Times noted his introspective approach — “Whereas most bands play for the audience, Mr. Dawkins played for himself” — but praised him as “a master of rhythms” whose “playing reveled in the erratic.”

James Henry Dawkins was born on Oct. 24, 1936, in Tchula, Miss., and grew up in Pascagoula, a coastal town, where the easy-swinging music of New Orleans was as much an influence on his playing as the Delta blues. After teaching himself to play guitar, he moved to Chicago in 1955 and worked in a box factory by day while sharpening his guitar skills in blues clubs by night.

He was brought to Delmark Records by his fellow West Side blues guitarist Magic Sam. His first album, “Fast Fingers,” was released in 1969 and won the Grand Prix du Disque from the Hot Club of France. He recorded several albums in the United States and Europe and in the 1980s had his own record company, Leric.

Survivors include his wife, Verdia; six children; and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Dwike Mitchell, Jazz Pianist

Dwike Mitchell, Pianist Who Roamed the World, Dies at 83

By PAUL VITELLO

Published: April 18, 2013

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Dwike Mitchell, a classically trained pianist, performed for 56 years as half of the Mitchell-Ruff Duo, a celebrated ensemble that even by jazz standards was considered unusual — and not just because its other half, Willie Ruff, played the French horn.

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Dwike Mitchell (seated) and Willie Ruff.

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What set them apart was their missionary zeal. From 1955 to 2011, their thousands of concerts at schools and colleges and in foreign countries where jazz was taboo doubled as music appreciation classes for the young and uninitiated and came to define the duo at least as much as their professional work, which was formidable.

Raised in poverty and given their first musical training in the black church, Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Ruff “seemed to be under some moral persuasion to pass their experience along,” wrote William Zinsser, the author of the 1984 book “Mitchell & Ruff: An American Profile in Jazz.”

Mr. Mitchell, who died on April 7 in Jacksonville, Fla., at 83, was a virtuoso who worked with Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie. Billy Strayhorn, the composer of “Take the ‘A’ Train” and other songs made famous by Duke Ellington, wrote a piece for Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Ruff, “Suite for Horn and Piano,” one of the few he wrote for any artist besides Ellington after their long collaboration began.

Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Ruff, who doubled on bass and was also classically trained, met in the Army in the late 1940s, went their separate ways in pursuit of education under the G.I. Bill — Mr. Mitchell to a Philadelphia conservatory, Mr. Ruff to the Yale School of Music — and reunited in 1954 as members of Hampton’s band. The two struck out on their own in 1955, opening for major acts like Ellington and Count Basie.

They were never embraced by jazz critics. Some viewed their classical training as detrimental to their credibility as jazz artists. But their academic backgrounds propelled the introspective Mr. Mitchell and the kinetic Mr. Ruff to world fame in 1959, when Mr. Ruff, who had a part-time teaching job at the Yale School of Music, arranged for them to accompany the Yale Russian Chorus on a summer visit to the Soviet Union.  

The duo performed an impromptu jazz concert at Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow during the trip, in defiance of state injunctions against the bourgeois decadence of jazz. Time magazine called it the first unofficial concert by American jazz musicians in the Soviet Union. (Benny Goodman and his orchestra gave the first official one three years later, in a deal between the State Department and the Soviet Ministry of Culture.)

They reprised the feat in the People’s Republic of China in 1981, demonstrating jazz techniques at conservatories in Shanghai and Beijing — openly this time. Headlines called it another first: the first jazz performance in China after the Cultural Revolution. Mr. Ruff, now a professor at Yale and curator of the Duke Ellington Fellowship, which he helped create in 1972 to bring well-known jazz musicians there to teach, said in a phone interview on Tuesday that Mr. Mitchell was “my main musical inspiration.”

He said the cause of death was pancreatic disease. Mr. Mitchell, who lived for many years in Manhattan when he was not on tour, moved to Jacksonville last year after becoming ill. He had no known immediate survivors.

Ivory Mitchell Jr. was born on Feb. 14, 1930, in Dunedin, Fla., a small city on the Gulf of Mexico where his father drove a garbage truck. He got his first piano, a discard his father retrieved from a curb, when he was 3. By the time he was 5 he was picking out chords by ear and accompanying his mother, Lilla, when she sang solos for a church choir.

He wanted a name less obvious than Ivory for a piano player, but could not settle on one. His mother came up with Dwike, a compression of several family names, he told Mr. Zinsser.

His mother left his father when Dwike was 8. An only child, he found refuge in music.

In a blog essay posted on the Web site of The American Scholar before Mr. Mitchell’s death, Mr. Zinsser said Mr. Mitchell’s approach to broken-down pianos (which musicians sometimes encounter on tour) illustrated his approach to life. “I learned long ago that it does no good to complain,” Mr. Zinsser recalled Mr. Mitchell telling him. Instead, listen to the keys and put their flatness or sharpness to use. “You say, ‘What does it do?’ ” said Mr. Mitchell, sounding an imaginary clinker on a piano. “ ‘Will it do anything? Let’s check it out.’ ”