Harry Belafonte obituary: A US icon of music, film and civil rights

Harry Belafonte, who has died at the age of 96, was far more than just the "Calypso King".

He was a passionate civil rights activist who struggled to end segregation and a close confidant of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.

He was also the star of films that challenged racist boundaries and dated stereotypes; an entertainer blacklisted in the savage, suspicious frenzy of McCarthyism.

When the US music industry needed a legend to bring its super-egos together for 1985 charity single We Are The World, it was Belafonte who had the credibility and the respect to make it happen.

Yet he remained charming and self-deprecating to a fault, fond of observing that he was the world's greatest actor "based on the fact I've convinced so many people I'm a singer".

This came from the man with an Oscar and a fistful of Grammys; the artist who gave the world the first album to sell a million copies; the performer who could turn his talent to blues, folk, jazz, gospel and, of course, calypso alike.

An early promise

Born in Harlem on 1 March 1927, Harold George Bellanfanti Jr was the son of mixed-race West Indian immigrants. His racial lineage was complex.

"On both sides of my family, my aunts and uncles intermarried," he said. "If you could see my whole family congregated together, you would see every tonality of colour, from the darkest black, like my Uncle Hyne, to the ruddiest white, like my Uncle Eric - a Scotsman."

His mother Melvine was a housekeeper who worked long days and made him promise never to let injustice go unchallenged. "It stayed with me forever," he later recalled.

"Whenever I came upon opportunities that were not offered to us because of race, because of poverty, I always remembered her counsel. She faced a life of endless rejection. I just marvelled at the way in which she seemed to endure."

As a boy, he was sent to live with his grandmother in Jamaica to escape the grinding hardship of the Depression. There, he attended a British-style boarding school while back home his parents quietly separated.

Belafonte returned to the US in his early teens and joined the US Navy in World War Two - although he never saw active service or left the American mainland.

From Jazz to Calypso

Demobbed, he married his first wife, Frances Margaret Byrd, scraped a living as a maintenance man, and began hanging round the American Negro Theatre in his native New York. At first, they gave him work shifting scenes. Then they threw him bit parts. Eventually, he was playing the lead.

He was given a part in a mixed race company alongside two other aspiring actors - Marlon Brando and Tony Curtis. The play included a song that caught the attention of local talent spotters and he was asked to do a set at a jazz club called the Royal Roost.

Thinking he'd be the only performer, he did a double take as he walked on stage and spotted the house band. Charlie Parker was waiting with saxophone. Miles Davis was dangling his trumpet. "I had to clear my throat about 90 times before I knew what key I was in," Belafonte recalled.

Parker was a huge inspiration "playing in an incredible time for civilisation, when culture was leaping ahead". Belafonte was hired on the spot but eventually decided jazz didn't suit. "There was little room for lyrics or story," he said. "I had to think exclusively in terms of vocal gymnastics."

Soon he was picking up a Tony Award for his part in the musical revue John Murray Anderson's Almanac. He also starred in the successful film musical Carmen Jones, although his voice was inexplicably overdubbed by an opera singer.

Carmen Jones - starring Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge - was an international hit in 1954

Then came Calypso. In 1956, the album became the first in US history to sell more than one million copies. It spent 31 weeks at the top of the Billboard charts and made Belafonte a household name.

The first track was Banana Boat Song, better known as Day-O in reference to its famous chorus. It is a traditional Jamaican folk tune - and thus not technically a calypso - sung from the point of view of dock workers loading fruit on to ships. "Daylight come and me wan' go home" became his anthem.

A string of successful albums followed. His Christmas hit Mary's Boy Child sold a million copies in Britain alone, and Frank Sinatra recruited him to play at President John F Kennedy's inauguration.

Film stardom

A series of TV specials cemented his popular appeal and gave him the chance to introduce new acts to US audiences. They included a bright new star from Greece, Nana Mouskouri, and a shuffling harmonica player that Belafonte thought had talent - Bob Dylan.

As an actor, Belafonte turned down the lead in a film version of Porgy and Bess because he objected to what he considered to be the racial stereotyping of the role. In 1957, he did appear as an aspiring politician who threatens the white ruling class in Island in the Sun, a movie about interracial romance on a fictional Caribbean island.

The relationship between Belafonte's character and the film's leading lady, Joan Fontaine, was hugely controversial in pre-civil rights America. The film was a major success but Fontaine had to endure hate mail for her performance. Some of it was from the Ku Klux Klan.

Off screen, Belafonte fell for another of his co-stars, Joan Collins. The resulting affair coincided with the end of his marriage, but the relationship did not last. Soon after the film's release, he married for a second time, to former dancer Julie Robinson.

The coming of The Beatles was a turning point. Belafonte's style of music suddenly seemed dated and his record sales suffered.

Civil rights

He became increasingly involved in the civil rights movement. Blacklisted during the McCarthy era, he suffered racial taunts and refused to play in the American South, where segregation was in force.

He became close to singer Paul Robeson, who opposed colonialism in Africa as well as racial segregation in the US. He supported the Freedom Riders, who travelled on buses in the Southern states challenging racial discrimination, and he idolised Martin Luther King.

Belafonte supported Dr King financially - the legendary orator made only $8,000 a year as a preacher. He also stood bail when his idol was thrown in Birmingham City jail.

Belafonte, with Martin Luther King, toured the US supporting the civil rights campaign

With his friend Sidney Poitier, he entertained crowds campaigning for civil rights and stumped up $60,000 for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one of the major civil rights organisations.

When Petula Clark briefly touched Belafonte's arm during a TV special, the sponsors tried to cut the segment.

"I've always accepted the fact that there's a price to be paid for those who choose to step into the waters of social development, civil rights, fighting against racism," he later said.

"I would rather have not been blacklisted, and perhaps made enough money to get me a private plane - but if in order to achieve that end I have to sell my soul, the answer is no."

In later years, there was a memorable appearance on The Muppet Show, where he sang a spiritual with characters designed like African tribal masks. It became creator Jim Henson's favourite episode and Belafonte would later sing it at his memorial.

Mandela, Bush and Trump

In 1985, he was instrumental in organising the recording of We Are The World - with the cream of US singing and songwriting talent - in an effort to raise funds for famine relief in Africa. He was later appointed a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Children's Fund.

Three years later, he hosted a concert at London's Wembley Stadium to mark Nelson Mandela's 70th birthday. Mandela later brought him to South Africa, where he lent his weight to a campaign to highlight the dangers of Aids. He married for a third and final time, to photographer Pamela Frank, in 2008.

At various times, he opposed the US embargo on Cuba and its invasion of Grenada. He attacked black members of the Bush administration during the Iraq war, including Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, comparing them to subservient slaves in the home of a white master.

Powell blandly dismissed his remarks as "unfortunate". An incandescent Rice went further, retorting that: "I don't need Harry Belafonte to tell me what it means to be black."

Belafonte hosted Nelson Mandela's 70th birthday celebrations

He claimed he failed to see much difference between the Bush government and the 9/11 hijackers: Both, in his opinion, were terrorists. Convinced that global capitalism was a clear and present danger to individual freedom, he told the Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez that thousands of Americans supported his revolution.

When the Oval Office gained its first black president, Belafonte held him to the same standard as he did the others - condemning Barack Obama for failing to devote sufficient attention to the suffering of the poor. When Donald Trump was elected, he instantly became co-chair of the Women's March on Washington.

Belafonte remained a performer, film-maker and outspoken activist into his 10th decade. There were appearances alongside John Travolta in White Man's Burden and in Robert Altman's jazz-age drama Kansas City. In 2014, he was awarded an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement.

In 2018, he made a dramatic cameo appearance in Spike Lee's film BlacKkKlansman as an elderly witness recalling a horrific lynching that took place in his childhood.

It is an extraordinary performance. The young black actors playing the audience are seen clinging to his every word in the knowledge that the character - and the man playing him - directly connect them to their grandparents' fight for civil rights and the legend of Dr King.

Belafonte will be remembered as a great entertainer who declined the temptation to sit back and enjoy the fruits of his good fortune. He campaigned as his mother had once directed: Turning his fire on political and social injustice wherever he found it.

There were harsh words for those he thought stood in way of progress - which infuriated many. But there was also this wry admission that progress had been made, which perhaps contained a hint of pride in his own contribution to history.

"When I was born, I was coloured," he said. "I soon became a negro. Not long after that I was black. Most recently, I was African-American. It seems we are on a roll.”

First published at BBC News, April 25, 2023

SS Montevideo Maru shipwreck found 81 years after Australia's worst maritime disaster

By Brianna Morris-Grant

The Montevideo Maru was sunk by an American submarine off the coast of the Philippine island of Luzon.(AAP/Australian War Memorial, file photo)

The ship at the centre of the worst maritime disaster in Australia's history has been discovered more than 4,000 metres beneath the sea, 81 years after it sank.

Japanese transport ship SS Montevideo Maru sank with about 979 Australian troops and civilians on July 1, 1942, off the coast of the Philippines.

It was torpedoed by an American submarine, which did not know it was carrying prisoners of war and civilians captured in Rabaul.

In total, about 1,060 prisoners were lost, including 850 service members and 210 civilians from 14 countries.

The location of the wreck has remained a mystery for decades — until now.

SS Montevideo Maru was found after 12 days of searching in the South China Sea, by a team led by not-for-profit Silentworld Foundation, deep-sea survey specialists Fugro and supported by the Department of Defence.

The wreckage will not be disturbed, and no human remains or artefacts will be removed. The site will be recorded for research purposes.

Features found on scans of the wreckage, including the hold, the foremast, and the curve of the bow, match those found on drawings of the Montevideo Maru.  

Silentworld Foundation director John Mullens told ABC News Breakfast there were mixed emotions on board the ship when the discovery was made.

"We're looking at the gravesite of over 1,000 people," he said.

"We lost nearly twice as many [Australians] as in the whole of the Vietnam War, so it's extraordinarily significant for families and descendants.

"[The significance] is a mixture of the technical challenge, which is absorbing and motivating … but on the other side of it is the human side.

"When we first saw the images coming up of the ship no-one had seen for 80 years, since that terrible night, it was pretty emotional stuff.

"We had two people on board who had family members who were lost, so while on the one side there were cheers, on the other there were a few tears. It was very emotional."

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he hoped the discovery would bring "a measure of comfort" to the families of the victims.

Scans taken of the bottom of the ocean show the shipwreck. (Supplied: Silentworld)

"The extraordinary effort behind this discovery speaks for the enduring truth of Australia's solemn national promise to always remember and honour those who served our country," he said.

"This is the heart and the spirit of Lest We Forget."

'Hugely emotional' moment for families

On board when the wreck was discovered was Andrea Williams, who lost both her grandfather and her great uncle in the disaster.

Ms Williams is a founding member of the Rabaul and Montevideo Maru Society, which represents the interests of the descendants.

"Today is an extraordinarily momentous day for all Australians connected with this tragic disaster," Ms Williams said.

Andrea Williams founded the Montevideo Maru Society to represent those who lost family in the disaster. (Supplied: Silentworld )

"Having had a grandfather and great-uncle as civilian internees on Montevideo Maru always meant the story was important to me, as it is to so many generations of families whose men perished.

"I could never understand why it was not a more powerful part of our Australian WWII history.

"Being part of the Silentworld team that has found the wreck has been both hugely emotional and also fulfilling."

Australian Army Chief Lieutenant General Simon Stuart said those involved had met a "terrible fate at sea".

"Today we remember their service, and the loss of all those aboard, including the 20 Japanese guards and crew, the Norwegian sailors and the hundreds of civilians from many nations," he said.

"I want to thank the Silentworld team and the dedicated researchers, including the Unrecovered War Casualties team at army, who have never given up hope of finding the final resting place of the Montevideo Maru."

"A loss like this reaches down through the decades and reminds us all of the human cost of conflict."

Letters from long-dead loved ones

The Japanese prisoner of war ship was transporting Australians and others to Hainan Island when it was sunk by US Navy submarine the USS Sturgeon.

The Sturgeon fired its four torpedoes at the Montevideo Maru. Lifeboats onboard the vessel were launched, but all capsized and the ship sank in less than 11 minutes.

Many families were not told of their relatives' deaths for years. 

Also on board the Montevideo Maru were Australian soldiers who had been stationed with Lark Force at Rabaul. They were captured by conquering Japanese soldiers just weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbour.

Months later, hundreds of handwritten letters written by the men were dropped from the skies by Japanese bombers over Port Moresby.

By the time they reached their intended destination, all of the authors were dead.

Among them was Ronald Freeman, a gunner with the 17th anti-tank battery in Rabaul, who signed off a letter to his pregnant wife Dorothy and his two-year-old daughter Vicki: "I love you, I love. Kiss Vicki for me. Your loving husband."

First published at ABC Website, April 22, 2023

Ahmad Jamal, measured maestro of the jazz piano, dies at 92

By Martin Johnson

Ahmad Jamal, pictured in 2016. Rémy Gabalda/AFP via Getty Images

For most jazz performers, a song is part of a performance. For Ahmad Jamal, each song was a performance. Over the course of a remarkable eight-decade career, Jamal, who passed away Sunday at the age of 92, created stellar recordings both as an ambitious youth and a sagely veteran.

Jamal's death was confirmed by his daughter, Sumayah Jamal. He died Sunday afternoon in Ashley Falls, Mass., after a battle with prostate cancer.

Jamal's influence and admirers spread far and wide in jazz. For instance, Miles Davis found enormous inspiration in his work: In his 1989 autobiography, Miles, the legendary trumpeter said that Jamal "knocked me out with his concept of space, his lightness of touch, his understatement, and the way he phrases notes and chords and passages." Miles went on to record Jamal's "New Rhumba" on his classic 1957 recording Miles Ahead.

His contemporary admirers are just as fervent. Pianist Ethan Iverson, a founding member of the exceptionally popular trio The Bad Plus, said, "All of his pieces are theatrical and contained. In some ways the Bad Plus was an extension of his classic trio."

Pianist Vijay Iyer was just as adamant. "His sense of time is that of a dancer, or a comedian. His left hand stays focused, and his right hand is always in motion, interacting with, leaning on, and shading the pulse.

"He bends any song to his will, always open to the moment and always pushing the boundaries, willing to override whatever old chestnut he's playing in search of something profoundly alive."

Jamal was born Frederick Russell Jones in Pittsburgh on July 2, 1930. When he was 3 years old, his uncle challenged him to duplicate what he was playing on the piano, and the youngster actually could. He began formal studies of the piano at the age of 7 and quickly took on an advanced curriculum. He told Eugene Holley Jr. of Wax Poetics in a 2018 interview, "I studied Art Tatum, Bach, Beethoven, Count Basie, John Kirby, and Nat Cole. I was studying Liszt. I had to know European and American classical music. My mother was rich in spirit, and she led me to another rich person: my teacher, Mary Cardwell Dawson, who started the first African-American opera company in the country."

Jamal grew up in a Pittsburgh community that was rich in jazz history. His neighbors included the legendary pianists Earl Hines, Erroll Garner and Mary Lou Williams. As a youth, Jamal delivered newspapers to the household of Billy Strayhorn. When Jamal began his professional career at the age of 14, Art Tatum, an early titan of the keyboard, proclaimed him "a coming great." During a tour stop in Detroit, Jamal, who was born to Baptist parents, converted to Islam and changed his name.

His fluency in European classical music — Jamal disdained the term jazz, preferring American classical music as a descriptor for his work — was a highlight of his style. In a 2001 New York Times article, Ben Waltzer, a pianist and curriculum director at the University of Chicago, noted, "when we listen to his music, fragments from Ravel's 'Bolero' and Falla's 'Ritual Fire Dance' mingle with the blues, standard songs, melodic catch-phrases from bebop, and the 'Marseillaise.'"

This may not seem remarkable today, when most jazz musicians are conservatory-trained and well versed in art music, from Louis Armstrong to Iannis Xenakis and from Laurie Anderson to John Zorn. But Jamal was a youth when there were significant barriers to African Americans entering the academy. "In Pittsburgh, we didn't separate the two schools," he told Waltzer.

Jamal's style went well beyond a diverse range of source material; he expanded the borders and depth of improvisation. "Jazz improvisation is generally understood as a narrative melodic line composed spontaneously in relation to a song's harmonic structure," wrote Waltzer. "Jamal broadened this concept by using recurring riffs, vamps and ostinatos — tropes of big-band jazz that were employed as background accompaniment for featured instrumentalists — not just to frame solos, as many musicians did, but as the stuff of improvisation itself."

Ahmad Jamal, April 2010 (Paul CHARBIT/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Poinciana live! on YouTube

In the early and mid-'50s, Jamal led various trios and quartets, before settling into a trio setting with bassist Israel Crosby and drummer Vernel Fournier. In 1958, they released the landmark jazz recording, At The Pershing: But Not For Me. It is one of the most popular and influential recordings in jazz history. It stayed on the Billboard Top 200 album chart for an astounding 108 weeks.

Iverson said of the title track, "The classic Jamal Trio with Crosby and Fournier is one of the greatest groups of all time. 'But Not For Me' is a perfect three minutes. Literally perfect. There's nothing better."

The trio's version of "Poinciana" sparked the popularity of the recording, and it became a signature tune for Jamal. He told Wax Poetics, "It was a combination of things: Israel Crosby's lines, what I was playing, and Vernel—if you listen to his work on "Poinciana," you'd think it was two drummers!"

Jamal visited Africa in 1959. Upon his return to Chicago, he had a failed venture as a club owner, then took a hiatus from recording in the early '60s. By the middle of the decade, he'd resumed recording and touring. His 1969 album, The Awakening, was widely hailed for its rendering of jazz standards and originals.

His music was found in the soundtracks of movies like M*A*S*H and The Bridges of Madison County. In a 1985 episode of NPR's Piano Jazz, Jamal told host and fellow piano legend Marian McPartland that his favorite recording was "the next one." Then he allowed that the Pershing "was close to perfection." He also said that he continued to focus on ballads. "They are difficult to play," he told her, "it takes years of living to read them properly." In 1994, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master Fellowship.

He continued making stellar recordings into the past decade. His 2017 release, Marseille, was noted in the NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll.

The recording featured all of the hallmarks that made Jamal a great pianist and bandleader, and the drummer Herlin Riley, like Fournier, was from New Orleans. It prompted Iyer to note that Jamal's lineage of New Orleanian drummers — Fournier, Idris Muhammad and Riley — suggests rhythm as a ritual or cultural cornerstone.

Jamal's work continued to impress other pianists. In 2014 Matthew Shipp told NPR's Karen Michel, "His imagination is so deep. One of the joys of listening to him is to see how his fertile imagination interacts with the material he does pick and recombines it into a musical entity that we've never heard. I mean, he is a musical architect of the highest order."

Waltzer added, "innovation in jazz can be subtle. Rather than reaching outward to create an overtly revolutionary sound, Mr. Jamal explored the inner workings of the small ensemble to control, shape and dramatize his music."

First published at NPR, April 16, 

Principal Guest Conductor Emeritus: Sir John Eliot Gardiner

The Philharmonia Orchestra are thrilled to announce the appointment of Sir John Eliot Gardiner as Principal Guest Conductor Emeritus from the 2023/24 season.

Following a gap of 23 years, the Orchestra was delighted to reignite its relationship with Sir John Eliot Gardiner during the Covid lockdowns with a streamed performance of Elgar’s Enigma Variations. A recent concert at the Royal Festival Hall, conducted by Sir John Eliot, had critics and audiences celebrating the partnership and exceptional rapport between the conductor and Orchestra. These recent successes moved the musicians of the Philharmonia to create a more formal relationship by bestowing the unprecedented title of Principal Guest Conductor Emeritus on Sir John Eliot, in the week of his 80th birthday.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner is an international leader in today’s musical life. Regarded as one of the world’s most respected and boundary-redefining musicians, he is consistently at the forefront of vivid and enlightened interpretation, working regularly with the world’s foremost orchestras. Gardiner’s work as Artistic Director of his Monteverdi Choir & Orchestra, English Baroque Soloists and Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique has marked him out as a pioneer of historically informed performance. He regularly guests conducts leading orchestras such as the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Berliner Philharmoniker. His many hundreds of recordings lay testimony to the extraordinary range and breadth of his artistry.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner said: “I’m greatly honoured to accept this title which the Philharmonia have conferred on me. Re-establishing contact with this magnificent orchestra feels like a wonderful homecoming. It’s been a delight to re-encounter the translucent warmth of the legendary Philharmonia string sound, to rediscover and admire the individual character and musicality of their woodwind principals and the burnished sonority of their brass section. I am excited by this opportunity to renew and deepen my fruitful association with this flexible and open-minded body of musicians, and the chance it gives to cement the links with them by developing fresh ways to explore both familiar and unchartered areas of the symphonic repertoire”.

Sir John Eliot will begin his tenure with one concert and an international tour in the 2023/24 season; the following three seasons will then see the relationship deepen, with three RFH programmes per season and further tours, allowing the development of his own programmatic ideas, including the introduction of new repertoire.

Thorben Dittes, Philharmonia Chief Executive said: “I’m thrilled that Sir John Eliot Gardiner will be part of the Philharmonia family. With this new relationship the Orchestra will be in the unique position to draw on Sir John Eliot’s distinguished musical insight and unrivalled curiosity to shape new distinctive programming strands which will build on our history of excellence and innovation.”

Kira Doherty, President and Second Horn said: “It will be a huge pleasure and honour to welcome Sir John Eliot Gardiner back to the Philharmonia in the new role of Principal Guest Conductor Emeritus. Not only is Gardiner one of the most eminent and celebrated conductors of his time, he is also a passionate and vocal advocate for the arts. A man of towering talent and unshakable musical conviction, we look forward immensely to working together and building an artistic vision that will see the Orchestra pushed to new musical heights”.

This announcement comes ahead of the 2023/24 season programme launch on 24 April, which will include a further exciting addition to the Philharmonia musical family.

First published at Philharmonia website, April 19, 2023