Word: vienna-born
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...EUROPEANS CAN SAY they changed American jazz. But with his innovative electronic-piano playing and composing, most notably for Miles Davis in the 1960s, Vienna-born keyboardist Joe Zawinul pioneered the electrified genre of jazz fusion. He wrote the title song on Davis' first electric-jazz album, In a Silent Way, and later co-founded the seminal jazz-rock band Weather Report, which he led for 15 years. Zawinul...
DIED. Elliot Welles, 79, Vienna-born Holocaust survivor who, as longtime director of the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League's task force on war criminals, became one of the most influential and relentless Nazi hunters in the U.S.; in New York City. Welles got his start seeking to avenge the murder of his mother, who had been executed in the woods near Riga, Latvia, where his family had recently been deported. Haunted by the face and name of the officer who ordered her transport, Welles, with the help of the Justice Department, tracked him down in Germany--where...
DIED. Rudolf Flesch, 75, unambiguous champion of plain English; of congestive heart failure; in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. Vienna-born, he emigrated to the U.S. at 27 and wrote more than 20 books about language and learning, most notably the 1955 best seller Why Johnny Can't Read, which attacked the flash-card school of reading instruction and sparked a resurgence of the more traditional phonetic method of sounding out words syllable by syllable. A readability test devised by Flesch spurred a generation of journalists to write short, uncomplicated sentences but caused critics to complain that his tenets shackled richness...
DIED. ERNEST GOLD, 77, Vienna-born Oscar-winning composer who wrote scores for It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Exodus, among other films; of a stroke; in Santa Monica, Calif. Gold broke into Hollywood in the mid-1940s, writing music for low-budget movies for Columbia Pictures...
Popular wisdom holds that virtuosity on any instrument is a hard-won proposition, the product of years of painstaking study and practice. Despite the evidence of such performers as the pathbreaking American Maud Powell around the turn of the century or the brilliant Vienna-born Erica Morini, now 84 and in retirement, it also holds that the violin is properly a male preserve. But with age comes maturity, not mastery, and instruments are no respecters of gender. Although still young, today's crop of women violinists can already be judged on accomplishment rather than promise...