Rigmor Newman, who began her career in Sweden as a singer and beauty queen and went on to become a fixture in the U.S. jazz world as a concert and film producer as well as a talent manager, died on April 26 in the Bronx. She was 86.
Her daughter, Annie Newman, said she died in a hospital from complications of Parkinson’s disease. Her death was not widely reported at the time.
Ms. Newman, who sang at the Nobel Prize banquet in Stockholm in 1957, arrived in New York in the early 1960s after marrying Joe Newman, a standout trumpeter in the Count Basie and Lionel Hampton orchestras.
She later managed the Nicholas Brothers, a gravity-defying dance duo that dazzled cinema audiences starting in the late 1930s, and became heroes to many Black Americans. Harold Nicholas of the Nicholas Brothers became her second husband.
Among her many professional incarnations, Ms. Newman served as the executive director of Jazz Interactions, a nonprofit organization promoting jazz throughout the New York metropolitan area, which Joe Newman helped found in the early 1960s.
After their divorce in the mid-1970s, Ms. Newman began a relationship with Mr. Nicholas in 1979. She also started managing Mr. Nicholas and his brother, Fayard.
As a blue-eyed Nordic woman who spent much of her life and career among Black musicians and performers, Ms. Newman found that race was often at the front of her mind, her daughter said.
She married Mr. Newman in 1961, at a time when interracial marriage was still outlawed in many states, and she often accompanied him on tour with Basie’s band, including bus trips through the Jim Crow-era South.
“She was absolutely aware of the symbolism,” Annie Newman said in an interview. “It felt very natural to her to do what she thought was right.”
A taciturn Swede, Ms. Newman was not given to grand pronouncements. Instead, she fought intolerance in subtler ways. Among her efforts to bring new exposure to her second husband’s dance duo, she helped produce “Nicholas Brothers: We Sing and We Dance,” a 1992 documentary about the duo that detailed their fight against the racism in Hollywood that eventually which eventually contributed to stalling their career.
The film, which won a CableACE Award from the National Cable Television Association, showcased the brothers’ wildly acrobatic tap dance routines, including one in the 1943 film “Stormy Weather” in which they bounded across table tops to the accompaniment of the Cab Calloway orchestra’s performance of “Jumpin’ Jive.”
Interviewed for the documentary, no less than Mikhail Baryshnikov called the brothers “the most amazing, amazing dancers I’ve ever seen in my life — ever.”
Ms. Newman also brought the Nicholas Brothers back into the spotlight by arranging theater, television and film appearances. The duo ultimately received Kennedy Center Honors in 1991 and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame three years later.
Rigmor Marta Alfredsson was born on May 9, 1938, in Udevalla, Sweden, the middle of three children of Alfred and Annie (Angelique) Alfredsson. Her father was an artist.
Growing up in Gothenburg, she was admitted to Sigrid Rudebecks Gymnasium, a prestigious secondary school. In 1957, she represented Sweden in the Miss Europe contest. She met Mr. Newman when the Basie band performed in Gothenburg and she asked for his autograph.
Over the years, Ms. Newman produced concerts in association with George Wein, the impresario who all but invented the modern jazz festival. As an independent producer, she mounted jazz, classical and dance performances at Town Hall, Symphony Space, Lincoln Center and Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall.
In the mid-1970s, Ms. Newman opened Storyville, a jazz club on the East Side of Manhattan, with Mr. Wein. She eventually took the venue over and booked acts like the drummer and composer Max Roach, the saxophonist Dexter Gordon and the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
In addition to her daughter, Ms. Newman is survived by a sister, Britt-Marianne Hayes and a grandson. Her son, Fredrik Newman, died in 2020. Harold Nicholas died in 2000.
In a career spent behind the scenes, perhaps Ms. Newman’s most public act was posing with Mr. Newman on the cover of his album “Counting Five in Sweden,” released in 1960. The photograph featured the couple seated and smiling beside a statue in front of an ornate building in Gothenburg while Mr. Newman plays with her left hand, as if demonstrating trumpet fingerings.
Given the racial climate of the day, the image was a symbolic triumph. “They posed together because that was her statement about her belief in civil rights,” Annie Newman said. “She showed what she believed through her actions.”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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