Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll find out why a singer flew more than 4,000 miles to attend a concert in Bryant Park where he wasn’t the headliner. We’ll also get details on lawsuits filed by families of people who died in an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in Harlem a year ago.
The singer Ray Brown Jr. flew 4,500 miles, with a stop or two along the way, to be in New York City for an outdoor concert in Bryant Park tonight. He doesn’t have top billing, and he might not even sing a song. But he will say something to the crowd.
The organizers want him to talk about Ella Fitzgerald, because the concert is a tribute to her and she was his adoptive mother. He said he would keep his remarks short.
The headliner — the soprano Latonia Moore — and the event’s organizer, New York City Opera, wish he would talk a blue streak. Constantine Orbelian, City Opera’s executive director, is a longtime Fitzgerald fan. “Since I was a kid, I just would melt anytime I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing,” he said. He found a compatriot in Moore. Orbelian said that when he offered her the booking, she said, “Oh, that’s been my dream.”
New York City Opera? An Ella Fitzgerald tribute? City Opera was, after all, founded by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia as “the people’s opera” — and Orbelian’s agenda includes arranging to meet with Mayor Zohran Mamdani to discuss “cultural education for the entire city” and programs for children.
City Opera was where stars like Renée Fleming, José Carreras, Plácido Domingo, Samuel Ramey and Beverly Sills were noticed early in their careers (with Sills returning later as general director). But City Opera filed for bankruptcy protection in 2013 and has hit some financial downdrafts since.
Orbelian said the organization was now in “resurrection mode,” and he has plans. One is to commission an opera about Clarence B. Jones, a lawyer and speechwriter for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King who helped draft the famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
“And his clients were Ella and Sammy Davis Jr.,” said Orbelian, who is also City Opera’s music director and principal conductor.
Like Orbelian, Moore said that she had encountered Fitzgerald when she was young: An older sister brought home recordings of jazz greats like Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan.
“Ella’s voice to this day remains probably my favorite voice of all time across any genre,” Moore said. “No matter what she’s singing, she always had the joie de vivre in her voice.”
‘Ready to Pick His Brain’
Brown said that the concert tonight was the first Fitzgerald tribute he had been invited to, and Moore said that she was “ready to pick his brain.” I had already done that, asking him the obvious question about what life with Fitzgerald was like.
“I knew that my parents were musicians,” said Brown, who will turn 77 next week, “but they weren’t the Beatles or the Stones or James Brown or any of those people.”
But they were performers, and each had a different philosophy, he said. His father, the bassist Ray Brown, budgeted time for “personal practicing” after an early-morning round of golf and, often, a late-night rehearsal with his band.
And Fitzgerald? “He used to say, ‘Your mother has a natural talent. God gave her something he didn’t give a lot of people,’” Ray Brown Jr. said.
“She worked hard in her own way,” he said. “She would get the music that they were going to do. She would sit down and listen to it and look at the charts and just be able to take what was presented and do something fabulous with it.”
What about the long trip to New York? Brown lives in Uzhgorod, on the Slovakian border in western Ukraine. He moved there after meeting and marrying Nataliia Ilina, a cellist. “We were both working on a cruise ship,” he said. “I had a jazz quartet. She was playing in a string quartet.”
Before Russia invaded Ukraine more than four years ago, the couple lived in Enerhodar, a city in southern Ukraine that is home to a major nuclear power plant.
“The Russians took that pretty quickly” after the war began, Brown said, so they moved to Hungary and lived in Budapest for a year. “And then we went back to Ukraine.”
Weather
Today will be mostly sunny with a high near 90 and a chance of showers and thunderstorms later. Expect a mostly cloudy night with showers and thunderstorms likely and a low around 76. A heat advisory is in effect.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Aug. 15 (Feast of the Assumption).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“They’re in huge trouble.” — Margaret Stock, a lawyer who is considered an authority on U.S. immigration law, on the roughly 400 noncitizens who cast ballots in New Jersey after the state improperly registered them to vote. They are at risk of both criminal prosecution and deportation.
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Families sue the city over a 2025 Legionnaires’ outbreak
It has been a year since seven people died in an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in Harlem. On Thursday, the families of five of those people and others who became ill sued New York City, saying that cooling towers at two city-owned sites had gushed out dangerous bacteria.
The outbreak was traced to Harlem Hospital and a construction site for a city-owned health laboratory.
The lawsuits allege that the defendants — the city; NYC Health and Hospitals, which runs the city’s public hospital system; and subcontractors responsible for maintaining the cooling towers — “failed to properly test, treat and maintain” the towers. The suits also say that the defendants did not comply with city and state regulations or warn the public of the danger that the towers posed.
The suits were filed in State Supreme Court by Ben Crump, a lawyer representing the families, and the law firm Weitz & Luxenberg. Crump appeared yesterday at a news conference in Harlem alongside the Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist. They were joined by family members of those who died or were infected.
One, Lakisha Plowden, talked about the distress that her fiancé’s 6-year-old daughter had faced with the loss of her father, Bruce Scott, who contracted Legionnaires’ while working at Harlem Hospital. “She doesn’t want me to go anywhere outside,” Plowden said, “because the last time she saw her dad, he was leaving to go to the hospital and he never came back.”
Officials with NYC Health and Hospitals said last summer that the hospital’s cooling tower inspections appeared to have been up-to-date.
The lawsuits come a week after city officials announced that a Legionnaires’ outbreak on the Upper East Side was over. Seven people died and 92 were infected. That outbreak, like the one last year, was also tied to a cooling tower. Health authorities have not pinpointed which tower was to blame but they expect to do so in the coming weeks.
METROPOLITAN diary
Precarious parcel
Dear Diary:
I was biking through Midtown on a warm spring day. Next to me at a stop light was a man on a Citi Bike. He was carefully holding onto a full-size air-conditioner that was sitting on the bike’s basket.
A delivery worker on the bike next to him at the light pulled out a bungee cord from his insulated bag.
“You can have this,” the deliveryman said.
The light changed, and we all rode off.
— Rob Price
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you Monday. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post Flying In From Ukraine to Honor Ella Fitzgerald appeared first on New York Times.
