EGN NEWS DESK
Angela Bofill, a New York-bred singer whose sultry alto propelled a string of R&B hits within the late Nineteen Seventies and early ’80s earlier than strokes derailed her profession within the 2000s, died on Thursday in Vallejo, Calif. She was 70.
Her loss of life, on the residence of her daughter, Shauna Bofill Vincent, was introduced in a social media put up by her manager, Rich Engel. He didn’t specify a trigger.
With a silky mix of Latin, jazz, adult-contemporary and soul, Ms. Bofill is greatest remembered for jazzy love songs like “This Time I’ll Be Sweeter” and funk-inflected pop numbers like “Something About You.” Armed with a three-and-a-half-octave vary, her voice was “as cool as sherbet, creamy, delicately coloured, mildly flavored,” as Ariel Swartley wrote in Rolling Stone journal in 1979.
Starting in 1978, Ms. Bofill logged six albums within the Top 40 of the Billboard R&B charts, with 5 of them crossing over to the Top 100 of the pop charts. She additionally scored seven Top 40 R&B singles, together with “Angel of the Night,” (1979) and “Too Tough” (1983).
Angela Tomasa Bofill was born on May 2, 1954, in New York City to a Puerto Rican mom and a Cuban father and grew up within the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, in Manhattan and within the West Bronx. She began writing songs as a toddler.
By her teenagers, she was already displaying off her vocal chops in a duo together with her sister Sandra and a gaggle known as the Puerto Rican Supremes, and in addition as a member of the distinguished All-City Chorus, a gaggle composed of prime high-school singers within the metropolis’s 5 boroughs.
After graduating from Hunter College High School in Manhattan in 1972, she created a buzz on the town’s membership circuit, singing within the band of the long run Latin Grammy winner Richie Marrero.
She studied on the Hartford Conservatory in Connecticut and graduated with a bachelor’s diploma from the Manhattan School of Music in 1976. Ms. Bofill labored with the Dance Theater of Harlem as a singer, author and arranger earlier than signing to GRP Records and releasing her critically acclaimed debut album, “Angie,” in 1978.
The album’s signature single, “This Time I’ll Be Sweeter,” a music beforehand recorded by Martha Reeves, Roberta Flack and others, rose to No. 23 on what was then referred to as Billboard’s soul chart.
In a profile in The Daily News after the album’s launch, the columnist Pete Hamill singled out one observe, “Under the Moon and Over the Sky” — certainly one of 4 songs on the album that Ms. Bofill wrote or co-wrote — as “a metropolis dream: lyrical and defiant, with the congas rolling by the center, and the sounds of Santeria add a thread of the unearthly.”
“You dream this type of music on subways,” he added.
At the time, Ms. Bofill was nonetheless residing within the West Bronx, the place the city decay spreading by the borough was all too obvious to her.
“It’s so unhappy,” she instructed Mr. Hamill. “Where I used to reside, the identical constructing that was flourishing with folks is now the pits. I used to go to a sweet retailer on the nook and hang around, and that’s gone. It appears like the traditional ruins of Rome.”
“Maybe I could be a part of the answer,” she added. “Even the poorest household has a radio. Even the poorest household can have music.”
Hailed as a uncommon Latin singer to cross over to the R&B charts, Ms. Bofill continued her ascent. Her follow-up album, “Angel of the Night” (1979), was a good larger important and industrial success, fueled by the singles “What I Wouldn’t Do (For the Love of You)” and “I Try,” which she carried out on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” together with the title observe.
Clive Davis, the Arista Records founder, lured her to his label in 1981.
By the mid-Eighties, Ms. Bofill was residing together with her husband, the nation music performer Rick Vincent, within the Napa Valley of California and elevating her child daughter. (The couple divorced in 1994; full details about survivors was not instantly out there).
In a 1985 interview with Ben Fong-Torres, a music author for The San Francisco Chronicle, Ms. Bofill mentioned motherhood had not solely grounded her emotionally — “I’m extra assertive; I do know what I need extra” — but additionally affected her musical skills. “I gained three notes on my higher register,” she mentioned. “If I’d had a boy, I’d have grow to be a bass, who is aware of.”
She launched her final studio album, “Love in Slow Motion,” in 1996. Her music profession ended when she had strokes in 2006 and 2007 that left her partly paralyzed and speech-impaired.
Still, Ms. Bofill hardly ever expressed remorse and tried to be lighthearted in speaking about her misfortunes in interviews. She recounted to The Washington Post in 2011 how she had already wearied of the trials of the street earlier than her first stroke.
“I requested God, ‘Give me break,’” she recalled in disjointed syntax. “Tell the reality, I want a break. I’m going, going. No break very long time. Over 26 years, no break. I prayed in the future, ‘God, I want a break.’ Bam! That’s when stroke hit.”
She added, “Next time, God, possibly one other form break.”
