RIP Angela Bofill

[carlo]

Her passing was announced today on her official Facebook page...

"ON BEHALF OF MY DEAR FRIEND ANGIE, I AM SADDENED TO ANNOUNCE HER PASSING ON THE MORNING OF JUNE 13TH. THE FUNERAL WILL BE HELD AT ST. DOMINCKS CHURCH IN VALEJO CA. ON JUNE 28TH AT 1:00pm."

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100044180243805

[carlo]

RIP Angela. My favourite song of hers...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKUY4dL5n0s

[Motown Eddie]

Her passing was announced today on her official Facebook page...

"ON BEHALF OF MY DEAR FRIEND ANGIE, I AM SADDENED TO ANNOUNCE HER PASSING ON THE MORNING OF JUNE 13TH. THE FUNERAL WILL BE HELD AT ST. DOMINCKS CHURCH IN VALEJO CA. ON JUNE 28TH AT 1:00pm."

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100044180243805

Awful News!! Thanks for sharing Carlo. Rest In Power, Music, Peace & Soul Angela Bofill.

[Motown Eddie]

Her passing was announced today on her official Facebook page...

"ON BEHALF OF MY DEAR FRIEND ANGIE, I AM SADDENED TO ANNOUNCE HER PASSING ON THE MORNING OF JUNE 13TH. THE FUNERAL WILL BE HELD AT ST. DOMINCKS CHURCH IN VALEJO CA. ON JUNE 28TH AT 1:00pm."

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100044180243805

I've tried looking around for confirmation of Angela Bofill's passing however I can't find anything about it on CNN, Entertainment Weekly or anywhere else. It might be a post from Ms. Bofill herself referring to a Friend of hers named Angie. We'll See.

[sansradio]

People, I think this is unfortunately another misunderstanding, or possibly a "death hoax"/hacking. Miss Bofill doesn't live anywhere near Vallejo. It may have been a friend with the same name. Let's wait until this is substantiated elsewhere...

[sansradio]

Now I’m hearing that her manager has confirmed on Facebook…

[sophisticated_soul]

Yes it has been confirmed. Rest In Peace Angela Bofill. Thank you for the music.

[milven]

Yes, it seems to be true.

https://jang.com.pk/en/14037-i-try-s...way-at-70-news

It is just hard to believe since there was a death hoax about her one other time. That time, her manager informed her of the hoax, and she thanked her fans for reaching out, but told them that she was very much on the right side of the grass.

[Motown Eddie]

I saw the confirmations from her Family & and her Manager that indeed, Angela Bofill has passed on. RIP.

[carlo]

Someone shared this interview on her Facebook page. It's from last year...

https://50bold.com/angela-bofill-wil...ZieXRlcw&amp=1

[daviddesper]

Angela had a unique voice and was one of many female singers that Clive Davis signed to his Arista label. Sadly her timing was such that she was always in the shadow of Whitney, Dionne, and Aretha, so they got most of the sales during that period. She deserved to be a bigger star. So sorry to hear of her passing.

[carlo]

TV ONE will be re-airing their episode of Angela Bofill's Unsung, this Sunday at 11 pm EST.

[reese]

I was pleased to see that they included Angela on last Sunday's SUNDAY MORNING segment when they paid tribute to those who had passed recently. For the piece, they played THIS TIME I'LL BE SWEETER.

[sansradio]

I was pleased to see that they included Angela on last Sunday's SUNDAY MORNING segment when they paid tribute to those who had passed recently. For the piece, they played THIS TIME I'LL BE SWEETER.

I caught that, too. It warmed my heart, since none of her hometown papers [NYC] gave her any shine, save the Times, finally, a couple of days ago. [Incidentally, if anyone has an NYT subscription, would you kindly copy-and-paste their obit here?]

[carlo]

I caught that, too. It warmed my heart, since none of her hometown papers [NYC] gave her any shine, save the Times, finally, a couple of days ago. [Incidentally, if anyone has an NYT subscription, would you kindly copy-and-paste their obit here?]

Angela Bofill, R&B Hitmaker With a Silky Voice, Dies at 70

Starting in the late 1970s, she scored multiple hit singles, including “This Time I’ll Be Sweeter” and “I Try,” but a pair of strokes in the 2000s ended her career.

By Alex Williams, New York Times

Angela Bofill, a New York-bred singer whose sultry alto propelled a string of R&B hits in the late 1970s and early ’80s before strokes derailed her career in the 2000s, died on Thursday in Vallejo, Calif. She was 70.
Her death, at the home of her daughter, Shauna Bofill Vincent, was announced in a social media post by her manager, Rich Engel. He did not specify a cause.

With a silky blend of Latin, jazz, adult-contemporary and soul, Ms. Bofill is best 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 range, her voice was “as cool as sherbet, creamy, delicately colored, mildly flavored,” as Ariel Swartley wrote in Rolling Stone magazine in 1979.
Starting in 1978, Ms. Bofill logged six albums in the Top 40 of the Billboard R&B charts, with five of them crossing over to the Top 100 of the pop charts. She also scored seven Top 40 R&B singles, including “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 mother and a Cuban father and grew up in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, in Manhattan and in the West Bronx. She started writing songs as a child.

By her teens, she was already showing off her vocal chops in a duo with her sister Sandra and a group called the Puerto Rican Supremes, and also as a member of the prestigious All-City Chorus, a group composed of top high-school singers in the city’s five boroughs.

After graduating from Hunter College High School in Manhattan in 1972, she created a buzz on the city’s club circuit, singing in the band of the future Latin Grammy winner Richie Marrero.

She studied at the Hartford Conservatory in Connecticut and graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music in 1976. Ms. Bofill worked with the Dance Theater of Harlem as a singer, writer and arranger before 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 song previously recorded by Martha Reeves, Roberta Flack and others, rose to No. 23 on what was then known as Billboard’s soul chart.

In a profile in The Daily News after the album’s release, the columnist Pete Hamill singled out one track, “Under the Moon and Over the Sky” — one of four songs on the album that Ms. Bofill wrote or co-wrote — as “a city dream: lyrical and defiant, with the congas rolling through the middle, and the sounds of Santeria add a thread of the unearthly.”
“You dream this kind of music on subways,” he added.

At the time, Ms. Bofill was still living in the West Bronx, where the urban decay spreading through the borough was all too apparent to her.

“It’s so sad,” she told Mr. Hamill. “Where I used to live, the same building that was flourishing with people is now the pits. I used to go to a candy store on the corner and hang out, and that’s gone. It looks like the ancient ruins of Rome.”
“Maybe I can be part of the solution,” she added. “Even the poorest family has a radio. Even the poorest family can have music.”
Hailed as a rare 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 an even bigger critical and commercial success, fueled by the singles “What I Wouldn’t Do [[For the Love of You)” and “I Try,” which she performed on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” along with the title track.

Clive Davis, the Arista Records founder, lured her to his label in 1981.
By the mid-1980s, Ms. Bofill was living with her husband, the country music performer Rick Vincent, in the Napa Valley of California and raising her baby daughter. [[The couple divorced in 1994; complete information about survivors was not immediately available).
In a 1985 interview with Ben Fong-Torres, a music writer for The San Francisco Chronicle, Ms. Bofill said motherhood had not only grounded her emotionally — “I’m more assertive; I know what I want more” — but also affected her musical abilities. “I gained three notes on my upper register,” she said. “If I’d had a boy, I’d have become a bass, who knows.”
She released her last studio album, “Love in Slow Motion,” in 1996. Her music career ended when she had strokes in 2006 and 2007 that left her partly paralyzed and speech-impaired.
Still, Ms. Bofill rarely expressed regret and tried to be lighthearted in talking about her misfortunes in interviews. She recounted to The Washington Post in 2011 how she had already wearied of the rigors of the road before her first stroke.

“I asked God, ‘Give me break,’” she recalled in disjointed syntax. “Tell the truth, I need a break. I’m going, going. No break long time. Over 26 years, no break. I prayed one day, ‘God, I need a break.’ Bam! That’s when stroke hit.”
She added, “Next time, God, maybe another kind break.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/17/a...fill-dead.html

[sansradio]

^Thank you so much. Love that sherbet simile-- so apt.

Her passing has really affected me deeply--I found myself in tears as I listened to her body of work the night the news hit.

[GrtGzu]

Wow! I hadn't heard of this until now but I knew she had been ill for a while..

I ruined a few needles spinning her tunes on vinyl... But it was worth it...

Was just getting ready to crank up her tunes on YouTube....

LOVED her!!!

[sansradio]

Bump: Angela's hometown [NYC] memorial service will be held on July 22nd at Lincoln Center's Rose Hall. Here's a link to her daughter's GoFundMe to help defray the costs of the service:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/contribut...urce=copy_link