latin music

NEW YORK — David Clayton-Thomas, the lead singer of Blood, Sweat & Tears, whose husky, high-strung tenor on “Spinning Wheel,” “And When I Die” and other hits helped make the so-called brass rock band among the most popular acts of the late 1960s, has died at age 84.

Spokesperson Eric Alper said that Clayton-Thomas died peacefully Wednesday at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. Alper did not cite a specific cause of death.

Clayton-Thomas was a onetime street fighter and petty thief from Canada who briefly became a rock superstar, the front man of a nine-member group that sold millions of records and won two Grammys for “Blood, Sweat & Tears,” which beat out the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” for best album of 1969. Calling out amid a jazzy parade of horns, keyboards and percussion, Clayton-Thomas’ urgent shout was a signature voice of the era, preaching love on the Motown cover “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy,” a lasting legacy on Laura Nyro’s “And When I Die” and a cool head on his own “Spinning Wheel.” Meanwhile, Blood, Sweat & Tears helped inspire a wave of horn-led bands, among them Chicago, the Electric Flag and Ten Wheel Drive.

“A lot of the guys [in Blood, Sweat & Tears] would play a Broadway show matinee, then go up to Harlem and play Latin music or R&B and funk at night, or come down to the Village and play pure jazz the next night,” Clayton-Thomas told Bestclassicbands.com in 2023. “I was just a blues player: Give me three chords and I’ve got a song.”

At its peak, Blood, Sweat & Tears’ appeal was so broad it helped lead to the band’s downfall.

Hip enough to perform at the 1969 Woodstock festival, where they were among the highest paid acts, they also were known enough to the establishment to tour Eastern Europe the following year on behalf of the State Department. When Clayton-Thomas and other band members denounced the Communist regimes on the other side of the Cold War, Rolling Stone’s David Felton wrote that “the State Department got its money worth.” Counterculture Yippies would turn up at a 1970 Blood, Sweat & Tears show at Madison Square Garden, carrying obscene banners outside and dumping manure by the front gate.

The band had practical reasons for going along with the government: Clayton-Thomas, who had allegedly wielded a gun at his girlfriend, had been denied a green card and faced deportation. But after topping the charts in 1970 with the album “Blood, Sweat & Tears 3,” their appeal soon faded. A burned-out Clayton-Thomas left the group in 1972, and neither he nor the remaining musicians ever regained their old stature. Blood, Sweat & Tears would continue recording over the next few years, and even briefly reunited with Clayton-Thomas, who went on to release more than a dozen solo albums and tour on his own for decades.

Beginning under a licensing agreement reached in 1984, Clayton-Thomas toured as “Blood, Sweat Tears” for 20 years with a revolving roster of bandmates. A 1994 Times review of a show at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano reported that “BS&T’s formula has legs, that its music has withstood the test of time. Indeed, in a world full of today’s pop harmonic minimalism, the sound of trumpets, trombones, guitar and sax backing a singer somehow seems fresh, even if it has been around for so long,” and Clayton-Thomas “still has all the enthusiasm and buzz-saw roughness that gave his voice its distinctive quality way back when.”

In 2005, BS&T re-formed (without Clayton-Thomas, who continued his solo career) and has toured since with various lead singers.

Clayton-Thomas was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1996. “Spinning Wheel,” covered by everyone from James Brown to TV star Barbara Eden, was voted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame a decade later.

Born David Henry Thomsett on Sept. 13, 1941, in Kingston upon Thames, near London, and raised near Toronto and Ottawa, he was the son of a Canadian World War II veteran and of a pianist-entertainer who helped inspire her son’s interest in music. Thomsett was lucky to have the chance. He fought violently with his father, was living in the streets by his mid-teens and by age 20 was serving time in a reformatory for vagrancy, assault and other crimes.

An old guitar, left behind by a fellow inmate, changed his life. He taught himself to play and began spending extensive time in the early 1960s around Toronto’s Yonge Street music “strip,” where peers included the American rockabilly star Ronnie Hawkins, a mentor to Robbie Robertson and other future members of the Band and a guide for Thomsett early in his career.

Eager to reinvent himself, he changed his last name to Clayton-Thomas while leading his own groups. In the mid-’60s, he released such albums as “Sings Like It Is” and had a hit single with the antiwar rocker “Brainwashed.” He would also befriend a rising star, Joni Mitchell, whose childlike “Circle Game” helped inspire “Spinning Wheel,” and the venerable John Lee Hooker, who would indirectly contribute to Clayton-Thomas’ breakthrough in the U.S.

The band Blood, Sweat & Tears, including David Clayton-Thomas, far right, from the documentary “What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?”

(Sony Music Archives)

Hooker had encouraged Clayton-Thomas to move to New York, where the American bluesman had an engagement at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village. When Hooker unexpectedly departed for a tour of Europe, club owner Howard Solomon needed a replacement and recruited Clayton-Thomas.

“So I played him a couple songs on the guitar,” Clayton-Thomas told Bestclassicbands.com. “He said, ‘Do you have a band?’ I said, ‘Sure,’ and went out into Greenwich Village looking for anybody carrying a guitar case or even looking like a musician, and we put together a little band and we opened there that night. We ended up staying there for several months.”

Around the same time, session man-producer Al Kooper was looking to form a jazz-rock group and was joined by such musicians as guitarist Steve Katz, drummer Bobby Colomby and horn players Randy Brecker and Jerry Weiss. They called themselves Blood, Sweat & Tears, releasing the debut album “Child Is Father to the Man” early in 1968. Although praised by Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner as “a fine, exemplary group,” members were torn between those allied with Kooper and those who thought his vocals too weak to attract a substantial audience.

By the end of the year, Kooper and others had departed, and the band was seeking a new singer. After Judy Collins saw Clayton-Thomas perform, she recommended him to Colomby.

“I got home and just a couple of days later, Bobby Colomby called me up and said, ‘Hey, Kooper’s gone. We got four guys left out of the nine. And we still got a record contract with Columbia. Do you want to come down and try out for the band?’ ” Clayton-Thomas told Bestclassicbands.com. ”I said, ‘You’re damn right.’ I knew [bassist] Jim Fielder real well and I knew they were superb musicians. So I was on the next plane. We had a rehearsal that afternoon, an audition, and it was instant magic. We just knew right off the bat.”

Clayton-Thomas is survived by his daughters, Ashleigh Clayton-Thomas and Christine Graham.

Italie writes for the Associated Press.

The Recording Academy announced significant changes for the 2027 Grammys, introducing several new genre categories and updating eligibility rules for two of its top awards.

The rule changes will most prominently affect the new artist and album categories.

A change to allow for four submissions for new artist instead of three “establishes more specific language surrounding prominence,” the academy said in a statement. The change updates the famously confusing criteria for new artist, in which acts familiar to some fans for years can suddenly break through and earn new consideration for the category.

It’s likely to benefit an artist such as Ella Langley, who had previously submitted several times for new artist but finally had a commercial and critical breakthrough with her single “Choosin’ Texas” and LP “Dandelion.”

“We’ve heard from the music community that the way artists are being developed is changing, and the time it’s taking to find success or recognition can take longer than it once did. Artists are often releasing more music before they actually break through the consciousness of consumers or of our voters, and that evolution directly impacts this Category,” Recording Academy Chief Executive Harvey Mason Jr. said in a statement announcing the changes. The changes “reflect the reality that artist development looks different than it did even a few years ago.”

In the album category, new rules state that “the threshold of new recordings required on an eligible album is lowered from 75% to 66% to reduce the exclusion of entries that are widely recognized throughout the music industry as new albums.” Given the fast streaming-centric release cycle of new singles, remixes and live cuts, the rule changes reflect that a new album may have a significant amount material released earlier.

Additionally, the academy announced five new genre categories, most significantly a dedicated award for Asian pop — a late but welcome acknowledgment of the commercial reach, artistic accomplishments and deep fan culture of K-pop and other scenes in Japan, the Philippines and China.

Other new categories include Latin song, a songwriting-specific award for Latin music in an era when Bad Bunny and Karol G make some of pop’s most salient political and creative statements; distinct awards for R&B collaboration or duo/group performance and R&B solo performance; a new traditional pop vocal performance award; and the replacement of folk album with categories for contemporary folk album and traditional folk album.

Additionally, a new “ballot plus” option will allow for voting members working across genres to vote in more categories, and songwriting contributors to winning albums in most genre categories will receive Grammy statuettes and achievement certificates, as producers and engineers currently receive.

“These changes and expansions give even more people a place for their music to be respected, heard and evaluated. With more Categories, we can represent more music creators, artists, writers, and producers, and it gives us a great opportunity to be more inclusive,” Mason said in his statement. “Now more than ever, we have to keep pace because things are changing and evolving so quickly. These changes are a reflection of that fast-paced evolution.”