Beauty Queen to Beloved Advocate

The passing of Rigmor Newman

There was a good obituary of an old friend in yesterday’s NYTimes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/12/arts/music/rigmor-newman-dead.html?smid=url-share

Even though I knew Rigmor over the course of many decades, she was so modest that I was never really aware of her incredible background.

A Scandinavian beauty queen, no less!

Here are some reflections on Rigmor’s world, starting with my first encounter with her.

Let's go back 36 years. Rigmor's second husband, the dancer Harold Nicholas, had long ago split up with his brother Fayard (the other half of the internationally acclaimed dance team The Nicholas Brothers). She had been working hard to create a new context for him, as he was also a superb singer; few remembered that he had introduced COME RAIN OR COME SHINE in the 1946 Broadway production of St. Louis Woman:

Michael’s Pub was a noted New York nightclub on East 55^th Street between 2^nd and 3rd Avenues that featured the very best in jazz and jazz-adjacent music. The owner Gil Wiest was a handful, to put it mildly, but had impeccable taste, and somehow Rigmor persuaded him to give Harold the singer a two-week engagement. Mike Abene put together a band including Rodney Jones, Randy Sandke, and me. You wouldn’t even have known that Rigmor was there – she was the definition of an eminence gris. A large part of her success came from the rare ability to create situations and then recede. The gig went very well – see the 12/22/89 NYTimes review below. Throughout the evening, Harold only gestured his dancing, but nothing happened rhythmically with his feet. They came to life only during his encore (OH, LADY BE GOOD) which brought down the house every night with just a few, but supremely elegant, terpsichorean taps.

Unforgettable. 

Returning to the obituary, it becomes clear what a great powerhouse Rigmor was in her own quiet way. Pay attention to the section that talks about the significance of her interracial marriage to Count Basie trumpeter Joe Newman. Several years earlier, while Newman and trumpeter Joe Wilder were touring with Basie’s band in Scandinavia, they met a pair of beautiful young women - Wilder was the first to marry one of them. You can read about that in Ed Berger‘s wonderful biography of Wilder. 


There were many jazz organizations in the 1960s and 70s (even a Jazz Museum in NY!) that made a real difference in the music and the lives of the musicians and yet most of them are forgotten today. One of the most important was Jazz Interactions; Rigmor and Joe Newman put it together with the help of a large community of friends. It’s hard for people today to imagine the status of jazz back at that point. It wasn’t in the conservatories, there weren’t’ huge not-for-profits supporting it, and many of the now revered musicians were frankly wandering out in the desert. The great majority of serious and/or analytical writing about the music of those times focuses (naturally) on the music itself, but at the expense of the social/cultural and financial imperatives that surrounded the people who made it. There were no victors at that time as jazz disappeared with a vengeance from the general scheme of popular music at the time.

NYTimes 5/26/74

Rigmor later booked and managed the East Side club Storyville in New York City, where so many of us gathered to welcome Dexter Gordon back for his massive return back to the US in October, 1976. I know Kenny Washington and I were both there that night - we sat on the steps, and then there was Charles Mingus and family and so many other many other giants as well. Rigmor never inserted herself into the proceedings – again, purposefully behind the scene.

Through my friend film archivist Bruce Goldstein, I had the chance to reunite with Rigmor just a few years ago. She was still as passionate and interested in the music as ever, but felt adrift and forgotten in the current world.

Her accomplishments were real and significant.

May her memory be a blessing.