Hermeto Pascoal, the eccentric and prolific Brazilian multi-instrumentalist, composer and arranger known affectionately as “The Sorcerer of Sounds” and “The Mad Genius,” has died. He was 89.

“With serenity and love, we announce that Hermeto Pascoal has passed on to the spiritual realm, surrounded by family and fellow musicians,” his family and team said in a statement late Saturday (Sept. 13) on Instagram.

The statement did not provide a cause of death or say where he had died.

Pascoal was an instantly recognizable figure with his mane of white hair and thick beard. He created music that defied fixed labels and blended jazz, samba, Brazilian popular music (MPB), bossa nova, chorinho and forro.

An accomplished pianist, accordionist and flautist, Pascoal also used more unconventional objects to produce sounds, including pints of beer, dolls, body parts, tea cups, and — perhaps most famously — live pigs.

On his 1977 album Slaves Mass, Pascoal squeezed a piglet to make it squeal for the opening of a track. A photo of him with the animal in his arms appeared on its back cover.

Born on June 22, 1936, in Alagoas, a state in Brazil’s poor northeast, his albino condition allowed him to escape working in the fields under the harsh sun. He taught himself to play his father’s accordion instead.

At age 14, Pascoal moved with his family to the port city of Recife, where he continued to develop his skills and performed on local radio stations.

He later headed to Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. During the 1960s, he worked with drummer and percussionist Airto Moreira, who took Pascoal on tour to the U.S., where he met Miles Davis. Pascoal played on Davis’ 1971 album Live-Evil.

The meeting with Miles kickstarted an international career that continued well into Pascoal’s 80s.
“I was born music; I haven’t done anything without music,” he told Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo in 2024. “What I write on a toilet bowl is as important as what I write on any paper, because music is sacred.”

As noted by the Barbican, a London venue where Pascoal was due to play in November, the artist was known as an “iconic Brazilian composer” who created more than 10,000 compositions.

Tributes for Pascoal poured in after the announcement of his death.

“Brazilian music and culture owe a great deal to Hermeto Pascoal,” President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil said Saturday on X. Pascoal’s “talent and tireless creativity (…) earned him international acclaim and influenced generations of musicians around the world,” he added.

Caetano Veloso said on Instagram that Pascoal is “one of the highest points in the history of music in Brazil.”

Pascoal leaves behind six children.

With the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack reaching No. 1 on the Billboard 200 (dated Sept. 20) after seven nonconsecutive weeks at No. 2, it completes the longest wait an album has endured in the runner-up spot before hitting No. 1 in nearly a half-century.

The last No. 1 album to wait as long or longer at No. 2 before ascending to the top was Linda Ronstadt’s Simple Dreams in late 1977. The set debuted at No. 43 on the chart dated Sept. 24 of that year and then spent its next nine weeks locked at No. 2 (Oct. 1-Nov. 26) before finally hitting No. 1 on the Dec. 3 chart.

For all nine weeks Simple Dreams was at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 before hitting No. 1, it was blocked from the top by Fleetwood Mac’s monster hit Rumours, which spent a total of 31 nonconsecutive weeks at No. 1 in 1977-78.

The Simple Dreams album launched four top 40-charted hits on the Billboard Hot 100, including two top 10s. Its first single, “Blue Bayou,” hit No. 3, and was followed by “It’s So Easy” (No. 5), “Poor Poor Pitiful Me” (No. 31) and “Tumbling Dice” (No. 32). “Blue Bayou” also scored Ronstadt a pair of Grammy Award nominations, for record of the year (her only career nomination in the category) and best pop vocal performance, female.

Simple Dreams marked Ronstadt’s second of three No. 1s and spent five total weeks at No. 1, all consecutive (Dec. 3-31), the most weeks atop the list of her leaders. Heart Like a Wheel and Living in the USA each spent one week on top, in 1975 and 1978, respectively.

In Between Simple Dreams and KPop Demon Hunters, two albums spent nearly as lengthy a time at No. 2 before hitting No. 1 — and they were both by the same act. Celine Dion’s Falling Into You and Let’s Talk About Love both spent five weeks at No. 2 before climbing to No. 1, in 1996 and 1998, respectively.

On the Oct. 5, 1996 chart, Falling Into You rose 4-1, after having spent five nonconsecutive weeks at No. 2. Falling Into You became Dion’s first of five leaders and spent three nonconsecutive weeks on top. Before it hit No. 1, Falling Into You was blocked from the top by Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill for four of its weeks at No. 2 and Pearl Jam’s No Code for one week.

Dion’s next album, Let’s Talk About Love, also had five nonconsecutive weeks in the runner-up position before hitting No. 1. It climbed 2-1 on the Jan. 17, 1998, chart. Before it reached No. 1, Let’s Talk About Love was blocked from the top by Metallica’s ReLoad for one week and Garth Brooks’ Sevens for four weeks.

Let’s Talk About Love had great timing when it reached No. 1 for its one and only week atop the list. The week it hit No. 1, the Titanic soundtrack (which shared a song with Let’s Talk About Love in Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On”) sailed 31-11. The next week, on the Jan. 24 chart, Titanic steamed 11-1, for its first of 16 weeks (all consecutive) at No. 1 (Jan. 24-May 9). For 12 of those weeks, Let’s Talk About Love was No. 2 behind Titanic.

With all this talk of albums spending a long time at No. 2 before reaching No. 1, one might be wondering what album holds the record for the most weeks at No. 2 without going to No. 1. The answer is Stray Cats’ Built for Speed, which spent 15 weeks at its No. 2 peak in 1982-83. It was blocked from No. 1 by Men at Work’s Business as Usual (13 weeks) and Michael Jackson’s Thriller (two weeks).

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Bobby Hart, a key part of the the Monkees’ multimedia empire who teamed with Tommy Boyce on such hits as “Last Train to Clarksville” and “I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone,” has died. He was 86.

Hart died at his home in Los Angeles, according to his friend and co-author Glenn Ballantyne. He had been in poor health since breaking his hip last year.

Boyce and Hart were a prolific and successful team in the mid-1960s, especially for the Monkees, the made-for-television group promoted by Don Kirshner. They wrote the Monkees’ theme song, with its opening shot, “Here we come, walkin’ down the street,” and its enduring chant, “Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees,” and their first No. 1 hit, “Last Train to Clarksville.” The Monkees’ eponymous, million-selling debut album included six songs from Boyce and Hart, who also served as producers and used their own backing musicians, the Candy Store Prophets, as session players.

“I always credit them not only with writing many of our biggest hits, but, as producers, being instrumental in creating the unique Monkee sound we all know and love,” the Monkees’ Micky Dolenz wrote in a foreword to Hart’s memoir, Psychedelic Bubblegum, published in 2015.

As Boyce and Hart grew in fame and the Monkees took more control of their work, they pursued their own careers, releasing the albums Test Patterns and I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonite and appearing on such sitcoms as I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched. They also were politically active. They campaigned for Robert F. Kennedy when he ran for president in 1968 and wrote the brassy “L.U.V. (Let Us Vote)” in support of the 26th Amendment, which in 1971 lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. Their other songs included the Monkees’ melancholy “I Wanna Be Free” and the theme to the daytime soap opera Days of Our Lives.

They were covered by everyone from Dean Martin (“Little Lovely One”) to the Sex Pistols (“I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone”).

In the 1970s and ‘80s, Hart managed several hits with other collaborators and even contributed material to another TV act, the Partridge Family. He worked with Austin Roberts on “Over You,” an Oscar-nominated ballad performed by Betty Buckley in “Tender Mercies,” and with Dick Eastman on “My Secret (Didja Gitit Yet?)” for New Edition. He and Bryce toured with Dolenz and fellow Monkee Davy Jones in the ‘70s, put out the album Dolenz, Jones, Boyce & Hart and received renewed attention when the Monkees enjoyed a comeback in the 1980s.

Boyce, who died in 1994, and Hart were the subjects of a 2014 documentary The Guys Who Wrote ‘Em. Hart was married twice, most recently to singer Mary Ann Hart, and had two children from his first marriage.

He was a minister’s son, born Robert Luke Harshman in Phoenix, Arizona. In his memoir, he remembered himself as a shy kid with a “strong desire to distinguish” himself, as he wrote in Psychedelic Bubblegum. Music was the answer. By high school, he had learned piano, guitar and the Hammond B-3 organ. He also started his own amateur radio station, eventually adding a console, turntables and microphones. After graduating from high school and serving in the Army reserves, he settled in Los Angeles in the late 1950s, hoping first to become a disc jockey, but soon working as a songwriter and session musician. His name shortened to Bobby Hart, he toured as a member of Teddy Randazzo and the Dazzlers, and with Randazzo and Bobby Weinstein wrote “Hurt So Bad,” a hit for Little Anthony and the Imperials later covered by Linda Ronstadt.

He also befriended Boyce, a singer and songwriter from Charlottesville, Virginia, with a “very unusual personality, spontaneous and extroverted, yet very cool at the same time.” Boyce and Hart helped write the top 10 hit “Come a Little Bit Closer” for Jay and the Americans and were a strong enough combination that Kirshner recruited them for his Screen Gems songwriting factory: They were assigned to the Monkees. Asked to come up with songs for a quartet openly modeled on the Beatles, they devised a twangy guitar line similar to the one for “Paperback Writer” and wrote “Last Train to Clarksville,” a chart topper in 1966. When Kirshner suggested a song with a girl’s name in the title, they turned out “Valleri” and reached the top 5.

For the show’s theme song, a stroll outside was enough.

“Boyce began strumming his guitar and I joined in by snapping my fingers & making noises with my mouth that simulated an open & closed hi-hat cymbal,” Hart wrote in his memoir. “We had created the perfect recipe for inspiration and started singing about just what we were doing: ‘Walkin’ down the street.’”