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The entertainment field has suffered the recent losses of veteran record producer Joel Dorn and groundbreaking Harlem filmmaker St. Clair Bourne.
Dorn - a former disc-jockey for a Philadelphia jazz radio station who went on to work at Atlantic Records with such artists as Roberta Flack, Max Roach and the Neville Brothers - died of a heart attack on Monday in New York. He was 65.
He produced Flack's 1969 debut album "First Take" and with the singer won consecutive Record of the Year Grammys, for "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" (1972) and "Killing Me Softly With His Song" (1973).
Bourne, a documentary filmmaker who recorded American black culture, died Saturday in a New York hospital after an operation to remove a brain tumor. He was 64.
Among Bourne's documentary subjects were the singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson; the poet, novelist and playwright Langston Hughes; the photojournalist and filmmaker Gordon Parks; and the poet and activist Amiri Baraka.
Born in Harlem in 1943, Bourne attended Georgetown University in the 1960s, but was kicked out after being arrested at an off-campus sit-in. He joined the Peace Corps and helped to re-launch a fading newspaper, El Comeno, in Lima.
Bourne later returned to college, graduating from Syracuse University with a dual degree in journalism and political science. In 1971, he was hired as a producer for "Black Journal" - the nation's first black-oriented public affairs show. Eventually, he launched his own production company, Chamba, which he led until his death.
At the time of his passing, Bourne was working on a documentary about veteran Memphis-based civil rights photographer Ernest Withers, who died in October at age 85.
Bourne is survived by a sister, Judith Bourne, a lawyer in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands.
