In Passing

Copenhagen, Denmark

Ahmed Abu Laban, Muslim leader

Ahmed Abu Laban, Denmark’s most prominent Muslim leader and a central figure in last year’s uproar over cartoons featuring the Prophet Muhammad, has died from cancer. He was 60.

Abu Laban died Thursday at the Hvidovre Hospital in Copenhagen after battling lung cancer.

A Palestinian immigrant who became Denmark’s leading imam, Abu Laban was thrust into the international spotlight during the firestorm over the cartoons, when he accused Denmark of being disrespectful of Islam and Muslim immigrants.

He angered many Danes by seeking support from the Middle East in his fight against the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which first published the controversial cartoons.

Monte Carlo

Gian Carlo Menotti, composer

Gian Carlo Menotti, who composed a pair of Pulitzer Prize-winning operas and founded the Spoleto arts festivals in Italy and the United States, died Thursday at a hospital in Monaco. He was 95.

The Italian-born composer won Pulitzers for a pair of the 20th century’s more acclaimed operas: “The Consul,” which premiered in 1950 in Philadelphia, and “The Saint of Bleecker Street,” which opened at New York’s Broadway Theater in 1954.

He also wrote the Christmas classic “Amahl and the Night Visitors” for NBC, which was broadcast in 1951 and may have been the first opera written for television.

Los Angeles

Bob Carroll Jr., comedy writer

Bob Carroll Jr. and Madelyn Pugh Davis were walking down a street in Hollywood one day in the 1950s when they noticed a pizza maker in the window of an Italian restaurant tossing pizza dough into the air – nothing out of the ordinary.

But for the comedy writing team of Carroll and Davis, two of the three original writers on Lucille Ball’s top-rated “I Love Lucy” TV series, it was potential gold.

“Bob and I looked at each other and said, ‘Ah-ha!’ ” Davis recalled last week. “We called Lucy, and she came down and went in and the guy taught her how to do that, and we used that on the show.”

Carroll, who spent a good portion of his more than 40-year comedy-writing career dreaming up new stunts and schemes for television’s red-haired queen of comedy, died Jan. 27 at his home in Los Angeles, said his daughter, Christina Carroll. He was 88. The cause of death was not announced.

Carroll and Davis were writing for Ball’s CBS radio show “My Favorite Husband,” co-starring Richard Denning, when she decided to launch a television series co-starring real-life husband Desi Arnaz. Carroll and Davis, along with “My Favorite Husband” colleague Jess Oppenheimer, made the move to television with Ball.

The three writers wrote the pilot for the landmark series, which premiered on CBS in October 1951, and they were the show’s only writers for the first four seasons.

During that time, they were responsible for a string of memorably hilarious episodes, including Lucy and Ethel (Vivian Vance) on a chocolate candy assembly line, Lucy stomping grapes in Italy and Lucy inadvertently getting intoxicated while doing a commercial for Vitameatavegamin.

New York

Whitney Balliett, jazz reporter

Whitney Balliett, 80, a jazz reporter who spent more than four decades writing thousands of graceful and definitive stories for the New Yorker magazine and helped create one of the finest jazz programs on television, died Thursday at his home in Manhattan, N.Y. He had liver cancer.

Dan Morgenstern, director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, called him “the greatest prose stylist to ever apply his writing skills to jazz.”

Balliett began writing a regular jazz column for the New Yorker in 1957. To convey the essence of music and musicians, he avoided technical terms. He considered himself an “impressionist” when he wrote about musicians because music itself is fleeting, so “transparent and bodiless.” Jazz in particular, he wrote, had “odd non-notes and strange tones and timbres.”

Collections of his New Yorker writings were published frequently over the years. His books included “American Singers” and “American Musicians.” One massive volume, subtitled “a Journal of Jazz,” came out in 2000.

Los Angeles

C.K. Yang, track star

C.K. Yang, the 1960 Olympic decathlon silver medalist for Taiwan who became a UCLA track and field star, has died. Yang, 74, died Jan. 27 in Los Angeles of complications from a massive stroke.

Yang (Yang Chuan-kwang) took the silver medal in the Rome Olympics, with Bruins teammate Rafer Johnson winning the gold. Yang’s Olympic medal was the first for Taiwan.

He finished fifth in the decathlon in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

Yang set a decathlon world record of 9,121 points in 1963, before the grading formula for the event was changed.

After ending his competitive career, Yang served on Taiwan’s Olympic Committee and spent time there each year helping develop the Olympic program.