Angela Bofill, R&B ballad singer with dreamy, dynamic voice, dies at the age of 70

Ms. Bofill grew up in the Bronx to a Cuban father and Puerto Rican mother. She released her debut album in 1978, when she was just 24 years old, making her one of the first Latina singers to achieve consistent success in R&B. She wrote many of her own songs, including the saxophone-backed ballad “I Try” and the funky “Too Tough,” and drew inspiration from a variety of musical influences: Aretha Franklin and the Platters, James Brown and the Supremes, Tito Puente and Celia Cruz.

“Her phrasing has a relaxed, smooth quality that has something in common with jazz singing, but she writes songs about her life in New York and sings them in a way that has as much in common with the urban pop of earlier singer-songwriters like Carole King and Laura Nyro,” wrote New York Times music critic Robert Palmer in 1982. Another reviewer, Stephen Holden, found her theatrical cabaret performances – full of comic interjections, stories about her love life and improvised vocal numbers – reminiscent of “Bette Midler or Melissa Manchester, colored by Latin accents.”

Eight of her singles made the R&B Top 40, starting with her tender version of “This Time I’ll Be Sweeter,” a soul classic by Haras Fyre and Gwen Guthrie. The song was featured on her debut album, “Angie,” along with originals like “Under the Moon and Over the Sky,” an idiosyncratic ode to love and happiness accompanied by strings, flute, electric piano and imitated bird calls.

“Under the Moon” wasn’t exactly commercial, although it attracted fans, including New York Daily News columnist Pete Hamill, who was inspired to track down Ms. Bofill for an interview at her family home in the West Bronx. In his column, he described the song as follows: “The music was an urban dream: lyrical and defiant, with the congas at the center and the sounds of Santeria and adds a touch of the otherworldly. This is the kind of music you dream about on the subway.”

Angela Tomasa Bofill was born in New York City on May 2, 1954. Her father, a longshoreman, played the conga and had sung with the Cuban bandleader Machito. Around the time she learned to walk, Ms. Bofill also sang and performed at family gatherings.

“My family had no objections to my career as a singer,” she told The Times in 1982. “But my mother insisted that I had to go to school and study if I wanted to sing professionally.”

At age 10, she began piano and viola lessons and wrote a children’s operetta inspired by a story from a Girl Scout book. As a teenager at Hunter College High School, a private prep school in Manhattan, she sang in the All-City High School Chorus, performed at dances with a trio called the Puerto Rican Supremes, and played with a popular Latin band, The Group, led by Ricardo Marrero.

By the age of 18, her reputation was so great that she performed at a dance at Madison Square Garden headlined by Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Bob Hope and Mel Tormé; the Daily News described her at the time as a “soloist in a schoolgirl costume”.

Ms. Bofill graduated from the Manhattan School of Music in 1976 with a bachelor’s degree and sang for the Dance Theater of Harlem. A childhood friend, flautist Dave Valentin, helped her get a contract with the newly formed jazz label GRP Records, which released her debut album. Within a year, she was opening for singers Al Jarreau (at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington) and Gil Scott-Heron (at Carnegie Hall in New York).

Critics were almost unanimous in praising Bofill’s silky, expressive voice, which found a home on the new Quiet Storm radio format, but were more divided about her material, which became increasingly pop-oriented after she signed to Clive Davis’ Arista Records and released “Something About You” (1981) and “Too Tough” (1983), both with producer Narada Michael Walden.

Her later recordings for Capitol, Jive and Shanachie received less attention, although Ms. Bofill continued to find audiences – including in the Philippines, where she played to sold-out crowds and said she was a guest of Imelda Marcos, wife of dictator Ferdinand Marcos (“Imelda sings, too. An amazing woman. A real star.”) Some of her songs also found new listeners when they were sampled by younger artists, as when Faith Evans used Ms. Bofill’s 1983 ballad “Gotta Make It Up to You” for her song “Life Will Pass You By.”

Ms. Bofill married country singer Rick Vincent but divorced (full information on survivors was not immediately available) and divided her time between the East Coast and Sonoma County, Calif. She supplemented her concert schedule with appearances in plays and performances with the jazz fusion group the Crusaders.

But her career was turned upside down in 2006 and 2007 when she suffered strokes that affected her speech and paralyzed the left side of her body. She had no health insurance, her recovery drained her bank account and plunged her into a deep depression.

“It was devastating to lose her singing voice,” her manager Engel later told the Washington Post. “There is nothing worse than taking away a singer’s voice. Many people thought, ‘What am I going to do now that I can’t sing anymore?’ That was their life. Their livelihood was being on stage.”

In 2010, Ms. Bofill began performing again, telling stories in concert and leaving the singing to singer Maysa, who performed with Ms. Bofill’s backing band and was later succeeded by Broadway singer Melba Moore.

During her performances in San Francisco and Alexandria, Virginia, where she played to a sold-out crowd at the Birchmere, she maintained her good-humored optimism (she once joked, “If people threw tomatoes and vegetables at me on stage, I’d make gazpacho”), even as she lamented that the strokes had robbed her of her voice and affected her speech.

“I feel happy again when I perform,” she told the Post in 2011. “I need the audience. Entertaining is in my blood. Whenever an audience comes to see me, I’m surprised. I don’t sing anymore, and people still come. Wow. Impressed.”