Angela Bofill, a classically trained singer who became an R&B hitmaker in the late 1970s and ’80s, singing lush ballads and torch songs that showed off her expansive three-and-a-half-octave range, died June 13 in Vallejo, Calif. She was 70.
Her death, at the home of her daughter Shauna, was announced on social media by her manager, Rich Engel. He did not cite a cause. Ms. Bofill’s singing career had been cut short in the mid-2000s, when she suffered a pair of strokes that led her to spend three years in rehab.
Raised in the Bronx by a Cuban father and Puerto Rican mother, Ms. Bofill released her debut album in 1978, when she was just 24, and became one of the first Latina singers to find 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 on a host of musical influences: Aretha Franklin and the Platters, James Brown and the Supremes, Tito Puente and Celia Cruz.
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“There is a relaxed, sinuous quality to her phrasing that has something to do with jazz singing, but she writes songs about her life in New York and sings them in a manner that has just as much to do with the urban pop of such earlier singer-songwriters as Carole King and Laura Nyro,” New York Times music critic Robert Palmer wrote in 1982. Another reviewer, Stephen Holden, found that her theatrical cabaret performances — filled with comic asides, stories about her love life and improvised vocal flourishes — suggested “Bette Midler or Melissa Manchester colored by Latin inflections.”
Eight of her singles made the R&B Top 40, beginning with her tender version of “This Time I’ll Be Sweeter,” a soul standard by Haras Fyre and Gwen Guthrie. The song was featured on her debut album, “Angie,” along with original compositions such as “Under the Moon and Over the Sky,” an idiosyncratic ode to love and happiness accompanied by strings, flute, electric piano and imitation bird calls.
“Under the Moon” was not 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’s home in the West Bronx. Describing the song in his column, he wrote that “the music was a city dream: lyrical and defiant, with the congas rolling through the middle and the sounds of santeria adding a thread of the unearthly. You dream this kind of music on subways.”
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 started walking, Ms. Bofill was singing as well, performing at family gatherings.
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“There was no family opposition to my becoming a singer,” she told the Times in 1982. “But my mother insisted that if I wanted to sing professionally, I had to go to school and study for it.”
At age 10, she started piano and viola lessons and wrote a children’s operetta, inspired by a story in a Girl Scout book. As a teenager at Hunter College High School, a selective public 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.
At 18, she had enough of a reputation that she was performing at a Madison Square Garden dance event headlined by Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Bob Hope and Mel Tormé; the Daily News referred to her at the time as a “schoolgirl soloist.”
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Ms. Bofill graduated from the Manhattan School of Music with a bachelor’s degree in 1976 and sang for the Dance Theatre of Harlem. A childhood friend, flutist Dave Valentin, helped her sign with the newly formed jazz label GRP Records, which released her debut album. Within a year, she was opening for singer Al Jarreau (at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington) and Gil Scott-Heron (at Carnegie Hall in New York).
Critics were virtually unanimous in praising Ms. Bofill’s silky, expressive voice, which found a home on the new radio format known as quiet storm. They were more mixed on her material, which became increasingly pop-oriented after she signed with Clive Davis’s 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 got less attention, although Ms. Bofill continued to find an audience — including in the Philippines, where she played packed houses and said she was a guest of Imelda Marcos, the wife of dictator Ferdinand Marcos. (“Imelda sings also. An amazing woman. A star, really.”) 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.”
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Ms. Bofill married and divorced country singer Rick Vincent (complete information on survivors was not immediately available) and split her time between the East Coast and California’s Sonoma County, supplementing concerts with appearances in stage plays and performances with the jazz fusion group the Crusaders.
But her career was upended in 2006 and 2007, when she suffered strokes that impaired her speech and paralyzed her left side. She had no health insurance, and her recovery drained her bank accounts and threw her into a deep depression.
“It was devastating to lose her singing voice,” Engel, her manager, later told The Washington Post. “When you take a voice away from a singer, nothing is worse. A lot of it was like, ‘What do I do now, now that I can’t sing?’ That was her life. Her livelihood was being onstage.”
Ms. Bofill began performing again in 2010, telling stories at concerts while leaving the singing to the vocalist Maysa, who performed with Ms. Bofill’s backing band and was later succeeded by Broadway singer Melba Moore.
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Performing in San Francisco and Alexandria, Va., where she played to sold-out crowds at the Birchmere, she retained her good-humored optimism (she had once joked that “if people threw tomatoes and vegetables at me onstage, I’d make gazpacho”) even as she lamented that the strokes had taken her voice and fractured her speech.
“I feel happy performing again,” she told The Post in 2011. “I need crowd. In the blood, entertain. Any time a crowd comes to see me, I’m surprised. No sing no more and still people come. Wow. Impressed.”
