Andy Gill, whose slashing, dissonant guitar playing in Gang of Four inspired waves of post-punk to come, died on Saturday in London. He was 64.The band announced his death on its website. A band spokesman said the cause was pneumonia.Gang of Four’s music was stark and bristling, yet danceable. Reimagining punk, funk and reggae with analytical rigor, the band set telegraphic lyrics and shards of guitar noise against austerely propulsive beats and syncopated silences. Its brusque, angular style would directly or indirectly influence post-punk and indie-rock bands like Red Hot Chili Peppers (who chose Mr. Gill to produce their debut album), the Jesus Lizard, Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine, Franz Ferdinand and Protomartyr. Michael Hutchence of INXS once said that Gang of Four’s music “took no prisoners,” adding, “It was art meets the devil via James Brown.”Andrew James Dalrymple Gill was born on Jan. 1, 1956, in Manchester, England. He was an art student at Leeds University when he started Gang of Four with the lead singer and main lyricist Jon King, the bassist Dave Allen and the drummer Hugo Burnham. (It was named, mockingly, after the Communist Party leaders who ruled China during its Cultural Revolution years.) He and Mr. King, friends from high school, had used travel grants to visit New York City’s burgeoning punk scene in 1976.From the beginning, Gang of Four was determined to avoid all clichés, musical and verbal. “You could tell by listening to Gang of Four music that punk had happened. But it definitely wasn’t punk music,” Mr. Gill told the online music magazine Perfect Sound Forever in a 2000 interview.“Every part of it had to be radical. It was building musical tension in a precise way,” he told The New York Times in 2005. “It would be the juxtaposition of tight, fixed patterns that were very physically energizing and relentless, which would largely be supplied by the bass and drums, and the guitar, which would sometimes completely go along with that and sometimes not. If you took one of these elements out and made it ordinary, the whole thing would lose its authenticity.”The band matched its caustic music to lyrics that confronted sociopolitical power structures as much as personal impulses. Its debut single, “Damaged Goods,” released in 1978, was an anti-romantic song about sex and consumerism; its debut album, “Entertainment!,” released the next year, included “At Home He’s a Tourist,” an anatomy of alienation, and “Not Great Men,” a ground-level theory of history. Onstage, Mr. King would often add to the band’s percussive attack by slamming pieces of scrap metal.Gang of Four made an immediate impact in British and American punk circles. Its original lineup lasted for one more album, “Solid Gold,” and Mr. Gill and Mr. King went on to work with other musicians while Gang of Four’s music began adapting some pop elements. Its 1982 album, “Songs of the Free,” included “I Love a Man in a Uniform,” its closest approach to a pop hit, with backup choruses sung by the band’s bassist at the time, Sara Lee. In Britain, the song was banned from BBC playlists as the Falkland Islands war began.Mr. Gill and Mr. King led Gang of Four on the 1983 album “Hard” before going their separate ways. Mr. Gill, who had shared production credits for Gang of Four, produced other acts, including Red Hot Chili Peppers in 1984, and released a solo EP, “Dispossession,” in 1987.He and Mr. King regrouped to lead Gang of Four for two 1990s albums, “Mall” and “Shrinkwrapped,” before another hiatus, during which Mr. Gill returned to producing, including a 1997 EP by the Jesus Lizard, the Stranglers’ album “Written in Red” (1997), Michael Hutchence’s posthumously released 1999 solo album and the Futureheads’ debut album, released in 2004.Mr. Gill, who lived in London, married Catherine Mayer, a journalist who leads the Women’s Equality Party in Britain, in 1999. She survives him, as does his brother, Martin Gill.In 2004, Gang of Four’s original lineup regrouped, touring (including a performance at the 2005 Coachella festival) and releasing new recordings — on better equipment — of songs from its first albums. The full reunion didn’t last, but Mr. Gill and Mr. King made one more album together as Gang of Four, “Content,” in 2011 before Mr. King chose to give up touring. Mr. Gill continued to lead Gang of Four, with John Sterry on lead vocals.The group released two albums, “What Happens Next” in 2015 and “Happy Now” in 2019, still making political statements, and toured until late 2019. The band wrote that Mr. Gill had been listening to mixes of an unfinished album while hospitalized.Mr. Gill’s “final tour in November,” the band wrote in its statement, “was the only way he was ever really going to bow out: with a Stratocaster around his neck, screaming with feedback and deafening the front row.” More

She brought new colors to modernist music, sometimes using electronics, and became the first female living composer to have two operas staged by the Met.Kaija Saariaho, a Finnish composer who was brought up in the world of male-dominated high modernism but who broke away to forge an identity of her own, becoming the first woman to have more than one work of hers staged by the Metropolitan Opera, died on Friday at her home in Paris. She was 70.She had been diagnosed with brain cancer in 2021, said her publisher, Chester Music, which confirmed the death.Ms. Saariaho brought new and often mysterious colors to classical music.In Paris, where she had settled permanently, she experimented with tape and live electronics, which she applied to nearly every form in classical music: works for solo instrument and small ensemble, and for symphony orchestra and opera. Over the years she rose to the top of her field, a slow-changing industry that only in recent years has made steps to correct the repertoire’s gender imbalances.Her first opera, “L’Amour de Loin,” which premiered at the Salzburg Festival in Austria in 2000 and came to the Met in 2016, won the Grawemeyer Award for music composition. Her most recent entry into that genre, “Innocence,” debuted at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France in 2021 and will travel to the Met in the 2025-26 season.When the Met joined the work’s list of commissioners, Ms. Saariaho in turn joined a select group of living composers to have a second opera mounted by that house — and the only woman to gain that distinction.Kaija Saariaho was born on Oct. 14, 1952, in Helsinki. She studied at the storied Sibelius Academy there, and was a pioneering impresario of contemporary music, forming the group Open Ears with fellow young artists. She left to continue her education in Freiburg, Germany, with summer courses taken in the modernist hotbed of Darmstadt. She moved to Paris in 1982 to finish her studies at IRCAM, the institute founded by Pierre Boulez.A complete obituary will appear soon. More

After making history as the Metropolitan Opera’s first work by a Black composer, Terence Blanchard’s “Fire” is back — with its showstopping step dance.The Metropolitan Opera premiere of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” on Sept. 27, 2021, was a momentous event. Doubly so: “Fire” was the company’s first staged opera after an 18-month pandemic closure, and it was, after 138 years, its first work by a Black composer.The opera, with a score by Terence Blanchard and a libretto by Kasi Lemmons, took on some of the grandeur and excitement of that moment. The raucous fraternity step dance that opens the third act brought down the house.That step dance still stopped the show on Monday evening, when “Fire” returned to the Met. Two and a half years later, the work is a test case. The company has sharply increased its diet of contemporary operas — some of which, including “Fire,” sold very well as new productions. But how will these operas perform when they’re brought back, without the same promotional push?On Monday, at least, the audience seemed robust and, as it was during the initial run, notably diverse. And “Fire” remains a heartfelt piece, emanating a touching if vague sadness. But without the exhilarating sense of occasion it had at its Met premiere, the opera’s shortcomings were clearer.Based on the New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow’s memoir of his turbulent upbringing in Louisiana, “Fire” is a progression of episodes — some upbeat, some forlorn. It takes the form of a search: The lonely Charles, his psyche wounded as a child by his cousin’s sexual abuse and his mother’s real but distracted love, looks for belonging and healing.He tries church, fraternity membership, his siblings, a woman, another woman, but none offer what he’s seeking; all want him to be different than he is. Only after a hasty, therapy-speak conclusion in the final minutes, presided over by an ethereal choir and the voice of his younger self, can he finally accept himself and sing, “Now my life begins.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeBake: Maximalist BrowniesListen: To Pink SweatsGrow: RosesUnwind: With Ambience VideosAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTimes InsiderA Musical Life With Echoes That Will LastThe lessons that the piano teacher Cornelia Vertenstein taught her students also resounded with many others, including me.Cornelia Vertenstein talking remotely with the reporter John Branch last year for a feature that made the front page. During the pandemic, she continued giving piano lessons to children, using FaceTime. Credit…John BranchFeb. 20, 2021, 10:00 a.m. ETTimes Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Cornelia Vertenstein, a 93-year-old Holocaust survivor, gave her last piano lesson at 6:30 a.m. on Feb. 1. She was not feeling well, so she arranged a ride to the hospital.Pneumonia settled in, and family gathered, sensing the end of a quietly extraordinary life.She began giving lessons at age 14 in war-torn Romania. She did not stop for nearly 80 years. Toward the end, adapting to the pandemic, Ms. Vertenstein gave lessons on FaceTime from her home in Denver.As her condition worsened this month, she reflected on her life’s work.“If I die, don’t be sad,” she told her daughter, Mariana. “I led a productive life helping children.”Near her hospital bed hung a copy of a New York Times story about Ms. Vertenstein, staying connected to her students through technology, that was published last May. It was on the front page, with a large photograph of her sitting at her piano, sharply dressed, hands folded, looking at the camera.Ms. Vertenstein died Feb. 12. Count me among the mourners, because I wrote that story.I never met Ms. Vertenstein in person; our interviews took place on FaceTime and over the phone. But she left a lasting impression on me and countless others whom she never met, judging by how widely and quickly her story spread. It spawned an invitation to the “Today” show (she declined) and inspired a German telephone commercial, among other things.Her family teased her for being a celebrity, but she was uncomfortable with the attention.“She’d say, ‘I just want to teach,’” her daughter said.As with most stories that I have written, I remember the experience of reporting more than the words that were published. My mind sees Ms. Vertenstein’s smile. I still have it in my phone, a screengrab from one of our conversations.I remember having technical difficulties the first time I interviewed her, all on my end. I was late to connect on FaceTime. Fumbling with my phone and laptop, I simply called her. She forgave my blundering tardiness.I remember telling her during our last conversation that I would like to visit her the next time I was in Denver, my hometown. I still have family in Colorado, so I try to get there a few times a year. This was last spring. Surely the pandemic would ease, we thought. But I have not been to Denver since.I also remember the unusual circumstances for how that story came to me. At the end of March, the pandemic smothering lives, I was searching for fresh story angles. Maybe the exponential powers of social media could be put to good use.“I’m entertaining thoughts, a community brainstorm,” I wrote on Facebook. “Know something that the world should know about that hasn’t already been read and seen?”The first response came from Jacqui Jorgeson, whom I met in 2015 when her boyfriend (now husband), Kevin Jorgeson, climbed the Dawn Wall of Yosemite’s El Capitan with his climbing partner, Tommy Caldwell.“Mind if I share?” she wrote. “I’ve got some awesomely weird friends.”Others shared, too. Ideas poured in. Most were the type that became familiar last spring, about quiet acts of heroism — sewing masks, volunteering for food banks, connecting with needy neighbors.In the end, I turned only one into a story.The suggestion stood out, about a Holocaust survivor in her 90s who lived alone and taught piano seven days a week. Unable to welcome her students into her home, as she had for decades, she took to conducting lessons using FaceTime. And now the spring recital was approaching.The note’s writer was Yvette Frampton, a Facebook acquaintance of Ms. Jorgeson. Her three children were among the dozens of Ms. Vertenstein’s students.Soon, I was like one of those students, virtually connected for scheduled meetings.Ms. Vertenstein coordinated our conversations around her teaching schedule and her iPad’s battery life — always a consideration, because there was no outlet near the piano. If she had an opening between 2 and 4, for example, she would ask if we could speak at 3, so that her device could charge on the counter for an hour first.Students considered Ms. Vertenstein a bit intimidating, at least at first, with her exacting standards and strong accent. (English was one of six languages she spoke.) She was the type of teacher that parents appreciate and that students may not, until they are older.With me, though, she was talkative and friendly. She spoke plainly of her life and its heartaches. She was patient with my probing questions. Her mind was sharp, her memory clear.All lives deserve more than a few paragraphs, but especially this one. I whittled it as sharply as I could to fit a newspaper word count.“The children do not know much of Ms. Vertenstein’s past — the yellow star she had to wear as a teenager during the war, the rocks thrown at her, the fist of fascism replaced by the slogging brutality of communism,” I wrote last year.It was mere context for her piano lessons.“It’s very painful to talk about,” Ms. Vertenstein told me. “Besides this, why should I tell those kids such sad stories?”There is no way to know how many children entered her house over the decades, learning scales or rehearsing Bach minuets and Haydn sonatas before exiting with a hug and a sticker and, perhaps, a life lesson not fully appreciated until later.She was sure not going to let social-distancing protocols get in the way of one-on-one piano lessons. Ms. Frampton and others helped teach Ms. Vertenstein to use FaceTime. The recitals, performed on Zoom from dozens of living rooms before a matrix of family members, were trickier. But they worked.Last May, Ms. Vertenstein hoped that she could soon welcome her students back into her home. That never happened.Her last student, it turns out, was Maggie Frampton, 14, one of those featured in the online recital last May. It was early in the morning two Mondays ago, on FaceTime before school. Maggie told her mother afterward that Ms. Vertenstein was not feeling well. (Ms. Vertenstein’s family said she did not have Covid-19 and had recently received the first dose of vaccine.)Now the Frampton children are among the 30 current students of Ms. Vertenstein in search of a new teacher.“Some naïve part of me thought she would live forever,” Yvette Frampton said.Also unclear is what will become of Ms. Vertenstein’s three pianos, including the Chickering & Sons that she and her husband bought for $600 in 1965, two years after landing in the United States, and the two grand pianos reserved mostly for older students or those rehearsing concerts or recitals.On Tuesday, on a cold and blustery Colorado afternoon, family and a few friends attended a graveside funeral as others watched online. The rabbi quoted Plato’s line about music giving “soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination” — the same line that Ms. Vertenstein chose for the program for last spring’s recital.Minutes before her small, plain coffin was lowered into the earth, notes from former students were read. One recalled how Ms. Vertenstein never liked the word “practice.”You do not practice, she would say. You make music.She sprinkled lessons everywhere.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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Announcing that he will perform his debut album in its entirety online, the ‘Superstar’ hitmaker will also offer NFT holders an opportunity to attend a virtual meet and greet with him.

Apr 15, 2021

AceShowbiz –
Rapper Lupe Fiasco is celebrating the 15th anniversary of his debut album “Food & Liquor” by performing the release in its entirety online on Thursday, April 15.

The “Superstar” hitmaker’s virtual concert will also capitalize on the growing popularity of digital assets known as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), with fans gaining access to the livestream by purchasing one of five special collectible items.

Devotees have also been offered the opportunity to attend a virtual meet and greet with Fiasco after the 8 P.M. ET show, which has been organized in conjunction with tech start-up bosses at Origin and Futurestream.

Announcing the gig on social media, he wrote, “I dropped Food & Liquor in 2006 and this Thursday, April 15th, I’m going to be doing the whole album live on Futurestream…I can’t wait for y’all to see what we got in store! Tickets available now: futurestream.tv/lupefiasco.”

  See also…

Back in late March, Lupe was revealed to be planning to launch five open edition NFTs on Origin’s NFT launchpad. In a statement, the crypto firm claimed to be “proud to follow up [its] record-breaking NFT auction with another direct-to-fan experience in collaboration with a true artistic visionary who has deep roots in crypto.”

This anniversary celebration came months after Lupe told fans he believes he is a better lyricist than Kendrick Lamar. “In my own words, once again for you b***hes, I love me some KDot,” he tweeted in September 2020. “Always have, always will. With that said, do I think he’s a good lyricist? Yes. Do I think he’s the best lyricist? No. Do I think it’s lyricists that are better than him? Yes.”

“Is he a better artist than me? Yes. Is he a better lyricist than me? No. Does he make better songs than me? Yes. Did I think control was ridicule? No. Am I jealous of Kdot? No,” he continued on. “Did I personally give him his props in Chicago on stage as the next nigga to take the crown? Yes. Is It on camera? Yes. Did I mean it? Yes.”

Meanwhile, other livestreaming highlights for Thursday include:

Vanity Fair’s Cocktail Hour (HAIM, Laura Dern, Glenn Close, Jessica Alba, Kelly Rowland and more) (7 P.M. ET)
Richard Thompson (7 P.M. ET) – https://www.92y.org/event/richard-thompson-and-david-fricke
Lord Huron (8 P.M. ET) – https://www.lordhuron.com/
Birdy (8 P.M. BST & ET) – https://shops.ticketmasterpartners.com/birdy-livestream
Travis Denning (8 P.M. ET) – https://sessionslive.com/TravisDenning/tickets
Jeffrey Gaines (8 P.M. ET) – https://www.stageit.com/jeffrey_gaines/jg_thursday_night_series/97116
Sylvan Esso (9 P.M. ET) – https://plus.bandsintown.com/

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