Lyric Opera of Chicago follows a recent world premiere with yet another: “Proximity,” a set of works by three librettist-composer pairs.CHICAGO — Major opera companies used to put on new or recent works once in a blue moon. But, astonishingly, pieces by living composers make up about a third of the Metropolitan Opera’s coming season. And on Friday, Lyric Opera of Chicago, just a month after one world premiere, presented another.Houses like these have been spurred by a hunger for fresh audiences that don’t have any particular devotion to “Aida” or “La Traviata.” But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. Creaking into development mode is a huge shift for institutions that have, for decades, almost solely done works from the distant past.And in Lyric’s premiere here on Friday, “Proximity,” the company gave itself an even more ambitious assignment than one new commission: three of them, by three composer-librettist pairs, sharing a single evening. Moreover, each opera takes on a different capital-I Issue, dealing with our closeness to and dependence on others: gun violence in Chicago; the difficulty of connection in a world mediated by technology; and the threat we pose to our planet.That this unwieldy idea ended up being stageworthy — sober, often blunt, sometimes meditative, sometimes listless, sometimes aggressively affecting — is largely because of the production’s ingenious director, Yuval Sharon.In shows like his “La Bohème,” which presented the opera’s four acts in reverse, Sharon has proved himself adept at executing thorny, even silly-sounding concepts in ways that end up being surprisingly clever and moving. With “Proximity,” he avoided the obvious decision to play the three pieces one after the other, à la Puccini’s “Il Trittico.”Instead, Sharon showed them off to better effect by putting them in closer, well, proximity: weaving them together, alternating scenes from the operas in a two-act evening. So, for example, the final half-hour of Act I brings the audience from a stylized Chicago L ride in “Four Portraits” (music by Caroline Shaw; text by Shaw and Jocelyn Clarke) to a realistic funeral in “The Walkers” (Daniel Bernard Roumain; Anna Deavere Smith), to the abstract poetry of “Night” (John Luther Adams; John Haines).Caroline Shaw and Jocelyn Clarke’s “Four Portraits” features a stylized ride on Chicago’s elevated train system.Todd RosenbergWith the edges of the scores smoothed by the conductor, Kazem Abdullah, and Lyric’s excellent orchestra, the three sound worlds play nicely together, with a shared grounding in repeating, minimal motifs, steady tonality and sensible, self-effacing lyricism — no earworm melodies, but no harshness, either, and hardly any look-at-me virtuosity.For a flexible set, the production designers Jason H. Thompson and Kaitlyn Pietras have stretched an LED screen across the stage floor and, halfpipe-style, up the backdrop. The screen is filled with spiffy and colorful imagery: slowly panning Chicago streetscapes seen from above; vast vistas of outer space; pulsating visualizations of communications networks. Without unwieldy scene changes, the three operas blend into a single performance with impressive seamlessness.It helps that Sharon, the artistic director of Detroit Opera, is experienced with collaborations (and logistics) even more complicated than this. For “Hopscotch” — presented in 2015 by the Industry, the experimental company he founded in California — audience members got into cars that drove around Los Angeles, and six composers and six writers shared billing.And his job is made easier here in Chicago by the fact that these are not three roughly equal installments, like the ones in “Il Trittico.” “The Walkers,” at an hour, is longer than “Four Portraits” and “Night” combined, so those shorter pieces naturally feel like interludes, breaking up a work that would otherwise dominate the threesome.And none of the three tells a story so realistic or sustained that it feels jolting to interrupt. The libretto of “The Walkers” is the latest in Smith’s long career of creating politically charged dramatic texts drawn from interviews she has conducted — in this case, with people she was introduced to through Chicago CRED and Choose to Change, organizations devoted to addressing gun violence in the city.Some passages from the interviews are sung as lamenting monologues, in the style of TED Talks; some remain spoken, with light underscoring. Quirks of speech — “you know,” “uh” — are preserved in a bit of naturalism that, especially when sung, is also endearingly strange.But some confusion is introduced because Smith and Roumain have, alongside these somber, stand-alone statements, embedded a loosely developed, difficult-to-follow plot about a gang rivalry, formed from composites of interview subjects. However impassioned the soprano Kearstin Piper Brown may be, it’s hard to make the plight of her roughly sketched character — who is targeted for killing after she is wrongly assumed to have shot a child — as clear or compelling as the plain-spoken truth of the longer monologues.The score is least convincing in slouchily rhythmic, singsong passages with drum kit. But Roumain pulls his orchestra back to a mellow steady-state undercurrent for the monologues, emphasizing the clarity of the text above all.And the funeral scene near the end of Act I is a persuasive Requiem, with lightly neo-Baroque solemnity and some stirring arias, including ones for the noble-toned baritone Norman Garrett and the shining tenor Issachah Savage as two of the figures who “walk” among vulnerable youth and attempt to guide them.The first of Shaw’s “Four Portraits” conveys a relationship between characters named only A (the countertenor John Holiday) and B (the baritone Lucia Lucas) that is stymied by an inability to connect: The call literally won’t go through.Shaw’s instrumental textures — ethereal strings; pricks of brasses and winds; sprightly pizzicato plucking; Minimalism-derived repetitions, more tentative than relentless — support a babble of fractured voices representing the technological ether, a conceit Nico Muhly explored in his 2011 opera “Two Boys.” Here and in the second section, that crowded L ride, the dramaturgy is hazy, the music bland.The last two sections are more interesting and beautiful, with troubled darknesses under the surface serenity. Shaw renders a car’s GPS as an electronically processed voice that veers from turn-left instructions to poetic flights, yielding to an introspective aria just right for Lucas’s tender voice.And in the final “portrait,” Lucas and Holiday, his tone floating into a soar, at last encounter each other without barriers, the music grandly building as a choir makes a trademark Shaw sound: a kind of modest, sliding low hum. (While Carlos J. Soto’s street clothes in “The Walkers” are an agile mixture of everyday and fanciful, the shapeless gray robes in “Four Portraits” do neither singer any favors.)Zoie Reams as the Erda-like narrator of John Luther Adams and John Haines’s “Night.”Todd RosenbergThe most disappointing of the three pieces is the 12-minute “Night,” a monotonous and clotted score from Adams, a usually inventive composer whose sonic depictions of ocean depths and parched, flickering deserts have been uncannily evocative. Here, his mezzo-soprano Sibyl (Katherine DeYoung, filling in for an ill Zoie Reams), like Erda in Wagner’s “Ring,” is a kind of earth goddess offering gnomic warning about a coming reckoning. Lowered from the flies and walking amid images of planets and stars, she is interrupted for stretches by a stentorian chorus.It’s a dreary way to end the first act. The second comes to a close in more powerful, if also emotionally manipulative, fashion, with the last scene of “The Walkers.” Singing the first-person account of Yasmine Miller, whose 20-month-old baby was killed in a 2020 shooting, Whitney Morrison’s gentle soprano is a little timid and tremulous. But the story is so obviously heartbreaking, and her performance so sincere, that criticizing her feels like actually criticizing a grieving mother.Mustering a warmly supportive chorus and a clichéd, echoey faux-choral keyboard effect, this finale is almost orgiastically sentimental, down to Miller’s smiling story about the new child she’s pregnant with and a quotation ascribed to Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey emblazoned on the screen: “For Black people, hope has to be resurrected every day.”Treacle is, of course, hardly foreign to opera. But bending real tragedy into thin uplift is.ProximityThrough April 8 at the Lyric Opera House, Chicago; lyricopera.org. More

The rapper, whose name was Kaseem Ryan, was known for self-producing 11 albums while also a maintaining a career with the New York Fire Department.Kaseem Ryan, who built a small but fervent following as an underground Brooklyn rapper known as Ka while maintaining a career as a New York City firefighter, died in the city on Saturday. He was 52.His death was announced by his wife, Mimi Valdés, on Instagram, as well as in a statement posted on his Instagram page. No cause was given, though the statement said that he had “died unexpectedly.”First with the mid-1990s underground group Natural Elements, and then on 11 solo albums he produced himself and released over nearly two decades, Ka gripped hard-core hip-hop listeners with gloomy beats and vivid descriptions of street life and struggle.In a 2012 review of his second album “Grief Pedigree”, The New York Times pop music critic Jon Caramanica described Ka as “a striking rapper largely for what he forgoes: flash, filigree, any sense that the hard work is already done.”Kaseem Ryan was born in 1972 and raised in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York. During his teen years, he dealt crack and sold firearms.He spent much of the 1990s trying to make a name for himself as a rapper, but then quit music altogether, only to come back a decade later.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

On his debut album, the Alaskan singer-songwriter moved into new emotional territory.Born in Anchorage to a wedding D.J. father and a karaoke-loving mother (whose own grandfather was a skilled luthier), Quinn Christopherson got his start in a music scene he describes as “closed in, so there’s nowhere to run.” For about six years, he played local shows and open mic nights while doing construction gigs and working with homeless and runaway teens at Covenant House. But that all changed in 2019, when he won NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest with his melancholy single “Erase Me,” which details his raw feelings relating to his gender transition. Last month, after wrapping a summer tour with Sharon Van Etten, Julien Baker and Angel Olsen, he released his debut album. “Write Your Name in Pink” is the sort of dreamy record you want to listen to at night, maybe with some flickering candles.“I’m glad I gave music a full-time shot, because in the past my songs were really sad,” says the 30-year-old Alaska Native, who is of Ahtna and Iñupiat ancestry. “The sliver of time I spent on music was spent trying to heal myself. When I started coming into my studio every morning, I could cover all kinds of emotions instead of just using [my music] as therapy.”His new offerings are more joyful — a celebration, he says, of his youth. Not that the songs are any less deeply felt. “Neighborhood,” the first track he wrote for the album, concerns Christopherson’s complex relationship with his mother. “Retelling these stories, I learn along the way,” he says. “My mom and I had some really rough times, but she was hurt before she hurt me. Having empathy for her younger self is important in telling my story, too.”His family has never hid their struggles, Christopherson says, and their openness has inspired him to be vulnerable in his music. “We, as native people, have had a lot to overcome, and we’re still climbing our way out of it,” he says. “You can take a lot of things from people, but you can’t take our stories.” More

He began playing professionally as a child, worked with some of jazz’s biggest names in the late 1950s, and remained a leading figure in the music for the next 60 years.Slide Hampton, a jazz trombonist, composer and arranger who arrived on the scene at the end of the bebop era and remained in demand for decades afterward, was found dead on Saturday at his home in Orange, N.J. He was 89.His grandson Richard Hampton confirmed the death.Mr. Hampton made his name in the late 1950s with bands led by Dizzy Gillespie, Maynard Ferguson and others. He was considered a triple threat — not just a virtuoso trombonist but also the creator of memorable compositions and arrangements.He won Grammy Awards for his arrangements in 1998 and in 2005, the same year the National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master.During the 1980s, he led a band called the World of Trombones that consisted of up to nine trombones and a rhythm section. Big, brassy jazz was out of favor at the time, but by then he had become an elder statesman of jazz, and he was able to insist on bringing his full band into clubs more interested in small, intimate groups. Once in the door, he was almost always a hit.He was also a fixture on college campuses, teaching composition and theory to the next generation of jazz musicians and instilling in them a respect for jazz — and the trombone — that went well beyond the music.“Playing a trombone makes you realize that you’re going to have to depend on other people,” Mr. Hampton told The New York Times in 1982. “If you’re going to need help, you can’t abuse other people. That’s why there’s a real sense of fellowship among trombonists.”Mr. Hampton in concert at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center in Manhattan in 2006.Rahav Segev for The New York TimesLocksley Wellington Hampton was born on April 21, 1932, in Jeannette, Pa., about 30 miles east of Pittsburgh. He was the youngest of 12 children, and his parents, Clarke and Laura (Buford) Hampton, recruited most of them to be in the family band they led — Locksley joined as a singer and dancer when he was just 6.In 1938 the family moved to Indianapolis in search of more work. The city had a thriving jazz scene, and they were soon touring the Midwest.They never lacked for gigs, but they did lack a trombone player, a deficit the elder Mr. Hampton remedied by handing the instrument to his youngest son when he was 12 and teaching him to play it. He took to the instrument — no easy task for a child — and it didn’t take long for him to earn the nickname Slide.He studied at a local conservatory, but most of his musical education came through his family and other musicians. He was particularly taken by J.J. Johnson, the leading trombonist of the sophisticated school of jazz known as bebop, who lived in Indianapolis. Mr. Hampton later recalled that one evening he was standing outside a club with his instrument, too young to enter, when Mr. Johnson walked by. He was supposed to play that night, but he didn’t have his trombone. Mr. Hampton gave him his own.Mr. Hampton later adapted several of Mr. Johnson’s compositions. He kept one of them, “Lament,” in his repertoire for decades.After his father died in 1951, the family band was led by Locksley’s brother Duke. In 1952 the band won a contest to play at Carnegie Hall, opening for Lionel Hampton (no relation).While in New York, Mr. Hampton and one of his brothers went to Birdland, the fabled jazz club, where they saw the bebop pianist Bud Powell play. That experience, he later said, left a much greater impression on him than performing at Carnegie.Mr. Hampton married Althea Gardner in 1948; they divorced in 1997. He is survived by his brother Maceo; his children, Jacquelyn, Lamont and Locksley Jr.; five grandchildren; and 13 great-grandchildren. His son Gregory died before him.The Hampton family band later returned to New York to play at the Apollo Theater, and Slide urged them to relocate to the city. When they demurred, he made his own plans.A friend recommended a once-a-week gig in Houston, and Mr. Hampton jumped at the chance. It paid well enough that he could use the rest of the week to study and compose.In 1955 the rhythm-and-blues pianist Buddy Johnson recruited him for his band, and he relocated to New York. A year later he moved to Lionel Hampton’s band, and a year after that he joined Maynard Ferguson’s. He composed some of the Ferguson band’s better-known pieces, including “The Fugue” and “Three Little Foxes.”Mr. Hampton found himself in high demand and struck out on his own in 1962 as the leader of the Slide Hampton Octet. Though that band lasted just a year and he later said he did a poor job as its leader, it greatly increased his visibility.As a leader, Mr. Hampton was humble. He often took a seat in the audience after playing a solo so as not to upstage other band members when their turns came. Once, when a television crew showed up to film the band, he cut his solo short to make sure everyone got a turn on camera.In the early 1960s he bought a brownstone in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, which quickly became a hot spot for jam sessions and a crash pad for some of the country’s top musicians. The saxophonists Wayne Shorter and Eric Dolphy and the guitarist Wes Montgomery all lived there for a time.After his octet broke up, Mr. Hampton worked as a musical director for Motown Records, collaborating on productions for Stevie Wonder, the Four Tops and others. There he encountered firsthand the rising popularity of pop and R&B and concluded that jazz was being boxed out of the American music scene. After touring Europe in 1968 with Woody Herman, he settled in Paris, where he found not just a thriving jazz audience, but public subsidies that supported the music.“The conditions and the respect for the artist in Europe were so incredible that I was overwhelmed,” Mr. Hampton told The Times in 1982. “They saw jazz as an art form in Europe long before they did here.”He returned to America in 1977, initially to write arrangements for the saxophonist Dexter Gordon, who himself had recently returned from Europe. By then the place of jazz had changed — major labels were becoming interested, government grants were becoming available and colleges were adding jazz to the curriculum.Mr. Hampton was once more in demand as a musician — and now also as an educator. Over the next decades he taught at Harvard, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, DePaul University in Chicago, and elsewhere. And he continued to play at New York venues into the 2010s.When asked what explained his success over such a long career, Mr. Hampton insisted that it wasn’t just talent, but also practice — he practiced four to five hours a day, and would do even more if he had the time.“Everything that’s really of quality requires a lot of work,” he said in a 2007 interview with the National Endowment for the Arts. “Things that come easy don’t have the highest level of quality connected to them.” More