Aurelia Butler

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    How ‘Insomniac’ Became an a Cappella Sensation

    Few people were aware of the 1994 single “Insomniac” by the rock duo Billy Pilgrim, and it quickly sank into obscurity. But a cappella groups can’t stop singing it. We set out to find an explanation.In high school, I joined Rebel Yell, an a cappella group named after the Billy Idol song. I mostly beatboxed or sang background vocals. But one year, my chorus teacher gave me a lead vocal.It was on a song called “Insomniac,” by a folk rock duo called Billy Pilgrim. Our audiences didn’t know the song before we sang it. None of us did, which made it an odd choice for contemporary a cappella, where most of the songs performed are big hits. I didn’t realize until years later that groups all across the country were singing this song, without knowing anything about the original version.But why?Billy Pilgrim performing in the early 1990s. Two students at Emory University, Kristian Bush and Andrew Hyra, formed Billy Pilgrim in the early 1990s, and their self-titled major record label debut came in 1994. “Insomniac” was released as a single, but never charted. The band, named for the lead character in the Kurt Vonnegut Jr. novel “Slaughterhouse-Five,” didn’t collect much acclaim either.The duo stopped playing together in 2000. Bush formed Sugarland with Jennifer Nettles, and his music career took off. Hyra became a carpenter.However, the strangest thing happened with “Insomniac.”It took on a life of its own. For almost three decades, the song has been a staple of a cappella groups all over the country at all levels, whether high school, colleges, professional groups or otherwise.Go on YouTube, and you’ll find countless performances of the song through the years. A sampling: The professional group Straight No Chaser. Ow! at Glenbrook North High School. Section 8 at Ohio University.Amid the roster of popular songs typically selected by a cappella groups, “Insomniac” stands out as an unusual favorite. Alex Kaplan, a 20-year-old junior at Wesleyan University, said he performed the song with his group, the Wesleyan Spirits, “a couple days ago.”“It’s not uncommon for the occasional song to sort of gain a foothold in the a cappella community if it’s got particular qualities that lend themselves well to performance,” Kaplan said. “‘Insomniac’ is a weird one because it’s, with maybe one or two exceptions, just about the most unknown song that I’ve seen multiple a cappella groups do.”It is a melancholy, guitar-driven love song, with lines like, “I can hear your bare feet on the kitchen floor/I don’t have to have these dreams no more.”The recording begins with a wailing Hammond organ and the middle of the song has a musical interlude, which extends into a jam of sorts. Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls sings background vocals on the Billy Pilgrim version.“I was looking for a girlfriend,” Bush, the song’s writer, said.The path for “Insomniac” becoming ubiquitous in the a cappella world began before the record was even released.Sheet music for “Insomniac.”Billy PilgrimIn the early 1990s, a cappella — singing without instrumental accompaniment, with the sheer power of the human voice — was changing.Groups like Rockapella and The Nylons were ushering in a new mainstream approach, different from the traditional barbershop quartet style of many predominantly white male groups of the time. This newer style of performance meant that every instrument on a given song was accounted for. Drums would be represented by beatboxing, guitar strums and piano chords represented by rhythmic vocal approximations.Deke Sharon, an a cappella-obsessed student at Tufts University, also helped pioneer the shift, particularly on college campuses. As musical director for the Beelzebubs, the Tufts group, he encouraged previously unperformed arrangements of pop songs. After graduating in 1991, Sharon aimed to make a career spreading the gospel of a cappella.“Everybody laughed,” he said. They said, “You can’t make a career out of a cappella,’” but he said he told them: “It’s so wonderful. If people only knew, they would literally fall in love.”Deke Sharon was part of a shift to a new style of a cappella where every instrument was accounted for. He started compiling the best performances from college campuses.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesThere wasn’t much recorded a cappella before that, except for occasional exceptions like Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry Be Happy” or the Huey Lewis and the News cover of “It’s Alright.”Sharon formed a nonprofit called the Contemporary A Cappella Society, with the aim of popularizing this new, more modern form of vocalizing through a cappella festivals, awards shows and networking events for enthusiasts.He also had an idea. Back then, college groups had no way of spreading their music beyond campuses. There was no YouTube or Spotify. The web had yet to arrive, and even email was uncommon.Using a meticulously crafted database of groups that he had compiled in his dorm room, Sharon started taking submissions for “Best Of College A Cappella” compilation albums. Groups that made the cut would be on a compact disc that they could sell at shows. They could buy them from for $5 and sell them at shows for $15. Suddenly, a performance from, say, Rutgers University, could be available at Boston College.It was around this time that John Craig Fennell, a graduate student at the University of Virginia, joined the Virginia Gentlemen, an all-male offshoot of the Virginia Glee Club. Working at a summer camp in New Jersey, a co-worker handed him the newly released Billy Pilgrim debut.“You hear those first few squeezebox notes on the Billy Pilgrim track,” Fennell said. “I love it. it was immediately compelling.”An arrangement made by John Craig Fennell for the Virginia Gentlemen at the University of Virginia assigned vocal parts to all singers.John FennellHe saw an opportunity to take advantage of the shift in a cappella and stretch the abilities of the Virginia Gentlemen. He painstakingly transcribed the arrangement by hand — how most arranging was done back then — with voices emulating the sounds of the guitar and organ: “JUM-BUH-DUH, JUM-BUH-DUH.”The arrangement marked one the first times that all 14 members of the Virginia Gentlemen had their own vocal part on a song, he said.They submitted their recording to Sharon, who liked it enough to put it on one of the first “Best Of College A Cappella” albums in the mid-1990s.From there, the record hit campuses and the arrangement began to spread the old-fashioned way: word of mouth.Other groups copied the arrangement by ear. A member of the Wesleyan Spirits who had performed a version in high school brought it to the Spirits. That arrangement made its way to the Vineyard Sound, a group based on Martha’s Vineyard. Similar arrangements were performed at the University of Rochester and Plymouth State.“This song is what made me fall in love with my group,” Michelle Shankar, who was part of the Dartmouth Dodecaphonics from 2008 to 2012, said. “They open almost every show with this piece. It’s high energy, super upbeat, at least the a cappella version of it is. And it just starts with this wall of sound — that really high belt that’s like, ‘Whoaaa!’, and that just became an iconic line.”Many of the singers interviewed about the song could not help but sing a few bars, unprompted.Straight No Chaser during a performance. Its members have been singing “Insomniac” since it was a college group at Indiana University in the 1990s.Ashley White“It’s a perfect storm that is specific to ‘Insomniac,’” Walter Chase, a founding member of Straight No Chaser, said.Chase arranged a version after hearing it off the compilation album for the group in the mid-1990s, when it was still a college group at Indiana University: “When you’re a college student and one of the main purposes you do a cappella for is to sing for girls, to get attention and to be able to croon, the soloists’ material is this very heady love song.”On an annual retreat in New Orleans around 2000, the Wesleyan Spirits performed the song at a bar during the day. The bartender informed the group that it just so happened that Bush, the song’s writer, happened to be performing that same night. The Spirits returned that evening and Bush invited the group onstage to sing his song.“I remember trying to play it, and it was very square,” Bush said, laughing. “You can’t really play guitar to it.”Kristian Bush of Billy Pilgrim wrote the song “Insomniac” and performed it for the first time in 1994 with Andrew Hyra. The song became a staple for a cappella groups, despite it not being a hit itself.Elliot Liss for The New York TimesStill, Bush and Hyra had little awareness of the niche hit they had created. Hyra first realized it about a decade ago when he was sitting at a hotel in Martha’s Vineyard with his family, including his sister, the actress Meg Ryan.The Vineyard Sound were nearby and began to sing “Insomniac.”“I was like, ‘Holy cow!’” Hyra said.Ryan, who still calls herself Billy Pilgrim’s No. 1 fan, said she couldn’t believe her ears.“I’m not a singer, but I can always sing along with that song,” the actress said. “They always seem to write these songs that kind of give poetry to something very universal.”With the help of movies like “Pitch Perfect” and the former NBC show “The Sing-Off,” a cappella has gone more mainstream. Production values are higher, and transcription is easier using software. But the Virginia Gentlemen’s arrangement of “Insomniac” remains a constant.Billy Pilgrim reunited during the pandemic. The band has never made any money off the covers, but the song’s spread has left them elated. At concerts, “Insomniac” is their most requested song, Bush said. They even perform a new version.“Maybe that song should have been a big hit,” Hyra says.Bush finds the whole phenomenon delightful.“The music business is a whole series of ‘You’re already failing,’” he said, adding, “Every once in a while, something shows up and it ties a little balloon to your belt loop and suddenly you’re a little lighter, you know? And I think that’s what this does for me.” More

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    Best and Worst Moments From the 2024 Golden Globes

    Lily Gladstone made history, Jo Koy did not. And dressing on a theme proved a hit. These were just some of the highs and lows.The Golden Globes had a lot to prove Sunday night. It was the award show’s return to a primo broadcast time slot after a series of scandals over finances and lack of diversity upended what used to be known as the biggest party of the year in Hollywood. Now privately owned with a greatly expanded pool of voters, the Globes were making a bid for relevance. Did that bid succeed? Well, it helped that this was the first major televised ceremony since the writers’ and actors’ strike brought Hollywood to a halt, and stars and studios looking to goose their Oscar chances turned out after some skipped last year’s event. Then again, this wasn’t the liveliest show. Here are the highs and lows as we saw them.Most Historic Win: Lily GladstoneIn a momentous triumph, Lily Gladstone became the first Indigenous person to win a Golden Globe for best actress, for her turn in “Killers of the Flower Moon” as an Osage woman whose family members are killed in a plot to take their fortune. Gladstone, whose background is Blackfeet and Nez Perce, was only the second Native actress to receive recognition from the Globes: Irene Bedard was nominated in 1995 for “Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee,” a television movie.After receiving a standing ovation, an overcome Gladstone spoke a few lines in the Blackfeet language, “the beautiful community nation that raised me, that encouraged me to keep going, keep doing this,” she explained in English.“I’m so grateful that I can speak even a little bit of my language,” she added later, “because in this business, Native actors used to speak their lines in English, and then the sound mixers would run them backwards to accomplish Native languages on camera.” She dedicated the award to “every little rez kid” who had a dream. — Esther ZuckermanLeast Suspenseful Rivalry: ‘Oppenheimer’ vs. ‘Barbie’The presenter Oprah Winfrey, far right, watches as the “Oppenheimer” team accepts best drama. From left, Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Emma Thomas, Ludwig Goransson, Florence Pugh, Christopher Nolan and Cillian Murphy. Sonja Flemming/CBSIn the end, the great “Barbenheimer” face-off was a complete fizzle. “Oppenheimer,” with eight nominations, won five trophies — best drama, director, actor, supporting actor and score. After sitting on the sidelines for most of the night, “Barbie,” the ceremony’s most-nominated film, with nine nods, finally got in the game with a win in the rather meaningless category of best blockbuster (“cinematic and box office achievement”). “Barbie” got a second prize in the form of best song, which was kind of a no-brainer because the film’s tunes filled three of the category’s six slots. Time to rev up that Oscar campaign, Babs! — Brooks BarnesBest Looks: Stars Dressing on a ThemeFrom left, Oprah Winfrey, Margot Robbie and Taylor Swift.Getty ImagesJust in case anyone forgot about the “Barbie” effect of last year, which turned entire crowds pink, Margot Robbie managed to out-“Barbie” her own red carpets past in a sequined slither of hot pink Armani paired with a bristling pink tulle boa, all of it inspired by the 1977 Superstar Barbie.As it turned out, however, that was just the beginning of the on-theme dressing. Oprah Winfrey wore Louis Vuitton in the color purple, in honor of — you guessed it — “The Color Purple,” for which she served as a producer. And Taylor Swift wore glimmering Gucci in the sort of bright leafy shade that evoked nothing so much as the color of money and made it impossible to forget just how much green her Eras Tour has generated.Together they made for a more interesting trend than the traditional strapless frocks that also proliferated. (The best of those being Elle Fanning’s vintage Balmain and Rosamund Pike’s not-quite-vintage 2019 Dior: if you’re going to go with the classics, might as all go back to the source). And the theme dressing added a new dimension to the brand-marketing machine that the red carpet has become. — Vanessa FriedmanFlattest Monologue: Jo KoyThe host, Jo Koy, onstage at the Beverly Hilton ceremony.Sonja Flemming/CBSI had high hopes for Jo Koy, the 52-year-old Filipino American comedian who is only the second Asian American to host the Golden Globes. (Sandra Oh was the first, in 2019.) But Koy’s opening monologue felt like a highlight reel of mortifying moments. From a weird joke about being attracted to a plastic Barbie to one about the “Killers of the Flower Moon” filmmakers stealing the plot, Koy’s jokes met an icy reception from the audience. To be fair, he had barely any time to prepare. “I got the gig 10 days ago!” he said from the stage. “You want a perfect monologue?” It’s a shame, but Koy’s jokes will probably end up being best remembered for the memes they inspire on social media. — Christopher KuoFlattest Joke: Koy Riffing on Taylor SwiftWhy you gotta be so mean? The host’s jokes did not really improve as the night went on.“We came on after a football doubleheader,” Koy said as the ceremony returned from its first commercial break. “The big difference between the Golden Globes and the N.F.L.? On the Golden Globes, we have fewer camera shots of Taylor Swift.”Koy seemed to swallow the word “camera” as he said it. And when the actual camera, on cue, panned to Swift, she appeared deeply unamused, her lips pursed, her eyes stern as she sipped a drink.It is true that Swift has been shown many, many times on N.F.L. telecasts since she began showing up at Kansas City Chiefs games to cheer on the team’s tight end, Travis Kelce.But Koy’s joke, at the expense of perhaps the most famous person in a room full of famous people, fell flat again. So flat, that he muttered, “Sorry about that.” — Matt StevensMost Historic Double Win: Steven Yeun and Ali Wong of ‘Beef’Steve Yeun and Ali Wong with their trophies for “Beef.”Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThey may have gone head-to-head in a bitter feud that crossed 10 episodes of “Beef,” the Netflix road rage comedy that gained a huge online fandom last year, but Ali Wong and Steven Yeun both left the Globes on Sunday with statuettes in hand, as the first actors of Asian descent to win honors for a limited series or TV movie. First, Wong won best actress in the category and delivered an emotional acceptance speech, thanking her ex-husband and children for making it possible for her to be a working mother in Hollywood. A few minutes later, Steven Yeun won best actor in the same category. How do we order up a sophomore outing for Amy and Danny? — Sarah BahrBest Speech With a Twist: YeunThe most entertaining speeches take us on a ride. That’s what Yeun did when he won for actor in a limited series. He started out with a serious and vulnerable tone, saying, “The story I usually tell of myself to myself is one of isolation and, like, separateness.” But then he threw in a twist, saying that once he climbed onto the stage he realized that — wait, that inner monologue “feels a lot like the plot to ‘Frozen.’” It was unexpected yet heartfelt, a joke for his daughter. — Brooks BarnesBest Speeches With a Dose of Honesty: Kieran Culkin and Robert Downey Jr.Kieran Culkin accepting his “Succession” trophy.Sonja Flemming/CBSRobert Downey Jr. accepting his best supporting actor award.Sonja Flemming/CBSAwards show speeches tend to be mash-ups of gushing adjectives meant to communicate maximum gratitude — “amazings” and “incredibles” aplenty — but a couple of actors were refreshingly measured in their delight. This isn’t the Oscars, after all. Winning for his role as Roman Roy in “Succession,” Kieran Culkin told the audience, simply, “This is a nice moment for me.” And when Robert Downey Jr. stepped up to the microphone, he deflected applause for his supporting performance in “Oppenheimer” by addressing the prescription medication powering his nonchalance onstage: “Yeah, yeah, I took a beta blocker,” he said, “so this is going to be a breeze.” — Julia JacobsBiggest Upset: Best Screenplay for ‘Anatomy of a Fall’The previous group of Golden Globe voters could always be counted on to give us a few unpredictable wins, and though they weren’t always welcome swerves, they at least lent the night a charge of anything-could-happen frisson. That feeling was hard to come by this year, thanks to a series of respectable, safe choices, though the unexpected triumph of “Anatomy of a Fall” in the screenplay category certainly woke up the ballroom: In years past, Globe voters almost certainly would have chosen a starrier pick like “Barbie” or “Oppenheimer,” and it was fun to get a worthy upset. — Kyle BuchananWorst Award: The Cinematic and Box Office Achievement GlobeGreta Gerwig, left, and Margot Robbie enjoy their “Barbie” win.Sonja Flemming/CBSThe Globes added a new box-office trophy this year, with nominees required to have earned at least $150 million (or, as the guidelines put it, “commensurate digital streaming viewership”). The whole thing is a little silly, especially in a year in which two huge hits — “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” — were also popular with critics and nominated for many awards. Is it an effort to revive the academy’s widely derided attempt to add a best popular film category to the Oscars? Or just to get more A-listers in the room (including, yes, Taylor Swift)?Entertainment plaudits are basically made up of vibes and campaigning, meant to create heated discussions. But if there’s anything in movies that’s impossible to argue with, it’s box office receipts and clicks. So what was the undisputed biggest box office achievement in 2023? “Barbie.” Who won this new Globe? “Barbie.” Who else could it have been? — Alissa WilkinsonBest Writers’ Revenge: A Script ‘Written’ by Studio ExecutivesDaniel Kaluuya, left, Hailee Steinfeld and Shameik Moore at the Globes.Sonja Flemming/CBSPerhaps as an ode to the recently settled Hollywood writers’ strike, the presenters Daniel Kaluuya, Hailee Steinfeld and Shameik Moore announced they would introduce the best screenplay nominees with words written by studio executives — although given the dry, stilted language, the script may well have been generated by ChatGPT.“I am relatable,” Steinfeld intoned. “I am enjoy the Golden Globes.”“I do agree,” Moore said.“As do I,” Kaluuya agreed.At least the “executives” generated a few laughs.— Jonathan AbramsLeast Satisfying Reunion: ‘Suits’What is a “Suits” reunion without Meghan Markle? The law-firm drama that has found unprecedented success on Netflix more than a decade after its debut deserved a moment in the sun just for the sheer number of viewers it accrued in recent months. And I’m sure actors Gabriel Macht, Patrick J. Adams, Gina Torres and Sarah Rafferty were thrilled to present the award for best drama series. But where was Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, who was a star of the show and played a key character? She doesn’t live very far from the Beverly Hilton, where the ceremony was held. “Suits” fans had to be thrilled that their beloved cast was alive and well, but without Meghan, can you really call it a reunion? — Nicole SperlingMost Improved Angle: Shots of the Audience Behind the PresentersAmerica Ferrera and Kevin Costner were among the presenters shot from different angles.Sonja Flemming/CBSKeeping things interesting visually during an awards show can be a challenging task. Talking heads. Nominees. Award. Speech. Rinse. Repeat. But on Sunday night, the producers mixed it up by pulling a simple reversal and shooting some of the presenters with the audience in the background. It changed the feel while allowing us at home to peek behind some of the presenters during the more boring banter to check out the celebrities behind them. Who’s paying attention? Who can’t be bothered? One drawback was that the lighting didn’t always favor the presenters at these varying angles. But overall, it felt fun and gave a little jolt to the proceedings. — Mekado MurphyMost Surprising (Apparent) Spoiler: ‘Anatomy of a Fall’“Anatomy of a Fall” took home two Globes for its taut dissection of the frictions in a marriage, exposed when a wife is put on trial and accused of pushing her husband to his death at their home in the French Alps. Under the scrutiny of a court and the couple’s preteen son, Sandra (Sandra Hüller), defends herself as viewers are left to plumb the evidence for signs of whether her husband’s death resulted from an assault, an accidental fall or his own leaping.But as she accepted the award for best screenplay for the film, written with her husband, Arthur Harari, Justine Triet maybe revealed what her script did not. Describing their thinking when they completed the script, she said: “OK we are having a lot of fun but it’s radical and dark, nobody’s going to see this movie. It’s too long, they talk all the time, there’s no score — a couple fighting, suicide, a dog vomiting. I mean, come on.” The (accidental?) disclosure of the manner of death seemed out of step for one of the creators of a film so meticulously built to leave audiences guessing. — Elena BergeronBest and Worst Reinvention: The Globes ThemselvesWith the Globes trying to claw their way to semi-legitimacy, this was a perfectly reasonable attempt, but it all felt perfunctory.High: Intro segments tend toward the cringey at every awards show, and there were plenty of awkward moments here, too, but there were some bright spots: Keri Russell and Ray Romano’s fun repartee, Andra Day and Jon Batiste’s giggly banter and especially Kristen Wiig and Will Ferrell’s goofy dance bit. Ferrell’s signature outburst — “The Golden Globes have not changed!” — was probably the biggest laugh of the night.Low: Kind of everything? The whole ceremony had sort of a blah energy. The speeches were all fine, but none was especially wild. The biggest shock came when the broadcast included what sounded like glasses clattering to the floor. — Margaret Lyons More

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    Linda Sharrock Has Lost Her Speech, but She’s Still Performing

    Linda Sharrock, an avant-garde jazz musician who became aphasic after a 2009 stroke, has returned to the stage and inspired new generations.Last April, the Vienna-based avant-garde jazz vocalist Linda Sharrock gave her first New York performance in over 40 years: a sold-out concert at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, as part of a series curated by Solange. Appearing between the poet Claudia Rankine and the saxophonist Archie Shepp, Sharrock guided eight musicians through a fully improvised set while she howled powerfully over the cacophonous squall of free jazz in a declamatory style that evoked the evening’s program title, “The Cry of My People.”It wasn’t until after she’d received multiple standing ovations that most of the audience realized the 76-year-old singer wasn’t able to speak: Sharrock became aphasic after a 2009 stroke that paralyzed her right side; she now uses a wheelchair. A few weeks later at the Cambridge, Mass., home of the pianist Eric Zinman, who plays in her group the Linda Sharrock Network, Sharrock was unable to verbalize much more than “yeah,” “no,” “OK” and “I don’t know.”Despite her limited dialogical abilities, Sharrock was cheerful, charming and quick to laughter. Much of the talking was done by her caregiver — Mario Rechtern, an 81-year-old Austrian free jazz saxophonist who has, by his account, overseen her personal affairs and daily activities for the last 20 years. He not only plays in her band, he helps her dress, feeds her if necessary and carries her down the stairs.“This work with Linda is consuming,” Rechtern said, tugging at his woolly gray beard, “and at the same time, I cannot give in to the consuming, because when I give in, she’s lost. So it’s challenging.”Sharrock’s return to the stage — a manifestation of her stubborn refusal to be silenced — is one of the most stirring comeback stories in recent memory. Over a career stretching six decades, Sharrock has been a resolutely singular figure; almost no peers share her uniquely unorthodox vocal delivery. Too “out” for jazz’s in-crowd, she was relegated to relative obscurity. Yet her commitment to challenging her audience has ultimately made her a role model for experimental vocalists and Black female performers, providing a beacon of tantalizing possibilities.The poet and vocalist Camae Ayewa, who performs as Moor Mother, recalled hearing Sharrock’s music for the first time and “losing my mind,” she said in an interview. “I wrote a little poem about this because it was such urgency on my part to be like, ‘What is going on here? This is where I want to go! This is what I want to sound like!’ I hadn’t heard anyone before that had inspired me this way besides Betty Carter. I just started to be obsessed about it.”Sharrock’s vocal exclamations have become deeper and more guttural moans than the high-pitched shrieks of her early work with her then-husband, the musician Sonny Sharrock. In the late 1960s, Sonny revolutionized jazz guitar through volume, distortion and feedback while playing with Pharoah Sanders, Don Cherry, Wayne Shorter and Miles Davis. Linda’s approach was no less radical: On three albums of collaborations with Sonny, beginning with their remarkable 1969 debut “Black Woman,” her wordless exhortations included psychedelic sighs, orgasmic yodels and blood-chilling screams, all delivered with an intensity that made “Plastic Ono Band”-era Yoko Ono sound like Anne Murray in comparison.“I’ve never listened to any kind of a female jazz singer for any kind of inspiration or anything like that,” Sharrock said in a 1973 WKCR radio interview. “I was influenced by horn players,” she explained, citing incendiary saxophonists like Sanders and Albert Ayler.“The thing that killed me about her singing was that she was, if not the first, one of the few jazz singers who improvise,” Sonny said in the same WKCR conversation. “That’s one of the reasons she doesn’t use words: because it hinders your improvisation.”Sharrock was born Linda Chambers in Philadelphia, and lived with her grandmother and her younger brother, Pablo, in the working class Germantown neighborhood, according to Jacquelyn Bullock, a longtime friend and former neighbor. In an interview, she said that despite Sharrock’s confrontational vocal approach, offstage “she was quiet and demure,” with an interest in fashion and a distinctive sense of style. “She’s a gracious woman. Like most women, she likes nice things, and she has a great sense of humor.”Sharrock moved to New York after graduating from high school in 1965 with the intention to study painting, but soon became immersed in the Lower East Side’s jazz scene, where her inaugural professional gig was singing with Sanders. When she first began performing, she shaved off her eyebrows and kept her hair close-cropped, she told The New York Times Magazine in 1975. “It was the strangest look I could conceive of,” she said. “My life had taken such a drastic change, I wanted to present it physically.”She met Sonny through Sanders, and they married in 1967. Earnings for most free jazz musicians were lean, but that year, Sonny got the opportunity to work with the commercially successful jazz-funk flutist Herbie Mann, and spent most of the next seven years playing in his group. Linda went on tour with them and eventually joined the band, usually performing two of the couple’s compositions each night, “Black Woman” and “Portrait of Linda in Three Colors, All Black.”The Sharrocks lived in an apartment at 77 East 3rd Street in the East Village; the pianist Dave Burrell was a neighbor and hosted rehearsals for the 1969 “Black Woman” album in his tiny living room. Burrell recalled in an interview that hearing Sharrock sing for the first time, “I felt a bolt of excitement,” he said. “I thought of her as a vocalist who could throw herself into the ‘Black is beautiful’ moment and movement, and that made her one of the boys, so having her around was cool.”Another “Black Woman” musician, the trumpeter Ted Daniel, was a childhood friend of Sonny’s from Ossining, N.Y. “She was one of a kind,” Daniel said in an interview. “I haven’t heard anybody sing with the raw passion and just that kind of freedom that she approached in her singing with Sonny in that band.”Released on the Vortex subsidiary of Atlantic Records, the trailblazing “Black Woman” failed to find a larger audience. A few years later, the couple put together the Savages, a working band that could play out regularly. The group included steel drums and Latin percussion and gigged at downtown venues like the Tin Palace and lofts like Studio Rivbea, said Abe Speller, the band’s drummer. The Savages recorded a soundtrack to Sedat Pakay’s 1973 short documentary “James Baldwin: From Another Place” and performed a live set in 1974 on WKCR, which are the only surviving souvenirs of their existence. Speller recalled the band holing up to rehearse before entering a studio in December 1977 to record a four-song demo tape, but the group failed to score a label deal and eventually fizzled out.After Linda and Sonny divorced, she moved to Turkey and then Vienna, where she met her second husband, the Austrian saxophonist Wolfgang Puschnig, a few years later. (Sonny died in 1994 at 53.) Initially they were just musical collaborators, Puschnig said in a video call from his home in southern Austria, but a relationship blossomed and they were married in 1987 while in Mozambique for a gig.Under their own names and in groups like the Pat Brothers, AM4 and Red Sun, Puschnig and Sharrock recorded more than 20 albums together on European and South Korean labels from 1986 to 2007, but her vocal approach had changed markedly. Puschnig said that she moved away from singing in her free style after consulting a former Ziegfeld girl turned palm reader, who told her, “I see you’re a singer, but you don’t use words, but you should because you have a talent to use words.”“So that’s how she started to do lyrics,” he said.The jazz fusion bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma performed with them for years, and produced “On Holiday,” Sharrock’s 1990 album of Billie Holiday covers, complete with new jack swing beats and a rapper. “She was pushing the ball,” Tacuma said in an interview, “thinking outside of the box, in terms of music, creativity, and improvisation, and trying to bring something about musically with her voice that had not been done before.”Puschnig said Sharrock’s health started to deteriorate in the mid-1990s, and though their romantic relationship ended around 1996, they continued working together as late as 2007. Around 2004, Rechtern — who had first met Sharrock in 1979 — began caring for her, and was granted power of attorney in 2007. “She was really falling into the nothingness,” Rechtern said. “If I wouldn’t have taken her she would be in a home.”During surgery for an intestinal blockage in 2009, Sharrock suffered her stroke, and spent the following two years in and out of the hospital. In 2012 she was visited in Austria by the jazz bassist Henry Grimes. “She was sitting on the couch while he played,” Rechtern recalled, “and I heard her very softly singing into the music.”Intrigued, Rechtern began gradually coaxing Sharrock to perform again. “She started to develop first this growl sound, this cry, because she couldn’t articulate,” he said. “Out of the blues and this typical sound, she found this explosion.”Beginning with “No Is No” in 2014, Sharrock has released five recordings in Europe since her stroke. Her recent music is more in the spirit of the free jazz she made with Sonny than her somewhat more conventional work with Puschnig, though her vocal range is understandably not the same.Sharrock responded affirmatively when asked if she had needed to sing and perform again, and when asked if she felt better while onstage, she cracked up laughing.“This music is healing for her,” Rechtern replied. “There’s no doubt.”Sharrock’s work and perseverance has inspired a new generation of artists. “So much of it doesn’t have lyrics,” Taja Cheek, who performs as L’Rain, said in an interview, “and isn’t easy to understand in a certain kind of way, but I understood it, and I felt it so viscerally when I first heard her that it got very emotional for me.”On a recent re-listen of “Black Woman,” Cheek said, “it sort of hit me like a ton of bricks that ‘Oh, Linda Sharrock is the lineage I might be a part of.’ I am able to do what I’m doing, and it can be met with a little bit of understanding, because Linda has already done something like this.”Sharrock’s resiliency has resonated with her old colleagues, as well. “It is very telling about the heart of a performing artist wanting to be able to do that until it’s completely impossible,” Burrell said, “another further dimension of the determination that she still has, no matter what the circumstances. I’m very proud of her.” More

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    Golden Globe Awards Takeaways: ‘Oppenheimer’ and ‘Succession’ Win Big

    The 81st Golden Globes kicked off Hollywood’s awards season on Sunday in a chaotic and sloppy manner, with the host, Jo Koy, delivering a train wreck of a monologue, winners alternately seeming to take the ceremony seriously and not at all, and prizes going to a wide array of films and television shows.“Oppenheimer,” which entered the ceremony with eight nominations, emerged as the movie to beat in the coming Oscar race, winning five Globes, including for best drama, Christopher Nolan’s directing and Cillian Murphy’s acting. “Barbie,” “The Holdovers” and “Poor Things” also won notable movie awards.Here are the other main takeaways:The most nominated film, “Barbie,” which received citations in nine categories, won two Globes, including the one for best cinematic and box office achievement, a newly created prize. Its other victory was for best song.HBO’s “Succession” was the top television winner, as expected. The show collected Globes for best drama, actress (Sarah Snook), actor (Kieran Culkin) and supporting actor (Matthew Macfadyen).“Poor Things,” a surreal science-fiction romance, won best movie, comedy or musical. Emma Stone, the film’s star, received the Globe for best comedic actress, while Paul Giamatti (“The Holdovers”) received the statuette for best comedic actor.Lily Gladstone won the Globe for best actress in a drama for her performance in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” becoming the first Indigenous person to win the award.Da’Vine Joy Randolph (“The Holdovers”) was honored as best supporting actress. Robert Downey Jr. (“Oppenheimer”) won best supporting actor.Netflix’s “Beef” and FX’s “The Bear” each won three Globes. “Beef” was named best limited series, and Ali Wong and Steven Yeun collected Globes for their acting in the show. “The Bear” won the trophy for best comedy and two of its stars, Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy Allen White, were honored for their performances.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?  More

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    Lily Gladstone Becomes First Indigenous Person to Win a Golden Globe for Best Actress

    In a history-making triumph, Lily Gladstone has become the first Indigenous person to win a Golden Globe for best actress, said a spokesman for the organization that hands out the awards.Gladstone played Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman whose family members are murdered as part of a plot to take their fortune, in Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Gladstone, whose background is Blackfeet and Nez Perce, is only the second Native actress to receive any recognition from the Globes: Irene Bedard was nominated in 1995 for “Lakota Woman: Siege at Wounded Knee,” a television movie.After an ovation, an overcome Gladstone spoke a few lines in the Blackfeet language, “the beautiful community nation that raised me, that encouraged me to keep going, keep doing this,” she explained in English. She also thanked her director and co-stars, including Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, then dedicated the award to “every little rez kid” who had a dream.Here’s her speech:“I love everyone in this room right now, thank you. I don’t have words. I just spoke a bit of Blackfeet language, the beautiful community nation that raised me, that encouraged me to keep going, keep doing this. To my mom, who even though she’s not Blackfeet worked tirelessly to get our language into our classroom, so I had a Blackfeet language teacher growing up.“… I’m so grateful that I can speak even a little bit of my language, which I’m not fluent enough here, because in this business Native actors used to speak their lines in English and then the sound mixers would run them backwards to accomplish Native languages on camera. This is an historic one. It doesn’t belong to just me. I’m holding it right now, I’m holding it with all my beautiful sisters in the film and my mother [in the film], Tantoo Cardinal.“… Thank you, thank you Marty, thank you Leo, thank you Bob. You are all changing things. Thank you for being such allies. Thank you, Eric [Roth, the co-screenwriter], thank you Chief Standing Bear … and the Osage Nation.“… This is for every little rez kid, every little urban kid, every little Native kid who has a dream, who is seeing themselves represented and our stories told by ourselves in our own words with tremendous allies and tremendous trust with and from each other. Thank you all so much.Whether Gladstone is the first Indigenous person to win a Globe overall, that is unclear. The singer Buffy Sainte-Marie, who has said she was born to an Indigenous woman, won a Golden Globe in 1983 for the song “Up Where We Belong” from the movie “An Officer and a Gentleman.” But her heritage has recently been disputed.There have been other Indigenous nominees. This year, the late musician Robbie Robertson, who was Mohawk and Cayuga, was nominated for original score for “Killers.” (He lost to Ludwig Göransson for “Oppenheimer.”) Going further back, Chief Dan George was nominated for the 1970 comic western “Little Big Man” and Adam Beach for the 2007 television adaptation “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.”“Killers,” based on the nonfiction book by David Grann, was reconceived early on to focus on the relationship between Mollie and her husband, Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio), who is engaged in the conspiracy to kill her relatives. More

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    ‘The Bear’ Wins Best Comedy at the Golden Globes

    Globe voters said “Yes, chef,” to “The Bear,” which beat out “Ted Lasso” and “Abbott Elementary” to win best comedy.One quibble: Is “The Bear” even a comedy? Any episode of the restaurant-set FX series has more agita and fewer jokes than most dramas. Some scenes and some entire episodes, like the most recent season’s standout, “Fishes,” can only be watched through fingers. But “The Bear,” created by Christopher Storer, also has a softish heart — among other organ meats — and a half-hour running time, enough to land it in this category.The first season, which saw Jeremy Allen White’s troubled chef, Carmy, inherit the restaurant from his dead brother, was a surprise hit despite its grubby milieu and absence of bankable stars. (Apologies, Oliver Platt.) It made an immediate internet pinup of White and a darling of his co-star, Ayo Edebiri, who plays a driven upstart chef. The second season saw the eatery morph from an Italian beef joint to a Michelin-courting sensation. It focused more on the camaraderie among the staff even as it broke a few characters away for special episodes, and it was praised for its realistic depictions of work, grief, Chicago, high-end food and friendship.A nominee last year for best comedy, “The Bear” yielded a surprise best lead actor win for White as the aggrieved Carmy. Repeating his win in the same category this year was less of a surprise.“I can’t believe I’m in this room with all these people I’ve loved so much, admired so much for so long. It’s unreal. I love this show,” he said.White’s co-star, Edebiri, won her first Golden Globe for best actress in a TV comedy.“Everybody at ‘The Bear,’ that’s my family,” Edebiri said in her breathless acceptance speech. “I love you guys so much. It’s an honor to work with you and grow alongside you.”“All of my agents, managers, assistants, the people who answer my emails, y’all are real ones,” she added. “Thank you for answering my crazy, crazy emails.”Lionel Bryce, who plays Marcus, spoke on behalf of the show’s cast and crew accepting the award. “Most importantly, thank you to the entire restaurant community,” he said. “We played these characters for a couple of hours a day for a couple of months out of the year, but this is your reality, the highs and the lows. So thank you for embracing us.” More

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    Golden Globes: Ali Wong Makes History With Best Actress Win for ‘Beef’

    Ali Wong’s character in the Netflix comedy “Beef” faced plenty of challenges and frustrations, but the actress herself was nothing less than triumphant on Sunday night. Wong made history by becoming the first actress of Asian descent to win a Golden Globe for best actress in the limited series or TV movie category.The comedian stars alongside Steven Yeun in the 10-episode tragicomedy about a bitter feud that develops between two strangers after a traffic incident. The series debuted in April and received plenty of praise online, with audiences celebrating its complexity, unpredictability and relatability. (Well, hopefully it wasn’t too relatable.) Critics were also fans of “Beef,” which James Poniewozik, chief television critic for The New York Times, called “one of the most invigorating, surprising and insightful debuts of the past year.”While “Beef” is in the limited series category at the Globes and at the Emmys, which will be awarded next week, the show’s creator, Lee Sung Jin, has said he is open to exploring different directions for another season, including the possibility of a new ensemble cast.Wong expressed her appreciation for Lee and the show’s director, Jake Schreier, in her acceptance speech. “I really need to thank Sonny so much for creating such a beautiful show and inviting me to be a part of it. And the friendship that I made with Steven and Jake and the rest of the cast and crew will always be the best thing that came out of ‘Beef,’” she said. More

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    Jo Koy Sticks With Celebrity Teasing in Golden Globes Monologue

    In his opening monologue, Jo Koy made a return to the Hollywood tradition of mild celebrity teasing from the awards show stage, staying away from any mention of the Golden Globes’ recent troubled history involving race and ethics.The comic’s monologue struck a far less provocative tone than last year’s, when the show’s host, Jerrod Carmichael, used his opening minutes to address the voting body’s lack of Black members, saying that he had been hired only because he is Black. (That organization, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, has been dissolved and private ownership has taken over the Globes.)On Sunday, Koy jokes were more traditional, focusing on long movie running times; Ozempic, Hollywood’s favorite weight-loss drug; Robert De Niro and the birth of his latest child when he was 80; and in a personal anecdote, how Koy rushed to watch the nominees after telling the awards organizers that he already had.“When the Golden Globes called me and asked me if I wanted to host, I jumped at the chance, and I said, ‘Yes!’” Koy recalled. “Then they asked me if I saw every movie and every TV show, and then I said, ‘Yes!’ I lied.”Joking about one of the night’s top nominees, “Barbie,” Koy made another Hollywood in-joke, saying, “The key moment in ‘Barbie’ is when she goes from perfect beauty to bad breath, cellulite and flat feet. Or, what casting directors call a character actor.”Koy’s most provocative moment came when he teased the filmmakers behind “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Martin Scorsese’s fact-based epic about a murderous scheme by white men to steal the Osage people’s oil profits in 1920s Oklahoma.“The one thing I learned about that movie is that white people stole everything!” Koy said. “You guys stole everything! Not, like, 97 percent. You guys stole 100 percent of everything. You took the land, you took the oil — you took the premise of the movie.”When segments of the room seemed to groan, Koy doubled down, saying, “That’s hilarious, I don’t care. It’s just that the room is really white.” More