Aurelia Butler

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    Antonia Bennett Used to Sing With Tony. Now She’s Carrying on Solo.

    The crooner’s daughter is ramping up her music career once again, and plotting a new album. On Friday, she’ll perform two sets at Dizzy’s Club in New York.Antonia Bennett’s childhood had some unique charms. There were the parties, where the likes of Rosemary Clooney, Ella Fitzgerald and Mel Tormé would gather around the piano and sing. There were the times Bennett’s father, Tony, took her to work, beginning when she was about 5, and gave her an early taste of the spotlight.“My dad would just bring me up onstage, and we would sing together,” Bennett recalled in a recent interview. “I guess it started with ‘The Hokey Pokey’ and ‘Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,’ and then I graduated to ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz,’ and we just kept going from there, you know?”Bennett, 49, is the younger of the crooner’s two daughters by the second of his three wives, the actress Sandra Grant Bennett. Over the years, she too has sung professionally, releasing a 2014 album, “Embrace Me,” and an earlier EP that mixed traditional pop standards with a cover of Pat Benatar’s “Love Is a Battlefield.” For the first time since her father’s death in July at 96, she is preparing to take the New York stage — and start her career anew.“It was such a privilege to be able to get to know my dad in my adult life, and to spend so much time traveling and performing with him,” said Bennett, who regularly opened for her father and was his featured duet partner at major venues and festivals until his retirement from the stage. “And I learned so much from him.”On Thursday, she will play two shows at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Dizzy’s Club. Earlier this month she released a new single, “Right on Time,” a breezy slice of jazz-tinged pop she co-wrote with her frequent collaborator Cliff Goldmacher, a Nashville veteran who has teamed with artists including Keb’ Mo’ and Kesha. “I don’t really have a timeline, because I look at my dad and I think, he just kept reinventing himself and going on and on,” Bennett said of her own career.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesThe tune is one of several originals that will be included on a forthcoming album she has produced with the noted jazz pianist and arranger Christian Jacob, with vocals produced by Mark Renk. There are also covers, of course, of standards such as “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Exactly Like You,” set to elegant, playful jazz arrangements that flaunt her influences, which extend to pop bards like Randy Newman.“I pull from everything,” Bennett said in a video interview from her Los Angeles home, showing off a lush mane of red hair and a girlish smile that matches her lissome, tangy singing voice, which The Times critic Stephen Holden once described as having “echoes of Billie Holiday and Rickie Lee Jones (with a hint of Betty Boop).” Bennett studied at Berklee College of Music and also plays piano, although “not in public,” she noted. She said the treatments on the new album are jazz “because that’s where I come from.”At Dizzy’s, Bennett will appear with the pianist Todd Hunter’s trio, featuring the bassist Ian Martin and the drummer Chris Wabich. “She knows what she’s looking for, but she’s also very open to collaboration,” Hunter said in an interview. “And she’s got a lot of great stories — though I don’t know if there are any I could actually repeat.”Jason Olaine, vice president of programming at Jazz at Lincoln Center, which will celebrate Tony Bennett in a concert gala next April, has known Antonia for years, and praised her “fresh, direct” vocal approach. “It feels very honest, without a lot of ornamentation,” he said. “I’ve seen her on the East Coast with other groups, and it will be nice to have her in a small group setting, with people she’s intimately familiar with.”While her album doesn’t have a firm release date, Bennett has more live concerts planned for February in Chicago. “I don’t really have a timeline, because I look at my dad and I think, he just kept reinventing himself and going on and on,” she said.Bennett also credits her light touch musically in part to her father’s influence: “He would always give me this great advice, which is to sing the way you speak.” She added, “I think the most important thing I absorbed from my dad was how much he loved what he did — how much he got from the audience, and how much he gave in return.”After her father learned he had Alzheimer’s disease, his work became therapeutic, she said. “I think just being in that routine of singing and performing was important for him. Sometimes he would repeat a song, but nobody ever cared — he always sang like it like he was singing it for the first time. It was beautiful to watch him do something he really loved. Even after he stopped singing in concert halls, he would get together with his piano player and go through songs.”Bennett is already carrying on a family tradition, inviting her own daughter, Maya, 7, onstage during performances. “I’ll let her sing the parts she knows, and if I think she doesn’t know a part I’ll just sneak the words in,” she said.For Bennett, something more than maternal pride is at work in such moments. “I feel very confident now,” she said. “I feel like this is my time; I’ve been honing my craft for many years, and I feel whatever I put out now will be a good reflection of who I am — like a page in a book that I can keep building on. I’d really like to be able to do this forever and ever.” More

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    Can a Rom-Com Make Sense in Dark Times? Yes, When It’s From This Master.

    Aki Kaurismaki’s “Fallen Leaves” is both magical and despairing, born of what the Finnish auteur’s stars say is an unusual shooting approach.There’s a detail in Aki Kaurismaki’s brilliant new gem of a comedy, “Fallen Leaves,” that I didn’t notice — even after two viewings — until one of its stars pointed it out to me. When the heroine goes to work as a dishwasher at a dingy Helsinki bar, there’s a shot of an oversize calendar. The year is 2024. “This is actually, you know, like a sci-fi film,” the actor Jussi Vatanen told me in a video call.As absurd as it sounds, there’s truth in that statement. The carefully constructed, dry-as-a-bone romantic comedy (in theaters now) technically takes place in the future. However, if you didn’t notice the calendar, you might assume it’s a period piece — one from the 1980s perhaps, given the clothing and décor — except for the fact that the radio is broadcasting reports from the ongoing war in Ukraine.It’s all a bit disorienting, but it’s also part of the magic of the latest from the Finnish master. Alma Poysti, the other star of the new film, described “Fallen Leaves” as something out of a “fairy tale,” adding, “He probably suggests to throw logic out of the window.”Perhaps one reason I’m so taken with “Fallen Leaves” is that it does feel like an uplifting fairy tale despite the despair that initially surrounds the characters. It’s a love story with a happy ending — and a cute dog to boot — that nonetheless throws together two people whose loneliness is palpable, who exist in an unforgiving world, where work and joy is often scarce. To love “Fallen Leaves” is to submit to the often hilarious deadpan rhythms that are characteristic of Kaurismaki’s work but also to its unrepentant optimism.One of Poysti’s co-stars in “Fallen Leaves” is a four-legged actor who happens to be the director’s dog, Alma. Malla Hukkanen/SputnikAt a moment in the release calendar when seeing a quote-unquote serious film often requires wrestling with humanity’s ills, “Fallen Leaves” is a rom-com from a great auteur that, in its brief run time, offers a balm for dark times. It’s not frivolous, but at the same time it’s genuinely heartwarming.Kaurismaki has called “Fallen Leaves” a lost installment of what is known as his “Proletariat” trilogy: three films released in Finland between 1986 and 1990. Like “Fallen Leaves,” these relatively short works are all stories about people on the margins.This latest finds its two solitary protagonists in Ansa (Poysti), who stocks the aisles of a coldly lit grocery store, and Holappa (Vatanen), who works on a construction site and dulls his pain with alcohol. Their eyes first meet, briefly but intensely, at a karaoke bar. He’s been dragged there by a bombastic friend, even though he would prefer to be reading comics alone. “I remember in the script it said that the gaze is upsetting Holappa so much that he needs to go out for a smoke because he can’t handle it,” Poysti said, adding, “It’s this kind of electric moment.”Their paths continue to collide across Helsinki — she finds him passed out at a bus station one night — before they finally make tentative moves toward a true introduction. A coffee date turns into an evening-long excursion to see a film. (Cheekily, it’s Jim Jarmusch’s zombie flick “The Dead Don’t Die,” a nod from one art-house hero to another.)And yet the path to romance is not easy. Some of the obstacles seem to emerge from the most conventional rom-com tropes. Holappa immediately loses Ansa’s phone number, for instance, when he reaches into his pocket for a cigarette and the slip of paper blows away. Other impediments are deeper and more painful. Though she is infatuated with him, Ansa is wary of Holappa’s dependence on alcohol, and refuses to allow herself to come second to his addiction — she’s been through that before with her father and her brother.Still, without spoiling too much, this is not a dour exploration of love lost. In fact, by the end it’s downright life-affirming. And, yes, at some point during the saga, Ansa takes in an adorable stray dog, played by Kaurismaki’s real life pup, Alma. Even if it doesn’t work out between her and Holappa, at least she’ll have a companion. The dog is an immediate comfort, settling in next to Ansa on her twin bed.In interviews, Poysti and Vatanen explained how unusual a Kaurismaki set is. He doesn’t want his actors to rehearse by themselves, and he usually does only one take. If they mess up, they get a second go. Only a disaster would prompt a third. Even the pooch would typically hit her mark, Poysti explained: “She’s got intuition.”The film offers glimmers of hope amid a bleak setting.Malla Hukkanen/SputnikIt would be tempting to view the frames Kaurismaki creates as almost too exacting, since he does construct this world with a painterly quality. At the karaoke establishment, there are beats when it seems as if the bartender and the other patrons are frozen while the singers perform. An absent-minded swig of beer breaks the spell. But there’s also an energy to this precision, especially when Ansa and Holappa are interacting. You feel the expectant tension between them, this flicker of hope for two souls resigned to the idea of being forever lonely.It’s reflective of the anxiousness felt by the performers — both Kaurismaki newcomers, children of the digital age being captured on 35-millimeter film.“There is this sort of sense of nervousness, and you can’t be very prepared,” Vatanen said. “So you have to be very present in that moment.”Poysti agreed that there was something terrifying about the experience initially, but that subsided when she realized what Kaurismaki was making. “It’s so precious and fragile and honest, and as soon as you repeat it, you have to start faking it a little bit,” she said. “So if you can avoid it then you will find something very, very honest and rare and beautiful, so you start to get kicks from it and you start to love it.”And it’s not as if Kaurismaki isn’t playful. For one musical sequence, he recruited the impossibly cool modern Finnish duo Maustetytot, whose name translates to “spice girls” and who perform a song with the lyric “I like you but can’t stand myself.” The jokes elicit chuckles even if the characters barely crack a smile; Poysti said there were some moments when she had trouble not breaking. After a rough patch for Ansa and Holappa, Ansa’s friend declares that “all men are swine.” Ansa shoots back: “They’re not. Swines are intelligent and sympathetic.”That humor in the face of desperation, which ultimately leads to an ending that is as tender as any Hollywood rom-com, is why “Fallen Leaves” feels like such a gift. Poysti said she believed that Ansa and Holappa were going to be all right as they walk off into the future, a little battered but together.“I think,” she said, “throughout the film, there is a sense that caring for each other is a counter force for cynicism, and as long as you care for each other, then you have strengths and you have some power in life.”And that is timeless — no matter the year on the calendar. More

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    JACK Quartet Commits to Finding the Music

    Its stylistic range, precision and passion have made the group one of contemporary music’s indispensable ensembles.“Can your hiccups be even bigger?” the composer Natacha Diels asked the JACK Quartet on a recent morning.“I was thinking there were differences in how you were leaning back on the flamingos,” she added, and, addressing the cellist, said: “Jay, your owls are a little unconvincing. Maybe a little more jowl in your owl?”Somehow, this bizarre code would translate into meticulously uproarious art. Diels and the JACK had come together in an airy room at the Mannes School of Music in Manhattan to rehearse her “Beautiful Trouble,” a five-part piece premiering in February that brings together surreal short films and just-as-absurdist live performance.Diels calls for the four musicians to hiccup, as well as make clicks, dings, odd little movements, head rolls and maniacal grins, among much else. Flamingos and owls are drawn in the score as notation for a full-body unfurling motion and shudder. At that morning rehearsal, the JACK’s usual instruments — violins, viola and cello — were still in their cases at the edge of the room.A few days before, I had spent time with the venerable Emerson String Quartet as it prepared to give its final concerts, with music of Beethoven and Schubert. Compared to that, this JACK rehearsal didn’t feel like a different group or a different piece; it felt like a different world.“The performance practice can be kind of far away from the Classical-Romantic continuum,” Jay Campbell, the quartet’s cellist, said with winking understatement in an interview alongside his colleagues a week later. “And we gravitate to that.”“That” can mean a lot of different things. The group — Campbell, the violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, and the violist John Pickford Richards, all in their mid-30s to mid-40s — can do, with equal aplomb, austerely earthy arrangements of Renaissance and medieval pieces, the eclectic folk jam of Gabriella Smith’s “Carrot Revolution” and Diels’s fanciful choreography.John Zorn’s ferociously fast thickets of notes and Catherine Lamb’s glacially shifting microtonal drones are both JACK specialties; on Friday, the group will perform Lamb’s 90-minute magnum opus “divisio spiralis” at Yale.With that sprawling stylistic range and its technical mastery, its enthusiastic curiosity about eminent and student composers alike, its precision and passion, the JACK has, since its founding in 2005, become one of contemporary music’s indispensable ensembles.“There’s almost nothing they can’t do,” said the composer Amy Williams, who is at work on a new JACK commission. “So in a way, it’s like writing for electronics, with no human limitations. That can be exciting, and also terrifying.”The soprano Barbara Hannigan, who has toured with the group, said: “It’s a very disciplined yet manic virtuosity. And somehow they’re also very calm at the center of all that virtuosity. They are super, super centered. I’ve worked with quartets with a specialty in modern repertoire, but there’s nobody like JACK.”The group formed in the heady atmosphere for new music at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., in the early 2000s. The players in the original lineup — Richards, Otto, the violinist Ari Streisfeld and the cellist Kevin McFarland — were united by decisive encounters with the work of the German composer Helmut Lachenmann, a master of sonic extremes. Lachenmann traveled to Toronto to coach three of the JACK members in his first quartet, “Gran Torso,” and the group flew to a festival in Mexico with other Eastman musicians to continue working with him.“I am their father, or something — their grandfather,” Lachenmann, who turns 88 this month, said with a laugh recently. “They were totally precise, and very musical. And there is for me one word that is very important: They are serene. When I met them, immediately it was clear, the honesty and the concentration. I don’t find better groups for my music than them.”Otto recalled, of their early work on Lachenmann’s third quartet, “Grido”: “We could sense that it was just the tip of the iceberg. Just the depth of this music — I’d never encountered something like that before, the thought that we could just continue practicing this piece for a really long time.”JACK performing at the Tribeca New Music Festival 2010 with its original lineup: from left, Ari Streisfeld, Otto, Kevin McFarland and Richards.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesThey chose to call the group “JACK,” an acronym of their first names — at first a jokey nod to Lachenmann, whose “Grido” is named after the members of the Arditti Quartet. But the players also liked its slightly ironic all-American quality and its modesty.In the first years, the group played only sporadic concerts, and they weren’t usually glamorous. The JACK often performed at the Tank, then on Church Street in Lower Manhattan, where cockroaches would sometimes scamper over the musicians’ feet while they played.Lachenmann put in a good word with WDR, the influential radio network in Cologne, Germany, which invited the JACK to play and record all four of Iannis Xenakis’s quartets, a feat not yet attempted. Released in 2009 as part of Mode Records’s complete Xenakis project, it made the group’s reputation.“We got paid to record it, which is crazy,” Richards said. “And that album introduced JACK to a lot of people.”It established the quartet as youthful masters of daunting modernism, as did a live recording of a 2011 performance of works by Xenakis (“Tetras,” an intense calling card), Ligeti, Cage and Matthias Pintscher at Wigmore Hall in London. But the flood of repertory and touring soon grew trying.“It’s hard to do more than 70 or 80 concerts a year with all new pieces,” Richards said. McFarland wanted to move to Colorado, where his partner lived, and Streisfeld wanted to stop traveling so much and take a steadier teaching position.They left the group in 2016, and while Otto and Richards were committed to keeping JACK going, it was, Richards recalled, “surprisingly hard to discover people who wanted to throw their whole lives into it.” But Campbell and Wulliman, both well regarded in the cozy contemporary-music community, fit the bill.“I had been playing in professional new-music ensembles in Chicago,” Wulliman recalled. “But to sit down with these guys to read through ‘Tetras’ — whoa, I have never, ever, ever experienced anything like that. Being able to just get through something that easily. The ease of the music moving forward.”The JACK is not one of those businesslike quartets that travels separately and meets up just for soundchecks and performances. “I still like spending time with them,” Wulliman said. They go on hikes and search out new restaurants together on tour — and, when road trips are involved, always sit in the same configuration in the car, with Richards at the wheel.The four have mock fights about things like whether they should play Ralph Shapey’s astringent music. (“I’m dying to do Shapey,” Otto said; “I’d rather die,” said Wulliman.) But when they’re rehearsing, they speak in genial fragments, completing one another’s sentences and doing much more playing than debating.Going through an arrangement of a piece by the 16th-century composer Nicola Vicentino, Otto, who was doing a harsh, very contemporary-sounding bow stroke, asked, “Does it feel over the top with the sweeping stuff?”JACK rehearsing in San Francisco recently. Otto said: “We’ve always gotten along, but there’s been an evolution in how we communicate — with our playing as well as our words.”Ulysses Ortega for The New York TimesWulliman thought a second, and answered, “I’m not ready to pass judgment yet.” And they moved on.In the interview, Otto said: “We’ve always gotten along, but there’s been an evolution in how we communicate — with our playing as well as our words. Sometimes, early on, we would get overly conceptual or just talkative at rehearsals, and it wasn’t really that productive.”Since those beginning years, using the Kronos Quartet as a model, JACK has been organized as a nonprofit — Lachenmann co-signed the articles of incorporation — to allow it to raise money, commission pieces and start initiatives on its own, rather than waiting for partner institutions.“It feels like institutions are just a little behind,” Campbell said. “I want to be more in front of it.”In 2018, the group became the quartet in residence at Mannes, a milestone for its artistic and financial stability. Its budget in 2010 was $120,000; it’s now $700,000, separate from the members’ Mannes salaries — and large enough for JACK to have hired a full-time executive director, Julia Bumke, in 2020.As its 20th anniversary approaches, the group is focusing on expanding its fund-raising to include more individual givers amid the grants and foundation support, as well as fortifying its already robust commissioning activities, including the JACK Studio program, which offers funding for new scores as well as a range of mentorship and performance opportunities.When the quartet believes in a composer, it truly commits. “As we worked together,” Catherine Lamb said, “something clicked: ‘I can really write what I want to write for these people. I don’t have to hold back. I can explore what I want to explore.’ So I let myself go.”The result was “divisio spiralis,” an epic, 13-part experiment in delicate yet rending, mesmerizing harmonic changes that demands hyper-exact intonation to make its impact.“The last time I heard them play it live,” Lamb said, “I was overwhelmed by how much it had grown since the premiere in 2019. They had more clarity in reaching the sound colors together, finding the right kinds of balances. It’s more and more seamless, more and more musical.”That commitment to finding the music — the sheer beauty — in what could be merely exercises in complexity, to treating every composer like a distinct style that can be ever more fully inhabited, is what sets JACK apart.The group said it was a little intimidated by the difficulty of Amy Williams’s music. But Williams, whose new JACK piece relies heavily on hocketing, the medieval technique of alternating rhythms so lines interlock like a zipper, said that was unlikely.“They have absorbed so much music — working with students, premiering pieces, large-scale composer projects,” she said. “It’s quite extraordinary how much they’re processing. Challenging them is no longer on the table.” More

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    Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’ Film: 4 Takeaways From the Premiere

    The star skipped the red carpet and slipped into the celebrity-filled screening on Saturday night. But the movie pulls back the curtain — a little.Near the end of her new concert documentary, “Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé,” Beyoncé states that she’s tired of being a “serial people-pleaser.” Since she was a child, she says, she has been striving for stardom, but now that she’s on top of the world and two years into her revelatory 40s, it’s time to recalibrate.“I have nothing to prove to anyone at this point,” she says.Maybe that’s why Beyoncé decided to skip the red carpet entirely at the Los Angeles premiere of her movie on Saturday night, leaving that task to a starry list of invitees that included Tyler Perry, Ava DuVernay, Lizzo and Issa Rae. Though Beyoncé made a posed appearance at the Oct. 11 premiere of “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” — like that concert documentary, “Renaissance” will be distributed by AMC Theaters — she entered her own premiere only after the lights had been turned off and the movie was seconds away from beginning.Unlike Swift, who shares plenty about her life and is currently in a high-profile, well-documented romance with the N.F.L. player Travis Kelce, Beyoncé is one of our most private superstars. She has given virtually no interviews over the last decade, and any insight into her life or work mostly has to be inferred from brief statements released on social media or her website. “Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé,” which chronicles the most recent world tour in support of her seventh studio album, offers fans something new to interpret, pulling back Beyoncé’s curtain ever so slightly.Here are four the takeaways from the premiere of the movie, which is out in theaters Dec. 1.This is more than just a filmed concertSwift’s AMC film was a straightforward concert documentary that never left the stage: It was meant to feel as if you had the best seat on her tour stop, but it included no behind-the-scenes frills.“Renaissance” does things a little differently. Like Beyoncé’s film “Homecoming,” which chronicled the assemblage of her 2018 Coachella performance, the new movie often takes us behind the steel girders to see just how the mammoth tour was put together. “I’m excited for people to see the show,” Beyoncé says in the film, “but I’m really excited for everyone to see the process.”That process comes in bits and pieces as we watch Beyoncé call the shots on everything from lighting to set decoration to orchestration, sometimes getting frustrated that her notes aren’t heard. “Communicating as a Black woman,” she says, “everything is a fight.”Still, people come around to Beyoncé’s will sooner or later, she says: “Eventually, they realize this bitch will not give up.”Beyoncé also devotes behind-the-scenes segments to her recovery from a knee injury, a hometown visit in Houston, and her late, treasured Uncle Johnny, whose love of house music helped inspire the dance bangers on “Renaissance.” And there’s plenty of fan footage, too: The film often cuts away to shots of audience members in various states of ecstatic crying or frozen, religious awe.Only a little bit got left outThough the ballad-heavy prelude that opened Beyoncé’s Renaissance set list is trimmed, nearly every other song from the tour is included in the film. She even found room for “Thique” and “All Up in Your Mind,” a Renaissance double-header excised from many of her tour stops.The only egregious omission in this two-hour-48-minute movie is a behind-the-scenes bit that goes by way too quickly: Beyoncé convenes a Destiny’s Child reunion in Houston that includes not just Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams but also two of the girl group’s first members, LeToya Luckett and LaTavia Roberson, who were contentiously pushed out. “It was like a new birth for us, and a lot of healing,” Beyoncé says in her narration, though we only see the five of them together for a second and don’t hear a single thing they discussed. I would have watched three more hours of that summit alone!The missing ‘visuals’ remain a mysteryThe “Renaissance” album was released in July 2022 without any sort of music-video accompaniment, a surprise given Beyoncé’s recent run of game-changing visual albums for “Lemonade” and her self-titled 2013 record. A subsequent teaser video for the first “Renaissance” album track “I’m That Girl” seemed to promise more to come, but none did.At a Louisville, Ky., stop on the Renaissance tour, a fan held up a sign asking where the visuals were, prompting Beyoncé to grandly tell the crowd, “You are the visuals.” (The crowd didn’t love that.) The “Renaissance” movie is cheeky enough to include that moment, but otherwise, there’s no mention of the missing visuals, nor an explanation of why they’ve seemingly been scuttled.Blue Ivy fought for her tour spotBy and large, the Renaissance tour eschewed celebrity cameos and surprise drop-ins, preferring to keep the focus on the queen bee herself. Big names joined Beyoncé onstage at only two tour stops: Houston, where Megan Thee Stallion performed “Savage,” and Los Angeles, where Diana Ross and Kendrick Lamar came out for the concert held on Beyoncé’s 42nd birthday.Those appearances all made it into the movie, but the special guest the movie is most interested in is Beyoncé’s 11-year-old daughter, Blue Ivy Carter, who often participated as one of the dancers on her mother’s songs “My Power” and “Black Parade.” I caught one of Blue Ivy’s first tour appearances last May in London, where she was still getting the hang of her choreography, but by the end of the Renaissance tour, she had everything — the moves, the attitude — down pat.Turns out, Blue Ivy’s performance was only supposed to be a one-off, and even that took some negotiating. “She told me she was ready to perform, and I told her no,” Beyoncé says in the film. Though she finally relented, Beyoncé was dismayed when Blue Ivy read comments on social media that criticized her lackluster moves. But it thrilled her mother that instead of quitting, she decided to put in the work and train even harder for future stops.Blue Ivy also pops up in much of the behind-the-scenes footage, offering her often unsugarcoated opinion on stage design, song choices and more. In a film where everyone else treats Beyoncé as a boss or a goddess, Blue Ivy is an amusingly irreverent presence: To this 11-year-old, Beyoncé is just a mom. More

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    Catherine Christer Hennix, Spiritual Drone Musician, Dies at 75

    She fused her mathematical knowledge with minimalist sounds and global spiritual traditions, most notably in her 1976 composition “The Electric Harpsichord.”Catherine Christer Hennix, a Swedish experimental musician and artist who fused minimalist drones, mathematical logic and global spiritual traditions into an approach she called “infinitary composition,” died on Sunday at her home in Istanbul, Turkey. She was 75.The cause was complications of an unspecified illness, according to Lawrence Kumpf, the founder and artistic director of Blank Forms, an organization that has promoted Ms. Hennix’s work. She had previously been treated for cancer.At 20, Ms. Hennix was already a promising mathematician, jazz drummer and electronic composer when she visited New York in 1968 to explore the downtown Manhattan arts scene. She soon met the pioneering minimalist composer La Monte Young and immersed herself in his world of drone music and “just intonation,” an alternative to the standard tuning system of Western music.In 1970, an encounter with the Indian classical singer and guru Pandit Pran Nath, whom Mr. Young had helped introduce to the West, further defined Ms. Hennix’s career and sound. Along with other prominent experimental musicians, including Terry Riley and Jon Hassell, she became a disciple of Mr. Nath, a so-called guruji. She was particularly drawn to the complex, shimmering sound of the raga’s underlying tambura drone, which seemed to stretch on endlessly in time.“You get your first intuitive acquaintance with infinity through the raga, and then mathematics amplifies this concept of infinity by teaching you to formally manipulate it on paper with symbols,” Ms. Hennix told the writer Marcus Boon in 2001.Alongside music making, she wrote poetry, logical equations and Japanese Noh dramas. Her efforts culminated in a 10-day festival called Brouwer’s Lattice, which she curated in 1976 at Moderna Museet in Stockholm and which included presentations of her art installations as well as performances by other minimalist musicians.The festival also featured “The Electric Harpsichord,” a full-scale synthesis of Ms. Hennix’s seemingly divergent interests. Utilizing a Yamaha keyboard calibrated to just intonation, she improvised on a raga scale and fed the results through a tape delay, all atop a constant drone. The result was a strange, trembling and powerfully uncanny soundscape. Though the extant recording of “The Electric Harpsichord,” from its first and only performance, is 25 minutes long, Ms. Hennix envisioned the music to have no end.Minimalist music went mainstream in 1976 — with groundbreaking compositions like Philip Glass’s “Einstein on the Beach” and Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” — but Ms. Hennix remained resolutely underground, committed to the ethos of the infinite drone and to a kind of artistry that could not be contained in a traditional concert setting. (The Deontic Miracle, her gagaku-inspired trio, which debuted at the Stockholm exhibition, had rehearsed for four years and never played a second concert.)Ms. Hennix then collaborated with the equally uncompromising artist Henry Flynt on a series of projects they described as “hallucinogenic/ecstatic sound experiences.” In 1979, they presented tapes of their music at the Manhattan performance space The Kitchen, including the recording of “The Electric Harpsichord.” Mr. Flynt heralded it as “unclassifiable and out of this world.” A skeptical New York Times critic, Ken Emerson, wrote that Ms. Hennix’s music “concluded an otherwise fascinating evening on a shrill, buzzing note that rang unpleasantly in this reviewer’s ears.”For decades afterward, Ms. Hennix toiled mostly in obscurity.“My contention has always been that the future of music and art, sound and light, needs aesthetics to coalesce with ethics,” she told Mr. Boon in 2020 in an interview for The Brooklyn Rail. “This has certainly been a hard sell during my 50 years as an active composer, which is why public exposure to my work has been very limited, not to say nonexistent, over long periods of time.”In the 21st century, however, Ms. Hennix’s work has undergone something of a revival. The partial recording of “The Electric Harpsichord” was finally released in 2010, and since 2016 Blank Forms has presented her concerts, released archival and new recordings, and published two volumes of her theoretical writings.She was born on Jan. 25, 1948, in Stockholm, to Gunnar Noak Hennix, a doctor, and Margit Sundin-Hennix, a jazz composer. Inspired by her older brother, she took up the drums at age 5. The flourishing Swedish jazz scene brought many American luminaries to Stockholm, and as a teenager she was transformed by hearing the saxophonist John Coltrane live.Ms. Hennix studied linguistics at Stockholm University and later pursued graduate studies in mathematical logic, drawn to the theories of Fourier and Brouwer. At Stockholm’s electronic music studio, she created synthesized compositions in the style of Karlheinz Stockhausen, but ultimately concluded that the hyper-complexity of European modernism was a dead end.Instead, it was Mr. Young’s drones that seemed to offer a path forward. The first time she heard his music, she recalled in 2010, “it took me about 60 seconds to decide that this was the sound.”Through the 1980s and ’90s, Ms. Hennix undertook other projects, including drumming in a band with Mr. Flynt called the Dharma Warriors; teaching logic and mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and at the State University of New York at New Paltz; and working with the Soviet-era dissident mathematician Alexander Esenin-Volpin.She moved back to Sweden and then to Amsterdam, where she collaborated with the photographer Lena Tuzzolino, her partner for about a decade. She eventually moved to Berlin, though she never found an artistic scene that fully supported her quixotic worldview.Ms. Hennix had been introduced to Sufism during her formative discipleship with Mr. Nath. In recent years, she converted to Islam, studying classical Arabic and the Turkish style of maqam music. In 2019, she moved to Istanbul, in part to regularly hear the call to prayer.Ms. Hennix, who had gone by Christer, began identifying as a woman in the late 1980s, and became known as Catherine or C.C. No immediate family members survive her.“Her refusal to be consumed by the practical conditions that most of us are consumed by really opened up this profound inner experience and inner exploration for her that in many ways didn’t need an audience,” said Mr. Kumpf, the Blank Forms artistic director. “It’s a spiritual practice: It’s between her and no one else.” More

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    André 3000’s Experiments With Flutes and Fame

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThis month, André 3000 — half of Outkast, and one of the most innovative rappers of all time — made a tentative return to music with the release of his first solo album, “New Blue Sun.” It is … not a hip-hop album. Instead, André, who has regularly been spotted out and about playing one of several flutes, has released an LP of contemplative experimental music, in which he is a supporting character, not the star.What does it mean when one of the most famous musicians of his generation decides to take such a radical creative turn? In what ways is this unconventional musical choice as revealing as the ones for which he’s long been known?On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about André’s reluctant relationship to stardom, the musical scene providing the setting for his public return, and the ways in which one can be in the spotlight but still very much in hiding.Guests:Zach Baron, GQ senior special projects editorSadie Sartini Garner, a critic for Pitchfork and othersConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at [email protected]. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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    France Scoffs at an Englishman’s ‘Napoleon’

    French critics considered Ridley Scott’s new biopic lazy, pointless, boring, migraine-inducing, too short and historically inaccurate. And that’s just to start.The French do not like an Englishman’s rendition of Napoleon.Or at least, the French critics do not.Looking grim and moody from under an enormous bicorn hat, Joaquin Phoenix glowers from posters around Paris, promoting the film by Ridley Scott that offers the latest reincarnation of the French hero whose nose — as one reviewer deliciously wrote — still rises in the middle of French political life two centuries after his death.Yet while British and American reviewers glowed, French critics considered it lazy, pointless, boring, migraine-inducing, too short and historically inaccurate. And that’s just to start.The critic for the left-wing daily Libération panned the film as not just ugly, but vacuous, positing nothing and “very sure of its inanity.” The review in Le Monde offered that if the director’s vision had one merit, it was “simplicity” — “a montage alternating between Napoleon’s love life and his feats of battle.”The right-wing Le Figaro took many positions in its breathless coverage, using the moment to pump out a 132-page special-edition magazine on Napoleon, along with more than a dozen articles, including a reader poll and a Napoleon knowledge test. The newspaper’s most memorable take came from Thierry Lentz, the director of the Napoleon Foundation, a charity dedicated to historical research: He considered Phoenix’s version of Napoleon — compared to more than 100 other actors who have played the role — “a bit vulgar, a bit rude, with a voice from elsewhere that doesn’t fit at all.” All of this was to be expected.British and American critics praised the film, but their French counterparts panned it, to say the least.Quentin de Groeve/Hans Lucas, via ReutersAs the French writer Sylvain Tesson once famously said, “France is a paradise inhabited by people who think they’re in hell.” How else would you expect a country where the perennial response to “How are you?” is “Not bad” to respond to a historical film about itself?But to have that film be about a French legend — even one whom many detest — played by an American actor and directed by a British filmmaker?L’horreur.“This very anti-French and very pro-English film is, however, not very ‘English’ in spirit,” said the historian Patrick Gueniffey, in Le Point magazine, “because the English have never compromised their admiration for their enemy.”“It’s hard not to see this hasty approach as the historical revenge of Ridley Scott, the Englishman,” assessed the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné. “An Austerlitz of cinema? More like Waterloo.”Bracing under the waterfall of negative reaction, you begin to wonder whether the criticism reveals more about the French psyche than the nation’s taste in historical cinema.“When we talk about Napoleon, in fact we are getting at the heart of our principles and our political divisions,” explained Arthur Chevallier, a Napoleon expert who has published five books on the Corsican soldier who seized power after the French Revolution, crowned himself emperor and proceeded to conquer — and later lose — much of Western Europe.“The common point among all French people is that Napoleon remains a subject that influences our understanding of ourselves, our identity,” Chevallier said.Phoenix and Ridley Scott, the film’s director, at the premiere of the movie in Paris this month.Stephanie Lecocq/ReutersMore than 200 years after his death, the smudge of Napoleon’s fingerprints still liberally decorates the country and its capital: along the streets and metro stations named after his generals and battles; from atop the Arc de Triomphe that he planned; in the gleam of the gold dome of the Invalides, under which his giant marble tomb rises.Lawyers still follow an updated version of his civil code. Provincial regions are still overseen by prefects — or government administrators — in a system he devised. Every year, high schoolers take the baccalaureate exam that his regime introduced, and citizens are awarded the country’s top honor, which he invented.Last Sunday, before the film hit theaters here, a French auction house announced that it had sold one of Napoleon’s signature bicorn hats for a record 1.9 million euros, or $2.1 million.In recent decades, Napoleon’s record for misogyny, imperialism and racism — he reimposed slavery eight years after the revolutionary government abolished it — has come under glaring critical light. But that seems to have simply reinforced the weight of his legacy.To many, Napoleon is the symbol of a France that has come under assault from what they consider an American import of identity politics and “wokeism.” The latest front page of the weekly far-right magazine Valeurs Actuelles declared him “The Anti-Woke Emperor.” (Its reviewer also panned the film: From the first scene, the viewer knows that “historical accuracy will suffer the guillotine,” wrote Laurent Dandrieu.)In a national poll conducted this week, 74 percent of respondents with an opinion on Napoleon considered his actions beneficial for France.“You have the impression that when we talk about him, he’s a living politician,” said Chevallier, who has already seen the film twice and counts himself among its few unabashed French fans.A reincarnated Napoleon and Imperial Guards welcomed viewers to a screening of the film in Ajaccio, the city in which the real Napoleon was born, on the Mediterranean island of Corsica.Pascal Pochard-Casabianca/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhat he liked, he said, was its different take on Napoleon and the revolution that birthed him and modern France. Instead of a regal leader with insatiable energy and ambition, Joaquin Phoenix portrays a regular grasping mortal who is the product of a bloodthirsty, barbaric upheaval — something that some find “very destabilizing,” Chevallier said, but that he considered interesting and instructive, “because you understand why Napoleon inspired such hate” among other European powers at the time.He predicted that his fellow citizens who were more cinema fans than history buffs would like the film, which opened to the public on Wednesday.Some 120,000 people went to see it across France that day — a strong opening, but not a blockbuster like “Asterix & Obelix: The Middle Kingdom,” which drew more than 460,000 on its opening day early this year, according to figures collected by C.B.O. Box Office, a firm that collates French box office data.Moviegoers streaming out of a theater in the Latin Quarter of Paris on Thursday night were not enthused.Augustin Ampe, 20, said he was all for demystifying Napoleon, but this was just too much. “Here he looks like a clumsy man focused only on his wife,” said the literature student, breaking for a moment from a fierce debate over the film’s failures with his friends. He preferred the mythical figure offered in the books and poems of Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo, he said.Waiting for her movie date to finish his post-film cigarette, Charline Tartar, a librarian, assessed Phoenix’s rendition as too moany.“It’s too bad Napoleon looks like a loser,” said Tartar, 27. She thought a French director would have paid more attention to historical accuracy.“The French,” she added, “are very jealous of their history.”Juliette Guéron-Gabrielle More

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    Disney Rejected Her a Few Times. The ‘Wish’ Director Just Kept Trying.

    After she was finally hired by the studio, Fawn Veerasunthorn worked her way up the ranks, and has applied that lesson of perseverance to her new film.At the turn of the century, a young medical student in Thailand mailed a handwritten letter to a Disney animator in Florida.The student, Fawn Veerasunthorn, had attended a guest lecture by this visual effects animator, Paitoon Ratanasirintrawoot, years earlier at her Bangkok high school (his alma mater). She’d since graduated and was miserable in her first year of med school. But, she wondered, might he have advice on how she could switch careers, move to the United States and follow in his footsteps at Disney?He wrote back with his email address and they struck up a correspondence, as he answered her questions, which ranged from “What is a portfolio?” and “Where did you go to college?” to “Do girls really work in animation?” and “Is this safe?”At the time, the animation industry in their home country was small. “Not many people from Thailand even have a dream of working in animation, let alone at Disney,” said Ratanasirintrawoot, who counts “The Lion King,” “Mulan” and “Lilo & Stitch” among his credits. “But she was really determined.”Spurred by that determination, Veerasunthorn dropped out of med school, moved across the Pacific for art school and pushed past multiple Disney rejections until she eventually got her foot in the door in 2011.She’s spent the past 12 years climbing the ranks of Walt Disney Animation Studios: serving as a story artist — visualizing and sketching out how a script will translate onscreen — on “Frozen,” “Moana” and “Zootopia,” and leading a team as the head of story on “Raya and the Last Dragon.”Now, Veerasunthorn is making her directorial debut alongside Chris Buck on “Wish” (in theaters), a tribute to the company’s legacy on it 100th anniversary.The musical fairy tale follows 17-year-old Asha (voiced by Ariana DeBose), who makes a wish to improve the plight of her people in Rosas, a fictional kingdom ruled by the tyrannical King Magnifico (Chris Pine).A scene from “Wish,” with Ariana DeBose voicing the 17-year-old Asha.Disney“Everyone keeps talking about, ‘Aren’t you stressed? It’s 100! How do you uphold that legacy?’” Veerasunthorn said. “But at some point, I felt like, ‘Oh, we can turn this energy into excitement.’”During an interview last month at the studio’s headquarters in Burbank, Calif., the 41-year-old director — wearing oversize magenta glasses and baby pink-accented sneakers — laughed frequently and verged on tears more than once. Not unlike the characters she brings to life, her energy was infectious.That capacity for emotion, said Disney Animation’s chief creative officer, Jennifer Lee, became a hallmark of Veerasunthorn’s storytelling early on.Lee first took note of Veerasunthorn when they worked together on “Frozen.” Both women had only recently arrived at Disney, but Veerasunthorn carried herself with confidence in chaotic production meetings, where team members jockey to have their ideas heard.“She would always cut through with something that was so clear and to the point,” Lee said. “If I could see her nodding, I’d be like, I’m in a good place because I can see that Fawn’s on board. She’s a great barometer.”On “Zootopia,” Veerasunthorn oversaw the poignant goodbye scene between Judy Hopps and her bunny family at the train station. For “Moana,” she worked on the opening village song, when Moana dances with her grandmother. And on “Frozen 2,” she helped actualize the climactic scene when Elsa realizes she’s been hearing her mother’s call.“Wish” employs a different style of animation for Disney, combining the look of traditional watercolors with modern computer animation. The blend is meant to invoke the art of hand-drawn films like “Sleeping Beauty,” and there are numerous references to Disney classics throughout.“We’re celebrating the legacy, but I think if Walt were to be alive today, he wouldn’t want to do the things that he had done,” Veerasunthorn said. “He would want to do something new. That was important to us.”Development on “Wish” began in 2018, and Veerasunthorn joined the project as head of story two years later. But after the first internal work-in-progress screening, the film was at an impasse.Star, a character that, as its name suggests, is a celestial body, originally could speak. But a wishing star that provided direct guidance didn’t allow Asha the space to figure out her own journey. Veerasunthorn offered solutions.Lee recalled of that period: “She was the one who said, ‘This is never going to come together if you can’t feel that what we’re ultimately saying is that this is not just about celebrating wishes. This is about really showing the importance of you working hard to make your dreams come true.’”Veerasunthorn applied repeatedly for jobs at Disney but kept getting turned down: “I’m like, that’s OK, it’s becoming a hobby.” Alex Welsh for The New York TimesIt was a proactive path Veerasunthorn knew well.She grew up in a small seaside town in Thailand’s Chonburi Province, where she said her only exposure to animation as a career came in the form of the local artists who hand-painted posters to announce new movie releases in the town square.At home, she and her younger siblings would watch the 1941 Disney animated film “Dumbo” on repeat. The movie’s fantastical nature and its message of persevering against the odds resonated with her as a young girl.Also, she said wryly, “Maybe that was the only VHS we had.”Her parents ran an auto parts shop in front of the family home, and Veerasunthorn used their industrial cardboard boxes and a wall in the kitchen as her canvases. But she had no formal training, and art was just a hobby.When she was 15, she left home for high school in Bangkok, where she chose a computer science track, hoping to learn to write emails. And after graduating in 2000 with the expectation that she would pursue a practical, lucrative career in her home country, she enrolled in medical school.But Veerasunthorn “did not love” the idea of becoming a doctor, and during her semester break, she began taking art classes and writing to Ratanasirintrawoot, who recommended her to the president at his alma mater, Columbus College of Art & Design in Ohio.Her parents were supportive but nervous. No one in Veerasunthorn’s family had pursued a career in the arts. “I was leaving behind something that, to a lot of people, family and friends, is a very solid career to do something that is unknown,” she said.Before moving to the United States, she asked her parents if she could take English lessons to improve her conversational skills. That was too expensive. Instead, her father bought her a subscription to HBO, where she watched “Forrest Gump” and Todd McFarlane’s “Spawn” on repeat.“Initially, I was like, even if I don’t communicate very well, my work speaks for itself,” she said.But Disney wasn’t listening at first. While she was in college, the company shuttered its Florida animation studio, where Ratanasirintrawoot had worked. So Veerasunthorn pivoted, applying at Pixar instead. Rejected. She applied for other jobs at Disney in California. Multiple rejections followed.“I’m like, that’s OK, it’s becoming a hobby,” she said with a laugh. “‘Oh, it’s a new year. Is Disney Animation hiring again?’”Scenes from a career: Veerasunthorn worked at Illumination on “Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax” and “Despicable Me 2,” top, before joining Disney and taking on scenes in “Zootopia” and “Moana.”Universal Pictures (“Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax” and “Despicable Me 2″); Disney (“Zootopia” and “Moana”)After stints in educational Flash animation and as a contributing story artist on Illumination films, including “Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax” and “Despicable Me 2,” she tried Disney again in 2011. This time, she got in.And a decade later, after that “Wish” screening, Lee — who also served as the film’s co-writer and executive producer — offered Veerasunthorn a directing role alongside Buck in early 2022. It was similar to the transition Lee herself had made on “Frozen,” when she joined Buck as a director midway through that production.“Talent is universal, I always say, but access hasn’t always been,” Lee said. “If you give people a chance, they’ll rise to the occasion. That happened to me.”Historically, Disney animated films have been the domain of male directors. Lee became the first woman at the studio to direct an animated feature with “Frozen” in 2013 and “Frozen II” in 2019. Since then, only Charise Castro Smith, a co-director on “Encanto,” and now Veerasunthorn, have joined the ranks. (At the Disney-owned Pixar, Brenda Chapman was replaced by a male director before the completion of “Brave,” in 2011. Domee Shi became that studio’s first solo female director on a feature, with “Turning Red” in 2022.)For Buck, who made his directorial debut on the 1999 Disney film “Tarzan,” forgoing solo duties again was a welcome reprieve.“These movies are such monsters that, hats off to someone who can do it by themselves. I can’t,” he said, adding that he needs the support. “I love the collaboration.”Away from the studio, Veerasunthorn and her husband, Ryan Green, whom she met in college and who also works in animation at Disney, share a daughter, Kina, who is 7. She’s one of the “production babies” listed in the end credits of “Moana,” and she provided valuable input on “Wish.” When Kina first watched the film’s ending, she was left bawling. Further test screenings would lead the directors to alter the finale to be less traumatic.Lee remained tight-lipped when asked if Veerasunthorn would be working on Disney’s announced third and fourth “Frozen” films or “Zootopia” sequel, but the studio executive said she was eager to see her lead an original project from the start. And for now, Veerasunthorn is reveling in her work on “Wish.”“The journey that a person takes toward a goal, that is what this movie is about,” Veerasunthorn said. “It took me a few tries to get here. If I were to be discouraged the very first time, this would never have happened.”She added, as tears brimmed in her eyes, “This film is saying that the choice is always yours, no matter what the situation.” More