Aurelia Butler

Created 75 years ago for the country’s prestigious high school baseball tournament, Yuji Koseki’s “The Crown Will Shine on You” stirs memories as it inspires new ones.In addition to being a starting pitcher for the Toronto Blue Jays, Yusei Kikuchi is an accomplished karaoke crooner who is proud of his spirited version of the fight song of his former team in Japan, the Seibu Lions. Asked if he knew the words of a more popular song, “Eikan ha Kimi ni Kagayaku,” or “The Crown Will Shine on You,” during on an off day between starts, the competitor in him took over.Standing in full uniform at the visitor’s dugout in Minnesota, he smiled broadly and began singing in Japanese (loosely translated):As clouds dissipate, sunlight fills the skyOn this day especially, the pure white ball flies highAnswer the jubilation around you, oh our youthWith your smiles of sportsmanshipThe crown will shine on youAs cherry blossoms are to spring, “The Crown Will Shine on You” is the melody of summer in Japan. It was composed by Yuji Koseki in 1948 for the wildly popular National High School Baseball Championship. And on Sunday, as they have for the last 75 years, players from the 49 prefectural champions will march into Koshien Stadium in Nishinomiya to open the single-elimination summer tournament, lifting their knees high and marching to Koseki’s song.“It’s the sound of summer,” Kikuchi said. “For sure, the sound of summer baseball. You don’t just hear it if you’re fortunate enough to advance to Koshien Stadium for the national tournament, it’s played throughout the prefectural rounds as you’re trying to advance to the national stage as a way to motivate you to play your best.”Kikuchi marched into Koshien Stadium as a sophomore and senior. Kenta Maeda, a starting pitcher for the Minnesota Twins, marched in as a sophomore.“It’s a melody that stays in your head,” Maeda said. “I think every Japanese person thinks of the summer baseball tournament when they hear it. For me, it reminds me of my high school years and making it there that one summer, for sure.”Koseki was born in 1909 in Fukushima, a small city 180 miles north of Tokyo. He joined Nippon Columbia, the licensee for the American label Columbia Records, as a composer in 1930. Despite having minimal interest in sports, he dabbled in team fight songs because the marching element appealed to him.He probably did not imagine that his career would become intertwined with Japan’s most popular sporting event.The annual event, which was created in 1915 as the National Middle School Championship Baseball Tournament, was halted for four years during World War II. Play resumed in 1946, and under Allied occupation Japan underwent many social and economic reforms. Among them was a revision of its education system that created a new, three-year curriculum called high school.For the annual summer baseball extravaganza at Koshien, this meant an official name change, denoting it as the National High School Baseball Championship, beginning with the 30th edition in 1948. To celebrate the change, organizers sponsored a national competition for a theme song. Koseki, who was 38 at the time, won.The champions from 49 prefectures compete at the annual tournament.Kyodo News, via Getty ImagesIn his autobiography, Koseki wrote that he drew inspiration from the end of the war — continuation of the tournament meant a continuation of peace. The soothing sounds of batted balls and youthful exuberance would replace the tension of blaring air raid sirens that had become commonplace.He wanted an uplifting, forward-thinking song. He explained his process.“For inspiration, I went to Koshien when it was completely empty and stood atop the mound,” Koseki wrote. “As I imagined what it would be like to be thrust into the emotions of fierce competition, the melody of the song sprung naturally into my mind. Standing on that mound was absolutely the right way to grasp it.”Koseki’s influence at Koshien Stadium goes beyond the tournament as well, because he also composed “Rokko Oroshi,” a fight song for the stadium’s home team, the Hanshin Tigers.Koseki was commissioned to compose the song when a professional league formed in 1936. Originally titled “Song of the Osaka Tigers,” the march has thrived as the longest continuing team fight song in Nippon Professional Baseball and is as synonymous with the Tigers as the team’s black-and-gold pinstriped uniform.“For inspiration, I went to Koshien when it was completely empty and stood atop the mound,” Yuji Koseki said of his inspiration to write “The Crown Will Shine on You.”The Asahi Shimbun, via Getty ImagesThe song has even developed a cultish following akin to Harry Caray’s rendition of “Take Me Out To The Ball Game,” which still has the Wrigley Field faithful clamoring for celebrity renditions during the seventh inning stretch 25 years after Caray’s passing.Countless musicians and celebrities have recorded versions of “Rokko Oroshi,” but perhaps the most famous came from one of Hanshin’s players. Tom O’Malley, a former Mets infielder, spent four years with Hanshin, hitting over .300 each season, but his most lasting impression came off the field.He recorded a version of “Rokko Oroshi” in Japanese and English in 1994. True to Caray, it appealed to the masses for being endearingly off-key. The original recording sold more than 100,000 copies and a remastered digital version was released in 2014, 18 years after O’Malley’s career in Japan ended.Koseki was inducted posthumously into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame last month for his musical contributions to both professional and amateur baseball. Twenty years earlier, he had received a far more surprising endorsement from Sadaharu Oh, who is Japan’s home run king and played for the rival Yomiuri Giants. Before the 2003 Japan Series, Oh, then managing the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks, was asked about the song he would once again be forced to hear as an opponent.“‘Rokko Oroshi’ actually has quite a nice rhythm and is a likable song,” Oh told reporters. “Even though it’s the opposition’s fight song, the truth is it inspires all of us. The fight songs Mr. Koseki composed have a way of uplifting all those who play sports.” More

New jazz and exhibition spaces, and an inaugural show curated by Jason Moran, feature the trumpeter’s history, collaged onto the walls.You can find anything in Queens. And yet for decades, the Louis Armstrong House Museum has been a well-kept secret on a quiet street in Corona. The longtime residence of the famed jazz trumpeter, singer and bandleader, it is a midcentury interior design treasure hidden behind a modest brick exterior.The museum’s new extension, the 14,000 square foot Louis Armstrong Center, blends in a little less. It looks, in fact, a bit like a 1960s spaceship landed in the middle of a residential block. By design, it doesn’t tower over its neighboring vinyl-sided houses but, with its curvilinear roof, it does seem to want to envelop them. And behind its rippling brass facade lie some ambitious goals: to connect Armstrong as a cultural figure to fans, artists, historians and his beloved Queens community; to extend his civic and creative values to generations that don’t know how much his vision, and his very being, changed things. It wants, above all, to invite more people in.“The house is relatively small,” said Regina Bain, executive director of the House Museum and Center, speaking of the two-story dwelling where Armstrong lived with his wife, Lucille, from 1943 until his death in 1971. “But his legacy is humongous. And this is the building that will help us to launch that.”The Center, 25 years in development, includes exhibition, research and education areas, and, for events, a 75-seat performance space whose blond wood and intimacy recall Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, the Jazz at Lincoln Center venue.“I think that this will do something that we haven’t quite seen in a jazz space,” said Jason Moran, the jazz pianist and composer, who was the Center’s inaugural exhibition curator. “That’s also something that my community needs to witness, too. It needs to watch, how can we take care of an artist’s history? And what else can it unleash in a community that might not even care about the art, but might care about something else related to it? Armstrong gives us all those opportunities to do that.”The new Louis Armstrong Center in Corona, Queens, designed by Caples Jefferson Architects, whose roof recalls a grand piano. The architects wanted to give their blueprint the sense of joy that Armstrong brings in his voice and music.Albert Vercerka/EstoThe longtime residence of the jazz trumpeter, singer and bandleader Louis Armstrong is a midcentury interior design treasure hidden behind a modest brick exterior.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesFor the architects, Sara Caples and Everardo Jefferson, the project was a puzzle in how to link two structures — the Center is across the street from the Armstrong House Museum — with the spirit of a musical legend. Their inspiration came by going back to the music, and to Armstrong’s street-level roots. “That kind of neighborhood that jazz actually emerged from — that wasn’t an elite creation, it was a popular creation,” Caples said. “And yet it was the music that revolutionized how we think, how we listen, how we think about nonmusical things, even.” They rounded the front of the Center to nod to the Armstrong house; its brass curtain echoes the color of his horn, and — the musically fluent may notice — the staggered hoop-shapes and columns in the entryway map out the notes of his most celebrated songs, like “What a Wonderful World” and “Dinah.”They also wanted to give their blueprint the sense of joy that Armstrong brings, the smile that you can feel in his singing voice. When they started the project, Jefferson called an uncle who’s a jazz saxophonist to ask — really, what made Armstrong so special? “And he said, you know, when you hear his music, you feel like dancing down the street,” Jefferson said.At the ribbon-cutting ceremony earlier this summer, trumpeters performed on the Armstrong house balcony and, across the road, on the upper deck of the Center, a fanfare that started with the opening bars of “West End Blues” and ended with “It’s a Wonderful World.” “It was an incredible moment — the building participated as a reflector of sound back to the street,” Caples said. Afterward, schoolchildren were invited in to plonk around on a Steinway.Visitors in the interior of the Louis Armstrong Center, 25 years in development, includes exhibition, research and education areas and a performance space.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesOn display is Armstrong’s Selmer Trumpet, engraved mouthpiece and monogrammed handkerchief. The gold-plated trumpet was a gift from King George V.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesIke Edeani for The New York TimesBuilt on the site of a former parking lot, with $26 million in mostly state and local funding, the new Center encompasses Armstrong’s 60,000-piece archive, including 700 tapes that were once housed miles away at Queens College. From that collection, Moran has curated the first permanent exhibition, “Here to Stay,” with a multimedia, interactive centerpiece of audio, video, interviews and songs. There’s Armstrong’s gold-plated trumpet — a gift from King George V — complete with his favorite imported German lip balm and the mouthpiece inscribed “Satchmo,” his nickname — and his collage art. (He made hundreds of pieces, paper cutouts on tape cases.) His first and last passports, among the ephemera, show his evolution from New Orleans-born youth player to a global icon in a tuxedo and an irrepressible grin.Armstrong was himself a documentarian, traveling with cameras and recording equipment and turning the mic on himself, his friends and loved ones in private moments — telling jokes backstage, opining at home. As a Black artist with an elementary school education, who was born into segregation, he went on to hobnob with presidents and royalty and to meet the pope. “He really marks a way of being a public figure,” Moran said. “And he has to weigh how he does that. If he’s getting a chance not only to tell his story with his trumpet in his mouth but through these microphones, then what are the stories he wants to tell, not in public? Those become important.”Jason Moran, the jazz musician, curated the opening exhibition, “Here to Stay” at the new Louis Armstrong Center in Corona.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesOne place his vision is most evident is in his reel-to-reel tape box collages, rarely displayed publicly until now. Armstrong used them as an outlet for years.“If he has a press clipping, maybe it wasn’t favorable, he could cut it up and make a collage,” Moran said. A photo in the exhibition shows him, after a trip to Italy, pasting his art work on the ceiling of his den, fresco-style. (Lucille Armstrong, a former Cotton Club dancer who was his fourth wife, put a stop to that.)Moran recalled that when Armstrong talked about his process and why he liked making collages, he explained that with just the push-pull of material on a small canvas, you can change “the story that you were given.” It echoed his expertise as a musician, Moran said, learning how to play background, on the cornet, with King Oliver, his early mentor, or foreground as he redefined what it meant to be a soloist, upending his destiny along the way.The exhibition also has the artist Lorna Simpson in a video reflecting on Armstrong’s collages and how they compartmentalized an enormous and complex life into the manageable and portable square of a tape case. “Armstrong archives and recontextualizes his public life by hand, to be layered and collaged onto the walls of his private life,” she said.Most of Armstrong’s collages were made in the den of his Corona, Queens home, from reel-to-reel tape boxes. In the 1950s, his love of collage spilled onto the walls of his den, which he adorned with photographs, newspaper clippings, and anything else he had at hand, eventually covering portions of his ceiling.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesLouis Armstrong created over 500 collages as covers of his tape collection, generating a priceless art and music catalog. Left: The box for Reel 27 features a German publicity photo of the musician, a snapshot of an unidentified man and “Gems from Buenos Aires.” Center: Reel 18, a photograph of Armstrong preparing to dine and Bing Crosby’s Musical Autobiography album on Decca. Right: Reel 68, with a reproduction of a photo of him with his mother and sister in New Orleans.Ike Edeani for The New York TimesThe gallery display (by C & G Partners) is full of circular motifs, reminiscent of musical notes or records. In determining the palette for the Center, Jefferson and Caples, the architects, looked at Armstrong’s art and his wardrobe; his home, with rooms in shades of electric blue or creamy peach, was mostly styled by Lucille. But he loved it — especially the spaces with gilded or reflective surfaces. “So it gave us the cue that we should not be too mousy,” Caples said, “and that this was a public building where there could be some expansiveness.” The club space at the Center, which recently hosted a rehearsal of trumpeters for the Newport Jazz Festival’s Armstrong tribute — taking place this weekend in Rhode Island — is a vibrant red.Moran made sure there was a book from the Armstrongs’ vast collection in every vitrine. “They had that kind of political library that was investigating their role in society,” he said. (They also were creatures of their era: The full archives include Playboy anthologies and vintage diet recipes; a guide called “Lose Weight the Satchmo Way” — heavy on the lamb chops — is displayed in the exhibition.)Lucille and Louis Armstrong traveled the world with customized luggage. Left: Armstrong’s passport for his first tour of England in 1932. Under occupation, Armstrong listed himself as an “Actor and Musician.” Right: Armstrong’s final passport in 1967, after years of being “America’s Ambassador of Goodwill.”Ike Edeani for The New York TimesEven a longtime Armstrong devotee like Marquis Hill, one of the Newport trumpeters, was moved by these personal mementos. (He snapped a picture of the handwritten recipe for Armstrong’s favorite dish, red beans and rice.) A half-century-old recording of Armstrong discussing how important it was to listen to all kinds of music inspired a Hill composition for Newport, commissioned by the Center. Its jazz club, he said, is “going to be a new space for what Louis Armstrong wanted, to keep pushing the music forward.”As part of an artist in residence program this fall, the Grammy winning bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding will present her project with the choreographer Antonio Brown that explores the era when people danced to jazz. Rooting herself in Armstrong’s history, and expanding his vision, Spalding said in an email, would “develop ways to re-merge and re-awaken the dialogue between these essential modalities of human expression — the improvising body and the improvising musician.”Under Bain, the executive director,the Center is also hosting new programming, including dance and yoga classes, trumpet lessons and events that engage the mostly Spanish-speaking community, whether through music or social activism.“Louis and Lucille were two Black artists who owned their own home in the ’40s,” Bain said. “Why can’t we have a workshop here about homeownership for our neighbors? If it’s in the legacy of Louis and Lucille — that’s what this space can also be.”Since it opened on July 6, the Center has exceeded visitor estimates and is adding more hours and drawing fans from across the country. “He was one of the heroes I was taught about,” said Jenne Dumay, 32, a social worker from Atlanta who plans music-oriented trips with friends, focusing on Black history. “This museum gives me insight that I didn’t learn in my textbooks.”Among the final work Armstrong created, after a lengthy hospital stay in 1971, was a six-page handwritten ode to Corona, and his happy, quotidian life there. In looping script, he extols the virtues of his Schnauzers as watch dogs (“When the two start barking together — oh boy, what a duet”), and his favoriteChinese restaurant.It is one of the treasures that Moran — who said Armstrong’s spirit-lifting music helped him through the pandemic — cherishes most. Armstrong’s handwriting, he noted, slants upward on every page. “The text is just so inherently aspirational,” Moran said. “It’s in line with how he holds his trumpet” — pointing up to the sky — “how his eyes look when he plays. It’s a slight thing, but it tells us: this is how he thinks about life.”Additional reporting by Chris Kuo.The Louis Armstrong Center34-56 107th Street, Queens, N.Y.; 718-478-8271; louisarmstronghouse.org. More

With the Sinfonia of London, Wilson has explored the variety of music — light and serious alike — that defined his musical upbringing.The conductor John Wilson spends a lot of time doing what he calls “home scholarship”: reconstructing lost scores from MGM musicals, correcting mistakes in orchestral parts and preparing new editions of pieces that can seem illegible.Then, he “fixes” his orchestra, the Sinfonia of London, a project-based ensemble that Wilson revived in 2018, which will appear at the BBC Proms on Sunday. Sometimes, he offers the players work via text message. “I’ve always had a say in who’s in the orchestra,” he said, “because it has to be the right kind of sound.”Wilson, who was born in Gateshead, England, in 1972, has always opted for this front-loaded way of working, in which the conductor actively engages in the types of logistics that others might find menial.“You’d be amazed at the difference good quality orchestral parts make to performance,” he said. “They can make it or break it. You can hit the ground running without having to decipher things.”All this preparation, he said, is to resuscitate the Sinfonia’s sound of old, “a sound in my head which never left me.” Wilson has a sentimental streak when it comes to his formative influences, and the origin story behind his rejuvenation of the Sinfonia, which disbanded in 2002, is romantic.When he was 11 and realized that he could buy classical records in his local, pop-oriented HMV, he picked out a copy of the Sinfonia of London’s “English Music for Strings,” conducted by John Barbirolli. That recording was from the ensemble’s earliest era, when it was a freelance recording orchestra made up of London’s premier chamber players and section principals, from 1955 to 1969.Then, during college, Wilson assisted the composer Howard Blake, who had brought back the orchestra and led it from 1982 to 2002. Wilson’s long-held obsession with the idea of reviving an orchestra, and a desire to record Korngold’s Symphony in F sharp, helped drive the orchestra’s relaunch in 2018. In the five years since, his edition of the orchestra has recorded 26 albums.Live performances from the ensemble are rarer, but no less anticipated than its award-winning recordings. In two sold-out nights of meaty, early-20th-century orchestral works at the Aldeburgh Festival in June, the Sinfonia produced two dazzlingly colorful performances, underpinned by a ravishing, at times eccentrically exuberant string sound. Yet Wilson’s gestures were economical to the point of near detachment from the ecstatic sounds around him, unleashing a fuller vocabulary of movements only a handful of times.It’s a different story in rehearsals. There’s an affability between Wilson and the players, many of whom he’s had relationships with for two decades. (“I feel very much as if I’m one of them,” he said in an interview later.) But that didn’t stop him tersely admonishing them for not giving “sheer naked concentration.”“The whole point of this overture is to be violently on the beat,” Wilson said during a rehearsal of William Walton’s exceedingly rhythmic “Scapino.”While working with the orchestra, “John is demanding from beginning to end,” said John Mills, a leader of the Sinfonia. “Most of us enjoy that; that’s why we come back,” he added. “We want to be in that very demanding, high-achieving environment, where most of us, 90 percent of the time, feel like we’re impostors. You’re surrounded by brilliant players, and then you talk to the other players, and they feel exactly the same.”The Sinfonia of London, despite the history of its name and the cohesiveness of its sound, is still in essence a session orchestra. Wilson aims “for a different kind of homogeneity,” Mills said. For string players, that means conserving bow to make long, spinning, bulge-free lines, and finding a vibrato that Mills described as “almost invisible”: narrow, fast and drawn from inside the note, rather than added on as an optional extra.“There’s plenty of sizzling vibrato,” said Charlie Lovell-Jones, another leader of the orchestra, making “a sound you can chew.”While he growing up, Wilson said, “music was just music.”Alex Ingram for The New York TimesWilson also encourages individuality within the sound, in part because of the kinds of players he books. “I have an orchestra full of artists,” he said. During one session, Mills and Wilson realized they had nine British orchestral leaders in the section, alongside some top freelancers, and a selection of chamber players.With the Sinfonia, Wilson prioritizes a particular repertoire. At Aldeburgh, they performed Rachmaninoff, Elgar and Respighi; at the Proms, they perform Lili Boulanger’s “D’un Matin de Printemps,” Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto and Walton’s First Symphony. Their Ravel, Dutilleux and Korngold recordings have won awards, and their next major recording project is a complete version of Ravel’s “Daphnis and Chloe,” featuring new parts that took Wilson 18 months to compile.He’s drawn to orchestral scores driven primarily by color, craft and texture. “I guess I’ve never ever grown tired of the possibilities of what we call the modern orchestra,” he said. “There are so many things you can do with an orchestra to make it sound.”Exploring the orchestra by color has led Wilson down some unusual avenues. With the BBC Philharmonic, he has recorded a third volume of orchestral works by Eric Coates, a prolific composer of light music. He’s drawn to the slithering sound of Frederick Delius, and to oddities like the “garish but amazing” Stokowski orchestration of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C sharp minor. Wilson recently conducted two performances of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta “Princess Ida” on period instruments, with “tiny trombones and cornets and gut strings and everything.”Wilson is a period performance specialist, but the periods he’s interested in aren’t Baroque. The John Wilson Orchestra, which he founded in 1994, and which would later bring him broader recognition through a 10-year run at the Proms, became known for “historically informed” performances of Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Golden Age movie musicals.During that time in his career, Wilson didn’t exactly feel pigeonholed, but, he said, “so many people’s perceptions of what I actually did were just skewed compared to reality.”Shifting his energies to the Sinfonia of London — in part, because of a spate of canceled dates for the John Wilson Orchestra during the pandemic — has coincided with more of a focus on the variety of music that shaped his musical upbringing. Wilson was a largely self-taught pianist and percussionist, who had “a general light music education” in northeast England, playing in Gilbert and Sullivan shows, brass bands and operetta, and fixing his own orchestras for performances of musicals like “West Side Story.”“Music was just music,” he said, “and I was lucky to grow up with movies on in the background and LPs from Sinatra, all performed to an exalted level.”Wilson grew up with a value system in which musical distinctions between “light” and “serious” were much less pronounced than elsewhere in the country. A few weeks before he moved to London to study at the Royal College of Music, he had an encounter with a soprano from a local choir after he performed a piece by Coates.“She said, ‘I hope you don’t take all that rubbish down with you when you go to London,’” he recalled. “I was shocked. She said, ‘You’ll be laughed out of the place when you go to the Royal College of Music.’ It had never crossed my mind that people wouldn’t take to that sort of music.”Wilson has continued to champion light music in all its varieties. “In its own way, it’s a very pure kind of music,” with “a direct emotional appeal.” It’s a sound and feeling that he heard in Barbirolli’s strings, and that he brings to the Sinfonia of London today: strong, immediate and indisputable. More