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    Robert Black, Bass Virtuoso of the Avant-Garde, Is Dead at 67

    As part of the influential Bang on a Can All-Stars, he helped popularize experimental music through international tours and well-regarded albums.Robert Black, a virtuoso bassist who collaborated with prominent composers including Philip Glass and John Cage and was a founding member of the influential Bang on a Can All-Stars ensemble, died on Thursday at his home in Hartford, Conn. He was 67.His partner, Gary Knoble, said the cause was colon cancer.Mr. Black was already a prominent interpreter of modern music for bass when he was invited, in 1987, to perform at the first Bang on a Can festival, a freewheeling marathon of contemporary music in downtown Manhattan.“He had a beautiful sound,” the composer Michael Gordon, one of the founders of Bang on a Can, said in an interview. “He did everything with the bass: He danced with it, he drummed on it, he scraped it, he coached all kinds of amazing sounds out of it.”At that festival, Mr. Black performed Iannis Xenakis’s “Theraps” — an extraordinarily difficult piece that traverses five octaves through uncanny glissandos — and Tom Johnson’s “Failing,” which asks the performer to play increasingly complex passages on the bass while at the same time reading aloud a humorous text that self-consciously describes the possibility of failure.“When I fail to succeed, I will succeed in communicating the essence of the piece,” Mr. Black stated while playing a tricky line — as per the composer’s instructions — to laughter from the audience, captured in a definitive live recording.In 1992, Mr. Gordon and his fellow Bang on a Can directors David Lang and Julia Wolfe asked Mr. Black to join the newly formed All-Stars sextet, which brought further renown and attention to the festival’s visceral, rock-inflected music. His technique was central to the group’s sound: In Ms. Wolfe’s 1997 piece “Believing,” written for the All-Stars, he improvised frenzied passages that Ms. Wolfe once called “quintessential Robert Black-isms.”As a soloist and a chamber musician, Mr. Black championed contemporary music and commissioned work from dozens of composers. His reserved personality belied the cacophonous sounds he could summon with his instrument, a double bass nicknamed Simone that was made in Paris in 1900.Mr. Black’s theatrical approach to performance extended to dramatic speaking — he commissioned a large-scale work from Philip Glass that includes the recitation of poetry by Lou Reed and Patti Smith — and even dancing, as a member of Yoshiko Chuma’s School of Hard Knocks, an interdisciplinary troupe.Mr. Black in 2021. His reserved personality belied the cacophonous sounds he could summon with his instrument.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesRobert Alan Black was born in Denver on March 16, 1956, to Ned Black, an engineer, and Frances (Canzone) Black. Growing up in the suburbs of Denver, he began playing bass in middle school. He attended the University of North Texas before transferring to the Hartt School in Connecticut, where he studied with Gary Karr. While in college, he started performing music composed by his friends, and he freelanced in the New York area after graduating in 1979.“It felt like nobody really trusted me,” he recalled of this time in a 2015 interview. “I would go to the orchestra rehearsal, playing along, and my colleagues were going, ‘Yeah, but you also do that strange contemporary music, you play John Cage.’ And then I would go to a hard-core new music thing, and they’d go, ‘Yeah, you’re really not one of us because you also play in an orchestra.”But, inspired by his longtime partner, the composer James Sellars, as well as the pianist Yvar Mikhashoff, Mr. Black increasingly dedicated himself to contemporary composition, at a time when few classical virtuosos were committed to new works. An early showcase was Mr. Sellars’s “For Love of the Double Bass,” a piece for bass and piano that combines music and theater, in which Mr. Black seduced his instrument, buying it a dress, dancing with it and ultimately taking it to bed.As part of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Mr. Black helped popularize experimental music through international tours and well-regarded albums. He and the guitarist Mark Stewart, the only two original members to remain with the sextet, performed together for more than three decades.“He was deeply kind, often playful, gently yet fiercely devoted to the composer and his colleagues onstage,” Mr. Stewart wrote in an email. “His humility was real because his wisdom came from listening.”Mr. Black also pursued a solo career, building a sizable new repertoire for his instrument and recording the complete bass music of Giacinto Scelsi and Christian Wolff. A dedicated pedagogue, he taught at the Hartt School for 29 years. In 2017, he formed the Robert Black Foundation to support contemporary music. He frequently commissioned work from young and emerging composers, whose music he performed as part of a monthly Friday series during the pandemic, live-streamed from his home.At Mr. Black’s final concert, which was in April amid a grove of trees in Philadelphia, he took part in “Murmur in the Trees,” a piece for 24 basses composed by Eve Beglarian.In an unconventional arrangement, Mr. Black had been partners since 1974 with both Mr. Sellars, who died in 2017, and Mr. Knoble, and he had also been married to Elliott Fredouelle since 2016. (They all lived together.) He is also survived by a sister, Debbie Walker.In 2013 Mr. Black, a gifted improviser, trekked into the culverts of Moab, Utah, with his bass to make a new album — a duet with the desert. The recording captures not just the vast array of strange sounds he drew from Simone, but also the murmurs of birds and insects. It was, he explained, an attempt to “make the environment start to sing.”“I would just fool around on the instrument, getting used to the space and the sound,” he told Colorado Public Radio. “When it came time to record — this sounds like such a cliché, but it really is true — I would just try to empty my mind, start listening, and just let my hands move.” More

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    Frederic Forrest, 86, Dies; Actor Known for ‘Apocalypse Now’ and ‘The Rose’

    He appeared in a string of films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and his performance as Bette Midler’s love interest earned him an Oscar nomination.Frederic Forrest, who appeared in more than 80 movies and television shows in a career that began in the 1960s, and who turned in perhaps his two most memorable performances in the same year, 1979, in two very different films — the romantic drama “The Rose” and the Vietnam War odyssey “Apocalypse Now” — died on Friday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 86.His sister and only immediate survivor, Ginger Jackson, confirmed his death. She said he had been dealing with congestive heart failure.Mr. Forrest began turning up on the stages of La MaMa and other Off and Off Off Broadway theaters in New York in the 1960s. In 1966, he was in “Viet Rock,” an antiwar rock musical by Megan Terry that was staged in Manhattan and in New Haven, Conn., and is often cited as a precursor to “Hair.”In 1970, he moved to Los Angeles and, while working in a pizza restaurant, appeared in a showcase production at the Actors Studio West. The director Stuart Millar saw him there and cast him in his first big film role, as a Ute Indian (though Mr. Forrest had only a little Native American blood) in “When the Legends Die,” starring opposite the veteran actor Richard Widmark. That film, released in 1972, put Mr. Forrest on the map.“Forrest, a husky, strong-featured actor of great sensitivity who probably won’t escape comparisons with the early Brando, holds his own with Widmark,” Kevin Thomas wrote in a review in The Los Angeles Times.From left, Gene Hackman, Cindy Williams and Mr. Forrest in “The Conversation” (1974), the first of several movies directed by Francis Ford Coppola in which Mr. Forrest appeared.via Everett CollectionAmong those impressed with Mr. Forrest’s performance was Francis Ford Coppola, who cast him in “The Conversation” (1974), his study of a surveillance expert played by Gene Hackman. Five years later, Mr. Forrest was on a boat going up a river in search of the mysterious Kurtz in Mr. Coppola’s harrowing “Apocalypse Now.”Critics were divided on the movie as a whole, but Mr. Forrest’s portrayal of a character known as Chef (who ultimately loses his head, literally) was widely praised. The film was shot in the Philippines, an experience Mr. Forrest found grueling.“Because we were creating a surreal, dreamlike war, nightmare personal things began happening. Sometimes we would think we were losing our minds,” he told The New York Times in 1979. “I became almost catatonic in the Philippines. I could think of no reason to do anything.”Less taxing was “The Rose,” in which Ms. Midler played a Janis Joplin-like singer who self-destructs. Mr. Forrest portrayed a limousine driver and AWOL soldier who became her romantic partner.Mr. Forrest, Janet Maslin wrote in a review in The New York Times, “would be the surprise hit of the movie if Miss Midler didn’t herself have dibs on that position.” The role earned him his only Oscar nomination, for best supporting actor. (Melvyn Douglas won that year, for “Being There.”)Mr. Forrest might have seemed poised at that point to become an A-list star. Yet even though he worked steadily throughout the 1980s and ’90s, he landed only a few leading roles, and those movies didn’t do well. His next project with Mr. Coppola was “One From the Heart” (1981), a romance in which he and Teri Garr play a couple who split up and try other partners. Critics savaged the film.Mr. Forrest and Bette Midler in “The Rose” (1979). His performance in that film earned him his first and only Academy Award nomination.Everett CollectionHe next played the title role in Wim Wenders’s “Hammett” (1982), a fictional story about the mystery writer Dashiell Hammett, but that movie had only a limited theatrical run. His later films included “Tucker: The Man and His Dreams” (1988, another Coppola project), “Cat Chaser” (1989) and “The Two Jakes” (1990), the ill-fated sequel to “Chinatown,” directed by Jack Nicholson. He was also in numerous television movies, as well as the 1989 mini-series “Lonesome Dove.” His most recent film credit was a small part in the 2006 Sean Penn movie “All the King’s Men.”“This is a fickle town, no rhyme or reason to it,” he said of Hollywood in 1979. ”By the time you go down the driveway to pick up your mail, you’re forgotten.”Frederic Fenimore Forrest Jr. was born on Dec. 23, 1936, in Waxahachie, Texas, to Frederic and Virginia Allee (McSpadden) Forrest. His father ran a large wholesale greenhouse operation. Young Frederic played four sports at Waxahachie High School and was named the most handsome boy in the senior class.He graduated from Texas Christian University, with a degree in television and radio and a minor in theater, in 1960, the same year he married his college sweetheart, Nancy Ann Whittaker, though that marriage lasted only three years. He moved to New York shortly after graduating and worked odd jobs while studying acting with Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisner and other noted teachers.Mr. Forrest in 2007. Although he worked steadily throughout the 1980s and ’90s, he landed only a few leading roles, and those movies didn’t do well. Stephen Shugerman/Getty ImagesHis early stage roles in New York included a hunky guy in Ted Harris’s “Silhouettes,” which was staged at the Actors Playhouse in Manhattan in 1969. He reprised the role in Los Angeles the next year, after his move to the West Coast.“Frederic Forrest is perfect as the lazy stud in what may be one of the sleepiest roles ever written — he never gets out of bed,” Margaret Harford wrote in The Los Angeles Times.A second marriage, to the actress Marilu Henner in 1980, stemmed from a screen test that year for “Hammett” that included a kissing scene.“Someone almost had to throw cold water on us,” Ms. Henner told The Toronto Star in 1993. “The tape is pretty wild.”They married six months later, but that marriage, like his earlier one, lasted only three years. A third marriage also ended in divorce, Mr. Forrest’s sister, Ms. Jackson, said.Barry Primus, an actor who worked with Mr. Forrest on “The Rose,” recalled his skill both onscreen and as a raconteur.“Working with him was a treat and, for me, a learning experience,” he said in a statement. “It was absolutely enchanting to spend an evening hearing him tell stories. So much fun, and in its own way, a kind of performance art. There was a love in them that made you feel how crazy and wonderful it was to be alive.”In a phone interview, Ms. Jackson said her brother was particularly pleased to have been able to bring their mother to the Academy Awards ceremony in 1980, when he was nominated for “The Rose.”“It was so wonderful for her to be able to see that,” she said. More

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    Angela Bassett and Mel Brooks Are Among Those to Receive Honorary Oscars

    The Sundance Institute executive Michelle Satter and the film editor Carol Littleton will also get prizes at the Governors Awards ceremony in November.Just a few months after Angela Bassett came close to clinching a supporting-actress Oscar for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” she’ll become one of four Hollywood figures to receive an honorary Oscar at this year’s Governors Awards, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced. Also getting honorary Oscars will be the director Mel Brooks and the editor Carol Littleton, while the Sundance Institute’s Michelle Satter will be presented with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.The awards “honor four trailblazers who have transformed the film industry and inspired generations of filmmakers and movie fans,” the academy president Janet Yang said in a statement.Bassett, 64, was first nominated for playing Tina Turner in the biopic “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” and also starred in films like “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” “Malcolm X” and “Boyz N the Hood.” Her awards-season run for Wakanda Forever” earlier this year netted her a Golden Globe, and though she lost the Oscar to “Everything Everywhere All at Once” supporting actress Jamie Lee Curtis, Bassett is still one of only four Black actresses to have received more than one Oscar nomination for acting.Mel Brooks previously won for “The Producers” screenplay.Richard Shotwell/Invision, via Associated PressBrooks, who turns 97 this week, is the rare recipient of this honorary award to have already won a competitive Oscar: In 1969, he triumphed in the original-screenplay category for his debut film, “The Producers.” Much more was still to come, as Brooks went on to become one of Hollywood’s most notable comic directors, making beloved films like “Young Frankenstein” and “Blazing Saddles.” He’s even one of 18 people in show business to have reached competitive EGOT status, after having added Grammys, Emmys, and Tonys to the Oscar on his awards shelf.Satter, the founding senior director of the Sundance Institute’s artist programs, has spent four decades nurturing independent filmmakers at the earliest stages of their careers: Projects like Wes Anderson’s “Bottle Rocket,” Darren Aronofsky’s “Requiem for a Dream,” Miranda July’s “Me and You and Everyone We Know” and Ryan Coogler’s “Fruitvale Station” were all developed at Satter’s Sundance Labs.Littleton was Oscar-nominated for editing Steven Spielberg’s “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and went on to work primarily with the directors Lawrence Kasdan (on films like “The Big Chill” and “The Accidental Tourist”) and Jonathan Demme (on “Beloved” and his remakes “The Manchurian Candidate” and “The Truth About Charlie”).Though these honorary prizes are not televised, they remain one of awards season’s most star-studded events: Scheduled this year for Nov. 18, they offer the chance not only to herald the deserving but also to get schmoozy face time with a packed ballroom of Oscar voters. Expect emotional speeches delivered to scads of this season’s hopeful nominees, all of whom will work the crowd at every intermission. More

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    6 Odes to Ohio

    The state has inspired memorable songs by Randy Newman, R.E.M., King Princess and more.R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, perhaps suggesting we put our heads together and start a new country up.Martial Trezzini/European Pressphoto AgencyDear listeners,For six of the past seven summers, I’ve spent a long weekend visiting college friends in northern Ohio — a part of the country with which I was previously unfamiliar but has now come to feel like a home away from home. A highlight of these trips is always, weather permitting, when we get to tube lazily down the Cuyahoga River. We tend to start the drive with this excursion’s unofficial theme song: “Burn On,” Randy Newman’s wry but warmly sung ode to that time in 1969 that the infamously polluted Cuyahoga caught fire.More than 50 years later, the fact that we can comfortably float in the Cuyahoga speaks to the success of the high-profile cleanup campaigns that have restored the river to its past glory — so much so that in 2019, the conservation association American Rivers named it “River of the Year.” I did not even know that was a thing. Congrats, Cuyahoga!Newman isn’t the only musician to be fascinated by the plight of this particular river. A song called “Cuyahoga” appears on R.E.M.’s great fourth album, “Life’s Rich Pageant”; Michael Stipe uses the word as a metaphor not just for environmental degradation but for the seizing of land — and even language — originally belonging to native people. “This is where they walked, this is where they swam,” Stipe sings, then adds with bitter irony, “Take a picture here, take a souvenir.”Perhaps because of the sing-songy, vowel-heavy composition of its name, the state of Ohio itself has inspired quite a few notable tunes. I collected a few for today’s playlist — from the likes of Harry Nilsson, King Princess and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young — to round out those musical odes to the 2019 River of the Year.Will this be the first in a long series of 50 Amplifier installments, each devoted to songs about a specific state? Well, even Sufjan Stevens couldn’t finish his 50 States Project, so I’d say don’t hold your breath.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Randy Newman: “Burn On”“There’s a red moon rising on the Cuyahoga River,” Newman begins in that inimitable voice, accompanied by his own plinking piano, “rolling into Cleveland from the lake.” Released on his 1972 album “Sail Away,” “Burn On” is featured in the opening montage of the classic 1989 baseball flick “Major League,” because — according to a Wikipedia statement without a citation that I will choose to believe anyway — the director David S. Ward said the song was “the only one he knew of that was about Cleveland, Ohio.” (Had he never heard “Cleveland Rocks”?) (Listen on YouTube)2. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: “Ohio”Recorded just two weeks after the fatal 1970 incident at Kent State University, when the Ohio National Guard killed four students and wounded nine more, the searing “Ohio,” featuring lyrics by Neil Young, was rush-released the following month and effectively tapped into the countercultural consciousness. (Listen on YouTube, because this one isn’t on Spotify for presumably Young-related reasons)3. R.E.M.: “Cuyahoga”On “Life’s Rich Pageant,” “Cuyahoga” is preceded by the jangling single “Fall on Me,” a song about the effects of acid rain. Taken together, these tracks indicate the band’s growing social conscience and its particular focus on environmentalism. (Listen on YouTube)4. King Princess: “Ohio”This rollicking live staple frequently closed out King Princess’s early shows. Some of her fans were so vocally upset that this song did not appear on her debut album that, in a 2019 Instagram story, the artist born Mikaela Straus cheekily wrote, “I recorded a version of Ohio that is almost done so everyone just calm down.” She kept her word: The sultry studio version of the song — addressed to a former flame who’s gone home to the Buckeye state — appeared on the deluxe edition of the album “Cheap Queen.” (Listen on YouTube)5. Damien Jurado: “Ohio”Ohio is also depicted as a mythical elsewhere — a love interest’s faraway home — in this heart-wrenching acoustic ballad by the Seattle singer-songwriter Damien Jurado. It appears on his 1999 album “Rehearsals for Departure” and also on many, many mix CDs I burned in college. (Listen on YouTube)6. Harry Nilsson: “Dayton Ohio 1903”What is it with Randy Newman and Ohio? He wrote this sweetly nostalgic ditty and recorded his own version for “Sail Away,” though in the spirit of mixing thing up, I chose Harry Nilsson’s version from the earlier, 1970 album “Nilsson Sings Newman.” The song recalls a simpler time, when people dropped by for tea and, perhaps, the Cuyahoga ran clear and blissfully inflammable. (Listen on YouTube)Burn on, big river,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Odes to Ohio” track listTrack 1: Randy Newman, “Burn On”Track 2: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, “Ohio”Track 3: REM, “Cuyahoga”Track 4: King Princess, “Ohio”Track 5: Damien Jurado, “Ohio”Track 6: Harry Nilsson, “Dayton Ohio 1903”Bonus tracksThis 2009 New York Times report, pegged to the 40th anniversary of the Cuyahoga catching fire, has a lede so vivid it is worth quoting in full: “The first time Gene Roberts fell into the Cuyahoga River, he worried he might die. The year was 1963, and the river was still an open sewer for industrial waste. Walking home, Mr. Roberts smelled so bad that his friends ran to stay upwind of him.”Also, it feels almost sacrilegious to talk about the music of Ohio and not mention Guided by Voices, so cue up “Glad Girls” — or another of the approximately 71 billion rippers the Dayton band has recorded over its career — and crank the volume up. More

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    Kylie Minogue’s ‘Padam Padam’ and the Queer Club-Pop Canon

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThe song defining Pride month this year is Kylie Minogue’s “Padam Padam,” a thumping tease that’s lightly campy and has taken on outsize importance as a gay nightlife anthem and meme-culture staple.For Minogue, 55 — a bona fide superstar abroad but more of a pop curio here — it’s one of a handful of breakthrough moments that have cemented her embrace among gay listeners. But “Padam Padam” is also part of a longer list of diva anthems — from Lady Gaga, Madonna, and many others — that become, in effect, gay canon.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about “Padam Padam” and how songs get inscribed into the gay pop canon, Minogue’s not-quite-stardom in the United States, and how a younger generation of pop aspirants like Rina Sawayama and Charli XCX perform their embrace of their gay fans.Guest:Jason P. Frank, news writer at VultureConnect 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 popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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    Diagnosed With Tourette’s, Lewis Capaldi Takes a Break From Touring

    After performing at Glastonbury Festival over the weekend, Capaldi, the popular Scottish singer-songwriter, said he would stop touring “for the foreseeable future.”The Scottish musician Lewis Capaldi announced on Tuesday that he would take a break from touring “for the foreseeable future,” including the remainder of his current world tour, in order to adjust to life with Tourette’s syndrome, with which he was diagnosed last year.During a performance Saturday at Glastonbury Festival in England, Capaldi, 26, lost his voice and had to enlist the help of the enormous, enthusiastic crowd to finish his 2018 hit “Someone You Loved.”We love you Lewis Capaldi ❤️Glastonbury crowds are the best. pic.twitter.com/x6ZnIIgRpP— BBC Radio 1 (@BBCR1) June 24, 2023
    In the three weeks leading up to Glastonbury, he had canceled shows, he said, to take a “moment to rest and recover.”In his statement on Tuesday announcing the break from touring, Capaldi wrote, “The fact that this probably won’t come as a surprise doesn’t make it any easier to write.”“I used to be able to enjoy every second of shows like this and I’d hoped 3 weeks away would sort me out,” he wrote. “But the truth is I’m still learning to adjust to the impact of my Tourette’s and on Saturday it became obvious that I need to spend much more time getting my mental and physical health in order, so I can keep doing everything I love for a long time to come.”Tourette’s syndrome is characterized by sudden jerking movements and uncontrollable tics and vocalizations, and Capaldi could be seen twitching onstage during his performance Saturday.His next show was scheduled for Wednesday in Zurich, followed by performances across Asia, Europe and the Middle East.This spring, he released a Netflix documentary, “How I’m Feeling Now,” about his diagnosis and the management of his illness. He also discussed it during an interview with The New York Times last month, before he released his second studio album, “Broken by Desire to Be Heavenly Sent.”“This sounds gross, but it’s become part of like a marketing strategy,” he said. “Every piece of content or thing I see with my name next to it is closely followed by Tourette’s.” More

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    ‘Sin La Habana’ Review: A Long Way From Home

    In Kaveh Nabatian’s new drama, an Afro-Cuban dancer tries to bring his girlfriend to Canada through a sham marriage.Kaveh Nabatian’s “Sin La Habana” is a study in contrasts: the sticky, vibrant heat of Cuba’s capital versus the pulverizing winter of Montreal; a spontaneous street performance versus the rigid formality of a ballet studio audition; a planned marriage versus an impulsive romance.The story of Leonardo (Yonah Acosta) — an Afro-Cuban dancer who seduces an Iranian Canadian tourist, Nasim (Aki Yaghoubi), into a sham marriage with the hopes of securing passage to Canada for himself and his girlfriend (Evelyn Castroda O’Farrill) — is a familiar immigrant tale with predictably disastrous results. Upon moving in with Nasim, his new wife, Leonardo finds that life in the north is not only difficult to adjust to, but not nearly as liberating as promised, as he faces the same racism at dance studios and workshops that drove him to leave Cuba in the first place.Nasim, suspecting that her connection with Leonardo may have been fraudulent from the beginning, nevertheless tries to build their relationship and defend him from her insular Iranian family and ex-husband. And in his absence, Leonardo’s girlfriend, Sara, sacrifices their future together in order to get a leg-up in her career as a lawyer.Nabatian is sympathetic to all three characters and their lack of easy choices, and his eye for small cultural details and rituals — the intricacies of Afro-Cuban dance, the tiles on the floor of a Havana apartment, the teacups at a gathering for Nasim’s family — enforces how identity continues to shape their lives even as they’re far from home. While the fate of their relationships is left ambiguous, these transient moments linger long after Leonardo has performed his last dance in front of the camera.Sin La HabanaNot rated. In Spanish, English and Persian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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    ‘Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music’ Review: Wish You Were There

    Only 650 people got to experience one of the 21st century’s artistic feats, until this documentary. Unfortunately, it misses some of the performance’s key aspects.The writer and performer Taylor Mac spent the first half of the 2010s developing an epic project, “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” that covered 240 years’ worth of American history. Mac would perform large excerpts at concerts, then on Oct. 8-9, 2016, did the whole caboodle as an ultramarathon of 246 songs. The show took over St. Ann’s Warehouse, in Brooklyn, in a 24-hour-long “radical faerie realness ritual sacrifice” that amounted to a transcendent artistic and political gesture. (Full disclosure: I was there.)Now, an HBO documentary by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (“The Celluloid Closet,” “Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice”) offers a necessarily abridged look at Mac’s towering achievement, which showcased an incredible range as an interpreter, a theatrical gusto and a mischievous, often biting humor. Key collaborators like the costume designer Machine Dazzle and the makeup artist Anastasia Durasova also explain what went into their many painstakingly intricate creations.But there is some ambiguity: The film is structured as if it were documenting the St. Ann’s happening, including time stamps, but some of the performance footage actually is from Los Angeles. The doc also does not illuminate how Mac dealt with the marathon’s grueling physical demands, or describe the surreal ambience that set over the Brooklyn venue as the hours ticked by and sleep deprivation set in. We do see some of the audience participation, which was an integral part of the show, but we don’t hear from attendees. It’s a loss, because the event was, in essence, about the making of community through the ages but also through one day and night.Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular MusicNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Max. More