Aurelia Butler

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    Anthony Braxton, Experimental Music Master, Gets His Due

    Anthony Braxton’s music is difficult to program even among forward-thinking institutions. Leave it to the scrappy companies to get the work done.Anthony Braxton’s music is inherently theatrical. It’s also serious, and hilariously entertaining.It is not, however, performed with a frequency that befits Braxton’s stature, in a glaring, countrywide omission. More on that in a bit, but first: When seasoned practitioners of his work gather to explore some of his most overlooked pieces, which is happening this weekend at the Brick Theater in Brooklyn, that should qualify as a major event.On Thursday night at the Brick, the scrappy Experiments in Opera company pulled off a delirious debut performance of what it’s calling “Anthony Braxton Theater Improvisations.” The one-hour show proved delightful; and the small, cozy venue was rightfully sold out. The run continues through Saturday, so grab one of the remaining seats while you can.Those who can’t make it can still dig into this side of Braxton’s music, thanks to how doggedly he documents his projects. The Experiments show deserves attention, and perhaps documentation, given the way it provides a new lens on a corner of Braxton’s more conceptual side.The trumpeter Nate Wooley.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesRob Reese served as both narrator and director.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesThe evening is based on Opuses 279-283 in Braxton’s catalog: comedic efforts written for a narrator and an improvising instrumentalist. Back in 2000, Braxton — playing a range of saxophones and clarinets — recorded several of these works with a young stand-up comedian, Alex Horwitz.In Composition No. 282, that narrator is called upon to read the day’s newspaper (with an option to crumple it for timbral effect), while the instrumentalist improvises. In No. 281, bebop-like phrases run underneath one-liners and observational humor.But with just two people, the recording’s charm sometimes peters out. The Experiments show maintains higher energy, and brings three artists to each performance: a narrator-actor (Rob Reese, who also directed); another scene partner and soprano (Kamala Sankaram, a veteran of Braxton opera recordings); and an instrumentalist (on Thursday, the trumpeter Nate Wooley, who participated memorably in some larger Braxton ensembles during the 2010s).Before the show, the saxophonist James Fei, who performs on Friday’s set, told me that Composition No. 279 is essentially a compendium of jokes. That piece didn’t make the cut in Braxton’s recording with Horwitz from 2000, but it was featured in the Experiments show.Holding a top hat, Reese paced among the audience members and asked some of them to pick a card from inside it. A card might carry one of Braxton’s “language music” organizational prompts (like “intervallic formings”), paired with a genre of joke from Composition No. 279 (like “Republican/Democrat jokes.”)While Wooley and Sankaram worked with strident, leaping intervals, Reese delivered a joke that tended toward the school of the one-liner king Henny Youngman (to whom Braxton dedicated Composition 282). I roughly transcribed one of the jokes this way: “Why are Democrats always in favor of gun control? Because they keep shooting themselves in the foot.”On the page, this may not seem like much. But set against a duet of wildly leaping figures, it all produced a dazzling novelty that also reinvigorated a vintage form; the borscht belt never sounded so endearingly strange.Reese, who collaborated with Sankaram on her imaginative opera “Miranda,” also improvised some scenic work at the front of the stage with her. Some of their material was less obviously connected to the Braxton compositions as previously recorded but felt in the right spirit — as did Wooley’s improvisations away from his horn. In the background of one scene between Reese and Sankaram, the trumpeter sat against the brick wall at the stage’s rear. While lit with the penumbra of a spotlight aimed elsewhere, he coolly mimed the smoking of a cigarette with a kazoo.And since Braxton has written that “all compositions in my music system can be executed at the same time/moment,” the troupe reveled in that possibility. At one point, Wooley relished the languid, bop-tinged opening theme of Composition No. 23D, originally recorded on the album “New York, Fall 1974.”Then Sankaram swung into one of the meatier passages written for her in Braxton’s Composition No. 380 — the opera “Trillium J,” which was recorded and performed in 2014 at Roulette in Brooklyn. In one scene, Sankaram plays the role of “Miss Scarlet,” a “helpless maiden who happens to own 400 nuclear weapons stockpile containers — not to mention the chemical gas warfare options.”Coloratura singing, written for those lines? That’s funny. In the full opera — which is available on Blu-ray and as a paid download on Vimeo — the moment of humor that Sankaram really sells can whiz by amid all the orchestral complexity. But it had new verve when she brought it back around in the improvisational maelstrom of Thursday’s more intimate set.Some of the assorted instruments used during “Anthony Braxton Theater Improvisations.” Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesAll of this spoke to the unexplored potential of Braxton’s oeuvre. His catalog of over a half-century’s compositions and his playing on reed instruments are both rightfully talked about with awe, as is his record as a mentor. Wave after wave of celebrated player-composers, including George E. Lewis and Mary Halvorson, have cut their professional teeth in his ensembles. Aaron Siegel, the executive director of Experiments in Opera, has also served as a percussionist in those groups. In opening remarks on Thursday, he credited Braxton as one of his company’s original mentors.Braxton has won a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Foundation grant, and an NEA Jazz Masters award. If you talk to leaders of forward-thinking orchestras and opera companies, you’ll often hear (off the record) about their desire to program Braxton’s ambitious pieces — the ones that carry traces of bebop and Karlheinz Stockhausen, of Hildegard von Bingen and American folk dances.But it’s evidently difficult to make happen. When the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang was young and working with the New York Philharmonic, he tried pushing Braxton’s orchestral music on his superiors. No dice. Perhaps that’s because Braxton asks players to improvise as well as pay attention to complex notated material.So, for now, we have to rely on smaller organizations like Experiments in Opera to find the right balance and bring Braxtonia to life properly. And this week, they’re nailing it. More

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    Meshell Ndegeocello’s Magnificent Mix, and 9 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Peggy Gou, Killer Mike, Sparklehorse and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Meshell Ndegeocello featuring Jeff Parker, ‘ASR’The songs on Meshell Ndegeocello’s magnificent new album, “The Omnichord Real Book,” are always in flux. In its seven-and-half minutes, “ASR” hints at fusion jazz, Funkadelic, Ethiopian pop, reggae and psychedelia; the guitarist Jeff Parker, from Tortoise, teases the music forward. As the song accelerates, Ndegeocello sings about pain, heartbreak, healing and perseverance, and she vows, “We’re here to set the clock to here and now.” JON PARELESPeggy Gou, ‘(It Goes Like) Nanana’Peggy Gou is a South Korean-born, Berlin-based D.J. and producer with a penchant for dreamy house beats and a velvety touch. Her latest single “(It Goes Like) Nanana” plays out a bit like her own personal reworking of ATC’s ubiquitous 2000 hit “All Around the World,” but with a kinetic energy that’s distinctly her own. “I can’t explain,” Gou sings over a thumping beat and light piano riff, before deciding she can best express the feeling she wants to describe in nonsense words: “I guess it goes like na na na na na na.” LINDSAY ZOLADZDoja Cat, ‘Attention’Doja Cat returns with a vengeance on the menacing “Attention,” a statement record that puts her pop sensibility aside (at least for now) and leans into her ample skills as an M.C. “Look at me, look at me — you lookin’?” she begins, and for the next few minutes commands the floor with charismatic grit. “Baby, if you like it, just reach out and pet it,” she sings on a hook that recalls ’90s R&B, albeit filtered through Doja’s alien sensibility. The verses, though, are pure venom: “Y’all fall into beef, but that’s another conversation,” she spits with that signature fire in her throat. “I’m sorry, but we all find it really entertaining.” ZOLADZKiller Mike featuring Future, André 3000 and Eryn Allen Kane, ‘Scientists & Engineers’Ambition and achievement, electronics and exaltation all figure in “Scientists & Engineers” from “Michael,” Killer Mike’s first solo album since he formed Run the Jewels with El-P. “Scientists & Engineers” has five producers including James Blake and No I.D. The track pulsates with keyboard chords under the elusive André 3000 (from Outkast), who insists, “Rebelling is like an itch.” The music switches to silky guitar chords for Future, who sings, “It’s better to be an outcast in a world of envious.” And a beat kicks in with trap drums and blipping synthesizers behind Killer Mike, who boasts in quick triplets: “I’m never chillin’, I gotta make millions.” A multitracked Eryn Allen Kane wafts choirlike harmonies — and gospel-tinged sentiments like “I’mma live forever” — while the rappers redefine themselves. PARELESFlesh Eater featuring Fiona Apple, ‘Komfortzone’None other than Fiona Apple decided to collaborate with Flesh Eater, a Nashville avant-pop group, on the mercurial seven-minute excursion “Komfortzone.” Over a low, sputtering programmed beat and outbursts of noise and electronics, Flesh Eater’s lead singer, Zwil AR, sings hopscotching melodies reminiscent of Dirty Projectors. Apple sprinkles in some piano and eventually adds vocal harmonies on refrains like “A field of sunflowers with their backs toward me/I’m on the train.” It’s as willful as it is arty. PARELESSparklehorse, ‘Evening Star Supercharger’Mark Linkous was making his fifth album as Sparklehorse when he died by suicide in 2010. Now his family and a handful of collaborators have completed it, due for a September release as “Bird Machine.” A preview single, “Evening Star Supercharger,” tops unhurried folk-rock with the tinkle of a toy piano, as Linkous cryptically but matter-of-factly considers mortality and depression: “Peace without pill, gun or needle or prayer appear/Never found sometimes near but too fleet to be clear.” In the sky, he calmly watches a star going nova: “Even though she’s dying, getting larger.” PARELESOmah Lay, ‘Reason’The Nigerian singer Omah Lay has split his songs between partying and self-doubt; he has also been featured by Justin Bieber. “Reason,” from the newly expanded version of his 2022 album, “Boy Alone,” has minor chords and grim scenarios: “I don’t know who to run to right now/Army is opening heavy fire.” The beat is buoyant, but the tone is fraught. PARELESDavid Virelles, ‘Uncommon Sense’A low-riding shuffle beat isn’t the Cuban-born pianist, composer and folklorist David Virelles’s most common environment. But “Carta,” Virelles’s new LP, puts him and his longtime first-call bassist, Ben Street, together with Eric McPherson, an innovator and tradition-bearer in today’s jazz drumming. This is the closest Virelles has come to making a standard-format jazz trio album, though it’s still not exactly that. On the opener, “Uncommon Sense,” McPherson’s shuffle kicks in after 25 seconds of solo piano, and Virelles has already led things down a tense path, changing keys capriciously while building up a foundation for the Cubist phrase at the center of the tune. McPherson’s elegantly splattered drum style, using traditional grip to roll his rhythms out as close to the ground as possible, gives solid support to Virelles while he toys with contemporary-side influences: the bodily elocution of Don Pullen’s piano playing, the harmonic splintering and superimpositions of Craig Taborn, the rhythmic restraint of a Gonzalo Rubalcaba. You wouldn’t need to be told this album was recorded at Van Gelder Studio to realize it’s speaking with jazz history — the antique, the modern and what’s barely come into shape. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOBen van Gelder, ‘Spectrum’“Manifold,” a new album from the rising bandleader Ben van Gelder, celebrates the voice. The voice of his saxophone, the voice of the pipe organ, the human voice, the collective voice of an eight-piece band. Each has its own grain. The organ has its own prominent side-narrative in jazz history, but the Amsterdam-based van Gelder is culling from a different stream, closer to contemporary classical composers like Arvo Pärt and György Ligeti, using dissonance and space. The Veracruz-born vocalist Fuensanta sings no words on “Spectrum,” the album’s rangy centerpiece track; she joins the horns, sounding almost like another reed instrument. Beneath them, Kit Downes toggles between minimalism and high-rising waves on the pipe organ. RUSSONELLOElliott Sharp, ‘Rosette’The composer Elliott Sharp has been devising systems of pitch and structure since the 1970s. His latest album, “Steppe,” is inspired by geography. It’s music for six overdubbed vintage electric steel guitars, microtonally tuned and arrayed in stereo, exploring texture and resonance. “Rosette” is built from quick, cascading, staggered, overlapping little runs. It’s bell-toned and spiky, crumbling and reassembling. PARELES More

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    Watch Jeffrey Wright Give a Rousing Speech in ‘Asteroid City’

    Wes Anderson narrates a scene from his film.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.On the page, the speech a military general delivers in the film “Asteroid City” might look a little loopy. On the screen, delivered with verve by the actor Jeffrey Wright, it reaches even greater heights of both oddity and emotion.“I wanted to write something that, in a way, only Jeffrey could do,” said Wes Anderson, the film’s director and screenwriter, during an interview in New York. He wanted to tell a story of the generations of this character’s family.“Jeffrey turns it into more like a poem,” he said. “But it’s a poem that is delivered with a sort of ferocity.”The speech is executed in one take, with the camera dollying side to side as well as forward and backward, to capture all of Wright’s beats. Anderson said it was achieved with a complicated setup using “a crazy set of dolly tracks, sideways dolly tracks with a with a section of track that glides on the top of the three tracks,” a rig conceived by Anderson’s key grip, Sanjay Sami.Read the “Asteroid City” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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    A Shorter Next Wave Festival Planned at BAM

    The lineup for the artistic director’s final season will feature an interactive food theater performance and several dance programs.An intimate dinner-party performance, a fire-and-brimstone immersive show and a slew of dance performances are on tap for the coming Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the performing arts center announced on Friday.The festival will be the last to be programmed under David Binder, the artistic director, who announced earlier this year that he would step down and transition to an artistic advisory role on July 2. An interim artistic director will be announced in the coming weeks.This year’s edition of the storied festival will be scaled back, featuring seven programs — nearly half the last slate — from Oct. 19 through Jan. 13. The festival’s offerings have been steadily declining in recent years. In 2019, Next Wave featured 16 programs, down from 31 in 2017.“We prefer to think of it as dense and not necessarily shrinking,” said Amy Cassello, the festival’s associate director of programming. “I don’t think it’s any secret that arts institutions are pressed for funding.”The program is “an incredibly intentional effort,” she said.First on the schedule is the U.S. premiere of “Broken Chord” (Oct. 19-21), a retelling of South Africa’s first Black choir by the South African dancer and choreographer Gregory Maqoma and the composer Thuthuka Sibisi. Using atmospheric soundscapes and traditional Xhosa movement, the performance will feature a single dancer, four vocal soloists and a live local choir.Also on the lineup is the theater maker Geoff Sobelle’s surreal interactive dinner performance, “Food” (Nov. 2-18), in which audience members gather around an colossal banquet table. The show, which debuted at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in 2022, and which the New York Times critic Alexis Soloski called “a meditation on what and how and why we eat,” is the third in a trilogy of Sobelle’s performance works at BAM, following “The Object Lesson” in 2014 and “Home” in 2017.The artist and filmmaker Lynette Wallworth’s “How to Live (After You Die)” (Dec. 7-9) is a personal monologue on the seduction of cults and the extreme edges of organized religion. The choreographer Trajal Harrell’s “The Köln Concert” (Nov. 2-4), a dance work inspired by Keith Jarrett’s genre-hopping piano recording of the same name, will be performed by Harrell’s Schauspielhaus Zürich Dance Ensemble. And the choreographer Rachid Ouramdane’s “Corps Extrêmes” (Oct. 27-29), an aerial dance work, contemplates the space between earth and sky, set against the backdrop of a climbing wall and a suspended high rope.The season will conclude with Huang Ruo’s “Angel Island” (Jan. 11-13), an opera-theater work about the plight of Chinese migrants who were detained under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1883. In collaboration with the Del Sol Quartet, the Choir of Trinity Wall Street and the archival filmmaker Bill Morrison, Ruo’s BAM debut will present a multimedia requiem based on poetry engraved on the detention center’s walls.“BAM has always said that we follow the artist,” Cassello said. “The work in this festival is very much attuned to present-day issues. We don’t take for granted that people are wanting to come back to theater.” More

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    Top Grammy Categories Are Returning to 8 Nominees, From 10

    The event is also moving two competitions into its “general” field, adding three awards, and setting a new threshold for collaborators in album of the year.Two years ago, the Grammy Awards abruptly increased the number of nominees permitted in its top categories, going to 10 slots on the ballot, from eight. Now, it is going back.The Recording Academy, the organization behind the Grammys, said on Friday that the number of nominees would once again be set at eight in the four top categories — album, record and song of the year, and best new artist — for the 66th annual awards, scheduled to be presented in early 2024.Among other tweaks to the awards rules is the addition of two categories to the all-genre “general” field: producer of the year, nonclassical, and songwriter of the year, nonclassical, a new prize introduced at the most recent ceremony, in February. This change — the first addition to the general field since 1959 — would allow all the academy’s voting members to cast votes in those categories.The move to 10 nominees, decided by the board just one day before nominations were announced in 2021, made the always-surprising Grammy process even more unpredictable. Some voters complained privately that broadening the field lowered the mandate for winners too far, allowing — theoretically, at least — one artist to prevail with little more than 10 percent of the vote.Harvey Mason Jr., the chief executive of the academy, said in an interview this week that the organization had not heard any such complaints, but he acknowledged that similar questions were on the minds of board members when they voted last month to change the rules.“Does the vote get split? Is 10 too many? Does it minimize the nomination?” Mason said. “All these conversations were happening in trying to find what is the best number.”At the Grammy ceremony in February, Harry Styles won album of the year for “Harry’s House,” beating out releases by Beyoncé, Adele, Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny.The change announced Friday is the third of its kind in five years. In 2018, the academy increased the ballot from five to eight; three years later, it went from eight to 10.In another shift, the Grammys are setting a new eligibility threshold for collaborators on album of the year. In recent years, the Grammys have required that contributors like songwriters, engineers and guest performers appear on at least 33 percent of an album’s playing time, but for the 2022 awards, that bar was reduced to zero — a change that in some cases resulted in more than 100 names appearing in the nomination.That threshold has now been raised to 20 percent, which should cull many songwriters and other contributors who appear on just one or two tracks on a typical album.Among other changes, the academy is introducing three awards for next year: best African music performance, best pop dance recording and best alternative jazz album.Those additions bring the total for the 66th ceremony to 94 categories, a number that has been growing rapidly. As recently as three years ago, the Grammys had 84.In another change that raised some eyebrows in the music industry, the Grammys shifted the eligibility period for the 2024 awards twice recently, first announcing an 11-month window and then adding two weeks two it, resulting in an unusual eligibility period of 11 and a half months, covering Oct. 1, 2022, to Sept. 15, 2023. More

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    Review: ‘The Whitney Album’ Looks to Theater to Remake a Painful Past

    Eschewing a conventional narrative, Jillian Walker’s soulful show seeks to heal deep wounds through ritual and celebratory singalongs.In “The Whitney Album,” a heady and ritualistic new show that recently opened at Soho Rep, the playwright and actor Jillian Walker uses Whitney Houston as an object lesson: The pressures heaped on gifted and famous Black women, Walker suggests, are stifling, destructive and rooted in colonial subjugation.Unlike the pop-diva-inspired musicals proliferating uptown, “The Whitney Album” eschews a hit catalog for a soundtrack that’s sui generis, with percussive body movements, a cappella solos and, eventually, a group singalong. The director Jenny Koons’s production unfolds — on a mostly white stage (designed by Peiyi Wong), with a brass singing bowl gleaming down center — as a kind of happening, unconcerned with conventional narrative. The show assumes the style of what Walker might call “a vibe.”After offering a warm welcome, the playwright delivers a lecture about the power of theater to remake history (“the archive is the unsung silence,” she says). Dense with academic syntax and punctuated by elemental rites (like the pouring of water or sand from one vessel to another), “The Whitney Album” blends intellectual theory and ceremony to the point of abstraction. (Walker studied to become an Afro-Indigenous priest, she says, after being passed over for a prestigious full-time professorship.)The actor Stephanie Weeks joins Walker onstage, and the two trade off playing Houston and the women she was closest to — her mother and a longtime confidante — in scenes fraught with the stress of celebrity. (The sound designer Ben Jalosa Williams, who operates an onstage board, briefly plays the role of an impatient white interviewer.) Walker likens Houston’s prodigious perspiration to the sweat, tears and saltwater graves of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, tracing the consumption and disposal of Black women over three centuries. It’s a powerful argument, at once persuasive and oversimplified. (“The Whitney Album” does not extend to consider today’s Black female pop stars, like Beyoncé, for example, who maintain a high degree of control over their labor and publicity.)The show’s shuffle of forms — including direct address, re-enactment, live and recorded vocals — can feel like an especially soulful, high-concept record that’s more evocative than linear. But its piled-up ideas, many of them couched in esoteric language that’s not easy to parse in a 90-minute performance, ultimately don’t cohere into a moving or insightful whole.Walker’s passion and intellect seem to place her along the continuum of artists and scholars she calls out by first name — like Saidiya, Lauryn and bell, among others. But how can Walker avoid participating in the cycle of consumption she aims to critique? It’s a question that she proves has no easy answers.The Whitney AlbumThrough July 2 at Soho Rep, Manhattan; sohorep.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    Glenda Jackson, an Unnervingly Energizing Presence at Every Age

    “I had been prepared to be awed, intimidated, even terrified,” Ben Brantley writes of meeting the actress in person five years ago.She didn’t so much enter the restaurant as erupt into it, a fast-burning blaze of psychic exasperation that seemed to set the silverware rattling. Glenda Jackson was five minutes late for our meeting, and she looked ferociously disgusted with herself, with the universe, with the “bloody” London transit system and, most likely, with the prospect of having to talk about herself.Such was my first in-the-flesh encounter with Jackson, who died Thursday at the age of 87 and who had seared herself into my teenage consciousness decades earlier as an uncompromisingly modern, sui generis movie star. Waiting for her five years ago in the restaurant of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, I had been prepared to be awed, intimidated, even terrified. What I hadn’t anticipated was how unnervingly energizing the presence of this 81-year-old woman would be.I probably shouldn’t have been surprised by the kinetic force of Jackson, who was about to return to Broadway for the first time in three decades in a revival of Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women.” She had, after all, made her international name in the 1960s and early ’70s — in films like Ken Russell’s “Women in Love” and John Schlesinger’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” — as the combustible embodiment of a very contemporary dissatisfaction with the world as she found it.Jackson and Oliver Reed in the film adaptation of the D.H. Lawrence novel “Women in Love,” for which she won a best-actress Oscar. A Park Circus/MGM StudiosHer most obvious antecedents were probably the nervy, forever restless Bette Davis and her Gallic descendant, Jeanne Moreau. But among her British peers, Jackson was the first to emerge as the female equivalent of a discomfiting archetype that had been haunting her country’s imagination since the 1950s, the Angry Young Man.Angular of form and feature, with a voice so sharp you half-expected it to draw blood, Jackson arrived into reluctant celebrity full-blown as the new Angry Young Woman, disgustedly making her way through the debris of a decaying establishment. She was the latter-day answer to Ibsen’s majestically discontented, hyperintelligent Hedda Gabler, a part she played both onstage and onscreen.That solar persona shone equally bright in period pieces (like the bohemian Gudrun in “Women in Love” and an extremely commanding Queen Elizabeth I in “Elizabeth R,” on television) and in 20th-century rom-coms (as the witheringly witty divorcée in “A Touch of Class,” her second Oscar-winning performance; “Women in Love” was her first).The same enlivening rage would be evident when she took on what she probably regarded as her greatest role, a Labour Party member of the British Parliament, where she served for 23 years. (In 2013 she delivered, in wonderfully high dudgeon, an anti-elegy for the newly deceased former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.)She was also a mythic creature of the stage, honing her scalpel-like style in the early 1960s in Peter Brook’s experimental company. It was for Brook that she portrayed, in London and on Broadway, the asylum inmate who becomes the murderous Charlotte Corday in Peter Weiss’s truly shocking “Marat/Sade.” It was one of those rare, raw performances whose impact was such in theater circles that even people who couldn’t possibly have seen it swear that they did.After a three-decade absence, Jackson returned to Broadway in 2018 in a revival of Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women,” which also starred Laurie Metcalf, left, and Alison Pill, center.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhen she returned to the theater at 80, years after retiring from Parliament, it was — but of course — in the most titanically angry role in the classic canon: King Lear, at London’s Old Vic. The dazzled reviews, along with a slew of awards, testified that age had not mellowed or muted her. When she came back to Broadway, two years later, she gave an eye-scalding fireworks display as the splenetic, dying mother in “Three Tall Women,” for which she won a Tony.In 2019, she did do Lear on Broadway, in a reconceived production tricked out with an abundance of postmodern conceits that might have smothered a less assertive star. Jackson cut through the surrounding flash like a buzz saw, throwing herself against the wall of old age and mortality until it seemed to crumble into unanswerable darkness.Jackson was not given to self-analysis, or at least not in any way that she was willing to share with the world. Nor was she fond of discussing the details of her craft. And her life outside her work, she said, was simple — that of a grandmother who did her own shopping and cleaning in a basement apartment. She eschewed the trappings of 21st-century technology (no cellphone) and of celebrity, the fact of which seemed only to embarrass her.And while she mostly avoided anything like personal confessions, she did make one admission that startled me. When I asked if it felt different performing for a live audience again, she said it felt exactly the same, meaning that this most fearless of dramatic actresses was profoundly scared. “You can go onto that stage every night,” she said, “and it’s always the equivalent of going onto the topmost diving board, and you don’t know if there’s any water in the pool.“Every time I say, ‘Yes, I’ll do it,’ I think, ‘My God, I don’t know how to do it. I can’t do it.’ We are sadomasochists as well as being brave, actors, and we torment ourselves.” More