Aurelia Butler

The sanctuary of Northside church in Charlotte, N.C., is built for joyous adoration. Enormous speakers hang from its domed ceiling, along with an elaborate system of colored lights. Its semicircular stage has wide, carpeted steps that lead down on all sides to rows and rows of wine red pews, which hold about 2,700 people. The evening I visited last February, they filled to capacity with Latino families who had come to see the evangelical superstar Marcos Witt.Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

Shahzad Ismaily cannot regulate his body temperature. He was born without sweat glands, or at least, not very many.When he was a month old, his parents rushed him to the hospital because he was beyond feverish and struggling to breathe. They learned their only child had ectodermal dysplasias, a rare genetic disorder that produces abnormalities at the body’s surface, including fingernails and teeth. Five decades later, Ismaily has become one of music’s most in-demand collaborators, flitting like a mischievous butterfly through genres as diverse as honeyed folk, rambunctious free jazz and spectral meditations sung in Urdu. He does not think these facts are unrelated.“Since I move with the temperatures of the outside world so readily, is it possible that I have an extra sensitivity to the tone of the world around me?” Ismaily, 51, recently wondered by phone from a tour stop in the Netherlands, as he briefly warmed himself in his hotel room’s bedside bathtub, during one of several extended interviews. “The hardest part of playing music with people is a kind of nonverbal, total empathetic awareness of how another person feels, how a room feels. I’m moving with the world around me. I’m not a sealed object.”Though he’s never released a solo album, Ismaily has played on or produced nearly 400 records since moving to New York in February 2000, including work by Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Yoko Ono. His Brooklyn studio, Figure 8, remains an affordable and inclusive hub for experimental musicians, even as Ismaily becomes a marquee session player.This year alone, his subtle keyboards lit the darkened corners of Feist’s “Multitudes”; his elastic bass provided the combustible matter inside “Connection,” a rock record from Ceramic Dog, his trio with the iconoclastic guitarist Marc Ribot; and his prismatic keyboards and askance rhythms shaped “Love in Exile,” the acclaimed debut from his improvisational group with the singer Arooj Aftab and the pianist Vijay Iyer. But summarizing exactly what Ismaily does — let alone, how he’s so good at it — can feel a little like bottling wind.“If you listen to my last record, you could not know he’s on it, because he’s not the most present musician,” Sam Amidon, the soft-voiced singer who has worked with Ismaily for nearly 20 years, said by phone. “But every moment he was in the room, he brought out the most beautiful stuff in other people through his energy. He’s just sneakily there.”For Ismaily, the invitation to play may be the most important part. “Since 30, I have been asked to walk into a room and be myself musically — an incredibly intense, intensely fortunate situation,” he said. “My preferred way to work is to walk into a room and feel, intuitively, what we should do today.”The self-confidence to play the part of himself did not come easily for Ismaily. Soon after that early emergency room visit, surgeons split his prematurely fused skull, adding space for it to expand as he aged. The scar cuts horizontally across his head, a reminder of his tenuous health as a child. Intense allergies and asthma often caused him to wake up in panics about catching his next breath. For several months, he was blind.When Ismaily was 4, his mother became a psychiatrist for the state of Pennsylvania, and the family shuttled among the campuses of mental hospitals where they stayed for years at a time. Ismaily quickly learned not just to live with people whose worldview he could not comprehend, but to communicate with them, to try and glimpse their reality. He befriended the bipolar, the depressed, the manic.“Since I move with the temperatures of the outside world so readily, is it possible that I have an extra sensitivity to the tone of the world around me?” Ismaily said.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesFriends his own age, however, were much harder for the lanky Pakistani boy with, as he put it, “a very thin amount of hair, no teeth or one tooth or dentures, and a compressed head” in small-town Pennsylvania. Kids would tease him about why he dressed for Halloween all year. His mother worked long hours on hospital grounds, and his father battled cancer when Ismaily was 3, leaving him emotionally withdrawn. Left alone, Ismaily slipped into science fiction, particularly the postapocalyptic escape of Terry Brooks’ “Shannara” series. These books taught him to drift into other realms beyond his physical surroundings.“When something opens up in front of you that you love, you dive headfirst into it,” he said.Music soon revealed the world he has spent his lifetime since exploring. His home was very quiet, with no instruments or even a stereo. Still, when Ismaily was 2, he began to crave the act of making sound. He specifically wanted rhythm, banging spoons against hot radiator coils until his parents relented and bought a tiny Muppets drum kit. A high school marching band was the source of his only childhood friends, offering respite from judgment.He shipped off for a lifesaving stint at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Massachusetts, which he called “a school of misfits, of 300 oddballs.” He headed to Arizona to join friends in bands and, ultimately, study biochemistry; too busy playing music to attend class, he stopped one credit short of his masters. Playing in bands there, he realized he could get just enough shows to pay his meager bills. Making the same scenario work in New York, however, presented new challenges, and Ismaily filled every ostensible day off with an extra recording session or one-off concert. The over-commitment kept him afloat; it also cost him romantic partnerships and rankled bandmates. But after almost two decades together in Ceramic Dog, which is Ismaily’s longest-running relationship, Ribot understands the need.“It’s not a coincidence, the challenges Shahzad had growing up and the way he plays rock. It’s about being forced into confrontation with mortality,” Ribot said in a phone interview. “He’s the most natural-born anarchist I ever met, because he has the natural desire to exceed whatever limit he’s standing next to.”“It’s crazy to be 51 and still have so much unresolved trauma. That’s keeping me from making a record,” Ismaily said.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesIsmaily is an expert at lending others that superpower, or reminding them that they have it. Beth Orton recalled the frustrating process of making her 2022 album, “Weather Alive,” and how label woes and abandoned sessions prompted her to believe she no longer belonged in the music business. But then she began sending demos to Ismaily, who replied to her uncertain hymns with tizzies of pre-dawn gut reactions. “I was so down, and I think he knew how tender I felt,” Orton said in an interview. “There was a sense of being met during a very cold winter.”Ismaily is still, however, trying to muster such temerity within his own work. He has often played shows in the nude, including memorable gigs on a very hot boat on the East River or covering the Counting Crows at a Brooklyn benefit cloaked only by an acoustic guitar. These stories stem in part from the body temperature troubles that will last him a lifetime and in part, he admitted, from confronting the shame of the body that long caused him grief.“I feel ecstasy when those performances are over,” Ismaily said. “It’s the ecstasy of feeling good in your own skin, just showing someone who you really are and surviving it.”He worried, though, that he still lacks the conviction — or “artistic depth,” as he called it — to put something permanently on record that takes his own name. For a decade, he has run a record label that shares a name with his studio. The imprint specializes in first albums by veteran collaborators and role players, the musicians who make albums by the more famous better. Ismaily knows that description encapsulates so much of his work. He hopes someday to be brave enough to own that mantle for himself, to make his own record in his own studio for his own label.“It’s crazy to be 51 and still have so much unresolved trauma. That’s keeping me from making a record,” Ismaily said, still energetic after nearly five hours of conversation about that very trauma. “It still feels like a non-mountaineer casually driving past the bottom of Mount Everest, but I would be so excited about that outcome.” More

The band he led with his brother broke new ground with an unusually broad repertoire, unorthodox instrumentation and untraditional vocal harmonies.Bobby Osborne, the singer and mandolin player who with his younger brother, Sonny, led one of the most groundbreaking bands in the history of bluegrass, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Gallatin, Tenn., a suburb of Nashville. He was 91.His death was confirmed by Dan Rogers, the vice president and executive producer of the Grand Ole Opry.Formed in 1953, the Osborne Brothers band habitually flouted bluegrass convention during its first two decades. They were the first bluegrass group of national renown to incorporate drums, electric bass, pedal steel guitar and even, on records, string sections. They were also the first to record with twin banjos, as well as the first to amplify their instruments with electric pickups.Employing a wider repertoire than the Appalachian wellspring from which most of their peers drew, the Osbornes also worked with a more expansive musical palette, embracing country, pop and rock material associated with the likes of Ernest Tubb, Randy Newman and the Everly Brothers.“We caught lots of flack from the die-hard bluegrass fans,” Mr. Osborne said of the group’s sometimes fraught relationship with bluegrass purists in a 2011 interview with the online publication Mandolin Café.Perhaps nothing the Osbornes did rankled the bluegrass orthodoxy more than the three-part vocal harmonies they patented on their 1958 recording of the lovelorn ballad “Once More.”At the time, bluegrass arrangements typically featured one voice singing the melody, with a tenor and a baritone supplying harmonies above and below it. By contrast, the Osbornes positioned Bobby’s voice, singing the melody, above the two other voices. The result was the bright, euphonious blend that became the group’s trademark.Mr. Osborne told NPR in 2017 that the group discovered this sound while rehearsing “Once More” as they drove home from a show one night. “We knew then,” he said, “that we caught onto something that we had never heard before.”“So we got the guitar out of the trunk and found out what key we was in,” he continued. “We sang that song all the way home so we would not forget that type of harmony.”The trio that perfected this new approach consisted of Mr. Osborne, his bold high-pitched lead the focal point; his brother, Sonny, on baritone; and the singer and guitarist Red Allen on another part beneath them both, adding a third layer of harmony.A formative member during the group’s early years, Mr. Allen had previously appeared on the Osbornes’ popular 1956 recording of “Ruby, Are You Mad?,” an unbridled two-banjo romp written by the old-time country singer Cousin Emmy, a.k.a. Cynthia May Carver.To the surprise of some people, the Osbornes were vindicated over the next decade and a half for steadfastly breaking with tradition. Among other accomplishments, they were named vocal group of the year by the Country Music Association in 1971. They were also one of the few bluegrass bands to consistently place records on the country singles chart.Along the way they built a bridge between first-generation bluegrass royalty like Bill Monroe and the duo of Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs and intrepid latter-day inheritors like New Grass Revival and Alison Krauss.Mr. Osborne performing at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville in 2019.Jason Kempin/Getty Images for Country Music Hall Of Fame And MuseumMaybe the best known of the Osbornes’ 18 charting singles was “Rocky Top,” an unabashed celebration of mountain culture that reached the country Top 40 in 1967. Written by the husband-and-wife team of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, who also wrote hits like “Tennessee Hound Dog” for the Osbornes — and even bigger hits for the Everly Brothers — “Rocky Top” was adopted as one of Tennessee’s official state songs and as the fight song of the University of Tennessee football team, the Volunteers.Robert Van Osborne Jr. was born on Dec. 7, 1931, in Thousandsticks, an unincorporated Appalachian enclave near Hyden, Ky., where he and his brother grew up. Their parents, Robert and Daisy (Dixon) Osborne, were schoolteachers; Robert Sr. supplemented their teaching income by moonlighting in his parents’ general store.Young Bobby took up the electric guitar as a teenager after the family moved to Dayton, Ohio, where he also began playing in local country bands and working as a cabdriver.The Osborne brothers started their own band after Bobby completed two years of service with the Marines in Korea, where he was wounded in combat and earned the Purple Heart. He and Sonny had previously worked for bluegrass luminaries — Bobby with Jimmy Martin and the Stanley Brothers, his brother with Bill Monroe.In 1956 the Osbornes joined the WWVA Jamboree in Wheeling, W.Va. Four years later they became one of the first bluegrass bands to perform on a college campus, appearing at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. They subsequently took their music to universities and clubs in the Northeast and performed at the Newport Folk Festival.In 1963 the brothers signed with the Nashville division of Decca Records, then run by the pre-eminent music producer Owen Bradley. In 1964 they became members of the cast of the Grand Ole Opry.The Osbornes recorded extensively for Decca (which later became MCA Records) before they parted with the label in 1974, disillusioned that their initial success at country radio did not extend into the 1970s.A return to a more time-honored approach to bluegrass revitalized their career, which over the next 30 years found them consolidating their place alongside pioneers of the genre like Mr. Monroe and the Stanleys. They were inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Hall of Fame in 1994.Sonny Osborne retired from performing in 2005, after suffering a shoulder injury, and died in 2021. Bobby, who had previously undergone quintuple bypass heart surgery, formed a new group, Rocky Top X-Press, with his son, Bobby Jr. (known as Boj), and continued to perform and record.Besides Bobby Jr., Mr. Osborne is survived by his wife, Karen Osborne; two other sons, Wynn and Robby; a daughter, Tina Osborne; a sister, Louise Williams; five grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. He lived in Portland, Tenn., another suburb of Nashville.Much has been made of the innovations in production, arrangements and repertoire that the Osbornes introduced to bluegrass. Less, however, has been said of how Mr. Osborne, whose syncopated, lyrical playing was inspired by the jazz-derived solos of old-time fiddlers, broke new ground as a mandolinist.Speaking to the website Bluegrass Situation in 2017, he explained: “Since I always liked fiddle tunes and the mandolin is tuned like a fiddle — and I was good with a flat pick from guitar — I got completely wrapped up playing fiddle tunes with the mandolin.”In the process Mr. Osborne earned a reputation as one of the first bluegrass mandolin players to expand the instrument’s vocabulary beyond what Mr. Monroe, the father of Bluegrass, had established early on.Alex Traub More

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