Aurelia Butler

More stories

  • 150 Shares189 Views

    in Music

    The Real Star of Bradley Cooper’s Film “Maestro” May Be a House

    Leonard Bernstein’s country house hasn’t changed much since the composer hosted Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins there. Jamie Bernstein is OK with that.In the early 1960s, after a number of summers renting on Martha’s Vineyard, Jamie Bernstein’s family bought a vacation home on a wooded hill in West Redding, Conn. There, 9-year-old Jamie and her younger brother, Alexander, devised various games of make-believe, chief among them a fantasy that they lived the same sort of low-key, small-town existence as the characters on their favorite television shows.It was a testament to the imaginative gifts of children whose actual home was a duplex apartment across the street from Carnegie Hall, and whose father was the celebrated, heat-seeking “West Side Story” composer and New York Philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein.“Once we had this little house, we weren’t going to Martha’s Vineyard and we were much closer to Manhattan, which was probably way more convenient for my parents,” said Ms. Bernstein, 70, the author of the 2018 memoir “Famous Father Girl” and the host of “The NY Phil Story: Made in New York,” a new podcast about the Philharmonic produced by the orchestra and the public radio station WQXR. “It meant that we could go there on the weekends during the regular part of the year.”“The front of the house makes it look very grand,” said Jamie Bernstein, the host of “The NY Phil Story: Made in New York” podcast, who spends weekends at the Fairfield, Conn., house that she and her two siblings inherited from their father, the composer and  Philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein. “But it isn’t as grand as it looks.”Allegra Anderson for The New York TimesThen, when her sister Nina was born in 1962, “we were a family of five,” Ms. Bernstein continued. “Plus the nanny and the cook who sometimes came up with us on the weekends. And suddenly the house seemed too small.”A few months later, her mother, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein, an actor and artist, announced that she had just bought a big, new country place. “And I guess I must have asked, ‘Well, how much did it cost?’” Ms. Bernstein recalled. “And my mother said, ‘Oh, I can’t talk about that. It was so expensive I can’t even say it out loud.’ And my brother and I were saying, ‘Oh, come on, how much was it? How much was it?’ We badgered her until finally she whispered, ‘80.’”Her children gasped: “$80 — it cost $80?”In that same whisper, Mrs. Bernstein corrected them: “$80,000.”What in those days seemed a lordly sum bought a former horse farm with a pool, a tennis court and outbuildings on six and a half acres in Fairfield, Conn. Over the years, additional parcels of woodland — almost 12 acres’ worth — were acquired to give the family more privacy and more of an escape from urban cares.“It was marvelous,” Ms. Bernstein said. “We spent many summers here, and almost every weekend during the rest of the year. We all loved it.”Ms. Bernstein shows off a photo of herself as a child flanked by her parents.Allegra Anderson for The New York TimesJamie Bernstein, 70Occupation: Author, filmmaker, podcast hostTaking the cure: “We go to the house to be completely relaxed. It’s like the antidote to New York life.”After Mr. Bernstein’s death in 1990 (Mrs. Bernstein died in 1978), the three children inherited the property. But it is Jamie who is most frequently in residence — pretty much every weekend.As when their parents were alive, the compound is a gathering spot for birthdays and holidays, and for fiercely contested rounds of Anagrams. Lately, it has also served as a set for the upcoming film “Maestro,” a portrait of the Bernsteins’ complicated marriage directed by and starring Bradley Cooper. (Carey Mulligan plays Felicia.)“He wanted an authenticity about how he was evoking our dad and his world,” Ms. Bernstein said of Mr. Cooper. “He was very curious to come up here and visit, and that’s when he decided he wanted to come back and shoot in and around the house. Bradley totally got why this place was so great and how it contains the family DNA.”Indeed, the house, with its graciously proportioned rooms, has barely been altered since the days when it was populated by the senior Bernsteins and their great and good friends — among them, Stephen Sondheim (who did not quite take it in stride when Jamie beat him at Anagrams), Jerome Robbins, Mike Nichols and Richard Avedon (who took the picture of Jamie that sits among a clutch of family photos in the living room).The Steinway baby grand in the living room was a gift to Mr. Bernstein from a childhood piano teacher, Helen Coates, who later became his secretary.Allegra Anderson for The New York Times“When we got older, we realized, ‘Boy, we had a lot of cool people at our house,’” Ms. Bernstein said. “But when we were little, they were just our parents’ friends. To us, they were just Steve and Jerry and Mike and Dick.”It may have been Mr. Sondheim who bought his “West Side Story” collaborator the abacus that sits on a shelf in the dining room — “I can’t guarantee that’s the case,” she said — and it was Mr. Sondheim or maybe Mr. Nichols who bought the fine telescope on the floor nearby.“There was a while there when our parents would have these Christmas parties for all their pals,” Ms. Bernstein said. “And there was a competitiveness about the present-giving that became so oppressive that my mother said, ‘We’re not having these parties anymore.’”The furniture — heavy on rattan, wicker and bamboo — conjures a summer pavilion. So does the dining room, which is anchored by a white-painted table and chairs, and filled with plants. Its entryway, framed by a trellis, adds to the illusion.“Our mother was a kind of brilliant, instinctive decorator,” Ms. Bernstein said. “Everyplace we lived was elegant but comfortable.”She recalled dinners with her father or mother at the head of the table. Under the carpet was a plug for a bell to summon the help, “and my parents would start disappearing,” Ms. Bernstein said. “They would go lower and lower down in their chair, as their foot groped for the buzzer.”The Steinway baby grand in the living room was a gift to Mr. Bernstein from a childhood piano teacher, Helen Coates, who later became his secretary. It was Ms. Coates who determinedly made the winning bid when, in 1949, there was an auction to raise money for the library in Lenox, Mass., and Mr. Bernstein made a painting, supposedly of Salome doing her Dance of the Seven Veils, to aid the cause.The pool was one of the family’s favorite spots. At least one guest has reported seeing the ghost of Ms. Bernstein’s mother, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein, in the garden next to it.Allegra Anderson for The New York Times“Helen acquired it, so that for the rest of time nobody would see it,” Ms. Bernstein said, pointing to her father’s well-meaning work hanging in a corner not far from the piano.“My father,” she added, quite unnecessarily, “was not visually talented.”The recollections that Ms. Bernstein and her siblings have of their childhood at the Fairfield house — family swims; their father carrying a saltshaker to the vegetable garden in the morning to properly season his chosen breakfast; elegant lunches of stuffed tomatoes with homemade mayonnaise on the terrace — have been overlaid by more recent memories. And the next generation, the children of the Bernstein children, now have their own history here and, of course, their own memories.“That,” Ms. Bernstein said, “is the beauty of having a house that stays in the family.”“If some wallpaper is coming unglued, if some fabrics are fading, if some drawer fronts are hanging by a thread and cabinets are stuffed with baffling detritus — well, it’s all part of the family DNA.“We don’t fix things,” Ms. Bernstein conceded. “There is a distinct element of funk in this house now. It’s kind of funky. But we’re kind of funky, too.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. More

  • 125 Shares159 Views

    in Music

    Frank Ocean Shows Us a More Human Way to Perform

    As live concert broadcasts have grown increasingly staid, his electrifying Coachella set gave us an unruly digital experience to share.Frank Ocean was constructing an ice-skating rink in the Sonoran desert. This was his reported plan — to headline the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival on the night of April 16 inside, or in front of, or atop a frozen pool, defying the basic logic of weather. What better metaphor could there be for an artist seemingly allergic to the typical mechanisms of the music industry than to accept the headlining slot at Coachella and then subvert it, to stage the opposite of the festival’s arid environment by scheming an icy exhibition among the sickening dust and heat? The rumored set design was ultimately scrapped, but the very concept of Ocean’s doomed ice rink felt symbolic — maybe of how distant this king of pop-world disenchantment felt from Coachella’s surroundings to begin with.I was not in the desert. Nor did I really believe that I would be able to watch Ocean’s set — his first major public performance since 2017 — on an officially sanctioned livestream. Before he came onstage, YouTube clarified that Ocean’s 10:05 p.m. Pacific Standard Time set would not be broadcast on Coachella’s own stream — his representatives say he was, in fact, never scheduled to appear on the stream — though this was not surprising. Enigma has always been a tenet of Ocean’s public persona. Having previously spurned the Grammy Awards, dismissed major record labels and called attention to the very nature of livestreaming with his 2016 visual album, “Endless,” Ocean was primed to opt out without apology.It did not stop fans; links to spontaneous Instagram Live streams, by those on the ground, abounded. As it approached 1:05 a.m. in New York, I opened one of these links on my desktop and sat for an hour, waiting. Tens of thousands of us clicked on and waited. It was democratizing — there are no V.I.P. sections that I know of on Instagram Live — and the rumor was that Lorde was waiting in the same stream, too. We were all in it, waiting in the Frank Ocean IG Live, together.When the music finally started, this particular improvised stream proved to be shaky — while the set quickly revealed itself to be an unconventional, at-times rough-hewed spectacle — cutting in and out as Ocean sang a rock version of “Novacane,” his 2011 breakthrough single about emotionless sex and a couple who meet at Coachella. Fortunately, I soon found @Morgandoesntcare, a young musician from North Carolina who facilitated the guerrilla video stream that brought Ocean’s set to the masses, reaching 130,000 viewers. Ocean’s absence from the official stream felt like a refusal of that frictionless status quo. Maybe Ocean said no to the sanctioned livestream because he knew his set wouldn’t be what he “intended to show,” as he acknowledged in a statement later that week. (According to that statement, he sustained a leg injury in the days before Coachella, requiring a rework of the show.) Maybe the choice was intuitive. It’s enticing, however, to wonder if he made the decision in order to reject our on-demand culture of convenience. Some industry prognosticators have wondered if livestreams could supplant in-person concerts in the future — though it doesn’t seem likely — as ticket prices surge at the hands of exploitative corporations and make large-scale concertgoing increasingly unattainable to anyone but the rich. Livestreamed concerts by mainstream artists are often more like note-by-note recitals. With streaming more broadly, the data-driven music companies want to find patterns, to engineer us further into a culture of predictability. Intentionally or not, Ocean’s absence from the official stream felt like a refusal of that frictionless status quo. Watching a teenager’s ad hoc broadcast instead made for a more unruly digital experience that could not be predicted, planned for, optimized or controlled.The day after Ocean’s set, it still consumed my thoughts. Though I had watched it on a trembly hand-held broadcast that cut in and out, I felt that I had not only witnessed but participated in something significant — not in spite of but because of the spontaneous stream. Most reviews disagreed, criticizing how Ocean stoked “confusion” and commenting that his songs didn’t sound the way they do on his records. When I watched alone in my bedroom more than 2,000 miles away, these qualities made the music feel alive. Liveness has always carried with it an expectation of, and invitation into, risk and imperfection. But the media landscape’s flood of manicured concert-film and livestream events has largely normalized staid, smooth performances, a trend that mirrors the streaming era’s broader preference for formulaic culture. Lauryn Hill’s commitment was to presenting the truest version of herself, not appealing to commercial interests.Ocean’s set seemed like a rebuke of this trend. New arrangements of his most beloved songs, like “Bad Religion” and “White Ferrari,” sounded more astral and expansive than ever. “Solo” approached something resembling starry electric jazz and nearly brought me to tears. The speech Ocean gave about his younger brother, who died in a car accident in 2020 and with whom he went to Coachella multiple times, immediately did. The songs sometimes showed their seams, letting his voice reach higher and skate the sky. Delicate acoustic takes of “Pink + White” and “Self Control” brought to mind the intimacy of a theoretical Ocean appearance on “MTV Unplugged.”Pop music history is filled with incidents in which celebrated artists polarized their audiences from big stages, but one important precedent is Lauryn Hill’s 2001 performance on “MTV Unplugged.” On that show, and the unvarnished album that followed the next year, “MTV Unplugged No. 2.0,” she sang her biblical hip-hop folk profundities in a gorgeous raspy voice, accompanied by her acoustic guitar. In between songs, she delivered monologues of uncompromising creative wisdom. At the time, this live session was considered bewildering and met with divided reviews. Hill’s commitment was to presenting the truest version of herself, not appealing to commercial interests. “Fantasy is what people want,” Hill said then, “but reality is what they need.”You can imagine the now-35-year-old Ocean growing up, absorbing Hill’s messaging and reflecting his own unpolished reality in concert. When he played Coachella in 2012, he covered “Tell Him” from “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.” Ocean has a documented fondness for her “Unplugged” performance: His song “Rushes,” from “Endless,” interpolates Hill’s “Just Like Water”; he once rapped over a sample of “I Gotta Find Peace of Mind,” a track on which Hill cries. “What I am is what I am, and I can’t be afraid to, you know, to expose that to the public,” Hill said during the “MTV Unplugged” performance. She defended her right to let her voice crack, which was a reflection of her lived experience. Such honesty calls people to be artists. But contemporary streaming culture, and the rigid aesthetic standards it widely supports, are hostile to frayed edges.On the spontaneous Ocean Instagram stream, I caught glory in flickers. Ocean’s set, which he himself called “chaotic” while emphasizing the “beauty in chaos,” was a presentation of his own humanity. In a just popular culture, that is what a “live” album, “live” stream, “live” concert and “live” artist is: raw, fallible and human.Source photographs: Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images; Getty Images; Timothy Hearsum/The Image Bank/Getty Images.Jenn Pelly is a freelance writer, contributing editor at Pitchfork and author of “The Raincoats.” More

  • 113 Shares189 Views

    in Music

    Grace Bumbry, Barrier-Shattering Opera Diva, Is Dead at 86

    A flamboyant mezzo-soprano (who could also sing meaty soprano roles), she overcame racial prejudice to become one of opera’s first, and biggest, Black stars.Grace Bumbry, a barrier-shattering mezzo-soprano whose vast vocal range and transcendent stage presence made her a towering figure in opera and one of its first, and biggest, Black stars, died on Sunday in Vienna. She was 86.Her death, following a stroke in October, was confirmed in a statement by the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where she was long a mainstay, performing more than 200 times over two decades.Growing up in St. Louis in an era of segregation, Ms. Bumbry came of age at a time when African American singers were a rare sight on the opera stage, despite breakthroughs by luminaries like Leontyne Price and Marian Anderson.But with a fierce drive and an outsize charisma, Ms. Bumbry broke out internationally in 1960, at 23, when she sang Amneris in Verdi’s “Aida” at the Paris Opera.The following year, she landed in something of a national scandal in West Germany when Wieland Wagner, a grandson of Richard Wagner, cast her as Venus, the Roman goddess of love, in a modernized version of Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” at the storied Bayreuth Festival.She was the first Black woman to perform at the festival, cast as a character typically portrayed as a Nordic ideal in an opera written by a composer known for his antisemitism and German nationalism. The festival — and newspapers — were flooded with letters asserting that the composer would “turn in his grave.”Ms. Bumbry was undeterred. Indeed, she was well prepared.“Everything that I had learned from my childhood was now being tested,” she recalled in an interview with St. Louis Magazine in 2021. “Because I remember being discriminated against in the United States, so why should it be any different in Germany?”The audience did not share such misgivings: Ms. Bumbry was showered with 30 minutes of applause. German critics were equally enchanted, christening her “the Black Venus.” The Cologne-area newspaper Kölnische Rundschau credited her with an “artistic triumph,” and Die Welt called her a “big discovery.”Her landmark performance helped earn her a $250,000 contract (the equivalent of more than $2.5 million now) with the opera impresario Sol Hurok.Ms. Bumbry performed at the White House in 1962, invited by the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, on the advice of European friends who had seen her at Bayreuth.Cecil Stoughton/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and MuseumIt also won her another honor: a performance at the White House, in February 1962. On the advice of European friends who had seen Ms. Bumbry at Bayreuth, Jacqueline Kennedy, the first lady, invited her to sing at a state dinner attended by President John F. Kennedy and Mrs. Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, Chief Justice Earl Warren and other Washington power brokers.Suddenly, she was a star.“If there is a more exciting new voice than Grace Bumbry’s skyrocketing over the horizon I have not heard it,” Claudia Cassidy wrote in The Chicago Tribune in a review of a recording of her arias the same year. “This is a glorious voice, by grace of the gods given its chance to be heard in its fullest beauty.”Of her Carnegie Hall debut in November 1962, Alan Rich of The New York Times gave a qualified review, but allowed that “Miss Bumbry has a gorgeous, clear, ringing voice and a great deal of control over it.”“She can swoop without the slightest effort from a brilliant high to a beautiful resonant chest tone,” he wrote.Ms. Bumbry transcended not only racial perceptions but vocal categorizations as well. Originally a mezzo-soprano, she made a striking departure by taking on soprano parts, too, which gave her access to marquee roles in operas such as Richard Strauss’s “Salome” and Puccini’s “Tosca.”“She gloried in the fact that she was able to perform both roles in Verdi’s ‘Aïda,’” Fred Plotkin wrote in a 2013 appreciation for the website for WXQR, the New York public radio station. “She could be Tosca and Salome, but also Carmen and Eboli.”Ms. Bumbry appearing in the 1968 film of Bizet’s opera “Carmen.”Erich Auerbach/Getty ImagesMs. Bumbry displayed a broad range in her choice of roles. In 1985, she received raves for her performance as Bess in the Metropolitan Opera’s 50th anniversary performance of George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” despite her conflicted feelings about a folk opera set among the tenements of Charleston, S.C., and rife with unflattering Black stereotypes.“I thought it beneath me,” she said in an interview with Life magazine. “I felt I had worked far too hard, that we had come far too far to have to retrogress to 1935. My way of dealing with it was to see that it was really a piece of Americana, of American history, whether we liked it or not. Whether I sing it or not, it was still going to be there.”Grace Melzia Bumbry was born on Jan. 4, 1937, in St. Louis, the youngest of three children of Benjamin Bumbry, a railroad freight handler, and Melzia Bumbry, a schoolteacher.A musical prodigy as a youth, she honed her skills in the choir at St. Louis Union Memorial Church and by performing Chopin on the piano at ladies’ tea parties. At 16, she saw a performance by Ms. Anderson, who would become a mentor, and was inspired to enter a singing contest on a local radio station. She took top prize, which included a $1,000 war bond and a scholarship to the St. Louis Institute of Music. She was nonetheless denied admission because of her race.“The reality was wounding,” Ms. Bumbry said in an interview with The Boston Globe. “But when it happened, I also thought, I’m the winner. Nothing can change that. My talent is superior.”Ms. Bumbry sang the national anthem at the Kennedy Center Honors gala in Washington in 2009. She was an honoree that year.Alex Brandon/Associated PressEmbarrassed, the radio contest organizers arranged for her to appear on “Talent Scouts,” a national radio and television program hosted by Arthur Godfrey. After hearing her heart-rending performance of “O Don Fatale,” from Verdi’s “Don Carlo,” the avuncular Mr. Godfrey informed the audience, “Her name will be one of the most famous names in music one day.”The exposure helped put her on a path to Boston University, and later, Northwestern University, where she fell under the tutelage of the German opera luminary Lotte Lehmann, who became another valuable mentor as Ms. Bumbry moved toward her debut in Paris.As her star continued to rise over the years, Ms. Bumbry was never afraid to inhabit the prima donna role offstage as well as on, outfitting herself in Yves Saint Laurent and Oscar de la Renta and tooling around in a Lamborghini.After marrying the tenor Erwin Jaeckel in 1963, she settled in a villa in Lugano, Switzerland. The couple divorced in 1972. Ms. Bumbry left no immediate survivors.Beyond her prodigious vocal skills, Ms. Bumbry brought a famous sultriness to her roles, a reputation she put to good use for a 1970 performance of “Salome” at the Royal Opera House in London.She leaked word to the press that for the racy “Dance of the Seven Veils,” she would strip off all seven veils, down to her “jewels and perfume,” as she put it — although the jewels, it turned out, were sufficient enough to serve as a “modest bikini,” as The New York Times noted.It hardly mattered. “In the history of Covent Garden,” Ms. Bumbry said in a 1985 interview with People magazine, “they never sold so many binoculars.” More

  • 138 Shares119 Views

    in Music

    Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels Win the Pulitzer Prize for Music

    Giddens said that the success of their opera “Omar” proves that “nobody has the lock on being a composer.”“I mean, look: I’m bowled over right now,” the polymathic musician Rhiannon Giddens said from her home in Ireland on Monday, shortly after winning the Pulitzer Prize for music.She was speaking in a phone interview with the composer Michael Abels, who joined separately by phone from the United States. Together, they wrote the Pulitzer-winner, “Omar,” an opera about Omar Ibn Said, a Muslim scholar who was captured in Africa in the early 1800s and sold into slavery in Charleston, S.C. It was there that the work premiered last May, at Spoleto Festival USA.Giddens wrote the libretto based on Said’s autobiography, and recorded self-accompanied demos that Abels then responded to with a fleshed-out score. The result was a multigenre, multicultural swirl — a tour through the sound worlds of Islam, bluegrass, spirituals and more — that I described in my review of the premiere as “an unforced ideal of American sound: expansive and ever-changing.”Abels has written for concert halls and films, including the “Get Out” soundtrack. Giddens is most famous as a folk musician but trained as a classical singer and has dipped her toes into opera in recent years, hosting the podcast “Aria Code” and performing works by John Adams. And now, to accolades like Grammy Awards and a MacArthur “genius” grant, Giddens, who never studied composition, can add the Pulitzer.“Nobody has the lock on being a composer,” she said. “We’ve got to stop with separation and who gets to be called a composer. There are a bunch of people who could write the next ‘Omar.’”In the interview, during which their phones could be heard ringing with calls and congratulations, Giddens and Abels reflected more on the creation of their opera and looked ahead to its future and theirs. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Where are your heads right now?RHIANNON GIDDENS It feels amazing, because Michael and I just put into this what we know. It was a love letter to my country. There’s so much to hate about it, but what I love about it is that ability that people have to come together and make some new amazing thing. American music is a spectrum.MICHAEL ABELS It shows the importance of telling all of our stories through our fine art, that people are waking up to the truth of that statement and the importance of our stories’ being part of our full artistic legacy. I’ve just come from seeing a couple of the shows in Boston, where it was playing to sold-out houses [at Boston Lyric Opera]. In each city, you’ve seen people who have never come to the opera before, feeling seen and feeling moved and being welcomed into an artistic space where they haven’t felt welcomed before.Rather than following the traditional route of a dramatic ending, the opera winds down with a communal, spiritual experience. Can you talk about why?GIDDENS There was a lot of instinctual writing. If you’d asked me this as I was writing the ending, I’d say, “I don’t know, I just need to do it this way.” Because the autobiography is so scant on details, I knew immediately that having a conventional narrative was not going to work.There have been American operas dealing with very American topics, but for African Americans, we had “Porgy and Bess.” It’s a beautiful opera, but now we’re starting to tell our stories. And we have to think about the story we’re telling, and how we want the audience to walk out of the theater. The end had to be about him and his faith, and it had to be about healing.ABELS It didn’t occur to me that it was unusual, that the first part was narrative and the last part wasn’t. Everything ended up where it needed to be. As a performing artist, [Rhiannon] constructs evenings for audiences all the time. I think her understanding that we need to take care of the audience at the end of this work comes from her being a performer.GIDDENS It shows that you don’t have to do it the same way everybody does it. I have not taken one composition class in my entire life. But I’ve lived composition in a different way.What does the future hold for this opera?GIDDENS The Ojai Music Festival commissioned a shorter concert version of “Omar.” And I’m going to be bold and say that I hope today pushes us to a recording. That would be my dream.And for you two as collaborators?ABELS Rhiannon is the most talented person I know, in terms of the variety and breadth of talent, and I’m thrilled to be part of her musical life.GIDDENS I’m not even blowing smoke when I say I don’t know what angel whispered Michael’s name — well, I do, because it was his soundtrack to “Get Out.” But I didn’t know what would happen. I had an instinct that it would work, and I don’t know how I lucked out so much in finding a collaborator. I can’t imagine us not doing more together. Watch this space. More

  • 138 Shares99 Views

    in Music

    Sum 41 Says It Will Disband After Final Album and Tour

    With catchy songs like “Fat Lip” and “In Too Deep,” the Canadian band was part of a pop-punk wave that included Blink-182, Simple Plan, Good Charlotte and others.The band Sum 41 announced on Monday that it was breaking up after 27 years, unleashing a well of nostalgia for the early 2000s, when pop punk seemed ubiquitous on MTV’s “Total Request Live” and in memorable scenes in blockbuster movies.The Canadian group, fronted by the spiky-haired singer Deryck Whibley, was part of a pop-punk wave that included Blink-182, Simple Plan, Good Charlotte and Avril Lavigne. Their hits included “Fat Lip” and “In Too Deep,” which fans loved to belt out in their car or jump up and down to at shows.The band’s music was also featured in popular movies from the early 2000s, among them “Spider-Man,” “Dude, Where’s My Car?” and “Bring It On.”In a statement on Twitter, Sum 41 did not explain why it was disbanding. It said it planned to finish its tour this year and that it would release a final album, “Heaven :x: Hell,” and announce a final tour to celebrate the end of its run.“Being in Sum 41 since 1996 brought us some of the best moments of our lives,” the band members wrote. “We are forever grateful to our fans both old and new, who have supported us in every way. It is hard to articulate the love and respect we have for all of you and we wanted you to hear this from us first.”News of the band’s decision led fans to mourn the end of an era. While many punk fans scorned Sum 41 and other groups like it as safe and conventional, pop-punk fans said the music was part of the soundtrack of their youth.“Fat Lip” reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart after Sum 41’s breakthrough album, “All Killer No Filler,” was released in 2001. And decades later, fans still packed Sum 41’s shows clad in fishnet stockings or dark skinny jeans and heavy eyeliner, accented with tricolor wrist sweatbands.“Sum 41 is most definitely on the Mount Rushmore of early 2000s pop punk,” said Finn McKenty, the creator of the YouTube series “The Punk Rock MBA,” which features an episode on “The Strange History of Sum 41.”“To be able to ride the wave of the MTV-type hype that they had and turn that into a career with real longevity and respect is a rare thing that they were able to pull off,” Mr. McKenty said.The band’s music seemed to capture the spirit of suburban teenage high jinks.In an interview with Billboard in 2021, Mr. Whibley said that when the band, which formed in suburban Toronto in 1996, was trying to gain notice, its members filmed themselves “doing stupid stuff like drive-by water gunning people, egging houses, and cut it with some film of our shows.”The band’s manager then sent a three-minute version of the video to record companies.“And then, it was a matter of weeks,” Mr. Whibley said. “Every label in the U.S. was trying to sign us, and it turned into a big bidding war.”Mike Damante, the author of “Hey Suburbia: A Guide to the Emo/Pop-Punk Rise,” said that Sum 41 was one of the first popular pop-punk bands to fuse metal and hip-hop and that it was disbanding during “a really nostalgic time period for this time in music.”In recent years, Sum 41 had toured with Simple Plan and The Offspring.Mr. McKenty said the band had recently been producing music that was “as good or better” than its music from the early 2000s.“I always like to see people go out on top, rather than go out sad,” he said. More

  • 175 Shares169 Views

    in Music

    Morgan Wallen’s ‘One Thing at a Time’ Notches a 9th Week at No. 1

    The country superstar held off a release from the K-pop group Seventeen to maintain his streak atop the Billboard 200. Ed Sheeran will challenge him next week.Morgan Wallen, the country superstar who dominates streaming, holds the No. 1 spot on the Billboard album chart for a ninth consecutive week, fending off a formidable challenge from the K-pop group Seventeen.Wallen’s latest, “One Thing at a Time,” notched the equivalent of 138,000 sales in the United States in its latest week out, according to the tracking service Luminate. That total is a composite number that includes 174 million streams of the 36-track LP and 5,500 copies sold as a complete package.The last release to post at least nine weeks in a row at No. 1 was Wallen’s previous LP, “Dangerous: The Double Album,” which ruled for 10 weeks without interruption in early 2021. (Since then, SZA’s “SOS” had 10 nonconsecutive times at the top, and Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” had 13.) More than two years later, “Dangerous” remains a hit, landing at No. 5 this week, its 118th time in the Top 10.With Ed Sheeran on deck for next week’s chart with his new album, “-” (pronounced “Subtract”), this chart could represent the end of Wallen’s winning streak, at least on the album chart. His song “Last Night” holds at No. 1 on the Hot 100 singles chart, its fifth time as the top track.Also this week, Seventeen opens at No. 2 with the equivalent of 135,000 sales of its six-track mini-album “FML.” It came out in a flurry of digital and physical variations. Those included multiple CD editions with goodies like lyric books, photos and stickers, and 17 downloadable versions, which included “exclusive digital signed covers” featuring each of the group’s 13 members.Altogether, Seventeen sold 132,000 copies of “FML” as a complete package, and had four million streams for the week.Taylor Swift’s “Midnights” is in third place this week, and SZA’s “SOS” is No. 4.“Desvelado” by the group Eslabon Armado opens at No. 6, which Billboard said is the highest-charting album of regional Mexican music in the history of the chart. “Desvelado” had the equivalent of 44,000 sales in the United States, including nearly 64 million streams. More

  • 150 Shares149 Views

    in Music

    Long Play Rises to the Top of New York Classical Music Festivals

    This weekend of concerts, organized by Bang on a Can, has quickly but assertively ascended to the rank of destination event.Long Play has been around only since last year, but it is already the most important classical music festival in New York City.And, based on the 15 concerts I attended during its second edition, which unfolded and overlapped in spaces around Brooklyn from Friday through Sunday, this festival by the Bang on a Can collective could even stand to get a little bigger.Capacity crowds amassed at Pioneer Works to hear Meredith Monk’s ensemble collaborate with the Bang on a Can All-Stars; at Roulette to hear the Philip Glass Ensemble; at the Mark Morris Dance Center to hear a new repertory group investigate music from the early 1990s by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Henry Threadgill. These in-demand sets couldn’t fit everyone who wanted to hear them, but with two or three other events always close by, nobody was truly left out in the cold.Before Long Play, Bang on a Can had spent three decades presenting one-day marathon concerts. But the scope of this organization’s ambition has reached a new level, and it is an untrammeled joy to experience.Meredith Monk, center, performing with members of the Bang on a Can All-Stars as part of her set on Friday.Peter Serling @lotsopikturesFor example, on Saturday afternoon at Public Records, the JACK Quartet performed a version of “Prisma Interius VII” by the young composer Catherine Lamb. Previously conceived for violin and synthesizer alone, the piece was recast here for the dreamy, collaborative ability of the JACK players to hold precise microtonal harmonies. Staggered entries of droning pitches steadily created complexly sour motifs that tended to plunge downward. Where Lamb switches up her patterns with melodic ascents, the players savored the opportunity to make this often static music sing out.From there, you could race over to the big crowd forming at Roulette for Glass’s music, or stay put to enjoy Xenakis’s “Tetras” as well as “rag′sma,” by the JACK violinist Chris Otto. Although I’ve enjoyed those pieces on recordings, I felt a need to check in on the Glass Ensemble. The composer was present in the audience but no longer performs with this band, so this was an opportunity to hear the group’s veteran music director, Michael Riesman, lead younger players like the saxophonist Sam Sadigursky.When interpreting the composer’s landmark “Glassworks” album from 1982, the ensemble brought a bass-heavy thump that reflected real love for the “Walkman” mix — created in its time “for your personal cassette player,” a way for Glass to put his music in a useful dialogue with contemporary pop styles (a lesson that the Bang on a Can crew took to heart in their own careers).Conrad Tao, left, and Tyshawn Sorey playing the music of Morton Feldman at Roulette.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesNext, at the BRIC House Ballroom, I heard a performance by the saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, who is known for his fusion of avant-garde jazz and London club music, but here stuck to flutes, as part of a serene South Asian-influenced quartet led by the vocalist (and sometime bassist) Ganavya. Call it another sign of an aesthetically confident festival: Here, artists are not required to stay in expected lanes.Early Saturday evening, Roulette hosted the symphonic, brawling, experimental, tuneful big-band music of David Sanford; slightly overlapping, in the BRIC lobby, was the Momenta Quartet’s presentation of Alvin Singleton’s string quartets. Sanford, one of my favorite living composers, conducted his own music, in which you can hear his taste for artists as wide-ranging as Helmut Lachenmann and Charles Mingus.

    A Prayer For Lester Bowie by David SanfordI stayed for Sanford’s entire set before watching the Momenta players handle the climactic, interlocking figures from Singleton’s third quartet with an acrobatic ease; after that, they brought Romantic feeling to the fourth. This varied sequence of music by two living Black composers, ecstatic on its own terms, also put the lie to claims that you’ll sometimes hear from bigger institutions that say they are retreating from “classical music” in an effort to appeal to new audiences.The composer Henry Threadgill, second from the right, was in the audience for a program of his music.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesWhen programmers at the Brooklyn Academy of Music or Lincoln Center say such things — fewer string quartets, like Momenta, more electric bass, as in Sanford’s band — you can understand the point, and maybe even agree with it in principle. But with the Long Play festival, Bang On a Can replies: “Why not both, and why not back to back?”Also on Saturday night, I caught a performance at Public Records by the trio Thumbscrew, with Mary Halvorson on guitar, Michael Formanek on bass and Tomas Fujiwara on drums. In addition to Thumbscrew’s own vibrant compositions, the trio also let loose a wild take on Mingus’s “Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Blue Silk.”This kind of wide array was on offer all weekend. The next day, I traveled from a set of electronic music by the composer Ash Fure to a quartet performance led by the vibraphonist Patricia Brennan.

    ANIMAL_LONGPLAY from Ash Fure on Vimeo.Though visually arresting, an environment combining art installation and avant-house-music light show, Fure’s new concept — a kind of thumping club from hell — seemed starkly limited as musical matter compared with thrilling past chamber works on the album “Something to Hunt.” Half an hour later, at BAMcafé, Brennan’s quartet interpreted languid-then-convulsive pieces like “Space for Hour,” from her recent album “More Touch”; her electronically outfitted vibraphone playing belongs in a conversation with the Ash Fures of the world.

    More Touch by Patricia BrennanFrom there, I enjoyed the first 75 minutes of a radical yet sensitive take on Morton Feldman’s “Triadic Memories,” with Conrad Tao on piano and Tyshawn Sorey on percussion. This is originally a piano solo, yet Sorey’s skittering cymbal work was closely attuned to the score, his floor toms tuned to highlight the densest chordal moments in Tao’s interpretation of the notated material.I would happily have stayed for the final minutes but needed to rush to hear a band playing the music of Threadgill’s Very Very Circus outfit. The guitarist Brandon Ross, the tuba player Marcus Rojas and the drummer Gene Lake were all veterans of that ensemble; here, they brought works like “Little Pocket Size Demons” to life in the company of younger players, including the guitarist Miles Okazaki.From left, Brandon Ross, Marcus Rojas, Yosvany Terry, Gene Lake, José Dávila, Ron Caswell and Miles Okazaki performing Threadgill’s music at the Mark Morris Dance Center.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesThreadgill isn’t likely to play the Very Very Circus music himself again, but he was in the audience on Sunday to appreciate the birth of a new repertory band in his honor; he soaked up applause from his seat, just as Glass had.The weekend was so rich, it hardly mattered that Sunday night’s planned closing set, by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, had to progress without the participation of the group’s sole remaining founder, the saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, who tested positive for Covid-19 before the gig. Hutchings bravely stepped in on short notice, and the potent, anchoring work of the percussionist Famoudou Don Moye recalled some of his first recorded performances with the group, after he joined in the early 1970s. Hutchings didn’t try to sound like Mitchell, but instead gave listeners a taste of the brawny, insistent tenor sax sound that we hadn’t heard the previous day in his appearance with Ganavya.Such is the strength of Long Play. When a veteran headliner has to drop out, there’s still something else to savor. And when a veteran like Meredith Monk does hit the stage — as she did for Friday night’s opening concert — she is apt to bring a new vigor to vintage works like her “Tokyo Cha Cha,” which she performed, complete with choreography, for nearly 20 grooving, ethereal minutes.Pray that this festival continues, and that it expands. It should become a destination event; and if it does, it’s going to need some bigger rooms — or a bigger schedule — to serve a public that is already showing that it wants to hear all of this music. More

  • 100 Shares149 Views

    in Music

    Two Creative Directors on Sports, Hip-Hop and Faith

    For the Taking the Lead series, we asked leaders in various fields to share insights on what they’ve learned and what lies ahead.The birth of the partnership between the creative directors Free Richardson and Phil Cho hinged on, of all things, their shared faith. In 2018, Mr. Cho, the founder of NoLedge Productions, pitched a collaboration between his company and Mr. Richardson’s creative agency the Compound.“I go to slide two, and he goes, ‘Yo. Turn that off,’” Mr. Cho recently recalled. “He’s like, ‘Do you love God?’ I was like, ‘Yeah. I’m a believer,’ and he goes, ‘All right. We’re good.’”Of course, it wasn’t just spirituality that brought them together. Mr. Richardson also was impressed with the effort Mr. Cho showed when documenting an event through photos and videos at the Compound’s art gallery. “Phil has something special about him,” Mr. Richardson said recently. “You can just feel a good presence of energy.”The two companies are now a major force in the world of marketing, particularly around the intersection of sports and hip-hop. Together, they have curated an impressive portfolio of campaigns for brands including the shoe company Clarks, ESPN, the software company Niantic and DraftKings. Last year, the duo won three Cannes Lions advertising awards and five Muse Creative Awards, given for inspirational marketing campaigns. Last month, they won 12 Clio Awards, given for creativity in advertising.Mr. Richardson, 50, also known as Set Free, is African American and was born in the Bronx. He grew up in Queens and Philadelphia and was deeply involved in the hip-hop community and the world of street basketball culture. In 1998, he created the AND1 Mixtape Tour, a traveling basketball competition, and in 2007, he founded the Compound.Mr. Richardson’s story has helped shape and inspire many, including Mr. Cho.Born and raised in Edison, N.J., Mr. Cho, 33, is Korean American and grew up with a passion for both basketball and hip-hop music. He was a middle school student when the AND1 Mixtape Tour debuted. (“Some moms in Korea probably know about AND1,” Mr. Cho said about the tour’s reach.) Since starting NoLedge at the age of 26, he has collaborated with a variety of brands including Toyota, the record label 300 Entertainment and musicians like Akon and Year of the Ox.Today, Mr. Richardson and Mr. Cho are innovators in the crowded landscape of creative marketing, and consider themselves family as they “navigate the invisible handcuffs of corporate rule,” as Mr. Richardson put it.“Authenticity is a word that gets thrown around a lot in our industry,” Ari Weiss, chief creative officer at the advertising agency DDB Worldwide, wrote in an email. But “you’re either authentic or you’re not. Mr. Free Richardson and Mr. Phil Cho are pure authenticity.”The two spoke at the Compound’s headquarters in Brooklyn to discuss remaining authentic to their craft, being relevant and their shared faith. The conversation has been edited and condensed.Adriana BelletHow do you stay current?FREE RICHARDSON I think it always goes back to staying authentic and storytelling. Everybody has a story, and you can tell it through A.I., pictures, music, all the creative elements. Look at the NFT [nonfungible token] world. It came, and though it’s not gone, the whole time, I was like, I’m still going to go with touchable, feel-able art. Authenticity within. Look at a tree. The leaves will die before the root of the tree dies. A lot of things are happening through technology, and a lot of things are going to happen, but I don’t know anything that is bigger than the Mona Lisa. No matter what happens in technology, the root of creativity will always be around.PHIL CHO The root of what we are is: It’s always been about relationships. When I walk into the Compound, and I see all this artwork, like Jonni Cheatwood, and you see how long it took for them to come up with these ideas and wasn’t A.I.-generated, I feel like that’s what drives more value.RICHARDSON Yeah, I think it’s a lot of relationships. That’s with everything. The two things in life are communication and relationships. If we don’t communicate, you can’t make the relationship. Creativity is a revolving door. I still work with people that I worked with 20 years ago. It’s the reason we still hear Fleetwood Mac and Marvin Gaye songs in the same rotation that you hear Drake. And so when things are authentic and true, the creativity never goes away.How are you navigating challenges and opportunities facing the advertising industry?RICHARDSON I think the ratio of African Americans and Asians is very small. I don’t blame everything on race, but I think it’s a tougher role for me and Phil being a minority, because there’s not a lot of dominance of minorities in the advertising agency world, especially with Fortune 500 companies, C-suite level and businesses, especially small ones. [According to a 2022 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics survey, of workers in “advertising, public relations, and related services,” 7.8 percent were African American and 6.6 percent were Asian American.] We’re kind of small, SWAT-style — boutique-small. That’s what I consider Compound and NoLedge. It’s a strategic partnership that executes some of the same things that big advertising agencies execute, without the red tape.CHO Before doing Compound, there weren’t people telling me how to facilitate production, and I felt like I had to just learn from trial and error. And a lot of the people that I would meet, they did happen to be white. So again, I’m not trying to make it a race thing either, but I just felt like there’s not a lot of people with my skin tone that are doing this and can help me out. So I think even merging with the Compound, it was a whole new world for me of just trying to be confident in what I’m doing and understanding that. What’s a lesson that you learned from your staff, team or peers?RICHARDSON At the end of the day, everybody makes mistakes. And myself, just looking people in the eye and just being like, “All of us are the same.” I think learning and working with NoLedge, it takes time. Everybody needs time — to execute a task, to learn, to communicate, to talk. To respect time and respect people and giving them time. Not to where you just want to get them to or the client, but just everybody needs time.CHO With the guys that are in NoLedge, for me, it’s patience. I’ll say this, but it’s harder to practice it. You might be able to do X, Y and Z, and you want the same from your guys, but you got to understand that they also need to learn X, Y and Z first. So you can’t expect people to move how you move. Adriana BelletHow do you keep campaigns authentic and meaningful?RICHARDSON I try to give everybody their own white box. When you go look at an apartment, you’d rather see the apartment empty so you can dream of how you’re going to decorate and design it. But if you go into a home that’s already furnished, it already blocks you in. You can’t really put your ideas on it. And so walking into brands and working with companies, I try to give them the white box and tell them, “How do you want to design this?”And then my job after that is just to put a magnifying glass on your ideas. You’re there to help the brand, not really to put your ideas on their brands. And doing it that way, it always helps expand what the goal is. The goal is not for my ideas to be presented. The goal is for my ideas to latch onto your ideas and make them bigger.CHO I really do feel like Free kind of sets his own trend. And I think that’s what a real creative is, right? To me, the better creative director you are, the more you don’t care about what other people think about you, and I think that’s given me confidence, too. It’s just what comes out of when we facilitate a project — just do what we feel would be dope. Just be comfortable with it.What are the challenges of a partnership?RICHARDSON Time. We can’t do everything we want to do. I mean, you have to understand what you’re going into with partnerships. It’s like a marriage. Phil, I love him. He’s my brother, my little cousin and a son. Then there’s times that he’s my uncle. I got to look up to him in certain areas. CHO It’s always about communicating. People have different work flows. It’s not like mine is exactly the same as Free’s. But I think the reason this works is so many young guys want to run the ship, right? So even while doing production, there’s certain things that I would do differently if I was shooting. But at the same time, a good leader is a good follower. I feel like these years right now, I’m soaking up the game. The same way Free was talking about clients and how you got to support their vision. I’m kind of doing a similar thing with Free. I’m supporting his vision. How do you stay inspired?RICHARDSON God. I want the world to understand that. He’s just the creator of all. If you can’t be inspired by thinking of that, I don’t know what else you’re going to be inspired by. God is my source of creativity.CHO I agree. All the stories in this world from different people and backgrounds — he’s the biggest artist. More