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    The Composer Gabriella Smith’s Music Marvels at Nature

    Smith, a rising young composer, has adapted her work “Lost Coast” into a cello concerto premiering this week at the Los Angeles Philharmonic.In 2014, the composer Gabriella Smith took a hike through the Lost Coast in Northern California. Populated by bears, mountain lions and Roosevelt elk, it’s an area so rugged that the scenic Highway 1, which runs along the water, has to detour far inland. She kept a tide log on hand for portions of the trail that follow the shore. “You have to be careful,” she said, “not to be swept away.”The wildness surprised her. “I felt so much awe being there,” Smith said. And she liked the sound of the name: the poetry of the words “lost” and “coast” together, the multiple meanings it suggests. It was, as John Adams, one of her mentors, would say, a title in search of a piece.She wrote a cello solo with looping electronics for Gabriel Cabezas, a friend and former classmate at the Curtis Institute of Music, inspired by the image of a trail being repeatedly washed away. Then the piece transformed into a more complex, layered recording, released in 2021. And now “Lost Coast” is taking on yet another life, its grandest yet: a cello concerto, premiering on Thursday with Cabezas and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.This work and its trajectory are a lot like Smith’s career. At 31, she prefers to write for people she has a relationship with, even as she receives increasingly prominent commissions. Here and elsewhere, her music, in addition to its fascination with the natural world, exudes inventiveness with a welcoming personality, rousing energy and torrents of joy — not to mention an infectious groove.“I always assume,” Cabezas said, “that anybody who listens to her music will be her next biggest fan.”Growing up in Berkeley, Calif., Smith studied piano and violin, and at 8 — even earlier, if you ask her mother — began to write music of her own to figure out how it all worked. But she kept it secret, convinced that what she was doing was strange, even embarrassing. She didn’t know anyone else like her.It took encouragement, as well as music theory lessons, from her teacher at the time to keep going. Smith was inspired by the composers whose works she was learning: Mozart, Bach, Haydn. Her own pieces, though, didn’t resemble theirs, if only because, she said, “I didn’t know how to sound like that.”Gustavo Dudamel, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s music and artistic director, speaking with Smith during a rehearsal this week. He will conduct the premiere of her cello concerto “Lost Coast.”Alex Welsh for The New York TimesOnce, she wrote what she thought was a Mozartean duo for violin and piano, until she heard two classmates play it. “But that,” Smith said, “encouraged me, because it was this puzzle to figure out how to make the idea match the result.”Other influences entered her brain, mainly Bartok and Joni Mitchell. And she received a boost from Adams. He remembered a quiet teenager who arrived at his house with a “staggering” number of pieces, all polished with plastic spiral binding. “I was impressed,” he said, “that she obviously had this incredible determination at a young age.”Smith wasn’t just determined in music. She also loved nature and became interested in environmental issues around the age she started composing. At 12, she started volunteering at a research station in Point Reyes; the people there told her that they had never been approached by someone so young, but they gave her a try. For the next five years, she banded birds and bonded with local biologists. She even got her mother on board.At 17, she started at Curtis in Philadelphia but missed the West Coast. “I was so homesick,” she said, “that it sort of forced me to reckon with not only who I was as a composer, but as a person. I infused all that into the music, and that’s when my music started to sound like me.”Smith is soft-spoken. But as a composer “she fills up the whole room,” said the violist Nadia Sirota, who has performed her music and collaborated with her and Cabezas as a producer on the “Lost Coast” album. “She knows exactly what she’s talking about. And when someone has clear ideas, it’s just about realizing them.”As Smith continued to write, Adams clocked that her sound was quickly maturing. He saw a sensitivity to the natural world that, he said, “goes all the way back to the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony.” And he could tell that, for performers and audiences alike, it would be fun. Cabezas has certainly felt that way: “You don’t lose a sense of what music should be, but at the same time there’s optimism, quirkiness and humor.”In “Tumblebird Contrails,” a piece that Adams and Deborah O’Grady, his wife, commissioned through their Pacific Harmony Foundation, a Point Reyes hike is translated into music of muscularity, amazement and delight. Similar adjectives come to mind for other scores, such as the quartet “Carrot Revolution,” an immediately engrossing work of pure excitement.These feelings, Smith said, come naturally: “I try to put in all the emotions, but joy is the one I care most about. It’s the joy that I experience from the natural world and, honestly, the joy of making music.”Smith’s titles tend toward the playful. Sometimes they can seem nonsensical, like “Imaginary Pancake,” a piano solo written for Timo Andres. But that was inspired by a memory from a childhood summer music program where she was impressed by an older boy who was playing something with his arms stretched to both ends of a keyboard. She asked him what it was, and he said Beethoven.As an adult, she tried to find that music but couldn’t; she realized that her memory had exaggerated it until it became something else. So she composed based on the inspiration of an imaginary piece. And “pancake”? That’s the image of a player leaning over the keyboard with arms outstretched, flat like a pancake.Now living in Seattle, Smith remains involved in environmentalism. She bikes instead of drives, and is working on an ecological restoration at a former Navy airfield. There is some anger about the state of climate change in her music, like the song “Bard of a Wasteland,” but even then the rhythms suggest underlying optimism. “It’s so easy to slip into despair,” she said, “but there are all these people around us working on this in incredibly joyful ways. We need to feel the things we need to feel and grieve the things we need to grieve. Then we need to go on.”The pervading emotion of Smith’s music is joy: “the joy that I experience from the natural world and, honestly, the joy of making music,” she said.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesThere is determination, too, alongside awe in “Lost Coast.” The album version was made in Iceland, over multiple sessions that layered Cabezas’s playing with a few contributions by Sirota and singing by Smith, based on her compositional method of recording herself on Ableton software. “She creates music in space,” Sirota said. “It’s almost like she’s molding clay.”For the concerto version, Smith adapted her singing into more traditional lines for winds and brasses. But it wasn’t a one-to-one transfer; many sections were heavily changed, and she also added a cadenza. “There are some wild parts that she rewrote,” Cabezas said. “It fits the orchestral aesthetic a little more, and she’s found some places where that works even better.”Smith wants to further integrate the environmental and musical sides of her life. Her next piece — for the Kronos Quartet’s 50th anniversary, with a preview coming to Carnegie Hall in November ahead of its full premiere in January — will include interviews she made with others working on climate solutions. But she is still figuring out how to do more.“I can write music, but that feels like the first step,” she said. “A lot of it feels like uncharted territory. But everybody, in every field, needs to do this.” More

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    Bill Lee, Bassist and Composer of Son Spike Lee’s Films, Dies at 94

    He accompanied a wide range of jazz and folk musicians and scored “She’s Gotta Have It,” “School Daze” “Do the Right Thing” and “Mo’ Better Blues.”Bill Lee, a jazz bassist and composer who scored the early films of his son Spike Lee, wrote folk-jazz operas, led an acclaimed ensemble of bassists and was a prolific sideman for Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin and others, died on Wednesday morning at his home in Brooklyn. He was 94. Spike Lee confirmed the death.Over six decades, in thousands of live performances and on more than 250 record albums, Mr. Lee’s mellow and ebullient string bass accompanied a pantheon of music stars, including as well Duke Ellington, Arlo Guthrie, Odetta, Simon and Garfunkel, Harry Belafonte, Ian & Sylvia, Judy Collins, Tom Paxton and Peter, Paul and Mary.Mr. Lee wrote the soundtracks for Spike Lee’s first four feature films, a musical challenge that called for capturing the independence of a romantic Black woman in “She’s Gotta Have It” (1986), a satirical look at life at a Black college in “School Daze” (1988), racial violence in “Do the Right Thing” (1989) and the poignant hardships of a Black jazz musician in “Mo’ Better Blues” (1990).Bill Lee had small parts in all but “Do the Right Thing,” and Spike Lee’s sister, Joie, had roles in all four. Bill Lee also scored an early Spike Lee short, “Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads,” the first student film to be showcased at Lincoln Center’s New Directors/New Films Festival, in 1983.The feature films won largely positive reviews and reaped sizable profits. Bill and Spike Lee had a falling-out in the early 1990s, over family matters, money and other issues, that ended their collaboration. Later Spike Lee films — he has directed more than 30, appearing in many of them himself — were scored by the trumpeter Terence Blanchard.Mr. Lee, right, on bass, at the Five Spot in New York in 1960 with the saxophonist John Handy’s quartet. Don Friedman was on piano and Joe Hunt on drums.Larry C. Morris/The New York TimesBorn into an Alabama family of musicians and educators who instilled a passion for music in him and his siblings, Bill Lee learned drums, piano and flute early on. He attended segregated small-town public schools and studied music at historically Black Morehouse College in Atlanta.Inspired in his early 20s by listening to the great jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, Mr. Lee mastered the double bass, the largest and lowest-pitched stringed instrument, and performed with small jazz groups in Atlanta and Chicago before migrating to New York City in 1959.Over the next decade, Mr. Lee, who favored a battered straw hat and often recited his own poetry between numbers, performed often in piano-bass duos and piano-bass-drums trios in smoky clubs that served soul food with jazz, many on the western edge of Greenwich Village, squeezed among meatpacking houses and trucking depots on Manhattan’s Hudson River shoreline.He recorded extensively on Strata-East Records, a musician-owned label, and founded and directed the New York Bass Violin Choir, a troupe of seven basses, sometimes accompanied by piano or saxophone. Critics lauded the ensemble for weaving an agile harmony of pastel and harsh moods in performing Mr. Lee’s folk operas at Town Hall, Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center and the Newport Jazz Festival.His numerous operas, including “One Mile East,” “The Depot” and “Baby Sweets,” were based on people and events from his early life in the South. They sometimes drew on the singing talents of Mr. Lee and his two sisters, Consuela Lee Moorehead, a jazz pianist and music teacher at Hampton University in Virginia, and Grace Lee Mims, a librarian, whose voices lent grandiloquent color to the tales.In a review of a performance by the Violin Choir at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1971, John S. Wilson of The New York Times wrote: “Mr. Lee served as bassist, singer and narrator of his sketches of small-town life in Snow Hill, Ala., building both his stories and his music from a rich vein of folk sources. His team of bassists, bending over their unwieldy instruments, produced ensemble passages that were by turns gorgeously warm and singing or so surprisingly light and airy that one suspected a couple of flutes might be hiding among them.”Mr. Lee in an undated portrait. His numerous operas were based on people and events from his early life in the South.David LeeIn the 1970s, when the electric bass became an instrument of choice in many jazz ensembles because its thumping tones suited the commercial sounds of jazz-rock fusion, Mr. Lee, an acoustic bass purist, refused to go along and lost work as a result. “Some things you just can’t live with,” he told The Boston Globe in 1992. “Just thinking about doing it, my gut reaction hit me so hard in the stomach. I knew I could never live with myself.”Spike Lee explored the problem of commercialism, with its racial implications, in “Mo’ Better Blues,” which starred Denzel Washington as a jazz trumpeter who fights exploitation by white club owners.“Musicians are low-priced slaves, whereas athletes and entertainers are high-priced slaves,” Spike Lee told The Times when the film opened. “It’s their music, but it’s not their nightclub, it’s not their record company. They have an understanding only of the music, not of the business, so they get treated any old way.”Despite other differences, Bill and Spike Lee agreed about integrity. “Everything I know about jazz I got from my father,” Spike Lee told The Times in 1990. “I saw his integrity, how he was not going to play just any kind of music, no matter how much money he could make.”Bill Lee in front of his brownstone across from Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn in 2013. The house was awash in music, often with jam sessions that went late into the night. Michael Nagle for The New York TimesWilliam James Edwards Lee was born in Snow Hill on July 23, 1928, to Arnold Lee, a cornet player and band director at Florida A&M University, and Alberta Grace (Edwards) Lee, a classical concert pianist and teacher. In addition to his sisters Consuela and Grace, he had four other siblings, Clifton, Arnold Jr., Leonard and Clarence.Their maternal grandfather, William J. Edwards, a graduate of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, founded a log-cabin arts school for Black students in Snow Hill in 1893. By 1918, the Snow Hill Normal and Industrial Institute had 24 buildings and 300 to 400 students pursuing academic subjects and vocational training. Mr. Edwards died a few years later, but the institute survived as a segregated public school until 1973, when it closed. Bill Lee graduated from there in the mid-1940s.Mr. Lee and his first wife, Jacquelyn (Shelton) Lee, an art teacher, had five children: Shelton (Spike), Christopher, David, Joie and Cinque. After Jacquelyn’s death in 1976, Mr. Lee married Susan Kaplan. They had one son, Arnold. Christopher died in 2013. Mr. Lee’s sister Consuela died at 83 in 2009.In addition to Spike Lee, he is survived by his wife; his sons David, Cinque and Arnold; his daughter, Joie; a brother, A. Clifton Lee; and two grandchildren.After arriving in New York, Mr. Lee settled in Fort Greene, a Brooklyn neighborhood that became a magnet for Black musicians and other creative artists who took pride in their lifestyles and their art. The neighborhood was the setting for “She’s Gotta Have It.”Mr. Lee with his son Spike in 2009 for a 20th-anniversary screening of the Spike Lee movie “Do the Right Thing,” for which Bill Lee wrote the soundtrack.Jimi Celeste/Patrick McMullan via Getty ImagesThe Lee household, overlooking Fort Greene Park, all but banished television but was awash in music, often with jam sessions that went late into the night, prompting noise complaints from neighbors but spawning jazz artists who found their sounds in the heart of Brooklyn.During a 2008 interview with The Times at his home, Mr. Lee played piano and double bass. “His music has the complex harmonies of bebop and hard bop, but it also has a sincere, down-home, churchy feel,” the reporter Corey Kilgannon wrote. “His passages move in interesting and unexpected places, but they resolve before long in a way that is simple and sincere, earthy and somehow very satisfying.” More

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    Elaine Mitchener and the Music of Screams

    Elaine Mitchener will draw on a range of extended vocal techniques to give a sensitive portrait of mental illness in the music theater piece “Eight Songs for a Mad King.”When the British vocalist Elaine Mitchener performs Peter Maxwell Davies’ “Eight Songs for a Mad King” at Wigmore Hall in London on Friday, a lot will be on her mind: the complex psychology of the work’s central character, the piece’s rich performing history and its sensitive perspective on mental health. That’s before she even gets to the notes.“It’s an exhausting piece emotionally,” Mitchener said in a recent interview. “You have to have a very still inner core in order to perform it. Otherwise, you just will not be able to get to the end.”“Eight Songs for a Mad King” is a 30-minute music-theater monodrama, written by Davies in 1969 in collaboration with the actor Roy Hart. It is based on the life of King George III, who reigned in Britain in late 18th and early 19th centuries and who had an unknown mental illness. Onstage, a highly distressed King George battles with, and eventually succumbs to, the sounds in his head. It’s a challenging work for any singer, requiring a five-octave vocal range, a variety of speech-singing techniques, plus multiphonics — singing two or more notes at the same time.Mitchener has honed these capabilities over nearly 15 years as an experimental vocal performer, but she is also and composer and movement artist. Her practice incorporates improvisation, choreography and research.Although Friday’s performance, in which she will sing with the contemporary music ensemble Apartment House, was programmed long before the coronation of King Charles III was announced, Mitchener said that watching the May 6 ceremony had fed into her preparation. It had helped her imagine the psychological extremes that George III must have experienced, she said: “from being crowned, to being completely mad,” and ending up “beaten, whipped, mocked, jeered.”Mitchener, center, in rehearsal with the contemporary music ensemble Apartment House in London on Tuesday.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times“The more I’ve understood the context of George III’s illness, and reading behind the scenes of what Davies was trying to do with this work — which was to destigmatize mental illness — I have a much more sympathetic approach to the character,” Mitchener said. “We as a society are becoming more understanding about these issues that could happen to any of us,” she added.Her research had also led her to believe that Hart’s contribution should be better recognized, she said. Hart developed the hyper-expressive vocal technique that the piece requires at the Alfred Wolfsohn Voice Research Center, a Berlin- and London-based institute that explored sounds beyond speech or song, informed by the screams that its founder heard in the trenches of World War I.Hart’s involvement in “Eight Songs” informed not only the piece’s many vocal requirements, but also its emphasis on drama, said Kelvin Thomas, a baritone who has performed “Eight Songs for a Mad King” over 100 times. “It’s the drama that drives the music and the technique,” he said. “It’s not just that you’re technically screaming,” Thomas added, “there’s a reason why you’re screaming.”“Eight Songs for a Mad King” requires a five-octave vocal range, a variety of speech-singing techniques and the ability to sing two notes at the same time.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times“Eight Songs for a Mad King” is toward the older end of the repertoire that Mitchener usually tackles. This past Sunday, she performed in London alongside the American poet Moor Mother in a series of improvised duets. In March, Mitchener performed a program of works by Jason Yarde, Matana Roberts, Tansy Davies and others, all written in the last three years, at the MaerzMusik contemporary music festival in Berlin.“I consider myself a performer who composes — in that order, really,” she said. “But to me,” she added, “the responsibility of any performer is to really liberate the score from what you see.”Michener was born in 1970, in London, to Jamaican parents. Early exposure at home to ska, dub, gospel and Rastafarian music was later nurtured at a local Adventist church. “If you go to particularly Black churches, and people discover that you have a talent for music, or delivering text, that’s really encouraged from a young age,” Mitchener said.Her path to contemporary music was complicated. As a student at Trinity College of Music in London, she encountered some modern works — including “Eight Songs for a Mad King” — although most of her studies involved classical singing. In her final year there, her singing teacher died, and a new tutor recategorized her voice from a low contralto to high mezzo-soprano. “I had to start again,” Mitchener said.After graduating, Mitchener took an eight-year hiatus from performing but continued taking vocal lessons while she worked jobs in theater advertising and music publishing. In 2008, she found a teacher who was “unfazed by contemporary music,” she said: the opera singer Jacqueline Straubinger-Bremar, whom she has continued lessons with for the past 15 years. “Some people never find the right teacher for their voice, for where they are musically, or where they are in their lives,” Mitchener said. “I was lucky to find her.”“Me being onstage as a Black experimental contemporary music vocalist,” Mitchener said, “is in itself a political act.”Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesAlongside interpreting others’ works, Mitchener has conceived performance projects herself, including “Industrializing Intimacy,” a work about togetherness and separation that uses improvised vocals, choreographed movement and computer-generated sound, and “SWEET TOOTH,” a music theater piece that examines the history of the British sugar trade and the brutalities of slavery.She said that foregrounding the historical contributions of Black performers and composers was particularly important to her, and noted that two of the best exponents of “Eight Songs for a Mad King” — Julius Eastman, the American composer and performance artist; and William Pearson, the baritone — were Black.“Me being onstage as a Black experimental contemporary music vocalist,” Mitchener said, “is in itself a political act.” She will be aware of this, as well as the lessons of her research, onstage on Friday. “When I do this piece, I’m thinking about all of these things,” she said. “How it comes out, I’m not sure I can say. But it all feeds in.” More

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    Halle Bailey Makes a Splash in ‘The Little Mermaid’

    Emotions wash over Halle Bailey in waves.When a little girl embraced her at Disney World in March, Bailey, who has the plum role of Ariel in the live-action film of “The Little Mermaid,” fought hard to keep her composure. But when a box of sequined Little Mermaid dolls with auburn locs and cinnamon skin arrived on her doorstep, she couldn’t hold it in.Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

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    ‘Victim/Suspect’ Review: When the Accuser Becomes the Accused

    A reporter investigates cases in which sexual assault survivors were arrested on charges of false reporting in this cogent documentary.Considered against the expanding subgenre of trope-laden streaming documentaries about troubling true crime, “Victim/Suspect” seems, at first glance, to conform to type — particularly during its opening waterfall of lurid video and audio clips. But the film, which examines cases in which sexual assault survivors are charged with false reporting, is the rare entry whose revelations feel cogent, earned and memorable.“Victim/Suspect” (on Netflix) takes the form of a real-time investigation, tracing the efforts of a young reporter at the Center for Investigative Reporting named Rachel de Leon. Over the course of several years, she unearths a matrix of rape survivors who turned to the criminal justice system for help only to be doubted by officers and then manipulated into recanting their accounts.The director, Nancy Schwartzman, zeros in on a small handful of de Leon’s subjects and lets them tell their side of the story, some for the first time. By centering on de Leon’s journalism rather than the individual experiences, Schwartzman is able to extrapolate from these cases a broader pattern of sexism and police intimidation.The film’s biggest weakness ends up being its lack of access to the attending officers, who decline to participate. In their stead, de Leon interviews a former detective who explains that law enforcement diverts rape cases into false reporting charges because the latter are less work. Alongside the documentary’s deluge of nightmarish interrogation room footage — minute after minute of police bullying women until they crumble — the absence of a better explanation is infuriating, but perhaps that’s the point.Victim/SuspectRated R. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    Ray Stevenson, Actor in ‘Thor’ and Other Films, Dies at 58

    His wide-ranging roles included fantasy characters, a knight, a Roman soldier and a Punisher.Ray Stevenson, who in a 30-year career played a wide range of roles in television and films, among them a talkative soldier in the HBO historical drama “Rome,” the pirate Blackbeard in the Starz series “Black Sails” and the Asgardian warrior Volstagg in the “Thor” fantasy movies, died on Sunday. He was 58.His publicist, Nicki Fioravante, confirmed his death but provided no further details. The Italian newspaper La Repubblica said Mr. Stevenson died on the Italian island of Ischia, where he had been filming a movie.Mr. Stevenson was born on May 25, 1964, in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, according to the Internet Movie Database. He had begun a career in interior design when, in his mid-20s, he decided to try acting. Seeing John Malkovich in the Lanford Wilson play “Burn This” in London’s West End in the early 1990s was the catalyst.“I was dumbstruck by John’s performance,” he told the California newspaper The Fresno Bee in 2008. “Everybody else disappeared. I knew at that moment there was something very valid about being an actor.”He studied at the Bristol Old Vic Theater School in England, where in 1993 he played the title role in a production of “Macbeth.” Before the year was over he had landed a recurring role in a British mini-series, “The Dwelling Place.” He had worked more or less steadily ever since.In the 1990s and early 2000s, Mr. Stevenson appeared on various British TV series, including the crime drama “Band of Gold.” He landed his first significant film role in 2004, playing the knight Dagonet in “King Arthur,” with Clive Owen in the title role.Then came “Rome,” a breakthrough role in a big-budget HBO series about ancient Rome that was the network’s attempt to create the next buzz-generating series after “Sex and the City” and “The Sopranos.”Mr. Stevenson’s character, Titus Pullo, was, as Alessandra Stanley put it in a 2005 review in The New York Times, “a drunken, womanizing lout — a soccer hooligan in sandals.” Titus Pullo’s friendship with another Roman soldier, played by James Purefoy, was among the show’s most appealing subplots, and Mr. Stevenson, a large man at 6-foot-4, seemed on the verge of something big.“He’s kind of George Clooney on steroids,” Chase Squires of The St. Petersburg Times of Florida wrote in 2005. “By the time ‘Rome’ completes its run, the Irish-born English actor will probably be a star, and a very real candidate to replace Russell Crowe when Hollywood gets tired of that actor’s notoriously bad behavior.”But “Rome” flamed out after two seasons, and Mr. Stevenson never quite achieved Clooneyesque stature. He did, however, land a number of meaty roles in lavish projects, including three movies from the Marvel Comics universe: “Thor” (2011), “Thor: The Dark World” (2013) and “Thor: Ragnarok” (2017). All three were box-office smashes.He often referred to the “Thor” stories as “Vikings in space,” and in 2020 he got a taste of the earthbound version of that life when he joined the cast of the long-running History channel series “Vikings.” He appeared throughout its sixth season.His other roles included a gangster in the 2011 movie “Kill the Irishman” and a British colonial official in the Indian film “RRR” (2022). He also played the vigilante Frank Castle, a.k.a. the Punisher, another character based on a comic book. He took on that role in 2008 in “Punisher: War Zone,” after Dolph Lundgren had played Castle in a 1989 movie and Thomas Jane had taken his turn in 2004.The 2008 movie was an orgy of violence, as A.O. Scott noted in his review in The Times.“Guys get their heads blown off, or severed, or pierced with chair legs, or pulverized with fists,” he wrote, “because that’s what they have coming and that’s what the fan base will pay money to see.”His character, Mr. Stevenson told The Oklahoman, was supposed to be not a hero but an antihero.“He really is on a one-way path and in his own hell,” he said. “You don’t want to be Frank Castle.”Mr. Stevenson’s marriage to the actress Ruth Gemmell ended in divorce. He and his partner, Elisabetta Caraccia, had three children. More

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    Leon Ichaso, Whose Films Explored Latino Identity, Dies at 74

    His first feature, “El Super,” was critically acclaimed. He continued to examine culture and exile in “Crossover Dreams,” “El Cantante” and “Piñero.”Leon Ichaso, a Cuban American filmmaker who in “El Super,” “Crossover Dreams,” “Piñero,” “El Cantante” and other movies examined themes of Latino assimilation and cultural identity, died on Sunday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 74.His sister, the journalist Mari Rodriguez Ichaso, said the cause was a heart attack.Mr. Ichaso, who came to the United States as a teenager, was writing advertising copy and making television commercials in New York in 1977 when he saw an Off Broadway play called “El Super,” written by Ivan Acosta, and decided to try a new career.“I remember he went to see it and said to me, ‘I’m going to make that movie,’” his sister said.He proceeded to do just that, on a shoestring budget.“I paid for the production car,” she added. “My father paid for the catering.”The movie, released in 1979 and directed by Mr. Ichaso and Orlando Jiménez Leal, is about a Cuban man (played by Raimundo Hidalgo-Gato) living in exile in New York who works as the superintendent of an Upper West Side tenement, resisting assimilation. Critics were impressed.“It’s a funny, even-tempered, unsentimental drama about people in particular transit,” Vincent Canby wrote in a review in The New York Times. Decades later, The Miami Herald, assessing Mr. Ichaso’s career, called “El Super” “the quintessential Cuban-exile film.”He followed “El Super” in 1985 with “Crossover Dreams,” about a salsa star on the rise who hopes to break out of Spanish Harlem and into the mainstream. The film, which Mr. Canby called “a sagely funny comedy, both heartfelt and sophisticated,” gave the singer Rubén Blades his breakout acting role.The singer Rubén Blades played a salsa star who hopes to break and into the mainstream in Mr. Ichaso’s “Crossover Dreams” (1985).Miramax, via Everett CollectionAfter “Crossover Dreams,” Mr. Ichaso moved away from Latino-themed films for a time and worked steadily directing television movies and episodes of “The Equalizer,” “Miami Vice” and other series. But he returned to that territory in 1996 with “Bitter Sugar,” a movie set in contemporary Cuba.“Bitter Sugar” went against the romanticized view of life in Havana that was popular in some artistic circles at the time, painting an ugly picture of the city that included drugs and prostitution. Its protagonist starts out pro-Communist but ends up so disillusioned that he tries to assassinate Fidel Castro.Mr. Ichaso resented that many festivals did not pick up the movie — a result, he said, not only of the film world’s leftist leanings but also of festival officials’ desire not to offend the organizers of the Havana Film Festival.“They don’t want to lose the Cuba account,” he told The New York Times in 1996. “Part of the film community very much flirts with a dictator and a country and says it’s cute to travel, have a daiquiri and ignore what’s going on just 50 yards outside the Hotel Nacional.”Mr. Ichaso’s next major project would become perhaps his most acclaimed film: “Piñero” (2001), about Miguel Piñero, a former prison inmate turned playwright whose “Short Eyes” made it to Broadway in 1974, but who died young in 1988.Benjamin Bratt, who was familiar to TV audiences from “Law & Order,” played Mr. Piñero, a Nuyorican, in what Stephen Holden, reviewing the movie in The Times, called “a career-defining performance.” Mr. Bratt attributed much of his success in the role to Mr. Ichaso.“His utter faith in my ability never faltered even when mine did,” Mr. Bratt said by email. “He loved his actors, understood our delicate temperament and nurtured a trust that would embolden you to walk out on a wire with no net. He was the net, and it was very easy to love him back for this.”Benjamin Bratt starred as the prison inmate turned playwright Miguel Piñero in Mr. Ichaso’s “Piñero” (2001). “His utter faith in my ability never faltered,” Mr. Bratt said of Mr. Ichaso, “even when mine did.” Abbot Genser/MiramaxIn “El Cantante” (2006), Mr. Ichaso told the story of the salsa singer Héctor Lavoe. The singer Marc Anthony, portrayed Mr. Lavoe with Jennifer Lopez (Mr. Anthony’s wife at the time) as Mr. Lavoe’s wife.In Mr. Ichaso’s movies, “you can almost smell the rooms the actors are in,” Mr. Anthony told The New York Times in 2007. “He knows how to create a period piece; he understands the streets, the humanity of it and the poetry of it all. He captures the essence of our people, our neighborhoods.”Although Mr. Ichaso continued to direct for television until recently, his last Latino-themed film was “Paraiso” in 2009. Considered the third film in his trilogy about the Cuban exile experience (following “El Super” and “Bitter Sugar”), it tells the story of a man who arrives in Miami by raft and proceeds to wreak his own brand of havoc. It was, Mr. Ichaso acknowledged in a 2009 interview with The Miami Herald, evidence of his ever-darkening view of Castro’s government.“I do think of the three films as a trilogy, and this one is the end,” he said, “exploring the new arrivals, these new little Cuban Frankensteins that Castro makes and sets loose on the world.”Leon Rodriguez Ichaso was born on Aug. 3, 1948, in Havana. His father, Justo Rodriguez Santos, was a poet and writer, and his mother, Antonia Ichaso, wrote for Cuban radio.When Leon was 14, he left Cuba for Miami with his mother and his sister; his father joined them there in 1968. By then, Mr. Ichaso had tried college briefly but dropped out. The family soon moved to New York, and there Mr. Ichaso learned about filmmaking by shooting commercials for Goya Foods and other clients.Mr. Ichaso’s marriages to Karen Willinger and Amanda Barber ended in divorce. His sister survives him.Though Mr. Ichaso’s films were generally well regarded, he never quite ascended to the directorial A list.“There are some directors who make a film, and they are set for life; that’s not my case,” Mr. Ichaso said in a 2007 interview with The Times. “Every time I make a film, I think, ‘This is the one.’ But then nothing happens.”Mr. Bratt, who met his wife, the actress Talisa Soto, while they were working on “Piñero,” said he admired Mr. Ichaso’s risk-taking.“There was a lively curiosity to him, a twinkle in the eye that hinted of mischief and knowing, a survivor’s wink that told you he had been to hell and back and probably enjoyed it,” Mr. Bratt said. “He had a deep passion for poetry and music, and his films — inspired by the work of his heroes, Miles, Monk and Coltrane — were pure jazz, respectful of compositional structure but most alive when he played outside the lines, riffing, daring you to follow along.” More

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    The Brilliance of Blur: Liste to t

    The band is back, woo-hoo! Revisit 12 of its greatest songs.Graham Coxon and Damon Albarn, Blur’s two opposing forces, showcasing their late-90s haircuts.Chris Pizzello/Associated PressDear listeners,Last week, out of nowhere, the beloved Britpop band Blur announced a new album due July 21 — its first in eight years. Say it with me now: Woo-hoo!“The Ballad of Darren” — recorded in secret and wrapped earlier this year — will be the band’s ninth album, arriving nearly 35 years after Blur was formed. The group’s discography can seem imposing if you’re not familiar with all of its twists and turns, and don’t have anyone to guide you through it. Luckily, you do not have this problem, because Blur is one of my favorite bands.Blur’s career is all about the friction of opposing forces — and those are, for the most part, the band’s charismatic frontman Damon Albarn and its more introverted but equally brilliant guitarist Graham Coxon. The bassist Alex James and the drummer Dave Rowntree are stabilizers, grounding the band’s adventurous sound.In the liner notes to “21,” a 2012 boxed set compiling material from the group’s first seven albums, Rowntree gave what is still perhaps the most succinct summary of the band’s driving tension: “Graham used to say that he wanted to make an album that nobody would want to listen to. But you can’t do that in a band with Damon.” (If you want to read an extended cut of me geeking out on Blur, I wrote a zoomed-out summary of the band’s first two decades in a review of “21.”)A few notes on this playlist, compiled to celebrate Blur’s return. It’s not quite chronological, but it’s meant to show the breadth of the band’s sprawling career. Only two Blur albums are not represented here, and for different reasons: “Modern Life Is Rubbish,” the sophomore effort from 1993, because I find most songs from its follow-up, “Parklife,” to be better examples of what Blur was trying to do in that era; and “Think Tank” from 2003, for the semi-controversial reason that I don’t consider it a Blur album at all, given that almost all of it was recorded without Coxon and I believe the definition of Blur to be a specific alchemical happening between four particular people. (Albarn has even admitted as much in recent years, joking that, if anything, “Think Tank” was a “LUR” album.)Consider this playlist slightly beyond entry level: Blur 201, if you will. I avoided the most obvious songs, presuming that you’re already familiar with “Song 2” at the very least, and maybe also the band’s era-defining mid-90s hits “Girls and Boys” and “Parklife,” or its 1999 stadium-size weepie “Tender.” If you’re not, check those out when you get a moment. But for now, let’s follow the herd down to Greece and dive in.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. “Lot 105” (1994)To set the mood: a zany interstitial from the band’s 1994 masterpiece, “Parklife.” (Listen on YouTube)2. “There’s No Other Way” (1991)Blur began life as a prettily vacant Britpop group that was often lumped in with late-80s U.K. subgenres like Madchester and baggy; the best-case scenario, at that time, was it would become the next Stone Roses. I am happy the quartet grew out of this sound quickly, but there are several perfect pop songs on its 1991 debut album, “Leisure,” including the exquisitely bratty single “There’s No Other Way.” The video for this song is important for several reasons: 1) Damon Albarn’s haircut 2) The Lynchian aesthetic that foreshadows the way Blur would soon come to write songs about the dark underbelly of polite society and 3) Seriously, behold Damon’s 1991 bowl cut. (Listen on YouTube)3. “Country House” (1995)Perhaps best known for beating Oasis’ “Roll With It” in the epochal battle of Britpop on the U.K. charts, “Country House,” from the band’s fourth album, “The Great Escape,” is a wickedly catchy sendup of rich people who abandon the urban rat race for lush, secluded digs in the country — and specifically, of Blur’s former manager and label head David Balfe. It also boasts the only music video ever directed by the artist Damien Hirst, who went to Goldsmiths College with three-quarters of Blur. (Listen on YouTube)4. “M.O.R.” (1997)Blur’s 1997 album — yes, the one with “Song 2” — was the band’s most dramatic stylistic pivot: Here was what until then seemed like a quintessentially British band earnestly and somehow convincingly embracing American indie rock. The propulsive “M.O.R.,” though, is a bridge between Blur’s past and future. The chorus interpolates David Bowie’s arch, vampy “Boys Keep Swinging,” even as Coxon’s distorted, disaffected guitar squalls like J Mascis. (Listen on YouTube)5. “Coffee & TV” (1999)One of just a few Blur songs on which Coxon sings lead vocals, the fan-favorite single “Coffee & TV” is at once prickly and sweet, a steadily chugging tune suffused with an introvert’s romanticism. “Sociability is hard enough for me,” he and Albarn sing in wobbly falsetto. “Take me away from this big, bad world and agree to marry me.” I am not exaggerating when I say I still think about that little milk carton guy all the time. (Listen on YouTube)6. “Tracy Jacks” (1994)A sharp, poignant character study of a middle-aged civil servant on the verge of a nervous breakdown, “Tracy Jacks” is a perfect encapsulation of the band’s widening sociological scope circa “Parklife.” (Listen on YouTube)7. “Charmless Man” (1995)And, from around the same time, here’s a much more acidic snapshot of British life: “Educated the expensive way/He knows his claret from his Beaujolais/I think he’d like to have been Ronnie Kray/But then nature didn’t make him that way.” (Listen on YouTube)8. “Go Out” (2015)I love all the weird art-rock textures and sounds that protrude from this jaunty pop ditty from the band’s 2015 comeback album, “The Magic Whip” — a perfect match for Albarn’s caustic, deadpan vocal. (Listen on YouTube)9. “Beetlebum” (1997)In news that does not surprise me at all, Liam Gallagher has admitted that this is his favorite Blur song. War is over (if you want it). (Listen on YouTube)10. “No Distance Left to Run” (1999)Inarguably the saddest Blur song; no, I won’t be taking any questions at this time. If this gutting ballad — written around the time of Albarn’s breakup with the Elastica frontwoman Justine Frischmann — doesn’t destroy your heart, I don’t even know what to tell you. This is the sound of love dying, with a whimper: “I won’t kill myself trying to stay in your life/I’ve got no distance left to run.” (Listen on YouTube)11. “This Is a Low” (1994)Blur constantly wrestles with ambivalence about Anglophilia, but it can’t hide a certain affection toward its native country on this majestic “Parklife” highlight, which was partly inspired by the band’s habit of listening to BBC shipping forecasts while homesick on tour. (Listen on YouTube)12. “The Universal (Live at Hyde Park)” (2012)On Aug. 12, 2012, Blur played a triumphant reunion concert in London’s Hyde Park, following the Summer Olympics closing ceremony. The excellent and inevitably titled live album “Parklive” captures the ecstatic energy of that night — and especially the soaring singalong “The Universal,” which closed the show in grand style. (Listen on YouTube)Well, here’s your lucky day,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“The Brilliance of Blur” track listTrack 1: “Lot 105”Track 2: “There’s No Other Way”Track 3: “Country House”Track 4: “M.O.R.”Track 5: “Coffee & TV”Track 6: “Tracy Jacks”Track 7: “Charmless Man”Track 8: “Go Out”Track 9: “Beetlebum”Track 10: “No Distance Left to Run”Track 11: “This Is a Low”Track 12: “The Universal (Live at Hyde Park)”Bonus tracksMore exciting news: The New York Times has a new audio app! From time to time, I’ll be recording audio versions of The Amplifier on there, and you can also find Jon Caramanica’s Popcast and Jon Pareles recommending new music, plus a whole lot more Times music content. The app also features read-aloud stories and narrated articles from the worlds of politics, tech, health, food, sports, the entire archive of This American Life and much more. To start exploring, download the New York Times Audio app here. More