Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Wynonna Judd: Between Hell and Hallelujah’ Review: The Show Must Go On

    A documentary about the country star, whose mother and singing partner, Naomi Judd, died last year, mostly fails to kindle unguided emotions.As portrayed in the new documentary “Wynonna Judd: Between Hell and Hallelujah,” the country artist Wynonna Judd experiences, in real time, a cruel kind of suffering. Her mother and longtime singing partner, Naomi Judd, died by suicide last year. In the director Patty Ivins Specht’s film, Wynonna is left to pick up the pieces.The film’s wistful opening frames are hauntingly emotional, showing the two women in conversation in their early years of performing as the Judds. But Wynonna is also a superstar with a history of her own, one that Specht’s film mostly omits in favor of a sweeping statement about perseverance and the importance of a solid support system in the face of tragedy.The doc, which captures the singer on a tour she was supposed to share with Naomi, seems content to exist primarily as a lifeline for others who have experienced loss. When Wynonna’s sister, the actress Ashley Judd, appears, it’s clear they’re working on their relationship, but not why they have to. Earlier, though, when Wynonna flips through old family photos at her mother’s home, that action is heartbreakingly specific. For the viewer, it’s a more palpable feeling.The rest of “Between Hell and Hallelujah” amounts to a performance-focused tour diary with Hallmark-movie energy. Though Wynonna powers through the songs with admirable grit and grace, Specht’s approach is too awkwardly methodical and cloyingly vague to kindle enough unguided emotions. Without those rich details that make a song like the Judds’ “Flies on the Butter” come to life, the film plays like a country song with more chorus than verse.Wynonna Judd: Between Hell and HallelujahNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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    The Boston Symphony Finds Surprises and Strengths in New Music

    Over two nights at Carnegie Hall, the Boston Symphony Orchestra presented the New York premieres of works by Thierry Escaich and Thomas Adès.When orchestras come to Carnegie Hall, their programs typically tell you two things: who they are and what they can do.That was true earlier this season when the Vienna Philharmonic and Christian Thielemann offered authoritative Strauss and Bruckner. Or when the Berlin Philharmonic and Kirill Petrenko opened up the complex worlds of Mahler’s Seventh with coordinated virtuosity. Or when the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel found irrepressible dynamism in blazing scores by Gabriela Ortiz.And over two nights at Carnegie this week, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its music director, Andris Nelsons, told their story gradually, one piece at a time, in canonical works by Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Sibelius and Mozart. It was only when they unveiled two New York premieres — Thierry Escaich’s “Les Chants de l’Aube,” with the cellist Gautier Capuçon, and Thomas Adès’s “Air,” with the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter — that they tapped into something special all at once.Among American orchestras, the Boston Symphony’s sound is enviably rich. That opulence was readily apparent in the ceaseless flow of cantabile melodies in Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony. You could hear it too in the briefest articulations, such as the resonant pizzicatos of Ravel’s cheeky “Alborada del Gracioso,” which on Monday opened the first concert, or the sonorous orchestral stabs on the last page of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, which on Tuesday closed the second.The Rachmaninoff often felt like an hourlong showcase for the spacious, burnished tone of the orchestra’s violin section. Nelsons coaxed gorgeous, heart-in-your-throat playing from them in one long-breathed line after another. As if to balance that, the Sibelius symphony was rife with woodwind and brass chorales; the strings don’t even enter until the 18th measure. The ensemble’s new principal horn, Richard Sebring — a longtime Boston Symphony player who recently won the chair after an international search — anchored his section with a glowing, edgeless sound.Nelsons seemed to celebrate one section at a time without employing his full forces — or full imagination — in the standard repertory pieces. Occasionally, an overwhelming plushness traded the vulnerability of Rachmaninoff’s music for invincible solidity. In the final movement, the players relaxed into the piece’s complexity, its romance caught in a swirl of vexed intent. Nelsons took the second movement of the Sibelius, built on a deceptively simple rhythmic unit, at face value, without the pluck, personality or sly contentment others have mined in it. In a piece as graceful and zesty as the Ravel, the slowly accumulating strength of the orchestra could be taken for turgidity.The violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, left, was the soloist in the New York premiere of Thomas Adès’s “Air.”Fadi KheirIn the two New York premieres, though, Nelsons unleashed the ensemble’s astonishing range of colors to enliven the particular atmosphere of each work.In a program note, Escaich compared his cello concerto “Les Chants de l’Aube” to a stained-glass window. The metaphor isn’t readily apparent; the music doesn’t bring to mind a mosaic of translucent, jeweled tones. If anything, its palette feels cool, foreboding.Escaich might be embodying spiritual forces both good and evil. With a glinting, coppery tone, Capuçon gave the opening phrase — a Baroque homage that nods to Bach’s Invention No. 13 — a cunning flicker of darkness and light. The violins played long notes on high, not unlike the angelic overture to Wagner’s “Lohengrin,” as the horns droned down below. Flutes dipped like swallows, and brasses popped out like goblins. Tubular bells tolled ritualistically. Within this frame, both beatific and ominous, Capuçon’s cello maneuvered: warm, bodily, determined.In that sense, the cello, in both design and execution, was very much the piece’s animating force, passing through light and shadow, and knowing something of both. Escaich wrote cadenzas to link the three movements into a continuous form, and Capuçon emphasized their atmospheric expressivity as opposed to their show-pony virtuosity. The orchestra navigated the shifting meters and watery textures of the second movement with conviction, and Nelsons masterfully plotted the way in which the final movement’s heavenly motif for celesta and harp melted away into a dangerous dance. Jazzy dalliances and an abrupt ending didn’t ultimately detract from the concerto’s absorbing sound world.Adès’s “Air,” by contrast, devotes itself to a single idea — one of fragile beauty — for its 15-minute duration. The way Adès pitches the violin writing high up, almost daring the soloist to sustain it, recalls the extreme tessitura for the soprano role of Ariel in his opera “The Tempest.” This time, though, the effect is serene instead of unnervingly otherworldly.Mutter, who gave the world premiere of “Air” at the Lucerne Festival last year, played at Carnegie with a platinum tone, densely concentrated. The orchestra drew mesmeric circles around her, conjuring a world of glass, as Mutter’s sound irradiated a childlike innocence full of whispered awe.With the sensitivity of an opera conductor who loves his singers, Nelsons consistently scaled the orchestra’s sound to his soloists’ resources. If his rendition of Sibelius’s “Luonnotar” — a tone poem about the mythic creation of the earth and firmament — lacked a cosmic spatial sense, then at least its quiet intensity was of a piece with the soprano Golda Schultz’s rosy tone and haloed high notes; these performers were very much describing, rather than dramatizing, the piece’s world-shattering dimensions. Nelsons cushioned Mutter’s elegantly assured playing with spirited, swift touches in Mozart’s First Violin Concerto, and he matched Capuçon’s dazzling, consuming focus and mercurial coloring. Each collaboration felt natural, intuitive.At times during the Boston Symphony’s performances, the parts were greater than the whole. A textbook reading can be exemplary but also plain. But when this orchestra had a new story to tell, it was full of surprises. More

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    Harry Belafonte, 96, Dies; Barrier-Breaking Singer, Actor and Activist

    In the 1950s, when segregation was still widespread, his ascent to the upper echelon of show business was historic. But his primary focus was civil rights.Harry Belafonte, who stormed the pop charts and smashed racial barriers in the 1950s with his highly personal brand of folk music, and who went on to become a dynamic force in the civil rights movement, died on Tuesday at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 96.The cause was congestive heart failure, said Ken Sunshine, his longtime spokesman.At a time when segregation was still widespread and Black faces were still a rarity on screens large and small, Mr. Belafonte’s ascent to the upper echelon of show business was historic. He was not the first Black entertainer to transcend racial boundaries; Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and others had achieved stardom before him. But none had made as much of a splash as he did, and for a while no one in music, Black or white, was bigger.Born in Harlem to West Indian immigrants, he almost single-handedly ignited a craze for Caribbean music with hit records like “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” and “Jamaica Farewell.” His album “Calypso,” which included both those songs, reached the top of the Billboard album chart shortly after its release in 1956 and stayed there for 31 weeks. Coming just before the breakthrough of Elvis Presley, it was said to be the first album by a single artist to sell more than a million copies.Performing at the Waldorf Astoria in New York in 1956.Al Lambert/Associated PressMr. Belafonte was equally successful as a concert attraction: Handsome and charismatic, he held audiences spellbound with dramatic interpretations of a repertoire that encompassed folk traditions from all over the world — rollicking calypsos like “Matilda,” work songs like “Lead Man Holler,” tender ballads like “Scarlet Ribbons.” By 1959 he was the most highly paid Black performer in history, with fat contracts for appearances in Las Vegas, at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles and at the Palace in New York.Success as a singer led to movie offers, and Mr. Belafonte soon became the first Black actor to achieve major success in Hollywood as a leading man. His movie stardom was short-lived, though, and it was his friendly rival Sidney Poitier, not Mr. Belafonte, who became the first bona fide Black matinee idol.But making movies was never Mr. Belafonte’s priority, and after a while neither was making music. He continued to perform into the 21st century, and to appear in movies as well (although he had two long hiatuses from the screen), but his primary focus from the late 1950s on was civil rights.Early in his career, Mr. Belafonte befriended the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and became not just a lifelong friend but also an ardent supporter. Dr. King and Mr. Belafonte at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem in 1956.via Harry BelafonteEarly in his career, he befriended the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and became not just a lifelong friend but also an ardent supporter of Dr. King and the quest for racial equality he personified. He put up much of the seed money to help start the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was one of the principal fund-raisers for that organization and Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.He provided money to bail Dr. King and other civil rights activists out of jail. He took part in the March on Washington in 1963. His spacious apartment on West End Avenue in Manhattan became Dr. King’s home away from home. And he quietly maintained an insurance policy on Dr. King’s life, with the King family as the beneficiary, and donated his own money to make sure that the family was taken care of after Dr. King was assassinated in 1968.(Nonetheless, in 2013 he sued Dr. King’s three surviving children in a dispute over documents that Mr. Belafonte said were his property and that the children said belonged to the King estate. The suit was settled the next year, with Mr. Belafonte retaining possession.)In an interview with The Washington Post a few months after Dr. King’s death, Mr. Belafonte expressed ambivalence about his high profile in the civil rights movement. He would like to “be able to stop answering questions as though I were a spokesman for my people,” he said, adding, “I hate marching, and getting called at 3 a.m. to bail some cats out of jail.” But, he said, he accepted his role.The Challenge of RacismIn the same interview, he noted ruefully that although he sang music with “roots in the Black culture of American Negroes, Africa and the West Indies,” most of his fans were white. As frustrating as that may have been, he was much more upset by the racism that he confronted even at the height of his fame.His role in the 1957 movie “Island in the Sun,” which contained the suggestion of a romance between his character and a white woman played by Joan Fontaine, generated outrage in the South; a bill was even introduced in the South Carolina Legislature that would have fined any theater showing the film. In Atlanta for a benefit concert for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1962, Mr. Belafonte was twice refused service in the same restaurant. Television appearances with white female singers — Petula Clark in 1968, Julie Andrews in 1969 — angered many viewers and, in the case of Ms. Clark, threatened to cost him a sponsor.He sometimes drew criticism from Black people, including the suggestion early in his career that he owed his success to the lightness of his skin (his paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother were white). When he divorced his wife in 1957 and married Julie Robinson, who had been the only white member of Katherine Dunham’s dance troupe, The Amsterdam News wrote, “Many Negroes are wondering why a man who has waved the flag of justice for his race should turn from a Negro wife to a white wife.”Mr. Belafonte with Ed Sullivan in 1955. At a time when segregation was still widespread and Black faces were still a rarity on screens large and small, Mr. Belafonte’s ascent to the upper echelon of show business was historic.Associated PressWhen RCA Victor, his record company, promoted him as the “King of Calypso,” Mr. Belafonte was denounced as a pretender in Trinidad, the acknowledged birthplace of that highly rhythmic music, where an annual competition is held to choose a calypso king.He himself never claimed to be a purist when it came to calypso or any of the other traditional styles he embraced, let alone the king of calypso. He and his songwriting collaborators loved folk music, he said, but saw nothing wrong with shaping it to their own ends.“Purism is the best cover-up for mediocrity,” he told The New York Times in 1959. “If there is no change we might just as well go back to the first ‘ugh,’ which must have been the first song.”Harold George Bellanfanti Jr. was born on March 1, 1927, in Harlem. His father, who was born in Martinique (and later changed the family name), worked occasionally as a chef on merchant ships and was often away; his mother, Melvine (Love) Bellanfanti, born in Jamaica, was a domestic.In 1936, Harry, his mother and his younger brother, Dennis, moved to Jamaica. Unable to find work there, his mother soon returned to New York, leaving him and his brother to be looked after by relatives who, he later recalled, were either “unemployed or above the law.” They rejoined her in Harlem in 1940.Awakening to Black HistoryMr. Belafonte dropped out of George Washington High School in Upper Manhattan in 1944 and enlisted in the Navy, where he was assigned to load munitions aboard ships. Black shipmates introduced him to the works of W.E.B. Du Bois and other African American authors and urged him to study Black history.He received further encouragement from Marguerite Byrd, the daughter of a middle-class Washington family, whom he met while he was stationed in Virginia and she was studying psychology at the Hampton Institute (now Hampton University). They married in 1948.He and Ms. Byrd had two children, Adrienne Biesemeyer and Shari Belafonte, who survive him, as do his two children by Ms. Robinson, Gina Belafonte and David; and eight grandchildren. He and Ms. Robinson divorced in 2004, and he married Pamela Frank, a photographer, in 2008, and she survives him, too, along with a stepdaughter, Sarah Frank; a stepson, Lindsey Frank; and three step-grandchildren.Mr. Belafonte and his wife, Julie Robinson, during a civil rights event — the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom — at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in 1957.George Tames/The New York TimesBack in New York after his discharge, Mr. Belafonte became interested in acting and enrolled under the G.I. Bill at Erwin Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop, where his classmates included Marlon Brando and Tony Curtis. He first took the stage at the American Negro Theater in Manhattan, where he worked as a stagehand and where he began his lifelong friendship with a fellow theatrical novice, Sidney Poitier.Finding anything other than what he called “Uncle Tom” roles proved difficult, and even though singing was little more than a hobby, it was as a singer and not an actor that Mr. Belafonte found an audience.Early in 1949, he was given the chance to perform during intermissions for two weeks at the Royal Roost, a popular Midtown jazz nightclub. He was an immediate hit, and the two weeks became five months.Finding Folk MusicAfter enjoying some success but little creative satisfaction as a jazz-oriented pop singer, Mr. Belafonte looked elsewhere for inspiration. With the guitarist Millard Thomas, who would become his accompanist, and the playwright and novelist William Attaway, who would collaborate on many of his songs, he immersed himself in the study of folk music. (The calypso singer and songwriter Irving Burgie later supplied much of his repertoire, including “Day-O” and “Jamaica Farewell.”)His manager, Jack Rollins, helped him develop an act that emphasized his acting ability and his striking good looks as much as a voice that was husky and expressive but, as Mr. Belafonte admitted, not very powerful.A triumphant 1951 engagement at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village led to an even more successful one at the Blue Angel, the Vanguard’s upscale sister room on the Upper East Side. That in turn led to a recording contract with RCA and a role on Broadway in the 1953 revue “John Murray Anderson’s Almanac.”Dorothy Dandridge and Mr. Belafonte in a scene from the 1954 film “Carmen Jones.”20th Century FoxPerforming a repertoire that included the calypso standard “Hold ’em Joe” and his arrangement of the folk song “Mark Twain,” Mr. Belafonte won enthusiastic reviews, television bookings and a Tony Award for best featured actor in a musical. He also caught the eye of the Hollywood producer and director Otto Preminger, who cast him in the 1954 movie version of “Carmen Jones,” an all-Black update of Bizet’s opera “Carmen” with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, which had been a hit on Broadway a decade earlier.Mr. Belafonte’s co-star was Dorothy Dandridge, with whom he had also appeared the year before in his first movie, the little-seen low-budget drama “Bright Road.” Although they were both accomplished vocalists, their singing voices in “Carmen Jones” were dubbed by opera singers.Mr. Belafonte also made news for a movie he turned down, citing what he called its negative racial stereotypes: the 1959 screen version of “Porgy and Bess,” also a Preminger film. The role of Porgy was offered instead to his old friend Mr. Poitier, whom he criticized publicly for accepting it.Stepping Away From FilmIn the 1960s, as Mr. Poitier became a major box-office attraction, Mr. Belafonte made no movies at all: Hollywood, he said, was not interested in the socially conscious films he wanted to make, and he was not interested in the roles he was offered. He did, however, become a familiar presence — and an occasional source of controversy — on television.His special “Tonight With Belafonte” won an Emmy in 1960 (a first for a Black performer), but a deal to do five more specials for that show’s sponsor, the cosmetics company Revlon, fell apart after one more was broadcast; according to Mr. Belafonte, Revlon asked him not to feature Black and white performers together. The taping of a 1968 special with Petula Clark was interrupted when Ms. Clark touched Mr. Belafonte’s arm, and a representative of the sponsor, Chrysler-Plymouth, demanded a retake. (The producer refused, and the sponsor’s representative later apologized, although Mr. Belafonte said the apology came “one hundred years too late.”)Jacob Harris/Associated PressWhen Mr. Belafonte returned to film as both producer and co-star, with Zero Mostel, of “The Angel Levine” (1970), based on a story by Bernard Malamud, the project had a sociopolitical edge: His Harry Belafonte Enterprises, with a grant from the Ford Foundation, hired 15 Black and Hispanic apprentices to learn filmmaking by working on the crew. One of them, Drake Walker, wrote the story for Mr. Belafonte’s next movie, “Buck and the Preacher” (1972), a gritty western that also starred Mr. Poitier.But after appearing as a mob boss (a parody of Marlon Brando’s character in “The Godfather”) with Mr. Poitier and Bill Cosby in the hit 1974 comedy “Uptown Saturday Night” — directed, as “Buck and the Preacher” had been, by Mr. Poitier — Mr. Belafonte was once again absent from the big screen, this time until 1992, when he played himself in Robert Altman’s Hollywood satire “The Player.”He appeared onscreen only sporadically after that, most notably as a gangster in Mr. Altman’s “Kansas City” (1996), for which Mr. Belafonte won a New York Film Critics Circle Award. His final film role was in Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” in 2018.Political ActivismMr. Belafonte continued to give concerts in the years when he was off the screen, but he concentrated on political activism and charitable work. In the 1980s, he helped organize a cultural boycott of South Africa as well as the Live Aid concert and the all-star recording “We Are the World,” both of which raised money to fight famine in Africa. In 1986, encouraged by some New York State Democratic Party leaders, he briefly considered running for the United States Senate. In 1987, he replaced Danny Kaye as UNICEF’s good-will ambassador.Never shy about expressing his opinion, he became increasingly outspoken during the George W. Bush administration. In 2002, he accused Secretary of State Colin L. Powell of abandoning his principles to “come into the house of the master.” Four years later he called Mr. Bush “the greatest terrorist in the world.”Harry Belafonte demonstrated against nuclear weapons in Bonn, Germany, in 1981.Klaus Rose/Picture-alliance, DPA, via Associated Press ImagesMr. Belafonte was equally outspoken in the 2013 New York mayoral election, in which he campaigned for the Democratic candidate and eventual winner, Bill de Blasio. During the campaign he referred to the Koch brothers, the wealthy industrialists known for their support of conservative causes, as “white supremacists” and compared them to the Ku Klux Klan. (Mr. de Blasio quickly distanced himself from that comment.)Such statements made Mr. Belafonte a frequent target of criticism, but no one disputed his artistry. Among the many honors he received in his later years were a Kennedy Center Honor in 1989, the National Medal of Arts in 1994 and a Grammy lifetime achievement award in 2000.In 2011, he was the subject of a documentary film, “Sing Your Song,” and published his autobiography, “My Song.”In 2014, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave him its Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in recognition of his lifelong fight for civil rights and other causes. The honor, he told The Times, gave him “a strong sense of reward.”He remained politically active to the end. On Election Day 2016, The Times published an opinion article by Mr. Belafonte urging people not to vote for Donald J. Trump, whom he called “feckless and immature.”“Mr. Trump asks us what we have to lose,” he wrote, referring to African American voters, “and we must answer: Only the dream, only everything.”Looking back on his life and career, Mr. Belafonte was proud but far from complacent. “About my own life, I have no complaints,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Yet the problems faced by most Americans of color seem as dire and entrenched as they were half a century ago.”Karsten Moran for The New York TimesFour years later, he returned to the opinion pages with a similar message: “We have learned exactly how much we had to lose — a lesson that has been inflicted upon Black people again and again in our history — and we will not be bought off by the empty promises of the flimflam man.”Looking back on his life and career, Mr. Belafonte was proud but far from complacent. “About my own life, I have no complaints,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Yet the problems faced by most Americans of color seem as dire and entrenched as they were half a century ago.”Richard Severo and Alex Traub contributed reporting. 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    Meet Jelly Roll, the Rapper Turned Country Singer Rousing Nashville

    The 38-year-old artist born Jason DeFord has been turning his struggles into music for years. Now it has a bit more twang, and a lot more attention.At the CMT Music Awards this month, the least likely nominee turned into the night’s biggest story.In a room full of country music royalty, the artist Jelly Roll — a 38-year-old face-tattooed former addict and drug dealer who got his start selling his own hip-hop mixtapes out of his car — took home the most trophies, beating superstars including Morgan Wallen, Kane Brown and Luke Combs. The crowd was on its feet as he performed his new single, “Need a Favor,” in a studded leather jacket, his gravelly voice backed by a full gospel choir.“It was an absolute dream come true, the best-case scenario, and I’ve had a worst-case scenario life up to this point,” Jelly Roll said in a telephone interview the following week, excitedly recounting his interactions backstage with Shania Twain and Slash. “I spent my entire childhood feeling like I didn’t belong — in every situation, I felt like the uncomfortable fat kid. So that was like my high school prom and the graduation I never had, on national television.”On June 2, Jelly Roll’s debut country album, “Whitsitt Chapel,” arrives, but it’s far from his first release. Since 2011, he has put out more than 20 albums, EPs and mixtapes, many of them independently released collaborations with other Southern white rappers like Lil’ Wyte and Haystak. His music has often addressed his criminal past and his journey to sobriety — what he calls “real music for real people with real problems.”Jelly Roll (born Jason DeFord) grew up in Antioch, a culturally diverse working-class suburb south of downtown Nashville. His father was a meat salesman with a side hustle as a bookie, while his mother struggled with her mental health and addiction. He was first arrested when he was 14 and spent the next decade in and out of juvenile centers and prison for charges including aggravated robbery and possession with intent to sell.Inspired by Southern rappers like Three 6 Mafia, UGK and 8ball & MJG, Jelly Roll started writing rhymes of his own, getting serious about pursuing music after learning that he had a daughter, now age 15. He began touring relentlessly and eventually racked up hundreds of millions of streams with virtually no mainstream visibility.In the last few years, though, he has leaned further into a heartfelt country-soul/Southern-rock style. “The music started evolving as the man did,” he said. “The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve found my singing voice and my love for instrumentation.”Since 2011, Jelly Roll has put out more than 20 albums, EPs and mixtapes. His official country debut is due in June.Gabriel McCurdy for The New York TimesThough Jelly Roll had several previous singles that had been certified gold, the real acceleration came with his 2020 song “Save Me,” a bluesy ballad sung over fingerpicked acoustic guitar. Emotional and despairing (“I’m so damaged beyond repair/Life has shattered my hopes and my dreams”), it was written on a Sunday, recorded and filmed on Monday, posted to YouTube on Tuesday and immediately exploded, racking up more than 165 million views to date. He recut the song as a duet with the rising star Lainey Wilson for the new album.In the last year, his bruising, fuzzed-out song “Dead Man Walking” went to No. 1 on rock radio while the mid-tempo “Son of a Sinner” topped the country radio chart, and Jelly Roll held the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s emerging artist chart for 25 straight weeks, the longest run in that ranking’s history. In December, about a year after headlining Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium, he sold out all 17,000 or so seats at Bridgestone Arena there. The Bridgestone show is chronicled in a new documentary, “Jelly Roll: Save Me,” premiering on Hulu on May 30.“Some traditional country music fans might be scratching their heads at his image and style of music,” Storme Warren, a host on SiriusXM’s The Highway channel, wrote in an email, “but I think they’ll come around when they realize he’s the real deal.”“In my opinion, he’s as country as any other artist,” Warren continued. “His stories are real and relatable. He’s living proof that anything is possible.”As Jelly Roll’s profile grows, he’s not slowing down his nonstop work habits. (“Drug dealers never take a day off,” he said in 2021, “and I wanted to apply that drive to music.”) This summer, he’ll be on the road with his Backroad Baptism Tour, as well as playing some shows with the country standard-bearer Eric Church. Several Nashville A-listers, including Miranda Lambert and Hardy, wrote with him for “Whitsitt Chapel.”“I could tell right away we would be fast friends,” Lambert wrote in an email. “He is so genuine and kind. He is very strong in who he is and what he wants to say as an artist. I respect that so much.”Jelly Roll, who notes that he’s “still trying to make fans when I’m at the gas station,” has long been studying the careers of country legends and what he can learn from their relationship to their fans. “They’ve stayed true to themselves,” he said. “You know who they are, and they know who they are and who they’re singing for.”“The music started evolving as the man did,” he said. “The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve found my singing voice and my love for instrumentation.”Gabriel McCurdy for The New York TimesHe wrote more than 80 songs for “Whitsitt Chapel” before landing on the album’s predominantly spiritual themes. “Everything was great, but it didn’t feel like it had a purpose,” he said. “I’m always diligent about the why, what’s the purpose? And if it’s just that it’s catchy or it’s easy to monetize, we don’t put that out.”Then in one night, he came up with “Dancing With the Devil” and “Hungover in a Church Pew,” which became the record’s final tracks, and knew where he wanted the project to go. “Those two songs were talking to each other, dealing with the same story,” he said. “I was thinking about the choices I made, some horrible decisions. My music is a constant cry for help and growth — it tells a story of change, and I wasn’t ready for this before now.”He admitted he went out drinking after the CMT awards show (he had announced those plans from the stage), but said he is “quite a few years removed from doing the drugs that were going to kill me,” explaining that “sobriety looks different on everybody.”His focus is on the “therapeutic” role his music can play for people with addictions and on his work for at-risk youth in Nashville. He donated all the profits from the Bridgestone show and, working with the local nonprofit Impact Youth Outreach, built a recording studio inside Davidson County Juvenile Detention Center.“That’s not even scratching the surface of my plan,” Jelly Roll said. “I’m going to build halfway houses and transitional centers — that’s my real heart.”“I just never forget being that kid,” he continued. “Those years in juvenile were so formative, and it was so devastating for me to miss that time. On my 16th birthday, I didn’t get a car; I woke up incarcerated. I didn’t get my G.E.D. until I was 23 and in jail. I just missed so much of life. So I want to be remembered as a guy that did something for the kids in this town.”After grinding for a dozen years only to finally find himself recognized as a “new artist,” Jelly Roll isn’t settling into a formula now. “Music is like human nature,” he said. “It evolves or dies. Artists should always be pushing the boundaries of what’s uncomfortable, and I plan to be doing that the rest of my career. That’s what I was thinking about when I was leaving the CMTs — now that I’ve gotten here, I deserve to stay.” More

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    Harry Belafonte, Folk Hero

    Cool and charismatic, Belafonte channeled his stardom into activism. He was a true people person, who knew how to reach, teach and challenge us.Of the many (many) job titles you could lay on Harry Belafonte — singer, actor, entertainer, talk show host, activist — the one that nails what he’s come to mean is folk hero.Not a title one puts on a business card or lists in, say, a Twitter bio. “Folk hero” is a description that accrues — over time, out of significance. You’re out doing those other jobs when, suddenly, what you’re doing matters — to people, to your people, to your country.Belafonte was a folk hero that way. Not the most dynamic or distinctive actor or singer or dancer you’ll ever come across. Yet the cool, frank, charismatic, seemingly indefatigable cat who died on Tuesday, at 96, had something else, something as crucial. He was, in his way, a people person. He understood how to reach, teach and challenge them, how to keep them honest, how to dedicate his fame to a politics of accountability, more tenaciously than any star of the civil rights era or in its wake. The forum for this sort of moral transformation probably should have been the movies. But the Hollywood of that era would tolerate a single Black person and, ultimately, it chose Sidney Poitier, Belafonte’s soul mate, sometime suitemate and fellow Caribbean American. Belafonte did make a handful of movies at the beginning of his career. “Odds Against Tomorrow,” a naturalist film noir from 1959, is the meatiest of them — and his last picture for more than a decade, too. Poitier became the movie star, during a dire stretch for this country. Belafonte became the folk hero.“Tonight With Belafonte,” a 1959 show that aired on CBS, featured work songs, gospel and moaning blues performed on spare sets.CBS Photo Archive/Getty ImagesIt began, of course, with the songs, actual folk music. Well, with Belafonte’s interpolation, which in its varied guises wed acoustic singing with Black spiritual arrangements and the sounds of the islands. He took his best-selling music on the road, to white audiences who’d pay a lot of money to watch him perform from his million-selling album “Calypso,” the one with “Day-O.” A major part of his knowing people was knowing that they watched TV. And rather than simply translate his hot-ticket cabaret act for American living rooms, Belafonte imagined something stranger and more alluring. In 1959, he somehow got CBS to broadcast “Tonight With Belafonte,” an hourlong studio performance that starts with a live commercial for Revlon (the night’s sponsor) and melts from the gleaming blond actor Barbara Britton (the ad’s pitchperson) into the sight of Black men amid shadows and great big chains.They’re pantomiming hard labor while Belafonte belts a viscous version of “Bald Headed Woman.” The whole hour is just this sort of chilling: percussive work songs, big-bottomed gospel, moaning blues, dramatically spare sets that imply segregation and incarceration, the weather system that called herself Odetta. Belafonte never makes a direct speech about injustice. He trusts the songs and stagecraft to speak for themselves. Folks — Black folks, especially — will get it. It’s their music.“The bleaker my acting prospects looked,” Belafonte wrote, in “My Song,” his memoir from 2011, “the more I threw myself into political organizing.” That organizing took familiar forms — marches, protests, rallies. Money. He helped underwrite the civil rights movement, paying for freedom rides. He maintained a life insurance policy on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., with Coretta Scott King as the beneficiary, because Dr. King didn’t believe he could afford it. The building he bought at 300 West End Avenue in Manhattan and converted into a 21-room palace seemed to double as the movement’s New York headquarters. (“Martin began drafting his antiwar speech in my apartment.”) So, yes, Belafonte was near the psychic core and administrative center of the movement.But those bleak Hollywood prospects — some incalculable combination of racism and too-raw talent — kept Belafonte uniquely earthbound, doing a kind of cultural organizing. It wasn’t the movies that have kept him in so many people’s lives these many decades, though he never stopped acting altogether, best of all in a handful of Robert Altman films, particularly “Kansas City,” from 1996, in which he does some persuasive intimidation as an icy 1930s gangster named Seldom Seen. His organizing happened on TV, where he was prominently featured throughout the 1960s, as himself, and where his political reach was arguably as penetrating as his soul mate’s, on variety shows he produced that introduced America to Gloria Lynne and Odetta and John Lewis.There was also that week in February 1968 when Johnny Carson handed his “Tonight Show” over to Belafonte. The national mood had sunk into infernal tumult driven by the Vietnam War and exasperation with racist neglect, for starters. (It was going to be a grim election year, too.) Whether a Black substitute host of a popular talk show was an antidote for malaise or a provocative reflection of it, Belafonte went beyond the chummy ribbing that was Carson’s forte. He was probing. His guests that week included Poitier, Lena Horne, Bill Cosby, Paul Newman, Wilt Chamberlain, the Smothers Brothers, Zero Mostel and, months before they were murdered, Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. King. Belafonte turned the famous into folks, mixing the frippery of the format with the gravitas of the moment.Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was among the interviewees when Belafonte guest hosted Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” for a week in February 1968.Associated PressPaul Robeson preceded Belafonte in an activism partly born of artistic frustration. Robeson’s pursuit of racial equality, for everybody, won him persecution and immiseration and derailed his career. He personally warned Belafonte and Poitier of the damaging toll this country will take on Black artists who believe their art and celebrity ought do more than dazzle and distract. Belafonte watched the American government drag Robeson through hell and decided to help drag white America to moral betterment in any arena that would have him, somewhat out of respect for his elder. (“My whole life was an homage to him,” Belafonte once wrote about Robeson.) Those arenas included everything from “Free to Be … You and Me” and “The Muppet Show” to Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” and, on several indelible occasions, “Sesame Street.”With some artists, a legacy is a tricky reduction. What did it all come down to? And it just can’t be that the immense career of Harry Belafonte — with its milestones and breakthroughs, with its risks and hazards, with its triumphs and disappointments, with its doubling as a living archive of the latter half of a 20th-century America that he fought to ennoble — can be summed up by the time he spent talking to the Count.But that, too, is how a people person reaches people. That’s how Harry Belafonte reached a lot of us: little kids who were curious and naturally open to the wonders of the human experience. So it makes sense that the sight of this elegant man, reclined among inquisitive children and surly felt critters, speaking with wisdom in that scratched timbre of his about, say, what an animal is (and, by extension, who an animal is not), told us who we were. People, yes, but perhaps another generation of folks with this hero in common, learning through the osmosis of good television how to live their lives in homage to him. More

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    ‘The Oak’: A Post-Communist Pinwheel

    Lucian Pintilie’s newly restored mad farce, now at Film Forum, paved the way for the Romanian new wave.Playing the last days of Romanian communism as frenzied farce, Lucian Pintilie’s “The Oak” is set in a world so despoiled a Hieronymus Bosch landscape might seem bucolic by comparison.First shown in 1992, some three years after the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife were executed and a year after a new constitution replaced single-party rule, “The Oak” has been restored and revived for a week at Film Forum. Ensuing decades have scarcely mitigated its power.Following the death of her father, a onetime colonel in the secret police, the disheveled and seemingly demented Nela (Maia Morgenstern) departs the squalid Bucharest apartment they shared and, carrying dad’s ashes in a jar of Nescafé, makes her way to Copsa Mica, the Transylvanian town where she has been hired to teach.The place is a citadel of pollution — industrial and otherwise. Nela is sexually assaulted by a gang of drunken workers. After she is dumped in a hospital bed (its previous occupant unceremoniously relocated to the floor), Nela meets a kindred soul in Mitica (Razvan Vasilescu), a surgeon similarly sent to the Transylvanian back of beyond. Equally unrestrained, Mitica eschews bribes and physically attacks his superiors, often with a fixed grin. The pair team up in a scattershot, anti-authoritarian conspiracy of two.As wildly impulsive Nela, Morgenstern gives a performance no less anarchic than the movie. (It’s a minor irony of cinema history that this whirlwind actress would be best known for her somber portrayal of Jesus’s mother in “The Passion of the Christ.”) She’s so much fun to watch that “The Oak” loses velocity when attention shifts to her cohort.Punctuated with sudden explosions, random mayhem, yelling, cursing, and ringing telephones, “The Oak” is impossibly busy as well as incredibly bleak. Trains stall, bridges flood, trucks crash. The army is perpetually holding drills. The hospital doubles as a charnel house. Officials are ineffectual even in their self-dealing. Ordinary people are pointlessly bellicose.The movie is sometimes exhausting but never dull. Indeed, the pace is dizzying to the point of disorientation. “You can’t be sure which way is up,” Vincent Canby wrote in his review in The Times, watching “The Oak” was like exploring “a house of horrors in an amusement park in space.”Pintilie, who died in 2018, has been called the godfather of the Romanian new wave — an example for the talented young directors who emerged in the early 20th century. “The Oak” provided a template for the journey-to-the-end-of-the-night absurdism found in Cristi Puiu’s “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” (2005) and Cristian Mungiu’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” (2007). In addition, “The Oak” pioneered a mode that might be called post-Communist grotesque, anticipating the Balkan tumult of the Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica’s “Underground” (1995), the frantic labyrinthine surrealism of Aleksei German’s “Khrustalyov, My Car!” (1998) and the political slapstick of Armando Iannucci’s “The Death of Stalin” (2017).Unlike those three films however, “The Oak” has the quality of a personal exorcism. Made upon Pintilie’s return to Romania after years of self-imposed exile, it is a work of bottled-up fury. The movie’s mad energy suggests that Pintilie, some of whose earlier films were personally banned by Ceausescu, is pounding a stake through the dictator’s heart the better to dance on his grave.The OakApril 28 through May 4 at Film Forum in Manhattan, filmforum.org. More

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    Watch These Great Harry Belafonte Screen Performances

    While Belafonte’s cinematic output was minimal, he made an impact with each role.With the death of Harry Belafonte, America lost a musical genius and an icon of activism, who rose from a life of poverty to one of massive record sales and sellout concerts, using his fame as a performer to shed light on the causes he believed in.But Belafonte was also a major movie star, and though his cinematic output wasn’t exactly prolific — he appeared, surprisingly, in fewer than two dozen feature films during his 65-year film career — he made a memorable impression each time he was onscreen. Below are a few highlights, all available to stream.‘Carmen Jones’ (1954)Rent or buy it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Belafonte’s first leading role was only his second film appearance, after a supporting turn in the Dorothy Dandridge vehicle “Bright Road.” He reteamed with Dandridge for Otto Preminger’s film adaptation of the Oscar Hammerstein II musical “Carmen Jones,” itself an interpretation of Bizet’s classic opera “Carmen,” modernized and reimagined for an all-Black cast. The production was notoriously tempestuous, but Belafonte couldn’t have asked for a project more suited to his talents: The picture gave him the opportunity to emote and smolder in equal measure as the young soldier Joe, proving that this was no mere pop singer moonlighting in movies. This was the work of a full-fledged film star.‘The Angel Levine’ (1970)Rent or buy it on Amazon and Apple TV.Yet Belafonte’s first burst of work was short-lived. After a handful of excellent dramatic turns in the late 1950s (most notably in Robert Wise’s “Odds Against Tomorrow,” sadly unavailable to stream), Belafonte devoted his time in the 1960s to his civil rights activism. But he made a triumphant return to the screen in this delightfully odd comedy-drama, playing the title role — an honest-to-goodness guardian angel who comes down to earth to help a poor Jewish tailor (the wonderful Zero Mostel) through a patch of bad luck and bad faith. This kind of material can easily veer into either the maudlin or the blasphemous, but Belafonte’s playful yet practical performance achieves the perfect balance of winking wit and gentle lesson-learning.‘Buck and the Preacher’ (1972)Rent or buy it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.The comic chops Belafonte exhibited in “The Angel Levine” would come to define his best screen work in the 1970s. Two years later, he teamed with his fellow actor-activist Sidney Poitier for what was clearly intended as a Black riff on “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” with Poitier and Belafonte in the titular roles of Wild West outlaws leading a wagon train away from white bounty hunters. Poitier plays the straight man, as he often did in comedies, allowing Belafonte to have a blast as Reverend Willis Oaks Rutherford, a con artist masquerading as a man of the cloth. When the original director, Joseph Sargent, was fired a few days into shooting, Poitier took over directorial duties, launching a new career in film.‘Uptown Saturday Night’ (1974)Rent or buy it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Unsurprisingly, when Poitier directed his next comedy, he again approached Belafonte to participate. Poitier co-stars in this rowdy buddy action-comedy with Bill Cosby (fair warning), leaving Belafonte to steal scenes galore — no mean feat when appearing with Flip Wilson and Richard Pryor — in his uproarious turn as Geechie Dan Beauford, a hot-tempered underworld boss. With “The Godfather” fresh in the minds of moviegoers, Belafonte played the role as a spoof on Marlon Brando’s already iconic performance as Don Vito Corleone, complete with rasping voice, puffed cheeks and pencil-thin mustache. It’s an inspired piece of comic acting, and a reminder that the serious-minded performer was just as comfortable with broad, “Saturday Night Live”-style tomfoolery.‘Kansas City’ (1996)Stream it on Amazon Prime and Arrow Player. Rent or buy it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, and YouTube.Belafonte took another long break — nearly two decades — from screen acting after “Uptown,” and even then, he appeared first as himself in a pair of star-studded Robert Altman pictures (“The Player” and “Ready to Wear”). But Altman got one more great, full-length performance out of the performer with this period gangster comedy-drama, set in the city and time of the director’s youth. As the underworld boss of Kansas City, the wonderfully named and perpetually whispering Seldom Seen, Belafonte eschews his customary warmth and comic inclinations to play a genuinely menacing villain — the kind of man who never raises his voice, because he never has to. It’s a chilling and unforgettable turn, and indicates the kind of third act he could’ve had as a character actor had he chosen that path.‘Sing Your Song: Harry Belafonte’ (2012)Stream it on Vudu. Rent or buy it on Amazon and Apple TV.Instead, he chose to keep fighting. This late-in-life biographical documentary from the director Susanne Rostock, made with the participation and blessing of the man himself, veers occasionally into hagiography and skims over the messier aspects of his long and complicated life. But there’s so much to celebrate, you can hardly blame its makers. Edited at a snappy clip from a wealth of rich archival materials (film and TV clips, home movies, newsreels) and both new and archival interviews, “Sing Your Song” celebrates Belafonte the artist, but even more, celebrates the man — and a life spent working for the causes he believed in, often putting his own career and comfort at risk.‘BlacKkKlansman’ (2018)Rent or buy it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Belafonte’s final film appearance came, significantly, in a work of protest by a provocative Black filmmaker. He appears in the cameo role of the civil rights activist Jerome Turner in Spike Lee’s Oscar-winning adaptation of the Ron Stallworth memoir — but he’s also playing himself, imparting history and knowledge of the struggle for civil rights. In his single, haunting scene, Belafonte exhibits not only his skills and charisma as an actor, but the gravitas of his decades in the trenches of the struggle. More

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    ‘Centurion: The Dancing Stallion’ Review: Romance on the Ranch

    A young woman training for a horse dancing competition confronts a medical crisis in this conventional family melodrama.The art of Mexican horse dancing becomes the backdrop for a formulaic family melodrama in “Centurion: The Dancing Stallion,” which stars a stable of equine and human performers gamely mounting a Nicholas Sparks-like story line complete with romance across social classes, a conniving antagonist and grave health crises.The movie begins as the breezy Ellissia (Amber Midthunder), the daughter of a ranch owner (Billy Zane), is training to compete in a local horse dancing competition. The event may sound like fun and games — the animals are clomping crowd-pleasers — but there are also stakes: Ellissia’s family insists a top prize will put their ranch “on the map.” She finds a staunch supporter in Danny (Aramis Knight), a hunky stable hand tasked with caring for Ellissia’s newest mount: the finicky white beauty Centurion.The director, Dana Gonzales, seems at times to embrace an atmosphere of camp. A near-constant stream of slow-motion montages amplifies bouts of action or histrionics, and establishing shots of the homestead, the barn or the outlying fields seem to appear every few scenes, even if the characters have barely moved locations.During its climax, “Centurion: The Dancing Stallion” rather ambitiously aligns the fates of Ellissia and Centurion, intercutting their struggles as they confront parallel medical emergencies. The sequence briefly gestures at the intriguing idea of a psychic alliance between the pair, similar to the one in “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.” But then the moment passes, and any challenging questions are pushed aside in favor of third-act mechanics.Centurion: The Dancing StallionRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More