Aurelia Butler

Born Lola Chantrelle Mitchell, she was one of the first female rappers to build off the gangster rap image and sound that took off in the 1990s.Lola Chantrelle Mitchell, the Memphis rapper and former member of Three 6 Mafia who, as Gangsta Boo, helped define the genre in the South with her confident flows and forged a path for other female artists, died on Sunday in Memphis. She was 43.She was found dead on Sunday afternoon in a neighborhood west of Memphis International Airport, the Memphis Police Department said in a statement on Monday. “There were no immediate signs of foul play,” the police said, adding that the investigation into her death was ongoing.With clever lyrics that could be flirtatious and playful or forceful and proud, Gangsta Boo quickly established herself in the 1990s as a rising rap star who hailed from and flourished in the South. As a teenager, she joined Three 6 Mafia, an underground rap group that would go on to become one of the most influential of its era.In 1995, Gangsta Boo and the other members of the group, Juicy J and DJ Paul, released their debut album, “Mystic Stylez,” a nightmarish addition to the booming rap scene at the time. The album, part of the subgenre of rap known as horrorcore, captivated listeners with its dark references to death and murders, its eerie beats and its ominous vocals. Gangsta Boo referred to herself on the album as “the devil’s daughter,” capturing the supernatural tone of the project.Three years later, Gangsta Boo released her first solo album, “Enquiring Minds.” It featured one of her best-known hits, in which a teasing line provided both its title and a sticky and memorable hook: “Where Dem Dollas At!?”While the single hinted at a superficial sentiment, Gangsta Boo said in an interview with the website HipHop DX in 2014 that it also touched on the pressures of motherhood and raising a child.“How can you have a baby by a dude that has nothing? I feel the same,” she said. “I feel like that even more now. That’s why I don’t have kids. It’s got to be the right one and the right moment.”Lola Chantrelle Mitchell was born on Aug. 7, 1979, in Memphis. Her father, Cedric, was a postal worker, and her mother, Veronica (Lee) Mitchell, was a homemaker. She once described the world of her youth as “rough.”“I got a hood in me because I had a lot of hood friends,” she said in an interview with All Urban Central in June 2022. Her neighborhood in Memphis was called Whitehaven, but she and her friends nicknamed it Blackhaven because the area’s residents were predominantly Black.She graduated from Hillcrest High School in Memphis. While young, she met Paul Duane Beauregard, better known as DJ Paul. The two soon bonded over their love of music.Impressed by her lyricism, DJ Paul asked if she wanted to join his crew, Three 6 Mafia. She did. At 16, Gangsta Boo made her first significant leap in the music industry.“It just happened like that overnight,” she told All Urban Central, adding, “We took off kind of fast.”Gangsta Boo collaborated with Three 6 Mafia on several albums but left the group in the early 2000s to pursue a solo career.When asked why she left, she said in an interview with MTV in 2001: “There’s no problem. Sometimes people grow apart, and basically that’s what it is. There’s no drama, no beef. It’s still the same. I just kind of grew apart, and I’m not doing things that they’re doing. I’m not cursing in my music no more. We just grew apart like a marriage.”That same year, Gangsta Boo renamed herself Lady Boo — because, she said, she was not “living the gangster lifestyle” and wanted to align herself more closely with God. However, her website still referred to her as Gangsta Boo at her death.The makeup of Three 6 Mafia evolved over the years. In 2006, after Gangsta Boo’s departure, the group won an Oscar for best original song with “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” from the film “Hustle & Flow.”Later in her career, Gangsta Boo collaborated with numerous rappers, especially those with roots in the South.She told Billboard last year that “as far as female hip-hop and rap, I think it’s in a good space.”“They say, ‘Gangsta Boo walked so a lot of people can run,’” she added.Gangsta Boo is survived by her mother and two brothers, Eric and Tarik.As she aged, Gangsta Boo reflected on having been one of the first female rappers to build off the gangster rap image and sound that took off in the 1990s, singing about smoking, payback and villainous intentions — themes typically reserved for men.“A lot of guys in Memphis was like ‘Gangsta Pat,’ ‘Gangsta Black’ — gangsta this, gangsta that,” she told All Urban Central.But toward the end of her life, the moniker had taken on an enhanced meaning.“It’s more, you know, just enjoying my life as a legendary gangster,” she said.Livia Albeck-Ripka More

“There are all these unbelievable artists who are creating work that’s really hard to define,” Beth Morrison, a music theater impresario, said during a recent interview. “It’s the work that falls between disciplines, that is beautiful and strange and challenging, and there’s so little space for that in New York right now.”Morrison, the leader of Beth Morrison Projects, produces exactly those types of works — operas and other pieces that can approach cabaret, concert or musical forms but defy categorization — with white-hot fervor, particularly as one of the founders of the Prototype Festival, which started 10 years ago and returns on Thursday with seven shows as idiosyncratic and fearlessly strange as ever.The niche that Prototype occupies on the New York performing arts calendar — something of a purely musical cousin to the Under the Radar theater festival, also this month — has become increasingly essential as Lincoln Center moves away from presenting festivals that would have hosted chamber and avant-garde operas, for example, or as small theaters nurture new works with an eye toward Broadway.Things weren’t much better when Prototype, created by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE, took shape with the help of a Mellon Foundation grant. “There wasn’t much,” said Kim Whitener, a founding director (and formerly of HERE), who is now an independent producer. “There didn’t seem to be a space for this really important work.”Over the years, Prototype has put on black box productions and works in progress, and expanded to theaters across the city as its operas grew in scale, like “Dog Days” and “Breaking the Waves.” During the pandemic, it commissioned streaming projects. And last year, when the Omicron variant’s spread led to the festival’s cancellation mere days before its start, it adapted yet again, finding ways to salvage much of its programming.Du Yun and Royce Vavrek’s “Angel’s Bone” (2016), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. This year, Du Yun has a new chamber opera, written for and starring the baritone Nathan Gunn.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesA scene from Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins’s “Prism,” another Pulitzer winner.Maria BaranovaAlong the way, it has been an early supporter of artists like Taylor Mac and Rugile Barzdziukaite, Vaiva Grainyte and Lina Lapelyte — the Lithuanian trio that went on to global recognition, and critical adoration, with its opera “Sun and Sea.” Two Prototype shows, the Du Yun and Royce Vavrek opera “Angel’s Bone,” and Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins’s “Prism,” have won the Pulitzer Prize for Music.Du Yun is back this year with the chamber opera “In Our Daughter’s Eyes,” written for and starring the baritone Nathan Gunn; other productions include Emma O’Halloran’s double bill “Trade/Mary Motorhead,” the vocalist Gelsey Bell’s “mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning],” Silvana Estrada’s “Marchita,” David Lang’s “note to a friend,” the streaming opera “Undine” and the 10th anniversary celebration “The All Sing ‘Here Lies Joy.’”Morrison and Whitener — along with Kristin Marting, HERE’s artistic director, who was among Prototypes founders and leads it with Morrison today, and Jecca Barry, a former director who was on the 2023 edition’s curatorial team — discussed Prototype’s past and present in a group video call. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Over the past decade, what kind of influence have you observed Prototype having on the industry?JECCA BARRY We’ve seen, across the country, other opera companies that have started their own festivals or explored the idea of second stages — other venues, like black box theaters. The first partnership show that we did with Los Angeles Opera was “Dog Days,” and that was at Redcat [a 200-seat theater]. L.A. Opera told us that 70 percent of the audience that came to see that had never set foot in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion [the company’s much-larger home]. It’s actually about creating a totally different audience, and really, that’s so important for opera companies these days.KRISTIN MARTING That’s about both form and content. I feel like the festival spans this spectrum of work. There’s a crossover thing that’s happening, and that’s because so many of the artists that we’re working with are not trying to stay within the lines. Then the second thing about content: I just feel like what we’re really interested in is socially relevant work that resonates with people — a whole range of people, told by a whole ranges of voices. I think that’s also something that the industry has been incorporating, happily, after so long of it being monochromatic.How would you say the New York cultural landscape changed during Prototype’s history, and what has that meant for the festival’s mission?BETH MORRISON It’s almost impossible right now to get opera programs at any of the venues in town. With Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Metropolitan Opera is doing new work, finally, but there’s a whole host of work that is being created for smaller stages and other kinds of stages that the big presenters aren’t doing here. And for a company like us, that doesn’t have a performing space, it’s freaking hard. Our stuff used to be at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and that’s completely shifted. Lincoln Center is not doing opera. The Shed’s not doing it. That means we can only get our stuff done in our festival when we self-present it, and I think that’s a real shame.BARRY The creative impulses are there. I mean, it’s incredible how many young composers want to write their first opera right out of the gate.KIM WHITENER They’re finding their niches elsewhere. I just think that we’re in a time of such great sea change; it’s really more that what we’re talking about with the loss of New York is the sense of a real footprint, you know, for opera theater in the way we used to have.Thinking about the pandemic, changing audience habits and new ways of presenting opera, how has the festival adapted?MORRISON We were really proud of what we did in ’21 with the commissions to composers to create work in a digital space, and making sure that we had a presence and an impact in our community’s lives at a time when we were all so locked down. Last year really sucked, though — to have the festival canceled a week before we opened was completely devastating. We lost a couple hundred thousand dollars because we paid all the artists. We managed to do three of the shows later in the year and then moved other things to this January. But I think that this year’s festival has come together really beautifully as a result.What effect, if any, has the festival’s success with awards like the Pulitzer Prize had on how it operates?MARTING I think we’re taking the same risks.MORRISON What we’re committed to is letting the artists lead and sort of walking hand-in-hand and bringing their visions to the fore. That recognition’s incredible, and I think we’re all thrilled that we were able to produce and present that work.BARRY But I think it’s also a testament to flexibility. So many companies that are developing new work, especially big institutions, are very rigid in their structures of what that looks like and what that timeline is, and that is not the way any producer on this screen works. Both of the pieces that won the Pulitzer took more time than we originally thought they were going to and got rescheduled and rescheduled.There’s this wonderful point when an artist says, “Can I really do that?” And to be able to say, “Yes, you can try that idea,” and then, on the flip side, to have the audience come in and say, “I didn’t know you could do that with opera.” Being able to empower artists to take those risks and then being able to see the audience, it’s so satisfying.MORRISON With “Dog Days” in particular, and with what Jecca just said — it reminds me of the phone call that I got from David T. Little when he was writing it, saying: “I don’t think the last 20 minutes has any words. Is that OK?” I love that phone call. That’s the best phone call ever, because they want the permission to go in a completely boundary-pushing direction, and that’s what we want.WHITENER When you really trust the artist, they in turn trust you. They’re putting this really raw, alien thing in your hands and trusting you to see it through.BARRY And from that, we then trust the audiences. We are putting that work out there and trusting audiences to come on that ride with us, and we certainly have no expectation that everybody who shows up to every Prototype show every year is going to love it all.There are a lot of world premieres at the festival this year. But we’re still dealing with Covid and flu outbreaks. How confident are you that Prototype is truly back?BARRY We have community agreements that we’re asking everyone to adhere to to keep themselves as safe as possible. We do daily testing. We do PCR weekly. Anyone who is not performing is masked in rehearsal. So, we take a lot of precautions. Our fingers are crossed that we’ll be able to offer all the performances that we want to offer audiences this January.WHITENER The opening night kind of thing — the big gathering of all the artists, getting together and partying — that’s definitely not happening right now. As a field, we are missing that a lot. You hear everybody saying that: how much they miss the community. More

Questlove, Dawn Richard and a range of other musicians, writers and critics share their favorites from the experimental pianist, organist and bandleader’s wide-ranging catalog.Lately The New York Times has asked jazz musicians, writers and scholars to share the favorites that would make a friend fall in love with Duke Ellington, Alice Coltrane, bebop, Ornette Coleman and jazz vocals.Now we’re putting the spotlight on Sun Ra, the experimental pianist, organist and bandleader whose idiosyncratic blend of jazz imagined life on other planets. Born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, Ala., he wore ornate robes and Egyptian headgear, and composed progressive music meant to commune with Saturn, a place he said he felt a connection with after an out-of-body experience in college. “My whole body was changed into something else,” Sun Ra once said. “I could see through myself.” He said aliens spoke to him: “They would teach me some things that when it looked like the world was going into complete chaos, when there was no hope for nothing, then I could speak, but not until then. I would speak, and the world would listen.” In turn, Sun Ra’s music centered on space travel as a form of Black liberation. He believed Black people would never find freedom on Earth, and that real emancipation resided in the cosmos. Over the course of his career, Sun Ra recorded more than 200 albums with his band — called the Arkestra — before his death in 1993 at 79.Sun Ra’s music can be challenging — both artistically and through the intimidating size of his discography. So while this isn’t a comprehensive list (what could be?), the songs chosen here by a range of musicians, writers and critics represent a cross-section of swing, fusion and free jazz. Enjoy listening to the excerpts or the full playlist at the bottom of the article, and be sure to leave your own Sun Ra favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Nicole Mitchell, creative flutist“El Is a Sound of Joy” has a symphonically blue, melodious, laid-back vibe that expresses the core of Sun Ra’s soul — his incredible love for Black folks. His piano solo knocks with grace through the changes that life puts us through in a mellow tempo that resists the stressful segregation and poverty that the Black community faced in Chicago in 1956, when this song was recorded. Just as Ra’s founding of the Saturn record label was a model for self-determination, “El Is a Sound of Joy” — a central track on this first Saturn album, “Super-Sonic Jazz” — is a mission statement that sings of our audacity to be beautiful. “El,” meaning “might, strength and power” in Hebrew, and a distinction of wisdom for the Moors, ties philosophical wisdom with sound intended to liberate. Climbing effortlessly through whole tones, on the backdrop of baritone blues shouts, we levitate into ethereal pleasantries. It’s the sound offered for our saving.“El Is a Sound of Joy — a.k.a. El Is the Sound of Joy”Sun Ra and His Arkestra (Enterplanetary Koncepts)◆ ◆ ◆Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, musicianMost of this song is a chant: “You made a mistake. You did something wrong. Now make another mistake and do something right.” This is a mantra I live by, and also a destination I arrived at even before I knew this song. I have made my art, and also made a career, and also made a living by developing a musical style that seems like it is a mistake. What Sun Ra is saying is that we shouldn’t think of mistakes in the way that they have traditionally been thought of, that we shouldn’t place a negative value on them but rather a positive one. Prince used to say something similar to Wendy Melvoin: When you make a mistake, repeat it twice so that it looks purposeful. Two lefts (or maybe three) make a right. I believe in this message and this method so much that this song has become one of my rare meditation soundtracks that’s not a binaural beat.“Make Another Mistake”Sun Ra and His Arkestra (Enterplanetary Koncepts)◆ ◆ ◆John Szwed, Sun Ra biographerKnown mostly for what he called sounds of the future, Sun Ra was also devoted to the music of his youth, and sometimes mixed late 1920s swing into his wildest music. No surprise, then, that when in 1988 the producer Hal Willner asked him to be part of the album “Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films,” he agreed to do it. Willner suggested a song from the 1941 film “Dumbo” during which the little misfit elephant gets drunk. Once Sun Ra watched the film, and saw Dumbo hallucinating elephants leaping into space and traveling over pyramids and past some Egypto-images, he declared that he understood the plight of the misunderstood, rewrote the arrangement he was given, and recorded a strikingly straight performance of “Pink Elephants on Parade” with the whole band singing. It was no joke: a year later he would record his own full-length Disney tribute album, “Second Star to the Right.”“Pink Elephants on Parade”Sun Ra and His Arkestra (A&M)◆ ◆ ◆Dawn Richard, musician“Space Loneliness No. 2” creates a frequency and vibration that sets me afire. The uncomfortable spaces and eerie chord pairings feel like actual bridges to space. It encompasses this black hole of sound while also giving you a vivid picture of isolation. (Before this, the song “The Cosmo-Fire,” with its brightly colored cadence and percussion, gave me that same feeling.) “Space Loneliness No. 2” is a fitting sonic description of the seclusion one feels during a global pandemic and political turmoil. It explains a time we all felt isolated, and this song speaks not only to my personal emotional journey, but to the brilliance and genius of Sun Ra, and his ability to constantly reflect the time while being light years ahead of it.“Space Loneliness No. 2”Sun Ra and His Arkestra (Strut)◆ ◆ ◆David Renard, Times senior editorIf I want to clear out the mind’s cobwebs, I’m putting on a long piece like “Atlantis” and letting it blow my hair back. But what if the vibe is more “zipping with the top down through an Afrofuturist spy movie”? Sun Ra has you covered there, too. “The Perfect Man” was released in 1974, on a single on Sun Ra’s own El Saturn label, paired with the jaunty, bluesy chant “I’m Gonna Unmask the Batman.” (No one can accuse the Arkestra of lacking a sense of humor.) On this B side, a simple cymbal-and-snare pattern sets things up for Sun Ra’s space-age explorations on a Moog synthesizer, accompanied by more earthbound, tuneful horns — funky minimalism at its finest.“The Perfect Man”Sun Ra Arkestra (Strut)◆ ◆ ◆Rob Mazurek, musicianSun Ra’s “Disco 3000” was culled from live recordings from Milan in 1978. The title track moves from Ra’s infectious bass lines, to free excursion, to ingenious use of rhythm machine and arpeggiator, creating this outer/inner sound unlike anything else. One gets the impression that Sun Ra is playing the past, present and future in one fell swoop, his mighty organ being played as if it’s some kind of time-travel device. It’s a seeming precursor to future studio cutup technique (although played live!), with stellar solos by the great John Gilmore and Michael Ray, and the colorful, propulsive drumming of Luqman Ali. A quartet performance that is orchestrated perfectly by Ra. We are even treated to a short shouted chorus of Sun Ra’s most famous hymn, “Space Is the Place.” If you are looking for a deep cut to take you somewhere else, frequencies to expand the mind, and at the same time absolutely relevant to now, then this is it.“Disco 3000”Sun Ra and His Arkestra (Enterplanetary Koncepts)◆ ◆ ◆Amirtha Kidambi, musician“Saturnian Queen of the Sun Ra Arkestra” (2019) is the only collection of June Tyson recordings, an odd thing considering her ubiquity in the Sun Ra universe. The inimitable Tyson was the voice of the Arkestra from 1967 until her untimely death in 1992. Now, 30 years later, Tyson is still one of the underrated vocalists of the idiom. I’ve personally been waiting for the June Tyson Renaissance for a while now, having soaked up her influence in my own singing, and in my work with Darius Jones in Angels & Demons, centered on the cosmological writings of Sun Ra. Ra wrote hundreds of poems, a practice serious enough for him to send them to publishers apart from their use as lyrics in his music. I spent much of the early pandemic period studying Tyson’s incisive delivery and analyzing these poems, whose prescient themes resonate even more potently today. “Satellites Are Spinning” is a bizarre, insistent little ditty built on an unstable augmented chord, with dissonant horn swells and an accompaniment that feels disjointed from Tyson’s vocal melody. In this chromatic field, Tyson pierces through with an angular yet characteristically bluesy line, “We sing this song to abolish sorrow.” I think the word “abolish” is key here. Abolition, for a better tomorrow, if only the Earth would awaken.“Satellites Are Spinning”June Tyson (with the Sun Ra Arkestra) (Modern Harmonic)◆ ◆ ◆Marcus J. Moore, jazz writerSun Ra’s “Shadow World,” from a 1970 concert at Fondation Maeght in the south of France, sounds like a subway car barreling underground, its cascading drums and squealing horns coalescing in turbulent harmony. It’s free jazz and psych-rock, cacophonous and dulcet. Midway through the song, Sun Ra cuts through the din with an organ solo beamed in from Saturn, giving it an otherworldly feel. Equally aggressive and brave, it’s the type of song needed this time of year in a cold-weather city, when the sun fades too soon and nothing shields you from the unforgiving chill. But I think that’s why I love the song: Like much of Sun Ra’s music, it’s uninhibited, and the crescendo reminds me of another personal favorite — Common’s “Jimi Was a Rock Star” — as an orchestral gem conjuring ancestors in the most frenetic way imaginable. That it upholds creative vision while confounding listeners is a plus. Nothing impactful comes from playing it safe.“Shadow World”Sun Ra and His Arkestra (Cosmic Myth Records)◆ ◆ ◆Andy Beta, writerAs a punk/alternative kid, noise was what originally pulled me into Sun Ra’s orbit, his use of terrestrial instrumentation to conjure sounds both astral and alien. But as the late Detroit house and techno producer Mike Huckaby once told me: “Most of what he is playing is not noise,” noting instead the man’s uncanny ability to blend chaos and tenderness in his music. Nowhere is that balance better documented than on a run of albums Ra recorded in 1979 for his El Saturn label, capped with “Sleeping Beauty,” which leans slightly toward the latter element. Some 28 musicians in total are credited, but on “Springtime Again,” they move as a single unit. The Arkestra’s sound is airy, dreamy, drifting, voices like a sigh. Here, Ra is not so much concerned with the cosmos, but with that most wondrous earthly delight, the return of spring.“Springtime Again”Sun Ra and His Intergalactic Myth Science Solar Arkestra (Enterplanetary Koncepts)◆ ◆ ◆Jes Skolnik, writer, editor and musicianThe B-side and title track of the album “Atlantis” isn’t exactly an easy piece, but it is one to which I return frequently. Recorded live at the Olatunji Center of African Culture in Harlem in 1967 — Ra and the Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji were good friends, bonded by musical inclinations and similar ideas around the importance of African and broader Black diasporic art — it was condensed down to just over 20 minutes from roughly 45. Ra’s keyboard improvisations here are aggressive and discordant, representing the titular ancient civilization being overwhelmed by the forces of the natural world; as the band finally enters the shattered landscape about 10 minutes in, one can see visions of the future built among the wreckage of the past.“Atlantis”Sun Ra and His Astro Infinity Arkestra (Enterplanetary Koncepts)◆ ◆ ◆keiyaA, musicianIf jazz is a language, then Sun Ra’s Arkestra was my introduction to the practice of speaking freely, intentionally objecting to traditional notions of form and communicating outside of them. Conscientious objection is something in which June Tyson is an expert, especially shown in my favorite tune of theirs, “Somebody Else’s World.” The opening organ line is the opening of a grand ceremony. June enters haunting and assured, a lesson in Southern Gothic. She sings a translucent “ah,” a melody, and then the lyrics:“Somebody else’s idea of somebody else’s world is not my idea of things as they are. Somebody else’s idea of things to come need not be the only way to vision the future.”June continues to bellow, with pulsating “ah”s, the band expanding and retracting. It’s so beautiful and consuming! She ends by humming the melody, giving us room to meditate on what’s been said. Hearing this for the first time felt like holding a ton of bricks; it’s heavy as hell, to be reminded and assured that we can (must?) shape the world to be what we believe it to be and not inherently what it is. I’d always known (and been intimidated by) Sun Ra’s work to reference life outside of this world, but June’s voice alongside his gave me a framework on what to do with this world. Long live Sun Ra and the Saturnian Queen — I am truly, truly thankful for them.“Somebody Else’s World — a.k.a. Somebody Else’s Idea”Sun Ra and His Astro Infinity Arkestra (Enterplanetary Koncepts)◆ ◆ ◆◆ ◆ ◆ More