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      Oasis and Stone Roses Musicians Team Up, and 7 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by A.G. Cook, Mary Timony, Bela Fleck and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes), and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Liam Gallagher and John Squire, ‘Just Another Rainbow’If you’ve ever wondered what Liam Gallagher fronting the Stone Roses would have sounded like — and don’t just say “Oasis” — have I got a song for you. The snarl-lipped Gallagher joins forces with the singular Stone Roses guitarist John Squire on “Just Another Rainbow,” the first single from a forthcoming collaborative project, and naturally the two Manchester musicians make immediate sonic sense together. “Red and orange, yellow and green, blue, indigo, violet,” Gallagher sings in his unmistakable lilt — seriously, this song has Liam Gallagher singing the colors of the rainbow. But Squire ultimately ascends into the spotlight in the track’s second half, projecting his towering, prismatic riffs across the sky. LINDSAY ZOLADZSmallgod featuring Black Sherif, ‘Fallen Angel’We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Review: The Philharmonic’s Maestro Revels in the Classics

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      Jaap van Zweden returned to the orchestra for the first time since October with a conservative lineup of works by Wagner, Beethoven and Brahms.With the new year, it’s the homestretch for Jaap van Zweden’s six-year tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic, which ends this spring.But even on their way out, chief conductors don’t lead their orchestras that much. Before this week, van Zweden hadn’t been on the Philharmonic’s podium since early October, and after Sunday he won’t return until mid-March.So Thursday’s concert at David Geffen Hall was an island in a sea of guest batons. And it was about as van Zweden-esque as a program could be, consisting of nothing but standards: the kind of music that this maestro most relishes, and what he was brought to New York to enforce discipline in.These days, if a major orchestra is going to play classic repertoire like Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto and Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, as the Philharmonic did on Thursday, it tends to precede it with a short contemporary piece in the opening slot. Window dressing, maybe, but it’s become the norm.So it was almost radical to instead give that position to the Act I Prelude from Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” probably the most-played chestnut of the evening. (For what it’s worth, audiences don’t seem to mind: The weekend’s run of four performances — rather than the usual three — is all but sold out.)The Wagner turned out to be the weakest point in an otherwise very fine concert. This was a flowing, not stodgy, take on the “Meistersinger” prelude, bringing the winds and brasses to the fore, their lines audible even in passages that usually spotlight the rich strings. While the sound wasn’t heavy, especially at loud dynamics it still emphasized the unpleasant way that, in densely massed music, the stark lucidity of Geffen Hall’s acoustics can tip into brittle blare rather than warm blend.This was less of a problem for the pared-down ensemble in the Beethoven concerto, though both here and in the Brahms, there was sleekness in the high strings without meaty heft; I kept wanting more depth to the violin sound. But there was considerable spirit and some evocative hushed playing. Again and again in the concerto, van Zweden cast a dreamlike glow without losing rhythmic tightness or momentum.And the performance boasted an immaculate soloist in Rudolf Buchbinder, nearing 80 and playing with patrician reserve and clarity, neither indulgent nor detached. At the start of the second movement, his tone was poignantly wounded in the face of orchestral aggression; in the finale, he was the ensemble’s graceful partner.The Brahms symphony was also clean and straightforward: precisely done, its tempos reasonable. The second movement developed eloquently from muted and funereal to noble and grand before a hearty third, and a fourth that was more sober and reflective than raging. This wasn’t a thrilling performance, but it was a considered and satisfying one.And it was part of a trend. When van Zweden last led the Philharmonic, in October, on the program was Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto and Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony. In those pieces and on Thursday, I didn’t feel the rigidly tense, mannered, punchy quality that has marred some of his performances. This Beethoven and Brahms were strong without being overbearing, shaped but with room to breathe.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Sunday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Willa Cather and Yehudi Menuhin: An Unlikely, Unwavering Friendship

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      These two titans of 20th-century literature and music formed a profound, yearslong relationship across generations and backgrounds.Early in 1935, a blizzard blew through New York City. The storm was so fierce, it virtually emptied Central Park. But Willa Cather spent her morning there, sledding with the violin prodigy Yehudi Menuhin and his sisters.Afterward, they all went to the Ansonia Hotel on the Upper West Side, where the Menuhins were living, for an intimate lunch — just the family, the violinist Sam Franko and Cather, along with her companion, Edith Lewis. “It was a lovely party, with the whole world outside lost in snow,” Cather, the author of American classics like “My Ántonia” and “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” wrote to her friend Carrie Miner Sherwood. “Inside, perfect harmony!”This idyll gets a passing mention in Benjamin Taylor’s brisk new biography, “Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather,” though it was one of many in the yearslong friendship of Menuhin and Cather, two titans of 20th-century culture — he a musician and she a writer whose works exude a passion for music.Their relationship was an unlikely one. Menuhin was a famous child with a busy performance schedule; Cather, several decades older, was in retreat from the modern world and skeptical of celebrity (even her own). Yet across generations and backgrounds, they formed a deep bond. She gave him a literary education, while he fed her love of music. With both of their lives in motion, they were a mutual source of stability and support, whether he was storing his sled in her Park Avenue apartment building or they were leaning on each other through loss, heartbreak and infirmity.They met when Menuhin was a young teenager, in 1930; both were in Paris and she was introduced to his family by shared friends. Cather was also struck by his younger sisters, writing to her nieces that the girls, Hephzibah and Yaltah, musicians too, were “almost as gifted and quite as handsome as he.”The next year, back in the United States, Menuhin was on a West Coast tour that coincided with Cather’s visit to her mother in Pasadena, Calif., and the two picked up where they had left off. Cather was so taken with Menuhin that she wanted to dedicate her next novel, “Shadows on the Rock,” to him and his siblings.A profile of her published that August in The New Yorker — one that described her prose “as surely counterpointed as music” — said that she “picked her intimates with care,” and that “she admires big careers and ambitious, strong characters, especially if they are the careers and characters of women. The most fortunate and most exciting of human beings, to her mind, is a singer with a pure, big voice and unerring musical taste.”The Menuhin children, instrumentalists born in America to Lithuanian Jews, didn’t fit that bill exactly, but enough for a quickly flourishing relationship. They called Cather Aunt Willa, and she loved them as if they were family. She kept what her friend Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant remembered as “a melting, angelic photograph of young Yehudi Menuhin” prominently displayed in her apartment, and frequently crossed Central Park to spend time with him and his sisters at the Ansonia.In his memoir, “Unfinished Journey,” Menuhin wrote that Cather was “a rock of strength and sweetness,” but also that “her strength had a patience and evenness which did not preclude a certain severity.”“Her mannish figure and country tweediness, her let’s-lay-it-on-the-table manners and unconcealed blue eyes, her rosy skin and energetic demeanor,” Menuhin wrote, “bespoke a phenomenon as strangely comforting to us all as it was foreign, something in the grain like Christian Temperance or the Girl Scout movement.” (The New Yorker said that she, “in spite of her Irish-Alsatian ancestry, her American upbringing, has a strain of Tartar in her temperament.”)Cather, right, traveling to Europe in 1902 with others including, at left, Isabelle McClung, who would later introduce Cather to Menuhin.University of Nebraska-LincolnCather gave Menuhin books of Heinrich Heine’s poetry and Goethe’s “Faust” in German, and would pick up used copies of Shakespeare plays for him and his sisters. “In our apartment,” Menuhin wrote, “there was a little room, nobody’s property in particular, small enough to be cozy, and furnished with a table around which Aunt Willa, Hephzibah, Yaltah, myself and often Aunt Willa’s companion, Edith Lewis, gathered for Shakespearean readings, each taking several parts, and Aunt Willa commenting on the language and situations in such a way as to draw us into her own pleasure and excitement.”She was, Menuhin thought, “the embodiment of America — but an America which has long ago disappeared.” Still, with a Henry James-like sensibility, treasuring new-world determination and hope alongside old-world refinement and tradition, she also impressed upon them European values. Through their peripatetic lives they occupied both cultures; and for them, she was a bridge.Even as Menuhin became an adult and Cather’s writing fixated increasingly on the past, their relationship remained strong. He would send her flowers and orange trees in winter. She would notify friends of his New York concerts and radio broadcasts. They went to “Parsifal” at the Metropolitan Opera, and saw Paul Robeson and Uta Hagen in “Othello” on Broadway. No matter the weather, they enjoyed walks in Central Park; her favorite path took them around the reservoir.Cather was protective of his reputation. In letters, she reminded people that “anything about my doings with the Menuhins is confidential,” and once wrote, “I scarcely dare whisper any fact or opinion about them for fear of seeing myself quoted in The New York Times.” (She was, beyond this, so private that she didn’t want any of her correspondence, as well as the draft of her unfinished final novel, to survive her death.)When Menuhin was navigating young love, Cather was a font of advice — “I always have your future very much at heart,” she told him in one letter — and gushed over his marriage to Nola Nicholas. “No artist ever made such a fortunate marriage,” Cather wrote to her friend Zoë Akins. “Yehudi loves goodness more than anything, (I mean beautiful goodness) and she has it.”When Cather was homebound for four weeks with bronchitis, Yehudi and Nola Menuhin visited her nearly every day; he tended to the fire, and she made tea. He was even more of a solace as Cather experienced loss: the deaths of her brothers and of her old friend Isabelle McClung Hambourg, who had introduced Cather and Menuhin.Little, however, could lift her from the depressive isolation that followed her surgery for breast cancer in early 1946. She wasn’t seeing any friends, “not even Yehudi,” and wasn’t even listening to music, she wrote to her sister-in-law Meta Cather. “I have simply had, for the present, to cut out all the things I loved most.”Cather would make it out again; her last night on the town was to see Menuhin play at Carnegie Hall. Then, in March 1947, he visited her at home with his two children. Hephzibah was there, too, with her husband and two boys. “Here we all were (the children only were new), the rest of us were sitting in these rooms just as we used to meet here every week 10 and 12 years ago,” Cather recounted in a letter the next day.The Menuhins were stopping by on their way to board the Queen Elizabeth. About an hour an a half before it was to set sail, they “quietly rose,” Cather recalled, then “without any flurry, dropped in the elevator to the street floor.” Seemingly understood but unspoken was that this would be the last time they saw one another. Cather died in April.In the letter about that final visit, Cather said that this friendship had been “one of the chief interests and joys of my life.” She went as far as to say that she would rather have almost any other chapter of her life left out than that of her time with Menuhin and his sisters. Even then, as adults, they felt like dear children to her, Aunt Willa.“Today,” she said at the end of the letter, “these rooms seem actually full of their presence and their faithful, loving friendship.” More

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      Rage Against the Machine Won’t Tour Again, Says Brad Wilk

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      A staple of 1990s rock music, Rage has disbanded before, including when its frontman quit in 2000. His recent leg injury forced the band to cancel its latest tour.The rock band Rage Against the Machine is done touring and playing live shows, its drummer said in a social media post on Wednesday.The band previously canceled the remaining performances of a reunion tour of Europe and North America that had been delayed by the pandemic and were planned for 2022 and 2023. They will not be rescheduled.“While there has been some communication that this may be happening in the future,” the drummer, Brad Wilk, wrote on Instagram, “I want to let you know that RATM (Tim, Zack, Tom and I) will not be touring or playing live again.”“I’m sorry for those of you who have been waiting for this to happen,” he continued. “I really wish it was.” He added in the caption: “Thank you to every person who has ever supported us.”The band, which was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in November, did not immediately respond to a request for comment overnight.Wilk and his bandmates, vocalist Zack de la Rocha, bassist Tim Commerford and guitarist Tom Morello, formed the group in 1991. The first public performance was in “somebody’s living room” in Orange County, Calif., according to the group’s website.Rage rose to fame throughout the 1990s with a style that fused metal, punk rock, funk and hip-hop. The band was a commercial success and won critical acclaim, including two Grammy Awards and seven nominations. Its songs were featured in the soundtracks of the 1999 film “The Matrix” and the 2003 sequel, “The Matrix Reloaded.”The band also embraced a leftist political message — the lyrics of its 1992 song “Know Your Enemy” denounced “compromise, conformity, assimilation, submission, ignorance, hypocrisy, brutality, the elite” — and held occasional onstage protests.In 1996, while promoting its second album, “Evil Empire,” the band tried to hang upside-down American flags on its amps during a two-song set on “Saturday Night Live,” a performance that was cut short. At the Woodstock ’99 festival, Commerford burned the flag during a performance of “Killing in the Name.”And in 2000, the band members were escorted from the site of the New York Stock Exchange by security officers after they tried to gain entry into the building while shooting a music video for their song “Sleep Now in the Fire.” The band has split up before, including in 2000, at the height of its success.“I feel that it is now necessary to leave Rage because our decision-making process has completely failed,” de la Rocha wrote in a statement at the time. “It is no longer meeting the aspirations of all four of us collectively as a band and from my perspective, has undermined our artistic and political ideal.”The band’s members did not perform together again until 2007, when they headlined the final day of the Coachella music festival. They later toured in the United States, Europe and South America.Rage took another hiatus in 2011. Wilk later said in an interview with Pulse Radio that the band’s performance at the L.A. Rising festival that year would be “our last show.”During the pandemic, Morello wrote a newsletter for The New York Times about music and his life.In July 2022, the band played its first concert in 11 years, in Wisconsin. That was the start of its “Public Service Announcement” Tour, originally been scheduled for 2020 but delayed by the pandemic.Rage canceled its remaining tour dates in North America and Europe months after announcing that tickets were on sale. De la Rocha said the reason was that he had torn his left Achilles’ tendon.“I still look down at my leg in disbelief,” he said in a statement in October 2022. “Two years of waiting through the pandemic, hoping we would have an opening to be a band again and continue the work we started 30 some odd years ago.” More

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      T.I. and Tiny Are Accused of Rape in Lawsuit

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      The Atlanta rapper and his wife, who have denied the allegations, are accused of drugging and assaulting a military veteran around 2005 in a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles on Tuesday.The Atlanta rapper T.I., born Clifford Harris, was sued on Tuesday, along with his wife, Tameka Harris, known as Tiny, by a woman who accused the couple of drugging and raping her after she met them at a Los Angeles nightclub around 2005.In the lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court under California’s Sexual Abuse and Cover-Up Accountability Act, which extended the statute of limitations for sexual abuse claims, the woman is identified only as Jane Doe, a veteran of the U.S. Air Force, who was 22 or 23 years old at the time. She previously gave her account of the alleged assault and its aftermath in an interview with The New York Times in 2021, when she spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her family.In her lawsuit, the woman accuses Mr. Harris, 43, and Ms. Harris, 48, of sexual battery, battery, sexual assault, negligence, false imprisonment and intentional infliction of emotional distress, and is seeking damages.In a statement provided by a lawyer for the couple, Andrew B. Brettler, Mr. and Ms. Harris denied the accusations, calling the civil suit a shakedown. “This plaintiff has been threatening to file this lawsuit for three years,” the statement said. “For three years, we have emphatically and categorically denied these allegations. For three years we have maintained our innocence and refused to pay these extortionate demands for things we didn’t do.”They added, “We are innocent of these fake claims, we will not be shaken down and we look forward to our day in court.”Prosecutors in Los Angeles had previously declined to pursue criminal charges against the Harrises in this incident, citing the statute of limitations. “Without the strengths and weaknesses of the evidence being evaluated, the case is declined due to the expiration,” the Los Angeles County authorities wrote in a charge evaluation filing in September 2021.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Mixtapes, T-Shirts and Even a Typeface Measure the Rise of Hip-Hop

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      For the last year, celebrations of hip-hop’s first five decades have attempted to capture the genre in full, but some early stars and scenes all but disappeared long before anyone came looking to fete them. Three excellent books published in recent months take up the task of cataloging hip-hop’s relics, the objects that embody its history, before they slip away.In the lovingly assembled, thoughtfully arranged “Do Remember! The Golden Era of NYC Hip-Hop Mixtapes,” Evan Auerbach and Daniel Isenberg wisely taxonomize the medium into distinct micro-eras, tracking innovations in form and also content — beginning with live recordings of party performances and D.J. sets and ending with artists using the format to self-distribute and self-promote.For over a decade, cassettes were the coin of the realm in mixtapes, even after CDs usurped them in popularity: They were mobile, durable and easily duplicated. (More than one D.J. rhapsodizes over the Telex cassette duplicator.)Each new influential D.J. found a way to push the medium forward — Brucie B talks about personalizing tapes for drug dealers in Harlem; Doo Wop recalls gathering a boatload of exclusive freestyles for his “95 Live” and in one memorable section; Harlem’s DJ S&S details how he secured some of his most coveted unreleased songs, sometimes angering the artists in the process.The book covers some D.J.s who were known for their mixing, like Ron G, and some who were known for breaking new music, like DJ Clue. Some, like Stretch Armstrong & Bobbito, whose late-night radio shows were widely bootlegged before they began distributing copies themselves, managed both.Left: A collection of original Ron G mixtape covers. Right: Lyrics from the Notorious B.I.G. shouting out mixtape D.J.s.Sonny Figueroa/The New York TimesHandwritten Kid Capri mixtapes. Sonny Figueroa/The New York TimesMixtapes were big business — one striking two-page photo documents a handwritten inventory list from Rock ’n’ Will’s, a storied shop in Harlem, which showed the breadth of stock on display. Tape Kingz formalized and helped export mixtapes globally, and more than one D.J. remarks about being shocked to see their tapes available for sale when they traveled to Japan.Mixtapes were the site of early innovations that ended up crucial to the industry as a whole, whether it was proving the effectiveness of street-corner promotion or, via blend tapes in the late ’80s and early ’90s, setting the table for hip-hop’s cross-pollination with R&B.Eventually, the format was co-opted as a vehicle for record labels like Bad Boy and Roc-a-Fella to introduce new music, or artists like 50 Cent and the Diplomats to release songs outside of label obligations. (The book effectively ends before the migration of mixtapes to the internet, and doesn’t include the contributions of the South.) Even now, the legacy of mixtapes endures, the phrase a kind of shorthand for something immediate, unregulated and possibly ephemeral. But “Do Remember!” makes clear they belong to posterity, too.That same pathway from informal to formal, from casual art to big business, was traveled by hip-hop’s promotional merchandise, particularly the T-shirt. That story is told over and again in “Rap Tees Volume 2: A Collection of Hip-Hop T-shirts & More 1980-2005,” by the well-known collector DJ Ross One.A collection of Public Enemy merchandise; the group was one of the most forward-thinking when it came to selling its brand. Sonny Figueroa/The New York TimesA collection of merchandise from Harlem’s Diplomats crew. Sonny Figueroa/The New York TimesIt’s a pocket history of hip-hop conveyed through the ways people wanted to wear their dedication to it, and the ways artists wanted to be seen. By the mid-1980s, logos were stylized and stylish. Public Enemy, especially, had a robust understanding of how merchandise could further the group’s notoriety, captured here in a wide range of shirts and jackets.In the 1980s, hip-hop hadn’t fully cleaved into thematic wings — tours often featured unexpected bedfellows. One tour shirt for the jovial Doug E. Fresh shows his openers included the angsty agit-rap outfit Boogie Down Productions and the ice-cold stoics Eric B. & Rakim.Many of the shirts in the book were made by record labels for promotion, but there’s a robust bootleg section as well — see the hand-painted denim trench coat featuring Salt-N-Pepa — reflecting the untapped demand that remained long before hip-hop fashion was considered unassailable business.This collection showcases some of hip-hop’s indelible logos: Nervous Records, the Diplomats, Loud Records, Outkast; shirts for radio stations and long-defunct magazines; impressive sections on Houston rap and Miami bass music; as well as promotional ephemera like Master P boxer shorts, a tchotchke toilet for Biz Markie and an unreleased Beastie Boys skateboard. That “Volume 2” is as thick as its essential 2015 predecessor is a testament to how much likely remains undiscovered, particularly from eras when archiving wasn’t a priority.Some of the earliest hip-hop T-shirts in “Rap Tees” feature flocked lettering that is familiar from the backs of Hell’s Angels and B-boy crews. The aesthetic is the subject of “Heated Words: Searching for a Mysterious Typeface” by Rory McCartney and Charlie Morgan, a heroic work of sociology, archival research and history that traces the development of the style, from its historical antecedents to the actual locations in New York where young people would get their T-shirts customized to contemporary streetwear’s re-embrace of the form.Custom T-shirts with flocked lettering for Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 5. Sonny Figueroa/The New York TimesA demonstration of how the lettering is impacted by the heat and force of applying it to other surfaces. Patricia Wall/The New York TimesThis typeface that, the authors discover, has no agreed-upon name (and also no fully agreed-upon back story) conveys “instant heritage,” the typographer Jonathan Hoefler tells them. The lettering derives from black letter, or Gothic typefaces, but the versions that adorned clothes throughout the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s were often more idiosyncratic and, at times, made by hand.The lettering style thrived thanks to the ease of heat-transfer technology, which allowed the D.I.Y.-inclined to embellish their own garments at will. It was embraced by car clubs and biker gangs (and, to a lesser extent, some early sports teams). Gangs were teams, too, of a sort, as were breakdancing crews. Shirts with these letters became de facto uniforms.McCartney and Morgan spend a lot of time detailing how the letters themselves came to be and track down the places where they were turned into fashion — spotlighting one store in the Bronx where many gangs would buy their letters, or the Orchard Street shop on the Lower East Side that provided letters for the Clash as well as shirts for Malcolm McLaren’s “Double Dutch” video and the cover of a local newspaper, East Village Eye.“Heated Words” is relatively light on text: It draws its connections through imagery, both professional and amateur. The book is an impressive compendium of primary sources, many of which have not been seen before, or which have been public, but not viewed through this particular historical lens.It’s a good reminder, along with “Do Remember!” and “Rap Tees,” that some elusive histories aren’t buried so much as they crumble into barely recognizable pieces. Devoted researchers like these can follow breadcrumb trails and piece together something like the full story, but some details remain forever out of reach, evaporated into yesteryear. More

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      In Detroit, an Opera Leader Finishes With One Last Triumph

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      After Yuval Sharon became the artistic director of Michigan Opera Theater in 2020, the company renamed itself the Detroit Opera — perhaps the most visible among moves that have led to a remarkable streak of successes based on a new, ambitious approach.The house has placed itself at the center of operatic conversation with productions like a drive-through “Götterdämmerung” and a virtual-reality “Walküre.” It has broken fund-raising records, drawn first-time ticket buyers by the thousands and collaborated more with companies elsewhere. Robert O’Hara’s staging of Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” at the Metropolitan Opera last November, for instance, began life a year and a half earlier in Michigan; the Met asked Detroit if it could join the production, not the other way around.Sharon receives most of the plaudits for the rise in Detroit’s fortunes, but little of its advance would have been possible without the courage and acumen of Wayne Brown. One of the few Black leaders in the field, Brown served as the Detroit Opera’s president and chief executive from 2014 until he retired at the end of 2023.“Wayne has always been wonderful to deal with,” said Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met. “One doesn’t think necessarily of Detroit as a center of opera production or creativity, but by hiring Yuval he has accomplished that. He has changed that impression of Detroit.”From left, Ethan Davidson, Yuval Sharon and Brown onstage at the Detroit Opera House.Austin Richey/Detroit OperaBrown, 75, is a veteran executive with almost half a century of varied experience, from stints at regional symphony orchestras to a spell from 1997 to 2014 as the director of music and opera at the National Endowment for the Arts. Even upon his retirement, his enthusiasm for the process of putting on a show remains infectious.“The fascination is about making sure that those connections can be made,” Brown said. “It’s not just about transaction; it’s about, how does one find that sweet spot where the art and the audiences align?”Brown is widely admired in the field for being a leader different from the norm, and one reluctant to take the spotlight for himself.“He’s been a uniter of people,” said Deborah Borda, the former head of the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics, who has known Brown since the 1970s. “He has a very quiet strength. He has a kind word for all, which is quite unusual in our business. I think he’s regarded as somewhat Solomonic.”Davóne Tines, the bass-baritone who served as an artist in residence at the Detroit Opera in 2021 and 2022, said that Brown’s support for creativity was an example, especially as “a young Black creator whose career began in arts administration.”“Someone in the position of the C.E.O. or the top executive of an opera company, you may have presuppositions about what that sort of person might be,” Tines said. “He’s a man of incredible gravity and conducts himself with a dignity that’s very inspiring. It’s wonderful to see that balance with how genuinely curious he is.”Davóne Tines, front center, in the title role of “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” at Detroit Opera in 2022.Micah Shumake/Detroit OperaBrown’s musical life began with learning the violin in fourth grade, and later the cello. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, he joined the men’s glee club, and was its president. “Increasingly, it became not just performance” that mattered, he said, “but performance with context, the whole notion of making it work.”Shortly before Brown graduated from college, the dean of the music school asked if he would be interested in a job with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, which was looking for an assistant administrator. “I said sure,” he recalled. “I mean, I didn’t know what it was.” He was quickly promoted to assistant manager, and embarked on a career working for orchestras that later included tenures as executive director of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra in Massachusetts and, for a decade, the Louisville Orchestra.Brown also briefly worked as a producer for the Cultural Olympiad that took place during the Olympic Games in Atlanta in 1996, a remit that included jazz, opera, chamber music and more. “Those were interesting opportunities,” he said, smiling.Borda recalled the tact with which Brown later convened the expert panels that advised the National Endowment for the Arts on its grants. “You had to go to Washington, D.C., for four days, you had to review literally a hundred applications, and listen to them, to do a good job,” she said. Brown made a burdensome process more meaningful. “When Wayne was there, I think he asked me almost every year, and I would go. After Wayne, I didn’t do it anymore.”Brown speaks fondly of the opportunity for public service that the N.E.A. afforded him, and he took useful lessons from the opportunity it gave him to see the field as a whole. “You can’t necessarily apply a scenario that’s taking place in one community to another,” he said. “Innovation is a relative term. Something can be innovative but be perceived as just a marginal difference in a larger setting.”At Detroit Opera, Brown said, “We wanted to make sure that we could convey a message of openness, inclusiveness, and a level of engagement.”Nick Hagen for The New York TimesContext certainly counted in Brown’s decision to return to Detroit to run Michigan Opera Theater in 2014. Going back to the city where his career had begun, Brown was determined to secure what the downtown house’s longtime leader, David DiChiera, had achieved after founding the company in 1971, four years after the 1967 race riots in the city.“If I could play a role in a place that I cared about, a place that inspired me, I could not imagine at the time any other role that would have been of interest,” Brown said. “We wanted to make sure that we could convey a message of openness, inclusiveness, and a level of engagement.”Marc Scorca, the president of Opera America, believes that Brown was the ideal person to manage the house’s transformation after DiChiera’s retirement. “It was Wayne’s extraordinary diplomacy that enabled that transition to happen with respect and dignity,” Scorca said.Hiring Sharon in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic was something of a tribute to the theater’s founding mission. DiChiera, Brown said, “had an interest in making sure that what was taking place in Detroit could resonate broadly.” Yet the theater was nothing if it was not rooted in its city.Sharon entered the job promising not only to make the house the most progressive in America, but also to embed it still more deeply in its community, even asking that it change its name when he arrived. Brown urged restraint, so that they could do the patient work necessary to build consensus.“My approach was very impulsive,” Sharon said. “Wayne’s more analytic and thoughtful approach, and his calm way of thinking through these things, made it so that when we ultimately took the vote on it, it had complete board support.”“I really saw the value,” Sharon added, “of what it means to not necessarily go into things like a bull in a china shop.”Sharon singled out the co-production of “X” as Brown’s other major achievement during their time working together in Michigan. “It really was so out of the realm of what the company has ever done in terms of its scale,” Sharon said. Almost half of the sold-out crowd that attended the run in Detroit was visiting the company for the first time.“The art form spans centuries; it’s not stopping,” Brown said of opera. “It’s about moving forward and being bold about it, and there’s no better time to do so than now.” More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Strata-East Records

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      This label founded in 1971 gave Afrocentric and psychedelic jazz a home, and found a breakout hit with Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson. Take a guided tour through its deep catalog.We’ve been asking writers, musicians and scholars to tell us what songs they’d play to get people into jazz. This month, we decided to highlight a record label: Strata-East Records, founded in 1971 by the trumpeter Charles Tolliver and the pianist Stanley Cowell.An artist-driven label, Strata-East became a hub for the type of Afrocentric and psychedelic jazz that wasn’t accepted by the wider mainstream. With projects like Tolliver’s own Music Inc., alongside experimental acts like Brother Ah, the Descendants of Mike and Phoebe, and Jayne Cortez, the albums released on Strata-East spoke to the Civil Rights struggles of Black Americans at the time. In 1974, the label enjoyed a breakout hit with “Winter in America,” a collaborative album from Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson powered by the lead single “The Bottle.” But while that’s the most notable album in the catalog, Strata-East is full of excellent records that are widely celebrated, if not always easy to hear; original copies of some trade hands for hundreds of dollars, and none of the selections below are available on Spotify. The lack of a streaming playlist just makes this guided tour of the label from 10 writers and musicians more essential.As you’ll see (and hear) below, Strata-East released some of the best jazz heard on any label, and shouldn’t be discounted because it wasn’t one of the majors. More than 50 years on, the work of Strata-East prevails. Be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Nabil Ayers, author and record executive“Alkebu-Lan” by Mtume Umoja EnsembleThe second LP of the 1972 Mtume Umoja Ensemble album, “Alkebu-Lan,” opens with an epic 16-minute journey into its title, which translates to “Land of the Blacks.” Over a patient backdrop of horns, voices and Stanley Cowell’s piano, James Mtume emphatically states the ensemble’s goals: Organizing and unifying! Unifying and organizing! Going back, back, back … to Africa!As “Alkebu-Lan” builds, horns blast, cymbals crash, voices shout, and at times, everything hits the tape just a bit too hard. But the resulting distortion is where the energy lives on this album recorded live at The East, gaining momentum, until 12 minutes in, when a restless chorus of saxophones devolves into Ndugu Chancler’s drum solo. The excitement in the room is palpable, and the collision of celebration and conviction causes the band and the audience — it’s sometimes hard to differentiate between the two — to sound like they might mutually erupt.Some might consider this music challenging or niche, but it’s actually a distant and seminal precursor to some of the most popular music of a generation: Ten years later, its drummer played the first sounds we hear on Michael Jackson’s megahit “Billie Jean.” I like to think that Chancler brought some of the energy with him from that night at The East.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆MidnightRoba, vocalist and producer“On the Nile” by Music Inc.The Strata-East label’s debut recording, Music Inc., features the co-founders Charles Tolliver and Stanley Cowell with Cecil McBee, Jimmy Hopps and a supporting orchestra of brass, reeds and flutes. Although initially recorded by Tolliver’s quartet on Polydor’s “The Ringer,” the Strata-East version of “On the Nile” is the ultimate contemporary sonic celebration of the grandeur of ancient Nubia. Brass opens, drawing us in, in sequence, to bear witness; the flutes are the heka, or magic and mysticism of ancient Egypt; Cowell’s piano is at times a firm salute to the power of the ancient civilization and at others reflective of the deity-worshiping arched harp. Tolliver’s own solo is the falcon, Horus, the spirit of the Nile itself; McBee’s bass solo, the milk and honey of the land. This recording is a truly visual sonic experience. A sensorial and transportive joy.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Alisa L. Brock, writer“First Impressions” by Shamek FarrahSteady bass in the intro, then the keys take the lead, sticks make their way swiftly behind, and the horn drags in like a somber cry. What is a first impression, if not rhythms meeting with a willingness to be heard and felt? It’s almost impossible not to feel Shamek Farrah’s “First Impressions.” It’s the kind of sound that pulls you in, and invites you on a beautiful and exciting ride with the unfamiliar.It’s effortless to soak in the comfort of the bass strings that play the bottom. The consistency grounds me as the introduction of each instrument pulls us deeper into this encounter with sacred noise. Feel it. Let it make its way through you. Get well acquainted with the shifts in mood that offer up a demonstration of the impermanence of everything and the joy of difference. Surrender to the sounds of a first impression. It’s a vibe.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Jeff Parker, guitarist, composer and producer“Hopscotch” by Charles RouseBack in 2001, Tortoise was performing at one of the early iterations of the Detroit Electronic Music Festival. The festival was packed with folks — supposedly about a million people were in attendance throughout the course of the weekend. We were hanging after our show and I heard this insane music come over the gigantic P.A.: a hypnotic groove with an angular melody atop, and unconventional instrumentation of tenor saxophone, electric guitar, acoustic bass and drums. Someone made their way to the D.J. booth and found out that the track was “Hopscotch” by Charles (a.k.a. Charlie) Rouse from his album “Two Is One” on Strata-East Records. Serendipity found me in Peoples Records the following day, and lo and behold, there the album was in the jazz bins (the only time I’ve ever seen it in the wild). I discovered that the composition was written by one of my favorites — the drummer and composer Joe Chambers — and features Rouse on tenor, Paul Metzke on guitar, Stanley Clarke on bass, Airto Moreira on percussion, and the great New Orleans drummer David Lee. This album introduced me to Strata-East Records, and I’ve been performing this tune, following the label and collecting the records ever since.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Greg Bryant, musician and broadcaster“Wilpan’s” by Music Inc.Inspired by the saunter of a former love interest, the bassist Cecil McBee’s composition “Wilpan’s” spotlights the post-bop quartet Music Inc. live at the legendary New York City nightclub Slugs’ Saloon. As few recordings of the music made in Slugs’ survive, “Wilpan’s” provides essential documentation of an ethos and an era that has inspired subsequent generations of forward-thinking improvisers grounded in swing.From the beginning, McBee’s catchy ostinato bass figure ignites the ensemble immediately. The trumpeter Charles Tolliver takes the first solo and navigates McBee’s tune with the confidence and cunning of a prizefighter. Listen for that same zeal in the pianist Stanley Cowell’s improvisation that emphasizes the tune’s harmony alongside powerful right-hand declarations. Next, McBee takes a solo that is one of his most explosive on record. He taps into the vocabulary of a shredding guitarist at times, and somehow, he never overplays. After the band states the final melody, they ride the lock-step groove set by the drummer Jimmy Hopps and McBee. As the tune’s pinnacle, it is an infectious, bouncy swing that will make you want to get involved.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Cosmo Baker, D.J.“Prince of Peace” by Pharoah SandersWhen I was 16 years old, while going through a crate of used records in the back of an old pet-supply store in Philly, I pulled out a well-worn (well loved) copy of Pharoah Sanders’s “Izipho Zam (My Gifts)” — a copy I still own to this day, and my world was never the same.This record was my introduction to Pharoah, setting off a personal journey that is still going. It was an intro to many of his collaborators — Sonny Sharrock! Cecil McBee! Leon Thomas! Mostly it was an intro to both the Strata-East label and the philosophy, ethos and sound that it exemplifies: the intersection of spiritual jazz, Black consciousness and identity, avant-garde pioneering, among so many more intangibles, and that’s for both this album and Strata-East in general. As for Pharoah, the album is a glimpse into his soul-baring relinquishment to something larger than all of us. Written words don’t do this masterpiece any justice, but “Prince of Peace” is a universal mantra the world could use right now, and always.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆V.C.R, recording artist, violinist and composer“Winter in America” by Gil Scott-Heron and Brian JacksonGrowing up, gospel, classical, jazz and folk music was the soundtrack to my life. This soundtrack has shaped how I dissect, digest and compose music. But no seed that was sown grew stronger roots than when my mother introduced me to Gil Scott-Heron. She would always tell me stories about her time at Harvard during her undergraduate years where she would follow his work, hoping to catch one of his live shows. For a lover of poetry and jazz, you didn’t get any more authentic than Boston in the late ’70s.“Winter in America,” like all of Scott-Heron’s repertoire, was timely and prophetic. The lyrics describe the ice-cold state of the nation in 1974, eerily echoing the cold front we are experiencing presently. Over a haunting, repetitive piano riff in C minor, Gil preached, “We have been taken over by the season of ice. Very few people recognize it for what it is. Although they feel uncomfortable very few people recognize the fact that somehow the seasons don’t change.” (A live performance of the song was released on the CD version of the “Winter in America” album in 1998.)Right now people are still so overwhelmed by the reality of how dark the state of the world is. My favorite line of the song is when he sang, “The truth is there ain’t nobody fighting because, well, nobody knows what to save. Brother, save your soul.” That statement alone hits home for me as I look around wondering how can I truly make a difference. I wish I could share this song with everyone in this country, especially now. Thank God my mother shared Gil with me.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Richard Scheinin, music writer“Cry of Hunger!” by Billy HarperNo one composes like Billy Harper. His tunes are noble, soulful, and questing. This epic track — from his debut album, “Capra Black” — begins with a call to attention. Wake up! We are instantly spun into some mysterious dimension by the sextet, which seems to move in slow motion as Harper makes one of his patented, monolithic entrances on tenor saxophone. He moans. He ascends. You hear the blues. You hear the ecstatic power of the Black church. We are held in suspense; there are moments of literal silence that take your breath away. Then the chorus enters, singing one of Harper’s most memorable themes: “There’ll be e-nough some day!” Over and over. A soprano sings an ethereal line in counterpoint to Harper’s next solo. With each beseeching note, he imparts a message: of joy, sorrow, yearning, beauty. He is singing; he is praying. The band (featuring the likes of George Cables, Reggie Workman and Jimmy Owens) moves at a majestic lope, cycling back to the wake-up call before the chorus (which includes the great Gene McDaniels) returns for the finale. Taken in another direction, this song of hope might have been a hit for someone like Curtis Mayfield. I’ve been listening to it for 50 years and it still brings me to my knees.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Angel Bat Dawid, musician“Baba Hengates” by Mtume Umoja EnsembleMtume’s “Alkebu-Lan” is my favorite Strata-East album. It’s hard to say which one song hits me with “Alkebu-Lan,” because it is in my opinion not an album to be compartmentalized in that way; it is a living, breathing creature, and one must commit to the sonic instructions of invocation to the end of this powerful incantation. But for reference purposes, the “Invocation” going into “Baba Hengates” resonates to my core. “Alkebu-Lan” is one of those holy grail albums I’m still searching for, waiting for my bank account to have the funds to afford an original, as most Strata-East O.G.s are pretty pricey. So if anyone out there wanna give a creative musician a present, holla at ya girl!Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Marcus J. Moore, jazz writer“Malika” by the Ensemble Al-SalaamOne day about 10 years ago, I was listening to the producer Madlib’s “Medicine Show #8: Advanced Jazz” when this piercing soprano came barreling through the speakers. I had just finished laughing at the album’s fake 1970s Blaxploitation film promo when the singer Beatrice Parker snapped me back into place. The song was “Malika” from the Ensemble Al-Salaam, a New York-based spiritual jazz septet who counted Bill Lee (a fellow Strata-East artist and the film director Spike Lee’s father) as inspiration. Between Parker’s rolling vocals and the band’s frenetic arrangement, “Malika” sounded like a car-chase scene in a crime saga. I liked free and spiritual jazz anyway, so I already had a palate for avant-garde music. But I’d never heard that. The song was something else, something I didn’t know I needed. To that end, I also give credit to Madlib for shaping my taste in jazz. I knew the classics, but albums like “Advanced Jazz” and “Shades of Blue” introduced me to psychedelic underground jazz, and labels like Strata-East Records.Listen on YouTube More