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      Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Thelonious Monk

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      We asked Jon Batiste, Arooj Aftab, Mary Halvorson and others to share their favorites.For over a year, The New York Times has been asking musicians, writers and scholars to share the music they’d play for a friend to get them into jazz. Now we’re focusing on Thelonious Monk, the innovative pianist and bandleader whose angular melodies and dissonant chords made him stand out among his peers in the bebop era.Where other pianists played light chords with their left hand and quicker notes with the right, Monk played equally complicated notes with both hands, leading to complex arrangements that traversed the entire scale. But he never overplayed; his use of space between the notes elicited peace and tension equally.“Those clashing intervals, you know?” the Monk biographer Robin D.G. Kelley once said. “Sometimes he’ll play, like, an F and F sharp at the same time.”Monk was born in 1917 in Rocky Mount, N.C., and his family moved to Manhattan when he was 4. At 9, after briefly studying the trumpet, Monk started playing the piano in church and at rent parties. He attended Stuyvesant High School for two years before dropping out to play on the road with an evangelist. Monk’s big break came in 1941 when the drummer Kenny Clarke hired him to be the house pianist at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem. It’s been said that’s where bebop was born: Charlie Parker, Max Roach, Mary Lou Williams and others would jam all hours of the night crafting this new sound.Monk’s solo career didn’t really take hold until the ’50s when, as a bandleader signed to Prestige Records, he recorded different ensemble sets with Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis and Art Blakey, which escalated his momentum. Shortly after he signed with Riverside Records in 1955, he broke through with the album “Brilliant Corners,” an acclaimed LP seen as the true launching point of his career. He played clubs throughout New York City, gigged with the likes of John Coltrane and Gerry Mulligan, then led big bands from the late 1950s to the early ’60s. In 1964, Time put Monk on its magazine cover — the fourth jazz musician in history to appear there.Yet you can’t talk about Monk without acknowledging his erratic behavior. He had mental health challenges and was first hospitalized in 1956; he got into a car accident and was uncommunicative when police arrived. Years later, he was diagnosed with depression. Onstage, he would sometimes get up from the piano and start dancing, leading some to believe these were autistic episodes. Others say he used dance as a way to convey to his band what he wanted to hear musically. Either way, Monk is on the Mount Rushmore of jazz, and deserves all the reverence he gets for shifting its modern sound. Below, we asked 11 musicians and writers to share their favorite Thelonious Monk songs. Enjoy listening to their choices, check out the playlist at the bottom of the article and be sure to leave your own picks in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Jon Batiste, pianist and composer“Introspection”It’s not possible for me to choose a favorite Monk song. At 19, I became obsessed with everything Thelonious and spent a year focused exclusively on absorbing as much as I could. Monk is a world. “Introspection,” from the album “Solo Monk,” is borderline atonal while still distinctively melody-rich. The melody is akin to a nursery rhyme in its playful logic and symmetry, all while whistling overtop a bed of through-composed dissonance. Those chords! The way he constructs the harmony to shift between at least three identifiable key centers creates a trance-like quality to the recording that rides the borders of Eastern mysticism and some obtuse sanctified hymn. The chord voicings are constructed for every note to have a deliberate intention. There’s no room for harmonic interpretation here — if you add or take away any of the notes from his chord voicings, the song risks completely losing its identity. Monk’s way of “super syncopation” is utilized significantly in this tune as well, making his charismatic approach to aligning the harmony and melody a defining characteristic of the composition.He named it “Introspection” ’cause he certainly had a lot on his mind with this one. Very concentrated in all harmony, melody and rhythm. The master of repetition. Over the years it’s the least played Monk tune of all. This is significant given that he is one of the most covered and influential composers of the modern age. I love the “Solo Monk” version because he doesn’t even improvise over the chord changes, he just states the melody twice and walks out of the studio (or at least that’s how I envision it). Sometimes that’s all that needs to be played: the tune.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, composer and multi-instrumentalist“Nutty”By my count, Thelonious Monk’s 1957 concert at Carnegie Hall was his 45th time being recorded on anything that was eventually released. He turned 40 years old the month before and was toward the end of his brief, but intense and deeply meaningful, collaboration with John Coltrane. While Monk’s sublime ballads “Ugly Beauty,” “Ruby, My Dear,” “Ask Me Now,” “Pannonica,” “Reflections” and “’Round Midnight” might represent some of his most genius work, I selected “Nutty” from the Carnegie Hall concert because of the depth of sophistication of the composition coupled with the sheer amazingness of his collaboration with Coltrane. It is a masterpiece, complete with disjunctive rhythms in the fourth measure of the form, perhaps most perfectly portraying Monk’s humorous dance style that he often did while getting up from the piano.For my personal taste, the epitome of virtuosity is when artists not only know their instrument and medium thoroughly, but know themselves well enough to be able to communicate highly personal or emotional concepts and stories through their work. “Nutty” is a tour de force of communication at the highest levels. So much happens within these five minutes that is mind blowing to me every time I listen, and I can’t help but to be left in utter awe and gratitude for the lives of these amazing gentlemen who continually chose transcendence and sophistication while the world around them so often chose barbarity.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Arooj Aftab, musician“Reflections”I found my mind kind of walking away from whatever was going on around me when I first heard this tune. I was just smiling and thinking about being at Zinc Bar in the West Village, talking to someone special. And then I kind of came back like, “Whoa, what is this beauty I’m hearing?” It was playing in a scene in some old movie I was watching on a plane. It’s become a beautiful mainstay in my vault of “deeper cuts” and I often head over to the “Thelonious Alone in San Francisco” album to listen to it. I really, really love this one. Every note kind of turns my head upside down and makes my ears smile. I love the way it’s paced, almost like a conversation. Other times it feels like a pendulum. There is an unbelievable amount of swag in the whole piece. I like hearing his voice quietly in the back, too. It perfectly sums up something very sweet and nostalgic, aptly “reflective,” like the “A” is the original story and the rest of what he plays around it is how we feel about the story as the years have gone by.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Andrew Winistorfer, writer and reissue producer“Ugly Beauty”Listening to Thelonious Monk sometimes feels like listening to Monk listening to Monk; he spent much of his recorded output reworking, rerecording and recontextualizing his masterwork compositions like “Ruby, My Dear” and “Crepuscule With Nellie” across multiple albums. His sense of the avant-garde meant not only breaking with established traditions, but also breaking his established songs.Which is why listening to “Ugly Beauty” feels like such a revelation: Here is Monk, on his last album with a quartet (1968’s “Underground”), playing the only waltz of his career. You can hear him roll and flit in and around the tenor work of Charlie Rouse, giving the proceedings a broken, emotional denouement in every key struck. Monk’s playing was always about feeling as much as technical proficiency, and here the entire composition is set up for him to be the emotional ballast, to the point that when he cedes the ground to his band in the song’s middle portion, you feel his return like a gut punch. But it’s not all mood music; he hits chords of dissonance that remind you that though it’s a waltz, Monk is still in there, fighting the fight against normalcy. One of his last original compositions before his semiformal retirement in the early ’70s, “Ugly Beauty” serves as a reminder that the true greats never stop evolving and pushing the bounds of their art.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆King Britt, professor and producer“Evidence”“Evidence” is one of the best examples of shifting time against the meter, and in the process disrupting the status quo. The Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall is otherworldly. ’Trane’s tone (timbre) and blazing response to Monk’s time traveling through meters. A transcendent masterpiece. However, I also love the ferocity of this video of the quartet playing “Evidence” live in Japan, in which Monk’s intensity pushes Charlie Rouse’s solo to truly have a serious conversation instead of a humorous one in which Monk always includes in his playing. Watching the performance also adds to the magic as opposed to just listening — truly seeing them as a unit.“Evidence” is the perfect title, as this song is a testimony to the fearlessness of Monk’s compositions and the magic of his playing. In contemporary music, I compare Dilla to Monk because of his placement of samples, challenging our idea of rhythm and hesitation. So much so, it changed the way drummers play.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Nikki Yeoh, composer, jazz pianist and educator“Trinkle, Tinkle”In the ’90s I was watching TV. An inventor was revealing their latest creation: a suit jacket that could record movement. The clever blazer would “remember” the motions and make the “model” involuntarily move in the same way. My mind wandered — what if you could do this with gloves? How would it feel to experience how Oscar Peterson, Bach or Monk moved across the piano? “Trinkle, Tinkle” is the invisible memory glove and almost the answer to my glove-desiring prayers. So ergonomically written, pianistic in its approach. It embodies ballet finesse, angular jazz-tap punchy stabs, a percussive African ancestral message and a portal into Monk’s movement and mind.I love the 2/4 bar at the end of the A section. The “extra” two beats remind me of when Monk thought the music was “cookin’” and would jump up and dance, a stumbling, twisty-turning dance like a soccer player dribbling the ball, with the utmost grace and purpose, the phrase landing being the “goal.” As with many Monk tunes, this piece is best heard and improvised to, while singing the melody. Just remember to substitute the 2/4 bar with a 4/4 bar in solos. Monk sticks closely to the melody on the original recording. Joshua Redman’s version on his self-titled album is excellent, albeit without piano. In my dreams they called me for that album, but I couldn’t go as my gloves weren’t ready!Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Morgan Rhodes, music supervisor“Let’s Cool One”Discovering “Let’s Cool One” was a complete love-at-first-listen experience. Having only heard “Solo Monk” before hearing this record, my introduction to big-band Thelonious was an awakening. While I’ll always appreciate the intimacy of the live recording on “Misterioso,” there’s something so compelling to me about the “Monk’s Blues” version. Oliver Nelson’s arrangement takes it to dramatic new levels. The upbeat tempo makes the song feel bigger and elegant, giving brass every opportunity to shine while marrying Thelonious’s well-known dissonance with traditional harmonies. The result sounds like a really good conversation between horns and piano — a call and response that holds space for both the avant-garde and the conventional. Monk’s playing is masterful on this one.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Anna Butterss, musician“Sweet and Lovely”I love Monk’s own compositions, but there is something exciting about hearing his interpretations of jazz standards. Monk tinkers with these songs, reconstructing harmony and melody alike until he might as well have written them in the first place. “Sweet and Lovely” is one of these standards that Monk revisited throughout his career — when he recorded this solo performance in 1964, he had been playing the song for over 10 years, and had made some characteristic tweaks to the original. The descending sevenths underlying the melody are classic Monk, as is his refusal to resolve the final chord to where we would expect. The lyrics of “Sweet and Lovely” (which we don’t hear, here) speak of a love with seemingly no complications: “Sweet and lovely, sweeter than the roses in May, and he loves me, there is nothing more I can say.”In contrast to this tone, Monk creates a more melancholy vignette. We first hear him play the melody in a lush, almost stylized, romantic manner, leaning into the warmth of his left hand, but the heavy descent of the bass line adds an uneasiness to the mood. Throughout his brief solo his articulation becomes more pronounced, until the melody returns in insistent, rolling octaves. Monk’s ending doesn’t quite seem to wrap things up neatly — leaving the listener slightly unsatisfied, and perhaps keeping the door open for him to return to this song once again.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Mary Halvorson, musician“Crepuscule With Nellie”Thelonious Monk was one of the first jazz musicians I listened to (on an album called “The Composer,” in the form of a cassette tape) as a preteen. At first I didn’t understand it at all, and the improvisations were totally lost on me, but somehow I kept coming back to that tape. What drew me in initially were the melodies. There is a version of “Crepuscule With Nellie” on that album. It’s classic Monk, instantly identifiable. There is so much beauty and strength of melodicism, with rhythmic quirks and whimsy integrated seamlessly, like the most natural thing in the world. You can feel Monk isn’t trying to do anything tricky; he’s just being himself. Underneath the wonderfully twisted logic, it’s still a melody you can sing along to. And once you learn Monk’s melodies, the improvisations unfold from there and enhance everything.Fast forward to 2005: I was happy, as a lifelong fan of Monk, when Blue Note released a live recording from 1957 of the Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane: “At Carnegie Hall.” This version of “Crepuscule” is spare, as that song often is: essentially just the melody, first with Monk alone, then with the band. It’s a perfect entry point into Monk’s sound. Then, listening to the rest of the record, you’ll hear Coltrane absolutely take off — dancing around Monk’s tunes and then effortlessly plowing through to another dimension. Some of the most inspired moments on that album are when Monk stops playing and simply lets Coltrane go.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Christina Wheeler, composer, musician and multimedia artist“Misterioso”While “’Round Midnight” is Monk’s most well known song, “Misterioso” encapsulates everything I love about his music. This was the first of his blues compositions, which he always wrote in B flat. It begins with a sparse, gentle piano introduction that unspools into a seemingly spare melody of repeating intervals that ascends harmonically. The steady rhythm accents on the two and four, moving with the hypnotic ticktock of a cat clock’s darting eyes or a dog toy’s bobbing head. What I love is how Monk twists the traditional blues structure so subtly, substituting these unexpected minor chords so he can add chromatic note clusters, only to leave the ascending melody dangling on an unresolved note. For me, this amplifies the enigmatic mood of the song’s title. Monk complements Milt Jackson’s limpid vibraphone solo of cascading notes with angular piano jabs. Monk then follows Jackson with a solo filled with all my favorite signature expressions: rhythmically off-kilter melodic splashes counterpointing the steady, 4/4 pulse; flourishes of whole-tone scales that juxtapose quick bursts of dissonant notes; and distinctively empty spaces that emphasize Monk’s flat-fingered, percussive playing. The melody’s reprise bookends the recording with a symmetry that makes “Misterioso” as accessible for dancing toddlers as it is for grown-up listeners like me. Blues is the foundation of jazz, and with “Misterioso,” Monk transmutes the blues so exquisitely and uniquely as his own.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆James Francies, pianist and producer“’Round Midnight”“’Round Midnight” is one of the best-written songs in the canon of American music; it’s a master class in counterpoint, theme and development, and harmony. For me when a song is truly great, most of the time both the harmony and melody can stand independently and still be beautiful. “’Round Midnight” is one of those songs. The melody is so thoughtful that it captures me every time. Hearing it by itself reminds me of when I first heard Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” It also reminds me of hearing Bach chorales for the first time, or Mozart. Each melodic cell develops in a way that truly shows how Monk’s mind was working during that period. The ascending five-note gesture that begins the A section of “’Round Midnight” is one of the most iconic melodic statements in the world of instrumental music; instantly recognizable. “’Round Midnight” is blues with baroque counterpoint and romantic harmony. Perfection.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆ More

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      How the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Is Trying to Evolve

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      John Sykes, the chairman of the organization behind the hall, talks about the ouster of Jann Wenner, the need to diversify inductees and surprises at this year’s ceremony.The 38th annual Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony will take place at Barclays Center in Brooklyn on Friday, bringing Kate Bush, Willie Nelson, George Michael, Sheryl Crow, Missy Elliott, Rage Against the Machine and the Spinners into pop music’s leading pantheon.In addition, Chaka Khan, Al Kooper and Bernie Taupin will receive the musical excellence award. DJ Kool Herc and Link Wray will be inducted as influences and Don Cornelius, the “Soul Train” creator and host who died in 2012, will be honored as a nonperformer.This year’s event comes at a pivotal moment for the Rock Hall, which has been under pressure for years to diversify its ranks, and in particular to admit more women. While the hall is already home to pop heroines like Aretha Franklin, Madonna, Joan Jett and Whitney Houston, overall women are woefully underrepresented, making up fewer than 100 of the nearly 1,000 inductees since 1986.The institution’s public image problems were compounded recently when Jann Wenner, the Rolling Stone magazine co-founder who helped start the Rock Hall, spoke to The New York Times about “The Masters,” his book of interviews with stars like Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen and John Lennon — all of them white men. Justifying the absence of women and people of color, he said that none were “as articulate enough on this intellectual level” and did not qualify as “philosophers of rock.”The response was harsh and immediate, including from the Rock Hall itself: The day after Wenner’s interview was published, the board of the hall’s governing foundation voted to eject him immediately.But the effort to remake the Rock Hall has been underway for several years now, and many give credit to John Sykes, a longtime media executive who took over from Wenner as chairman of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation in 2020. He has pushed the hall to diversify its makeup, particularly on its nominating committee, which largely operates outside of the public eye. This year the hall even opened up its definition of rock ’n’ roll, calling it “a spirit that is inclusive and ever-changing.”Still, change is taking time at an institution that has spent the better part of four decades heavily favoring male artists over females.Four years ago, Evelyn McDonnell, a music critic and journalism professor at Loyola Marymount University, published an essay that included detailed numbers about the hall’s ranks. According to her research, just 7.7 percent of individuals who had been inducted to that point were women.McDonnell has updated her numbers for 2023. Despite a sharp increase in the number of female inductees in recent years — among them Dolly Parton, Tina Turner, Carly Simon and the Go-Go’s — she found that only 8.8 percent of people in the hall are women.“They’ve dug themselves into such a hole,” McDonnell said in an interview, “that you really have to do something structural and significant to turn the ship around.”The Rock Hall prefers to count each act as one inductee, no matter how many members it has; using that methodology, the hall says that 15 percent of inductees are, or include, women.In an interview last week, Sykes addressed the hall’s progress so far, as well as its need for further change. He also spoke about plans for this year’s ceremony, including a surprise appearance by Olivia Rodrigo.Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.When you became chairman of the foundation, what was your mission or goal? Did you see it as an institution in need of change?I saw it as an institution that, like the music, had to continue to evolve. Rock ’n’ roll music, since its inception in the ’50s, has constantly evolved to different sounds, different styles. But one thing it’s had in common is attitude and spirit. My top priority coming in was to remind the music community that rock ’n’ roll was not rock. It was not one sound. It was an amalgam of rhythm and blues, country and gospel created in the ’50s. And it kept evolving.Number two, I needed to reset the board and the nominating committee to reflect those artists that we’re honoring. So we added nine new board members, four women, four African Americans. What I’m trying to do now is to update the general voting body that actually decides who gets in the Hall of Fame, to reflect the artists that are eligible. I want to make sure the voting body is young and diverse enough to really make the most educated decisions about who should be inducted.The biggest complaint has been about a relative lack of women inductees. How have you addressed that specifically?What I’ve tried to do with the nominating committee is shine a light on the fact that these women and people of color have been underrecognized and need to be nominated and then inducted. So if you look at the last three years, we’ve inducted the Go-Go’s, Tina Turner, Carole King, Dolly Parton, Carly Simon, Pat Benatar. Sylvia Robinson, who started the first hip-hop label. Elizabeth Cotten, great blues player. Kate Bush, Sheryl Crow, Missy Elliott, Chaka Khan.We have to do better, but we’re making progress.How do you actually make that change? How can you increase the representation of women without putting a thumb on the scale of what’s supposed to be a deliberative process?It starts with the people you put on the nominating committee. We have six more members now on the committee, and we’ve been focusing on putting more women and people of color on the committee, because that’s how it starts.Number two, we just remind them to understand the genesis of rock ’n’ roll. It doesn’t hurt to basically refresh people every year as to where this came from, and the fact that all of these sounds are to be honored.Why was it important for the board to take action against Jann Wenner so quickly?This had nothing to do with Jann Wenner as a person or anything about his history. It would have happened to anyone on that board who said those things. That’s what I made clear to the entire boardroom when we discussed this. Because those things go against the heart and soul of what the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is all about. Rock ’n’ roll doesn’t know color. It doesn’t know gender. And for us to have one of our board members say that, we felt that we couldn’t do our jobs continuing with someone like that as part of our community.When you talk about the evolution of the Rock Hall and how it includes other genres, it raises the question of boundaries. Like, what isn’t it?Rock ’n’ roll is what’s moving youth culture, what a 16-year-old is obsessed with. The only other qualification I would put on it is which of those artists inspired those that followed. In the ceremonies you’ll see Harry Styles, Pink, Olivia Rodrigo, Dave Matthews, Ed Sheeran come up and play. I call those Future Hall of Famers. They’re there because they’re so inspired by those artists that are getting inducted.Olivia Rodrigo is coming in this year. Last year she got up and sang “You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon. She’s going to play with Sheryl Crow this year. It’s this mutual admiration that connects the past with the present.What is your night like at the ceremony? When there’s a question of whether such-and-such will perform, or if there’s one member the others are feuding with, are you the negotiator backstage?I’m one of the negotiators. We have a great team that works on the show, along with Joel Peresman, the president. And if there’s an issue we’ll go to the artists. But at the end of the day, we’re all fans.The drama can be good, right?Rock ’n’ roll is not always nice. So if the members of Blondie all don’t want to stand on the stage together, well, sometimes you’ll hear it come out. We don’t edit anything. They’re free to do whatever they want. And yeah, if there is a little bit of animosity or rebellion, you know, that’s rock ’n’ roll. More

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      How Britney Spears Wrote ‘The Woman in Me’

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      Three authors helped Britney Spears get her life story on the page.“If you follow me on Instagram, you thought this book was going to be written in emojis, didn’t you?” Britney Spears asks at the end of her memoir, “The Woman in Me.”She has said that completing the recently published book — an account of her journey from Louisiana to the top of the pop charts and on to a conservatorship that denied her control of her career and finances — required an enormous amount of therapy. And to get the story on the page, she had the help of “collaborators,” as she called them in the book’s acknowledgments.“You know who you are,” she writes, without naming names.According to two people close to the project, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, three writers — all successful authors in their own right — made significant contributions to Ms. Spears’s memoir.Ada Calhoun, the author of four nonfiction books, including “Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me,” helped create the first draft, the two people said. Sam Lansky, a former editor at Time magazine who wrote the memoir “The Gilded Razor” and the novel “Broken People,” was the next to join the project. The book was completed with the assistance of Luke Dempsey, a ghostwriter and editor who has published books under his own name and worked with Priscilla and Lisa Marie Presley on “Elvis by the Presleys.”Ada Calhoun was among those who lent a hand to Ms. Spears’s memoir.Laurel Golio for The New York TimesIt is common practice for celebrities to work closely with proven authors when they decide to tell their life stories, said David Kuhn, the co-chief executive of the literary agency Aevitas Creative Management.“How many people do you think work on a presidential memoir, or one of Michelle Obama’s books?” said Mr. Kuhn, who has represented the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Liaquat Ahamed and the comedian Amy Schumer. “Because if you’re Michelle Obama, part of what I imagine you might want from your collaborator or your editors are different perspectives from different readers.“You might want a 30-year-old’s opinion,” he added, “because you want millennials to relate to the book. You might have a male editor offer his perspective, because you want it to appeal as much as possible to a male audience, as well as the more obvious female audience.”The creation of “The Woman in Me” was thus not unlike that of contemporary pop hits, which typically rely on the contributions of numerous collaborators.The New York Post’s Page Six column first reported the news of the “bombshell deal” for Ms. Spears’s memoir in February 2022. It was acquired by Gallery Publishing Group, a Simon & Schuster imprint that has taken many entertainers and personalities to the best-seller lists — among them Chelsea Handler, Tiffany Haddish, Olivia Newton-John and Omarosa Manigault Newman.Ms. Spears thanked “collaborators” in the acknowledgments section of her memoir without naming names.Gallery Books, via Associated PressA principal person involved in the acquisition, according to three people with knowledge of the deal, was Cait Hoyt, a literary agent at CAA, who is thanked in the book’s acknowledgments. Another key figure was the lawyer Mathew Rosengart, a partner at the firm Greenberg Traurig, who helped Ms. Spears extricate herself from the conservatorship in 2021. (Ms. Hoyt and Mr. Rosengart had no comment.)After the deal was signed, Ms. Spears traveled to Maui, a trip she chronicled on Instagram. While there, she wrote extensively about her life in notebooks and met with Ms. Calhoun for a series of lengthy interviews, the two people close to the project said. The draft Ms. Calhoun helped put together was completed in the spring, shortly before Ms. Spears married the actor and personal trainer Sam Asghari in a ceremony at her home in Los Angeles. (Ms. Calhoun did not reply to requests for comment.)Ms. Spears came to believe that the book’s voice did not sound enough like her own, according to a person close to the project. In came Mr. Lansky, a client of Ms. Hoyt’s whose two books were published by Gallery.Mr. Lansky’s background seems to have made him a good fit for the project. A decade ago, he wrote for the music website Idolator, where he served as the “resident Taylor Swift apologist, diva enthusiast, and snark monster.” In his memoir, “The Gilded Razor,” he writes of being “caught somewhere between a child and adult — grown up enough to get things right from time to time but still young enough not to know that wouldn’t always be enough.”Those words might also describe Ms. Spears, who started working in show business at age 10 and released the song “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” at 20. Before diving into the draft, Mr. Lansky did another round of interviews with her over Zoom and by phone, the two people said. (Mr. Lansky had no comment.)Sam Lansky, the author of two books, worked on the book last summer.Jeff Spicer/Getty Images For Atlantis The RoIn the fall, Mr. Dempsey came aboard, the people said. A constant collaborator throughout the process was Lauren Spiegel, an editor at Gallery who edited Anna Kendrick’s best-selling book, “Scrappy Little Nobody.” (Mr. Dempsey and Ms. Spiegel had no comment.)Ms. Spears has given only one interview timed to the publication of “The Woman in Me,” with People magazine. She does not describe the nuts and bolts of being a first-time author, but is clear on why she decided to tell her story.“It is finally time for me to raise my voice and speak out, and my fans deserve to hear it directly from me,” she said. “No more conspiracy, no more lies — just me owning my past, present and future.” More

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      An Introduction to the Mountain Goats

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      How do you start listening to a band with 22 albums? We’re here to help.The Mountain Goats just released their 22nd album. Wondering how to dig into a catalog this deep? We have a guide.Jackie Lee YoungDear listeners,When an artist you’re curious about but unfamiliar with has an extensive back catalog, it can be difficult to know where to start. Sometimes a trusted guide is needed. And when people learn I’m a fan of the Mountain Goats — the wildly prolific, verbose and cult-beloved group led by the singer-songwriter-novelist John Darnielle — I am sometimes called upon to be that guide. I’ve made multiple “introduction to the Mountain Goats” mixes and playlists for friends over the years, and today I’ve made one for you.The occasion is the band’s new album — its 22nd! — “Jenny From Thebes,” which is a kind of sequel to the great 2002 Mountain Goats album “All Hail West Texas.” “Jenny From Thebes” is a rich and rewarding listen, but for the uninitiated it would be a strange place to start. Which is why I am here to initiate you into the world of one of the greatest American songwriters currently working.Darnielle started the Mountain Goats in the early 1990s as a solo project; he would record most songs (often directly onto a Panasonic boombox) right after he’d written them, which gave early Mountain Goats albums a sense of rough-hewed urgency. Beginning with the 2002 release “Tallahassee” — a song cycle about a doomed married couple — he began making more polished studio recordings with other producers and filled the Goats out into a full band. The current lineup includes the longtime bassist Peter Hughes, the drummer and frequent “Best Show With Tom Scharpling” guest Jon Wurster and the multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas.Darnielle’s writing strikes a difficult balance between weightiness and levity. Some of his songs are about incredibly heavy topics — abuse, addiction, spirituality — but there’s a wit, a precision and a humanity to his voice that makes his music cathartic rather than depressing. That sensibility has translated into a particularly fervent and still expanding base of fans, who do things like make elaborate podcasts called “I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats.”The Mountain Goats are something of an acquired taste: They’re earnest and wordy, and Darnielle’s vocals strike some people as too … well, goatlike*. There are people in my life who have given them a fair chance and decided they’re just not for them. Fine. But I also have several decades-long friendships in which a mutual love of the Mountain Goats is a major component. My dear pal Matt first introduced the band to me almost 20 years ago (!) when he played me “Going to Georgia” while we were driving aimlessly around the New Jersey suburbs, and the world seemed to stand still. All these years later, we’re still going to shows, trading rarities and debating the merits of each new release. They’re just that kind of band.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. “Jenny”Some of the best Mountain Goats songs — like this one, from “All Hail West Texas” — seem like they’re trying to slow time and preserve an ecstatic moment as precisely as possible (“Our house faced west,” Darnielle specifies here, “so the big orange sun positioned at your back lit up your magnificent silhouette”). This song introduces the motorcyclist Jenny, for whom the Mountain Goats’ new album is named. (Listen on YouTube)2. “This Year”Perhaps the best-known Mountain Goats song (for good reason; it’s fantastic), “This Year” is also the most anthemic track from “The Sunset Tree,” the wrenching, straightforwardly autobiographical 2005 album on which Darnielle grappled with his relationship to his abusive stepfather, who had recently died. Though grounded in his own teenage experience, which he vividly reanimates here, the chorus features a rousing, universal survivor’s battle cry: “I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me.” (Listen on YouTube)3. “Cubs in Five”From one of the earliest Mountain Goats releases, the 1995 EP “Nine Black Poppies,” this passionately sung fan favorite lists a number of highly improbable events: “The Canterbury Tales” returning to the best-seller list, the narrator loving an old flame like he used to and, perhaps most improbably of all, the long-cursed Chicago Cubs winning the World Series. Twenty-one years after this song was released, they actually did it — though, contrary to Darnielle’s prophecy, it took the Cubs seven games. (Listen on YouTube)4. “Harlem Roulette”One of the finest Mountain Goats songs in the last decade or so, this full-band standout from the 2012 album “Transcendental Youth” is an impressionistic snapshot of the last day in the life of Frankie Lymon, the precocious soprano who sang “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” and died of a heroin overdose at age 25. The hook to this song is at once simple and devastating: “The loneliest people in the whole wide world are the ones you’re never going to see again.” (Listen on YouTube)5. “Damn These Vampires”If the rough edges of the early Mountain Goats recordings aren’t to your liking, try this gentler and more polished piano-driven song, from the 2011 album “All Eternals Deck.” The beautiful chorus melody in particular shows the gradual refinement of Darnielle’s songwriting. (Listen on YouTube)6. “Golden Boy”And now, the sillier — and yet, somehow, more spiritual — side of the Mountain Goats: an ode to a specific brand of Singaporean peanuts that Darnielle hopes to enjoy in the afterlife. “There are no pan-Asian supermarkets down in hell,” he sings on this recording from the 2002 compilation “Ghana,” “so you can’t buy Golden Boy peanuts there.” Troublingly, in a 2020 performance of this song released as a part of the “Jordan Lake Sessions” series, Darnielle noted, “I’d just like to point out, that for God knows how long, we have in fact been living in a world in which the company that once made these peanuts no longer makes them. You do the math.” (Listen on YouTube)7. “No Children”A (very) darkly funny song that became an incredibly unlikely TikTok sensation in 2021 (I have read the explainers and I still don’t fully understand why), “No Children” is the centerpiece of the Mountain Goats’ 2002 album “Tallahassee.” This song has also been a longtime staple in live Mountain Goats sets, perhaps because of how fun it is to scream, “I hope you die! I hope we both die!” in a crowded room at the top of one’s lungs. (Listen on YouTube)8. “Choked Out”Many of the Mountain Goats’ recent LPs have been concept albums, digging into some of Darnielle’s enthusiasms like vintage action films (last year’s “Bleed Out”), the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (“In the League of Dragons,” from 2019) and, on the inspired 2015 release “Beat the Champ,” professional wrestling. The frenzied rocker “Choked Out” is a highlight from that one. (Listen on YouTube)9. “Woke Up New”On this single from the devastating 2006 album “Get Lonely,” Darnielle paints almost too vivid a picture of the first day after a breakup, when a lover has moved out and their absence makes the familiar suddenly strange: “The first time I made coffee for just myself, I made too much of it/But I drank it all just ’cause you hated when I let things go to waste.” (Listen on YouTube)10. “Up the Wolves”Quite possibly my personal favorite Mountain Goats song ever — though don’t actually make me choose! — here’s another galvanic standout from “The Sunset Tree.” (Listen on YouTube)11. “Going to Georgia”Though it’s one of the Mountain Goats’ most beloved early songs (and the first one I ever heard), Darnielle mostly stopped playing this song live around 2012, because he worried that it romanticized gun violence and toxic relationships. (He once added when discussing the matter onstage, “I’m not ashamed of the song, the song has a vibe, I can’t deny it, and I listen to Cannibal Corpse, you know.”) Regardless, it’s an important entry in the Mountain Goats’ catalog, and the recorded version from the 1994 album “Zopilote Machine” contains some of Darnielle’s most urgent and impassioned bleating. (Listen on YouTube)12. “Against Pollution”Released in 2004, “We Shall All Be Healed,” one of the first Mountain Goats albums recorded with a full band, is a powerful collection of songs inspired by Darnielle’s and his friends’ adolescent struggles with drug addiction. Though some listeners were put off by the cleaner production sound when it first came out, I’ve come to appreciate it as one of the band’s best and most unappreciated albums. There’s a quiet power to this penultimate track, which toggles between the banal and the monumental, the sacred and the profane. (Listen on YouTube)13. “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton”A parable about the importance of keeping youthful dreams alive, told through the bittersweet story of West Texas metal-heads Jeff and Cyrus, this lo-fi gem is another of the best-loved Mountain Goats songs — and the reason you’re likely to hear people yelling “Hail Satan!” at their live shows. Listen and you’ll understand. (Listen on YouTube)Forty miles from Atlanta, this is nowhere,Lindsay* The band’s name is not actually a reference to Darnielle’s singing style, but rather to the Screamin’ Jay Hawkins song “Yellow Coat.”The Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“An Introduction to the Mountain Goats” track listTrack 1: “Jenny”Track 2: “This Year”Track 3: “Cubs in Five”Track 4: “Harlem Roulette”Track 5: “Damn These Vampires”Track 6: “Golden Boy”Track 7: “No Children”Track 8: “Choked Out”Track 9: “Woke Up New”Track 10: “Up the Wolves”Track 11: “Going to Georgia”Track 12: “Against Pollution”Track 13: “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton”Bonus TracksEarlier this week, Sam Sodomsky of Pitchfork published a great Q. and A. with Darnielle that dug into his process. “When I talk I get more and more animated, and my brain kind of boils,” Darnielle said at one point. “I can sustain that boil for a long time — but it also makes you do things like leave bags on subways.”Also, back in my own Pitchfork days, I spoke with Darnielle for a new interview format we were trying out, where we asked musicians what songs they would listen to in certain life situations. Let’s just say that Darnielle came prepared. With a lot of Danzig. More

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      Courtney Bryan’s Music Brings It All Together

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      A recent recipient of the MacArthur “genius” grant, this pianist and composer fuses different styles for a sound that is entirely her own.The name Courtney Bryan is not one that you’ll currently find on many recordings. Aside from two independently released, jazz-tilting albums from 2007 and 2010, precious little of this pianist and composer’s finely woven, adventurous music is available to hear widely.But you can expect that to change, beyond live performances including the premiere of Bryan’s chamber work “DREAMING (Freedom Sounds),” presented by the International Contemporary Ensemble at Merkin Hall on Wednesday. She also recently signed with the influential music publisher Boosey & Hawkes, whose biography of her online includes the promise of a third recording: “Sounds of Freedom.”Bryan, 41, who was born in New Orleans and received a MacArthur “genius” grant earlier this month, has been making her mark since earning her doctorate in composition from Columbia University in 2014. Symphony orchestras, chamber musicians, vocal groups and jazz performers have all been drawn to her sound. Last spring, the New York Philharmonic premiere of “Gathering Song,” with text by the stage director Tazewell Thompson and hints of post-bop jazz harmony, displayed her place among the most exciting voices in contemporary American music.In a phone interview, Bryan said that before she started her Ph.D. program, “I had the separate thing of doing ‘classical’ here, ‘jazz’ here,” while also working as an organist at the Bethany Baptist Church in Newark.From left, Leslie B. Dunner, Tazewell Thompson, Ryan Speedo Green and Bryan at the New York Philharmonic premiere of “Gathering Song” last spring.Chris LeeBut at Columbia, her composition teacher — the eminent composer, trombonist and computer-music pioneer George E. Lewis — encouraged her to put everything together. “He helped me dream bigger,” Bryan said.And Lewis also helped introduce her to other like-minded students, including the musicologist Matthew D. Morrison, who said that his forthcoming book “Blacksound” is “heavily informed by our conversations, our conspiring — trying to figure out how to get certain ideas of what Black music is out into the world.”Lewis recalled Bryan’s “unassuming brilliance,” a quality evident even at the admissions stage, in which “bombast” and “blowing your own horn” are the norm. Once she started, she altered the culture of the program, Lewis said. The school’s composition seminars had a reputation for treating people poorly: “you know, the idea that somehow sharpening one’s critique was confused with being mean to people.”One day, Lewis added, “Courtney stood up and said, ‘We just can’t continue to treat people this way.’ And everyone just looked at her; she hadn’t said very much, to this point. She’s a person who has that deep spiritual reservoir. And she changed a lot of people.”Their relationship continues today: Lewis leads the International Contemporary Ensemble, and he programmed Bryan at Merkin as part of “Composing While Black: Volume One” — which has ties to his latest book, a volume of critical essays that he edited with Harald Kisiedu.The inclusion of Bryan on this bill reflects Lewis’s appreciation for her direct approach to political commentary. “Courtney was one of the people who, early on, put Black Lives Matter on the classical music table,” he said. Yet, he added, in her works “there’s no one dogma. It’s not conventionally tonal; it’s not conventionally atonal. The orchestration is lush — but spare in some ways.”She brings eclectic references to bear in “DREAMING,” which incorporates text from a dissent by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and other legal opinions. To hear the gospel and jazz elements, Lewis said, “you have to go through the looking glass with her,” and the results are what he called “strange resonances.”“Courtney is able to make you feel reassured,” Lewis said, “but also to realize that you should be feeling unsettled about the state of the world.”In an archived La Jolla Symphony performance of “Yet Unheard,” a 2016 piece that incorporates poetry by Sharan Strange and commemorates the life of Sandra Bland (a Black woman who was found hanged in a Texas jail cell in 2015 after she was arrested during a traffic stop), you can hear Bryan’s talent for transfiguring trends in experimental orchestration, as well as gospel tradition. Similarly, a recently filmed performance of “Sanctum” (2015) by the London Sinfonietta illustrates the score’s braiding of influences including the sermons of Pastor Shirley Caesar, marching band percussion and the rhythmic exultations of street protests.Bryan’s religious side is likewise front and center in her Requiem, in which she sets Greek and Latin text from the Mass as well as selections, in English, from Ecclesiastes and Psalm 23. That work was performed on video during the lockdown portion of the pandemic by members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the treble-voice quartet Quince Ensemble.The mezzo-soprano Kayleigh Butcher, a member of Quince, said that Bryan’s use of extended technique — including whispering and chanting — was not “super intense or aggressive” compared with other contemporary music. But, she added, it was Bryan’s way of fusing those elements with more traditional chamber writing that was responsible for its distinctiveness: “Usually someone will only do an only-extended techniques piece. Or only a tonal, written-notes-on-a-page piece, and not combine them in interesting ways.”“Courtney is able to make you feel reassured,” George E. Lewis said, “but also to realize that you should be feeling unsettled about the state of the world.”Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesBryan’s recent piano concerto, “House of Pianos,” bustles with references to jazz-piano history, including boogie-woogie and Harlem stride. It also contains approaches to harmony that she learned in lessons from the towering New Orleans pedagogue Ellis Marsalis, and traces of music that she examined in a master’s degree program at Rutgers, where she studied with the jazz pianist Stanley Cowell. “New Orleans Concerto,” by her former teacher Roger Dickerson, also informs the work.“It’s my way to pay tribute to a lot of pianists who’ve inspired me — but also a challenge for me as a pianist and composer,” Bryan said of the concerto. For its premiere at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra last May, she performed the solo part.More of her pianistic prowess can be found on those early recordings. For Morrison, the musicologist, one exemplary moment comes during a rendition of “City Called Heaven,” from Bryan’s first album, “Quest for Freedom.”

      Quest for Freedom by Courtney Bryan“She takes this spiritual and she really transforms it,” he said, professing himself “obsessed” with its experimental rhythmic touches and its “Chopinesque” figurations. The first time he heard it, Morrison thought: “Oh my goodness, who does this so seamlessly? And it was Courtney.” More

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      The Met Opera Puts On a Malcolm X Marathon

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      For 18 hours on a rainy Sunday this Halloween weekend, the Metropolitan Opera House was visited by the ghost of Malcolm X.Words made famous by the Black nationalist leader and civil rights figure in his classic autobiography, dictated to Alex Haley and posthumously published in 1965, could be heard echoing throughout the soaring lobby of the Lincoln Center theater. It was a welcomed haunting, conjured by the Met in conjunction with a new production of Anthony Davis’s opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” which premieres on Friday.Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz, Malcolm X’s daughter.Text from “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”From 6 a.m. until a little after midnight, a starry lineup of Malcolm surrogates — including his daughter Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Michael R. Jackson and the actor Leslie Odom Jr. — read from the autobiography continuously and in its roughly 500-page entirety.“I didn’t think that they would do it,” said the director and playwright Robert O’Hara, who staged “Slave Play” and is at the helm’s of the Met’s production. He proposed the reading to the company’s leadership as a way to build word of mouth for the opera. “It’s amazing just to have the words in this space, and for the Met to open its doors and let people come.”Top row, from left, Maurio Hines, Anthony Davis and Christopher Davis, April Matthis. Second row, from left, Courtney B. Vance, Robert O’Hara, Bill Haley Jr. Third row, from left, Leah Hawkins and Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz, Makeda Hampton, Liesl Tommy.The event was free to attend, and an estimated 680 people cumulatively made their way to the lobby’s Grand Tier balcony, up the undulating, red-carpeted steps and around the low-hanging starburst chandeliers. At 10 a.m., about 100 people sat or stood around a small stage with a black backdrop set up in front of the building’s floor-to-ceiling windows.Marcia Sells, the Met’s chief diversity officer, said that Sunday was the first time the space had been used for a free event.“To all these people who are coming in here, to the speakers, to even the Black staff members who have worked here for a long time,” Sells said, “this represents the Met saying, ‘Yes, you really are included.’”Thompson, who plays a young Malcolm X in the opera.Shabazz’s Kaaba pendant.Around 10:30, the actor Peterson Townsend, a performer in “X,” brought a resounding musicality to an early chapter in which Malcolm details his inauspicious early years as a small-time drug dealer and hustler in Harlem known as Detroit Red.The actor Courtney B. Vance, of “The People v. O.J. Simpson” and “The Preacher’s Wife,” followed, drawing big laughs with a rousing rendition of a scene in which Malcolm X escapes the World War II draft by feigning madness at the induction office.“The educated folks had Martin Luther King, but the folks on the street — Malcolm had them,” Vance said in an interview after his reading. “It’s a wonderful opportunity to talk about him and what he stood for and to maybe make people go, Hmm, I want to learn more.”The Met’s event was free to attend, and brought in an estimated 680 people throughout the day.Peterson Townsend, a performer in “X,” preparing for his reading on Sunday.More than 70 speakers appeared, including Bill Haley, Alex Haley’s grandson; David C. Banks, the chancellor of the New York City Department of Education; and Liesl Tommy, the director of the Aretha Franklin biopic “Respect.”Around 2:30 p.m., Shabazz movingly channeled her father, and received a standing ovation, for a section that recounted his intellectual awakening while confined at Norfolk Prison Colony in Massachusetts, spurred by a trove of history and philosophy texts.“It’s a great way to tell my father’s story and to reach different audiences,” she said in an interview. “It’s as relevant now as it was then. We’re still living with the same challenges.”Readers on deck: Sunday’s event included appearances by more than 70 participants.Christopher-Rashee Stevenson, a member of the theater company Elevator Repair Service, watching Shabazz speak.“X” premiered at New York City Opera in 1986. This revival, which first ran in Detroit in 2021, was conceived by O’Hara as an Afrofuturist fable in which the title character is an archetypical Everyman who transcends time and space. The Met’s production stars the baritone Will Liverman, who opened the Met’s 2021-22 season in “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the first presentation of a work by a Black composer in its history; Kazem Abdullah will conduct Davis’s score, which was revised for Detroit and changed further for the Met.Davis said that the aim, then and now, was to present a challenge to opera as an art form, in the spirit of Malcolm himself.“I wanted to help transform opera into a truly American form, one that reflects African American musical traditions,” he said. “Not only can opera play an important role in music today, it can make statements about who we are and what’s going on in the world.” More

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      Aaron Spears, Drummer for Usher and Ariana Grande, Dies at 47

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      He received a Grammy nomination for Usher’s 2004 album “Confessions” and played on tracks by Ariana Grande, Lady Gaga and many other major pop musicians.Aaron Spears, a Grammy-nominated drummer who played with Usher, Ariana Grande and many other major pop stars, has died. He was 47.His death was confirmed on Monday in a statement on his official Instagram account by his wife Jessica that was co-signed by the couple’s son August. The statement did not provide details about other survivors or specify a time, place or cause of death. Representatives for Spears could not immediately be reached for comment late Monday night.In 2004, he earned a Grammy nomination as a producer for Usher’s album “Confessions,” which sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. The next year, Spears drummed during the Grammys for a medley of Usher’s “Caught Up” and James Brown’s “Sex Machine,” a performance that made the drumming community take notice.Over the years, Spears would play with Grande, Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga and Lil Wayne, among many other artists.“You’ve seen Aaron drum prolly 5-10 times in your life if you attend concerts & sometimes without knowing,” Questlove, the D.J., drummer and producer, said in an Instagram post on Monday. “That’s how much in demand his services were.”Aaron Spears was born on Oct. 26, 1976, according to a profile published by Remo, a drumming equipment manufacturer that sponsored him.He was from Washington D.C., grew up in the Pentecostal faith and developed an interest in drumming through his involvement with the church. As a child, he later said in an interview with the German show drumtalk, he would sit on someone’s lap in church playing “the stuff up top” while they played the pedals.One of his first professional gigs was drumming in Gideon Band, a group with a style spanning jazz, rock and R&B. He demonstrated his musical prowess by never repeating a “chop,” or rhythmic phrase, the band said in a statement.Moving from the local scene in Washington to the national one was intimidating, Spears said.“The level of musicianship had me questioning if I belonged there,” he told drumtalk in 2018. “I just didn’t know if I was ready to make the jump.”He clearly did belong. For nearly two decades after his breakthrough performance at the Grammys, Spears played with a long list of major artists, including Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys. He also performed on “Late Night with Seth Meyers” and was the music coordinator and drummer for a season of the television show “The Masked Singer.”Offstage, Spears held drum clinics and master classes around the world. During one such educational visit this year to Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., he sat in for a performance with the school’s marching band, the Human Jukebox.But even after a long career, Spears expressed humility about his success, saying that he was careful to “stay relatable” and avoid developing a false sense of entitlement.“The success that I’ve had is not necessarily because of me,” he said in a video published in May on the website of Ludwig Drums, one of his sponsors. “It’s really the connection that I’ve had with other musicians has helped to make me better.” More

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      Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Indigenous Parentage Is Questioned

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      An investigation by the CBC disputed a key part of Sainte-Marie’s story, saying that a birth certificate shows she was born to a white family in Massachusetts.The parentage of Buffy Sainte-Marie, a folk singer known for her activism on behalf of Indigenous people, was questioned after CBC News reported that it had found a birth certificate indicating that she was born to white parents in Massachusetts, and not on a Piapot Cree reservation in Canada.Sainte-Marie, considered the first Indigenous person to win an Oscar, has said for decades that she was born to an Indigenous mother before being adopted first by a white couple near Boston and then, as an adult, by the Piapot First Nation. The CBC investigation, which was published on Friday, pointed to documentation, including Sainte-Marie’s birth certificate and marriage certificate, to show she was born in Stoneham, Mass., as Beverly Jean Santamaria.Sainte-Marie did not speak to the CBC, but in video and written statements, she said the woman she called her “growing-up Mom” had told her that she was adopted and was Native. In both a 2018 biography and the statements, Sainte-Marie also says she was told she may have been born “on the wrong side of the blanket,” referring to an affair.“I don’t know where I’m from or who my birth parents were, and I will never know,” Sainte-Marie, 81, said in the written statement. “Which is why to be questioned in this way today is painful, both for me, and for my two families I love so dearly.”Sainte-Marie, whose songs include “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone,” “Universal Soldier” and “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” won an Oscar in 1983 for “Up Where We Belong,” a song from the film “An Officer and a Gentleman.” “I wanted to write songs that would last for generations,” she told The New York Times last year.News of the investigation was particularly surprising to Canadians because Sainte-Marie is such a well-known figure, said Kimberly Tallbear-Dauphine, a professor of Native Studies at the University of Alberta who was quoted in the CBC article.“She’s a celebrity but she’s also somebody a lot of Indigenous people know and have met with, and that makes it more personal,” Tallbear-Dauphine said in an interview with The Times. Emails and text messages she has received show that people are “feeling very emotional about this.”The freelance journalist Jacqueline Keeler said in the CBC investigation that she began looking for Sainte-Marie’s birth certificate after watching an “American Masters” episode about the singer last year. Keeler wrote a column for The San Francisco Chronicle last year that challenged the Indigenous heritage of the actor Sacheen Littlefeather.In their article, CBC reporters described how they obtained Sainte-Marie’s original birth certificate from Feb. 20, 1941, which says she was born to Winifred and Albert Santamaria at 3:15 a.m. The CBC said the Santamarias were of Italian and English ancestry; in her statements, Sainte-Marie said Winifred was part Mi’kmaq, a tribe from eastern Canada.The investigation also cites a 1945 life insurance policy document that says Sainte-Marie was born in Stoneham and a 1982 marriage certificate in which Sainte-Marie certified that she was born in Massachusetts. Also included was a 1964 newspaper article in which an uncle of Sainte-Marie’s disputed her claims that she was Indigenous, saying, “This is all part of the professional build-up.”A lawyer for Sainte-Marie told the CBC that many adoption records had been destroyed by Canadian governments and that children adopted in Massachusetts were commonly issued new birth certificates. “Sainte-Marie is entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy about her personal genealogical and family history,” the lawyer, Josephine de Whytell, told the CBC.After growing up in Massachusetts, Sainte-Marie was adopted by the Piapot First Nation in Saskatchewan, where she says she was born. In a statement, two members of the tribe, Debra and Ntawnis Piapot, said that “Buffy is our family.”“We chose her and she chose us,” they said. “We claim her as a member of our family and all of our family members are from the Piapot First Nation. To us that holds far more weight than any paper documentation or colonial record keeping ever could.” More