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      Is ‘J Christ’ Lil Nas X’s Final Troll?

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      The rapper and singer has always been a master of the internet, not of music. But with his latest release, “J Christ,” he’s lost his grip on virality, too.More than any working pop star, Lil Nas X understands how music is consumed in the contemporary landscape: in pieces, in memes, in reaction videos, in snippets of audio used to soundtrack get-ready-with-me clips on social media. In intimations and nudges. In discourse that may or may not have much to do with said music at all.And so for Lil Nas X, a song is a pretense. He is less a rapper or a singer than a meme maker with a seven-figure budget. Music is the fourth or fifth most important part of his presentation, the foundation for missives on X (formerly Twitter), TikToks and Instagram posts that matter as much, and probably more.Or, as the hook of his new single “J Christ” muses: “Is he ’bout to give ’em something viral?”That would be the goal, of course, but the best viral content bubbles up unpolished from the ether, slightly awkward and just novel enough to astound. That’s what Lil Nas X made his name with. It is the story of “Old Town Road,” his breakout song, which went from TikTok curiosity to bar mitzvah anthem in just a few months in early 2019.The vexatious “J Christ” tries to reverse engineer that kind of success. It is planned virality, mood-boarded and line-itemed. First, it is a concept — Lil Nas X is returning — and only then, a visual narrative and a song to animate it. The result is stylish but not artistic, glossy but without shine, hyperstylized but lazy. Being the most clever pop star is much easier than being the most clever online comedian, and his tropes are wearing thin.In the video, which vividly and sometimes beautifully riffs on cheap shock, he is a Christ-ish figure — another comeback king! — dancing his way through various fields of evil in a lumpy sequel to a beloved original: “Montero (Call Me by Your Name),” Lil Nas X’s comically baroque single and video from 2021. In that playful and bizarre clip, he theatrically tussles with the temptations of new fame, culminating in giving a lap dance to Satan. It was refreshing, winking bacchanal — a whole idea.“J Christ,” to the extent that it functions at all, works in bits. The video is merely a string of micro-shock vignettes, many of them a callback to his greatest hits (of two years ago): the Satan Shoes containing a drop of blood, the stripper pole to hell from the “Montero” video. He remakes the “Jesus crossing up Satan on a basketball court” meme. He ushers a flock of animals to a big boat. (That was Noah, but whatever.) In a promotional clip, he pounds his staff onto the ground and parts a huge body of water. (Moses, but who’s counting.)The video opens, for unclear reasons, with celebrity impersonators of Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Ed Sheeran, Kanye West and more lined up at heaven’s gate. This conceit, too, is recycled — either from the nearest Madame Tussauds, or from West’s 2016 “Famous” video, a far more titillating and genuine transgression.Each of these micro jokes functions like a jump scare — just unexpected enough to elicit a tiny gasp. But underneath, there’s little scaffolding. They’re punchlines designed to be clipped and denatured of meaning. The lyrics are empty, too — only the grating, nasal, syllable-extending assonance rhyming “vi-i-i-ral”/“hi-i-i-gh” has any stickiness. (It should be said that the video is a small triumph of wardrobe: striped sweat socks under cowboy boots paired with a sheer wrap, a pink cheerleader outfit, a bejeweled headpiece that bisects the face vertically. The haute-camp styling is the most conceptually rigorous thing here.)Record labels are increasingly in the content business, and by that metric, Lil Nas X is the platonic ideal of a star. Imagine the meetings involving artists who are less comfortable with the camera, less self-aware, less fluent with algorithmic distribution. Imagine musicians who simply wish to play music.Lil Nas X cannot. “yall mind if i enter my christian era?” he asked on Instagram a few weeks ago, in a caption to a video in which he sang a folk-gospel song more elegant than anything he’s thus far released.On TikTok, he wolfed down communion crackers. He posted a mock acceptance letter from Liberty University, the evangelical institution, signed by Jerry Falwell (who died in 2007).Lil Nas X even weaponized, meekly, the media outlets that would have given him breathless coverage regardless. The @PopCrave X account shared staged red carpet footage of the celebrity doppelgängers from his video shouting his praises as if it were real. Official Spotify accounts posted “LNX is back with more mid-music 🤷‍♂️” — he’s trolling the critics in advance.Call it what you want: a statement of fact, a statement of defiance, a statement of indifference. But really it’s just a cheap LOL, and a place for Lil Nas X defenders to aggregate.But all this attention farming must be tiring. During his last rollout, Lil Nas X spent loads of time on Twitter dunking on adversaries. Now, he’s doing much less of that, while sprinkling in the exasperation of the misunderstood: “since i’m a troll y’all discount my art as just ‘pissing ppl off,’” he wrote before “J Christ” was released.In a self-filmed four-minute video posted across all his social media on Monday, he paced and spoke seemingly extemporaneously about some of the backlash he’s received for his playful manipulation of religious imagery and themes. The Grammy-winning Christian rapper Lecrae said on X, “if God can transform King Neb, murders, slave masters, sex workers, etc. he can add another Blasphemer to the list.” And the antic Twitch streamer Kai Cenat fumed, “God gonna handle you, bro.”These are deep-sigh, predictable responses to deep-sigh, predictable jokes. But in his response video, it would seem Lil Nas X is taking critiques like these seriously. At one point, he apologizes for some of his specific bits, even while confessing that he doesn’t fully understand the imagery he was referencing.That said, the most powerful aspect of the clip is the anticipation that he might break character at any moment. Is this simply part of the bit, a setup for the next meme? Is he going to end up sitting down with Cenat for a debate about God, or do a saint-sinner duet with Lecrae?As he’s walking, Lil Nas X’s selfie camera returns again and again to a shelf with a pair of goofy yellow boots, a collaboration between Crocs and the unbearable meme brand MSCHF (his partner on last cycle’s Satan Shoes). Even in what’s meant to be his most earnest moment, the jester is just around the corner — it’s almost impossible to convey gravity when your sincerest form of expression is mockery. More

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      At 70, the Composer Georg Friedrich Haas Encourages Self-Discovery

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      One of Haas’s former students reflects on his time with a teacher who had lessons to offer in music, doubt and influence.One evening in 2013, during my graduate recital in composition at the City of Basel Music Academy in Switzerland, an instrument I had built went flying into the audience. It was a small loudspeaker duct-taped to a string — I called it a sound pendulum — and when the musician twirled it, the tape didn’t hold.Almost everything that could have gone wrong, did. A pianist lost her place in the music. A saxophonist mixed up the performance time and rushed in wearing flip-flops after a frantic phone call from me. In the composition I was most excited about, I badly misjudged an important combination of instruments: A passage meant to sound sleekly metallic was merely tinny.I had a panic attack. I went outside to get some air. My composition professor, Georg Friedrich Haas, and a fellow student, the Israeli composer Yair Klartag, followed, aiming to calm me down.As my breath returned to its regular rate, Haas told me that he valued my music, but that I would need to start believing in myself.Easy for him to say, I thought. This Austrian composer, who turned 70 last August, was close to the height of his fame. In 2010, the music critic Alex Ross of The New Yorker referred to Haas as “one of the major European composers of his generation,” and in early 2013 the eminent conductor Simon Rattle described Haas’s “In Vain” as “one of the only already acknowledged masterpieces of the 21st century.”Haas had forged an original voice using microtonal materials, or intervals smaller than the minor second, the smallest distance between two notes in standard Western intonation. He mined the unfamiliar density of these sounds to create a primal interplay of tension and release in which shattering tension lived beside wary beauty.I was a 25-year-old with indifferent grades whose homemade instrument had almost clocked someone.But Haas and I had more in common than was immediately obvious. He moved to Switzerland from Graz, Austria, in 2005; I arrived from Salzburg, in the same country, in 2011. We both had high hopes for our lives in Basel but felt ill at ease once we arrived. The city seemed skeptical of outsiders, and the atmosphere at the conservatory could be tense. I only ever seemed to meet gay men my age when I took the seven-hour train ride to Berlin; Haas’s third marriage was in crisis. In Basel, “I lost the ground beneath my feet,” Haas recalled in a recent interview. “I always felt on the defensive.”Haas knew what it felt like to question yourself. Self-belief, he said, “is one of the most fundamental things for me.”I looked forward to Haas’s courses. His private lessons included long silences punctuated by insightful remarks about the music and an occasional sly joke. In seminars, my classmates and I listened to old and new compositions, followed by sometimes raucous discussions about their merits. Haas never discouraged his students from trying an outlandish idea. He would only mention it if he had attempted something similar in a piece and had been disappointed by the result.Georg Friedrich Haas in his New York apartment in 2016.Brian Harkin for The New York TimesHaas didn’t talk to me about self-belief before my disastrous recital, but he modeled the trait by treating each of his students with respect, no matter how much their aesthetic preferences differed from his own. While studying with Haas, I became friends with my fellow composing students — Ryan Beppel, Arash Yazdani and William Dougherty, as well as Klartag — at least partially because Haas discouraged students from jockeying for position. “There was a kind of utopia in that classroom,” Beppel recalled. “We were really supportive of each other, which I now know isn’t always the case in creative circles.”For his part, Haas said that he sees “it as a certain logic in my work as a teacher that I try to accept every person who composes music as he or she is, and pass that on to the others.”He was enthusiastic about the wildest, least practical idea of my composing days: a piece for six ambulances driving around an audience. Their speeds would be carefully calibrated to create different layers of the Doppler effect, or the bending in a note that we perceive when sound passes us by. For obvious reasons, the piece was never performed.By the day of my recital, Haas and I both had our escapes from Basel planned. He was going to New York to become a music professor at Columbia University. I was going to Berlin to become a waiter at an American-style diner.Haas was so focused on moving that he now has no memory of our conversation at my concert. “I was at a complete dead end, and I had to get out,” he said. “I was unbelievably lucky that I was offered a way out.”His opera “Thomas,” which premiered in May 2013, encapsulates that feeling of suffocation. Based on a libretto by Händl Klaus, the work focuses on the title character, whose boyfriend, Matthias, has just died in a hospital. Thomas grieves but must interact with the businesslike functionaries of death. The instrumental music is often skeletal, with an ensemble consisting almost entirely of plucked instruments, their quick decays a reminder of transience. The opera expresses an existential loneliness eased only by the gentle shimmer of its microtonal harmonies.Once Haas began teaching at Columbia, his life changed rapidly. He met Mollena Williams, a writer, performer and alternative lifestyle activist, on OkCupid. Haas had long wanted a partner who shared his interest in B.D.S.M. and dominant-submissive dynamics. After decades of suppressing that desire, he found someone in New York who shared it. They married in 2015, and she now goes by Mollena Williams-Haas. The couple has collaborated on works such as “Hyena,” for which Williams-Haas wrote and performed a text about alcohol withdrawal, accompanied by Haas’s music.Since his move to New York, Haas, whom I remembered as a shy teacher, has been blunt about his past. Shortly after their wedding, he and Williams-Haas spoke with The New York Times about their relationship, describing how their shared kink encouraged their creativity. Later that year, Haas told Die Zeit that he was raised by a family that remained ideologically close to Nazis after the end of World War II.“The monsters,” Haas told the newspaper, “they were my parents and grandparents.”“The Artist and the Pervert,” an intimate documentary about Haas and Williams-Haas, premiered in 2018. When the composer moved to the United States, “There was the thought, ‘I’m in New York now and New York is big, New York is anonymous, I could do what I want and no one will notice,’” he said. “That concept didn’t quite work.”Klartag, my classmate, followed Haas to Columbia from Basel to pursue his doctorate in composition, and found his teacher transformed. “He was very shy and introverted, at least with the students, in Basel,” Klartag said. “In New York, he really opened up, was very outgoing, outspoken.”In 2022, Haas published a German-language memoir that goes into greater detail about his past, “Durch vergiftete Zeiten: Memoiren eines Nazibuben” (“Through Poisoned Times: Memoirs of a Nazi Boy”). His grandfather, the architect Fritz Haas, joined the Nazi Party in 1934, when the organization was still illegal in Austria. Haas’s father attempted to raise young Georg in the same ideology. While he was studying in Graz, from 1972 to 1979, Haas realized that Nazi sympathies remained among some Austrian composers. He described physical abuse at the hands of his family and sexual abuse at the hands of his schoolmates.Maybe most painfully, the book explores the roots and manifestations of the composer’s own Fascist views, which he held until his early 20s.I studied in Austria almost 30 years later than Haas, at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg. I had excellent teachers and an absurdly generous number of private lessons. But I can imagine the environment in which Haas learned. Once, I borrowed an obscure Mozart score from the university library. The cover page was emblazoned with a Third Reich seal.For Haas, his memoir was an act of exorcism that freed him to devote all his energies to music. “I’ve made peace with myself,” he wrote in the book. “The past is behind me. I still have much to do.”My youth, in Jewish, progressive Brookline, Mass., was much easier and happier than Haas’s. But conservatories have a way of instilling doubt in all but their most exceptional students, and although I don’t compose anymore, I’m still absorbing his broader lesson about self-belief. Recently, Haas brought up my old idea of the piece for ambulances. “It’s really a shame that we weren’t able to continue it,” he said.I couldn’t keep a miniature loudspeaker attached to a whirling string, but he trusted me to compose for real ambulances, he said, “like a 5-year-old child in the clouds somewhere playing with his cars.”In 2020, Haas wrote a piece of similarly fantastical ambition. Titled “11.000 Saiten” (“11,000 Strings”), the work, which premiered last August in Bolzano, Italy, is composed for chamber orchestra and 50 upright pianos, each tuned at the microscopic interval of two cents from the next. (Cents measure the difference between musical intervals; a minor second, the smallest distance between two notes in standard Western intonation, is a hundred cents.)Swarming “microclusters” created by this tuning morph in and out of radiant, complex overtone harmonies. Though the title refers to the number of strings in the ensemble, it also recalls Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1907 pornographic, sadomasochistic novel “The Eleven Thousand Rods.”“11.000 Saiten” is a culmination of the past decade in Haas’s life. Now, he wants to encourage self-discovery, no matter how oblique, in others. As he did for me.“My dream as a teacher,” Haas said, “is when something keeps growing underground, like a rhizome, and then at a different place grows into a different plant.” More

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      8 Upcoming Albums to Get Excited About

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      Sample songs from LPs by Waxahatchee, the Smile, Helado Negro and more.Waxahatchee’s “Tiger’s Blood” is due on March 22.Molly Matalon Dear listeners,Now that 2023 and all of its best-of-the-year lists are finally in the rearview, it’s time to look ahead to the music being released in 2024.Some marquee pop stars — Ariana Grande, Dua Lipa, Lil Nas X — are likely to put out their next albums in the near future, but for today’s playlist I wanted to spotlight some slightly lesser-known artists with fresh releases on the horizon.Sure, you’ll probably see some familiar names among the track list (including two members of Radiohead) but I hope this mix also introduces you to at least one artist you haven’t heard before, whether that’s the pop-minded neo-classical composer Julia Holter, the atmospheric indie artist Helado Negro or the kinetic rock band Sheer Mag. Without further ado, here are eight reasons to be excited about 2024 — musically speaking, at least.Listen along on Spotify while you read.1. Waxahatchee featuring MJ Lenderman: “Right Back to It”It’s been a slow, gradual joy to witness Katie Crutchfield, the founder of Waxahatchee, come into her maturity as a songwriter across the past decade or so. Her debut, “American Weekend,” a piercing, acoustic guitar-driven album released in 2012, announced her as a major talent, but she seemed to unlock a new level of confidence on her breakout 2020 album “Saint Cloud,” which melded laid-back country-rock with Crutchfield’s self-searching lyrics. Its follow-up, “Tiger’s Blood,” finally comes out on March 22, and its leadoff single “Right Back to It” finds Crutchfield in fine form, duetting with the guitarist and singer MJ Lenderman and contemplating a relationship that continues “like a song with no end.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Sheer Mag: “Playing Favorites”The punky, energetic rock band Sheer Mag has been a staple in the Philadelphia indie scene for years thanks in part to its reputation as a stellar live act. But the group’s recorded output is great, too — a streak it will hopefully continue on “Playing Favorites,” its third LP, out March 1. This jangly, driving title track showcases, among other things, the power of the lead singer Tina Halladay’s vocals. (Listen on YouTube)3. Brittany Howard: “Red Flags”A few months ago, I recommended Brittany Howard’s blisteringly funky “What Now,” the title track of the Alabama Shakes frontwoman’s second solo album. The next single, “Red Flags,” delves into the moodier and more meditative side of her versatile sound — at least until she lets it rip and hits a screaming high note that takes the song ever higher. “What Now” comes out on Feb. 9. (Listen on YouTube)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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      Morgan Wallen’s Latest Album Reclaims No. 1 for a 17th Time

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      “One Thing at a Time,” the country star’s 2023 release, tops the Billboard chart in a slow sales week.So far in 2024, the Billboard album chart is looking a lot like 2023.For the first two weeks of the year, Taylor Swift held at No. 1 with her “1989” remake. Now, the country star Morgan Wallen returns with “One Thing at a Time,” which dominated the chart for 16 weeks last year and now logs its 17th time in the top spot.“One Thing at a Time,” which had a blockbuster opening last March and remained a steady hit for months, rose to No. 1 with the equivalent of 61,000 sales in the United States, including 80 million streams and 2,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate.Luminate’s recent year-end report named “One Thing at a Time” the most popular album of 2023 in the United States, logging the equivalent of about 5.4 million sales, largely from streaming.With no major new releases to challenge it, “One Thing” has the lowest weekly sales number for a No. 1 album in almost two years, since Pusha T’s “It’s Almost Dry” logged 55,000 in May 2022. Swift’s total on last week’s chart was also notably low, at just 64,000 equivalent sales.Also this week, Drake’s “For All the Dogs” is No. 2, Swift’s “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” falls two spots to No. 3 and Nicki Minaj’s “Pink Friday 2” is No. 4.“Stick Season” by the Vermont pop-folkie Noah Kahan is in fifth place, that album’s highest chart position yet in the nearly year and half since its release. Kahan, who has scored streaming hits and has a major arena tour coming this year, is in contention for best new artist at the Grammys on Feb. 4. More

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      Winter Jazzfest Has Company: Unity Jazz Festival

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      The decision to place another festival right on top of Jazzfest highlighted how much has been flipped upside-down in jazz over the past 20 years.Back in 2005 — when the first NYC Winter Jazzfest was held at the Knitting Factory in Lower Manhattan, and Jazz at Lincoln Center’s multimillion-dollar facilities had recently opened on the Upper West Side — it was clear which represented the establishment, and which was proposing an alternative. Today, it’s not such an easy distinction.Steered by its artistic director, the Pulitzer Prize-winning trumpeter and retro jazz philosopher Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center was cultivating an older and affluent audience, adjacent to the opera-going crowd. Marsalis’s bookings proudly held the line for what he considered jazz’s defining virtues. Two decades later, those things are still true.Winter Jazzfest was geared toward disruption. The mid-2000s were lean years for the music: Online file sharing hit jazz musicians especially hard, and the fallout from the Sept. 11 attacks left many live-music venues closed throughout New York City.Brice Rosenbloom, Winter Jazzfest’s founder, positioned it as both an infusion of crucial life support and a challenge to some of jazz’s passively dominant trends. The festival’s biggest target, perhaps, was the idea that you could draw any stark dividing lines through music: Pop-friendly, fusion-driven, acoustic and tradition-revering improvisers coexisted on the festival’s bill, which in that first year unfolded across three stages on a single night at the Knit.New York jazz lost its flagship summertime festival in 2009, leaving Winter Jazzfest as the biggest game in town; since then it has grown into more than a week of concerts and satellite events. Every year, it offers a full buffet of the current flavors in jazz at a mix of theaters, rock halls and small rooms.The 20th annual Winter Jazzfest marathons took place over the weekend, in Lower Manhattan on Friday night and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Saturday. From the sound of things, no matter how dark things may look in the wider world, the state of improvised music appears strong.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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      Leon Wildes, Immigration Lawyer Who Defended John Lennon, Dies at 90

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      Leon Wildes, a New York immigration lawyer who successfully fought the United States government’s attempt to deport John Lennon, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 90.His death, at Lenox Hill Hospital, was confirmed by his son Michael.For more than three years, from early 1972 to the fall of 1975, Mr. Wildes (pronounced WY-ulds) doggedly battled the targeting by the Nixon administration and immigration officials of Mr. Lennon, the former Beatle, and his wife, Yoko Ono, marshaling a series of legal arguments that exposed both political chicanery and a hidden U.S. immigration policy.Uncovering secret records through the Freedom of Information Act, he showed that immigration officials, in practice, can exercise wide discretion in whom they choose to deport, a revelation that continues to resonate in immigration law. And he revealed that Mr. Lennon, an antiwar activist and a vocal critic of President Richard M. Nixon, had been singled out by the White House for political reasons.Mr. Wildes was ultimately vindicated by the stinging decision of a federal appeals court in October 1975, which said that “the courts will not condone selective deportation based upon secret political grounds,” and which halted the effort to kick Mr. Lennon out of the country.Mr. Lennon and Mr. Wildes addressing reporters about the case, which centered on Mr. Lennon’s 1968 London conviction for marijuana possession.via Wildes Family ArchivesThe Beatles had broken up in 1970, and Mr. Lennon and Ms. Ono moved to New York the next year. Mr. Lennon had been convicted of marijuana possession in London in 1968; that record would normally have barred him from entry, but he had obtained a waiver. The waiver was coming to an end, and the Lennons received a deportation notice.“It was a very frightening moment,” Ms. Ono said in the 2007 documentary “The U.S. vs. John Lennon.”When the Lennons engaged Mr. Wildes to represent them, he had barely heard of his famous clients. In his book about the case, “John Lennon vs. the USA,” published by the American Bar Association in 2016, he wrote that he was vaguely aware of the Beatles — it was nearly impossible not to be — but that the names of its members had escaped him.“I think it was Jack Lemmon and Yoko Moto,” he recalled telling his wife after meeting them in their apartment on Bank Street in Greenwich Village. She quickly corrected him.In the 2007 film, Mr. Lennon is seen telling reporters about Mr. Wildes: “He’s not a radical lawyer. He’s not William Kunstler.”Mr. Lennon had publicly opposed the Vietnam War — he recorded the antiwar anthem “Give Peace a Chance” in 1969 — and he had been involved in protests on behalf of figures in the New Left movement, which campaigned against the war.Nixon administration officials feared that he had outsize influence among the young, who would be allowed to vote in greater numbers in the 1972 presidential election, the first after the voting age had been lowered to 18 from 21. In the paranoid atmosphere then prevailing in the White House, that was enough for administration officials and their allies, notably the conservative South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, to go after Mr. Lennon.Their case centered on the London marijuana conviction. But the appellate court judge, Irving Kaufman, ultimately ruled that the crime was insufficient to make Mr. Lennon an “excludable alien.”The real reasons for the quixotic pursuit of Mr. Lennon, Mr. Wildes argued, lay elsewhere, as he was able to show thanks to his relentless digging through records. Early in 1972, Mr. Thurmond had drafted a letter recommending that Mr. Lennon be thrown out of the country, which Attorney General John N. Mitchell forwarded to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the agency then in charge of visas. Of particular concern was the fact that Mr. Lennon had performed at a rally in support of a New Left figure, the poet John Sinclair, who had been jailed on a marijuana charge.“If Lennon’s visa is terminated it would be a strategic countermeasure,” the South Carolina senator wrote.Ten days later, “a telegram went out to all immigration offices in the United States instructing that the Lennons should not be given any extensions of their time to visit the United States,” Mr. Wildes wrote in his book.For the next three years, the government continued to press its case, in efforts that appeared increasingly ham-fisted as public support for Mr. Lennon and Ms. Ono grew. In letters and testimony, many of the era’s cultural celebrities spoke up for them, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Leonard Bernstein, the artist Jasper Johns and the authors John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates and Joseph Heller, as well as Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York.“The sole reason for deporting the Lennons was President Nixon’s desire to remove John and Yoko from the country before the 1972 election and a new, much younger electorate getting the vote,” Mr. Wildes wrote. “To ensure his grip on power, any ‘dirty tricks,’ including the abusive misuse of the immigration process, were acceptable.”Mr. Wildes, seated, consulted with his partner, Steven Weinberg, at their immigration law office in 1983.via Wildes Family ArchivesThe whole time, the F.B.I. was keeping a close watch on Mr. Lennon. “Surveillance reports on him ran to literally hundreds of pages,” Mr. Wildes wrote.When Mr. Lennon learned of the skulduggery, he was infuriated. “They’re even changing their own rules because we’re peaceniks,” he said in a television interview.The 1975 ruling allowed him to remain in the country. He was killed in front of the Dakota, the Upper West Side building where he and Ms. Yoko lived, five years later.In another breakthrough, Mr. Wildes found that immigration officials had the discretion to deport or not, depending on whether there were extenuating circumstances. The revelation of this policy continues to aid immigration lawyers battling the deportation of noncitizens today.“As part of his legal strategy, Wildes conducted groundbreaking research on the ‘nonpriority’ program, and eventually filed an application for ‘nonpriority status’ for Lennon,” the immigration expert Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia wrote in her 2015 book, “Beyond Deportation.” “Wildes learned that I.N.S. had for many years been granting ‘nonpriority’ status to prevent the deportation of noncitizens with sympathetic cases, but I.N.S. had never publicized the practice.”Throughout what Mr. Wildes acknowledged was the all-consuming job of representing the Lennons, he kept a bemused and friendly eye on his famous clients, sometimes encountering them, as others did, in what he called the “wonderful upright bed” in their Bank Street apartment.“One could meet half the world around that bed,” he wrote — “radical types like Jerry Rubin or Bobby Seale, oddball musicians like David Peel, poets like Allen Ginsberg, actors like Peter Boyle, television personalities like Geraldo Rivera, or even political operatives like the deputy mayor of New York.”Mr. Wildes at his office in 2015. “He’s not a radical lawyer,” John Lennon said. “He’s not William Kunstler.”via Wildes Family ArchivesLeon Wildes was born on March 4, 1933, in Olyphant, Pa., a small coal-mining town near Scranton. His father, Harry, was a clothing and dry goods merchant, and his mother, Sarah (Rudin) Wildes, worked in his store. Mr. Wildes was educated at public schools in Olyphant and earned a bachelor’s degree from Yeshiva University in 1954 and a law degree from New York University in 1958.He quickly gravitated toward immigration law, working for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a refugee aid organization, and helping two Americans who had gone to Israel establish their U.S. citizenship. He founded the immigration law firm Wildes & Weinberg in 1960 and went on to write numerous law review articles on immigration law and to teach at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University.In addition to his son Michael, he is survived by another son, Mark; his wife, Alice Goldberg Wiles; eight grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.Immigration law had “biblical import to him,” Michael Wildes, who is also a lawyer, recalled in a phone interview. “My father drew value from helping others achieve their American dream, as he had done — the golden grail of a green card, or citizenship.” More

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      Jay Clayton, Vocal Innovator in Jazz and Beyond, Dies at 82

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      She sparred with avant-garde instrumentalists and used electronics to alter and extend her vocal palette. She was also at home in more conventional settings.Jay Clayton, a singer whose six-decade career encompassed freewheeling improvisation, lyrical songs and poetry, and the prescient use of electronics, died on Dec. 31 at her home in New Paltz, N.Y. She was 82.Her daughter, Dejha Colantuono, said the cause was small-cell lung cancer.Ms. Clayton established herself as an innovator in the 1970s and ’80s, sparring with instrumentalists in avant-garde settings and using electronics to alter and extend her vocal palette well before the practice became common. She worked frequently with other singers — she formed an especially close bond with Sheila Jordan, an early mentor — and she sang in playfully aerobatic vocal groups with peers like Jeanne Lee, Ursula Dudziak, Norma Winstone and Bobby McFerrin.“She works in the familiar avant-garde terrain of wordless, spontaneous improvisations in duo and group settings,” the critic Jon Garelick wrote of her work in The Boston Phoenix in 1990. “But Clayton is also a warm, gracious interpreter of lyric standards, and this lyricism pervades all her work.”Ms. Clayton in 1969. She fell in with the downtown jazz scene after moving to New York in 1963.via Clayton familyShe performed for a decade with the composer Steve Reich, participating in the development and recording of breakthrough pieces like “Drumming,” “Music for 18 Musicians” and “Tehillim.” She also worked closely with dancers and choreographers early in her career, and she maintained an enduring collaboration with the tap dancer Brenda Bufalino.A prominent and influential teacher, Ms. Clayton held positions at the City College of New York, the Peabody Institute and Princeton University. She developed a vocal program for the Banff Center in Alberta, Canada, where she taught with Ms. Jordan. The two further collaborated in training programs in Massachusetts and Vermont and ran a celebrated retreat for singers at Willow Lane Farm in Berne, N.Y., near Albany.Prominent among Ms. Clayton’s students are the composer Karen Goldfeder and the protean vocal improviser Theo Bleckmann. But through her widespread pedagogy — including a book, “Sing Your Story: A Practical Guide for Learning and Teaching the Art of Jazz Singing,” published in 2001 — her progeny are legion.She was born Judith Theresa Colantone on Oct. 28, 1941, in Youngstown, Ohio. Her father, William Colantone, was a carpenter and construction worker; her mother, Josephine (Armeni) Colantone, had sung professionally during the big-band era.Ms. Clayton took up the accordion and later had several years of piano lessons. After high school, she attended a summer program at the St. Louis Institute of Music and then enrolled at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she received a bachelor’s degree in music education in 1963. Since jazz courses were not available, she studied classical repertoire while quietly polishing her improvisational skills on weekend dates with a local trombonist.A prominent and influential teacher, Ms. Clayton was the author of what she called “a practical guide” to the study of jazz singing/No creditAfter moving to New York City in 1963, Ms. Clayton fell in with the downtown jazz scene and formed an early association with the soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy. Through him, she met the drummer Frank Clayton, with whom she began a relationship in 1965. In 1967, the couple started a concert series, “Jazz at the Loft,” in their home on Lispenard Street, in the neighborhood later called TriBeCa, presenting performances by the saxophonist Sam Rivers, the pianist Joanne Brackeen and others. They married in 1968.Not long afterward, Ms. Clayton was introduced to Mr. Reich by the singer Joan La Barbara, who was her student. What he sought, he said in a phone interview, was a “modern-day equivalent” of Ella Fitzgerald: someone who could perform his music with spontaneity as well as precision.Ms. Clayton fit the bill. “Her pitch was dead-on, and her rhythm was a lift to the spirit,” Mr. Reich said. “She grasped what had to be done, and she did it to perfection.”Flourishing among her fellow innovators and iconoclasts, Ms. Clayton led educational workshops with Jeanne Lee and performed with the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams at the Public Theater in 1979. That same year, she consulted on the first Women in Jazz festival, produced by Cobi Narita (who died in November).In 1981, Ms. Clayton released her first album, “All-Out,” a wide-ranging statement with an ensemble that included Mr. Clayton, the pianist Larry Karush, the saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom, the vocalist Shelley Hirsch and others. On several tracks Ms. Clayton sang swooping, soaring lines in tandem with Ms. Bloom, a recent arrival from New Haven, Conn., whom Ms. Clayton had taken under her wing.“From the minute she and I met, we had this linear synchronicity,” Ms. Bloom said in an interview. “There’s something about the combination of her sound and my sound: We played lines together, and it was like this other instrument.” They collaborated for decades.In 1982, Ms. Clayton, her husband and their two children moved to Seattle, where she taught at the Cornish School, now Cornish College of the Arts. When she and Mr. Clayton divorced in 1984, she remained in Seattle, developing a new circle of collaborators that included the drummer Jerry Granelli, the trombonist Julian Priester, the bassist and the saxophonist Briggan Krauss.Ms. Clayton, center, in the 1980s with, from left, the pianist Larry Karush, the bassist Harvie Swartz, the drummer Frank Clayton and the saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom.via Clayton familyShe recorded works by the experimental composer John Cage in the late 1980s and returned to Mr. Reich’s music on occasion. Her jazz recordings from those years include “Beautiful Love,” a 1995 album devoted to vintage popular standards with the pianist Fred Hersch.“I always think that doing standard material lets you know where somebody’s coming from,” Mr. Hersch said in an interview, likening the practice to a painter rendering a still life or a nude. “In Jay’s case, a lot of it is very hauntingly beautiful, and pretty fierce in terms of improvising.”Ms. Clayton moved back to New York in 2002, re-establishing a local presence both alone and in collaboration with Ms. Jordan. She made a stream of recordings for the Sunnyside label, ranging from a lyrical tribute to the songwriter Harry Warren to an adventurous electronic fantasia involving poetry by Emily Dickinson, made with the composer and pianist Kirk Nurock.She was diagnosed with aggressive lung cancer in December 2022. Her final recording, “Voices in Flight,” a collaboration with the singer Judy Niemack, was released in June.In addition to her daughter, Ms. Clayton is survived by her brother, William Colantone Jr.; her son, Dov Clayton; and two grandchildren.To the end, Ms. Clayton remained devoted to her students. “She was always just exactly herself, personally and musically,” Ms. Goldfeder wrote in a Facebook post; “it’s one of the many ways she was a great teacher.” More

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      Phill Niblock, Dedicated Avant-Gardist of Music and Film, Dies at 90

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      Making music with no melody or rhythm and films with no plot, he became a darling of New York’s experimental underground.Phill Niblock, an influential New York composer and film and video artist who opened new sonic terrain with hauntingly minimalist works incorporating drones, microtones and instruments as diverse as bagpipes and hurdy-gurdies, often accompanied by his equally minimalist moving images, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 90.His partner, Katherine Liberovskaya, said he died in a hospital of heart failure after years of cardiac procedures.Mr. Niblock had no formal musical training. Nevertheless, he came to be hailed as a leading light in the world of experimental music, not only as an artist himself but also, beginning in the 1970s, as the director, with the choreographer Elaine Summers, of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation for dance, avant-garde music and other media. He served as the foundation’s sole director from 1985 until his death, and he was also the curator of the foundation’s record label, XI.His loft on Centre Street in Lower Manhattan served as a performance space for the foundation. It was also a social nexus for boundary-pushing musicians and composers like John Cage, Arthur Russell, David Behrman and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth.In an Instagram post on Tuesday, Mr. Moore wrote that Mr. Niblock’s work summoned a “collective consciousness which gave it its own genuine engagement with listener and performer alike.”Mr. Niblock’s music was marked by densely layered sound textures consisting of tones, close to one another in pitch, that made only very small movements for extended durations. “Minimalism to me is about stripping out things, and looking at a very small segment — to get rid of melody and rhythm and typical harmonic progressions,” Mr. Niblock said in an interview with Frieze magazine last summer. He added that his pieces “don’t really ‘develop,’ as that word is used in music.”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