Music

Shiffrin, the champion American ski racer, is an unabashed Swiftie, and has long seen the pop culture force as a textbook guide for navigating fame, adversity and unprecedented success.As Mikaela Shiffrin plans the next phase of her record-setting career as a skier, she is looking, as she always has, to the example of another female megastar who has experienced kindred highs and lows and highs in her career: Taylor Swift.The American skier Shiffrin is the most successful, and precocious, Alpine racer in history, having smashed the mark for World Cup victories, by women and men, while still in her prime skiing years. The American singer-songwriter Swift is the world’s biggest pop star, smashing music industry records one after another.When Shiffrin made her debut on the World Cup circuit, she was just shy of turning 16, the same age Swift was when she began recording her debut album five years earlier. They have both been teenage sensations lavished with praise and profit. While Swift, named Time magazine’s person of the year for 2023, might right now be the most famous human on the planet, Shiffrin, celebrated at home, has bona fide rock star status in Europe, where ski racing is the national sport of several countries. They are both at the top of their respective mountains.They have been innovators, history-makers and leading figures in their high-wire professions. But like many caught in the pop culture maelstrom, they’ve experienced intense, barbed criticism after any failure, real or perceived. Each has openly dealt with a parent’s death or serious illness and each has taken lengthy breaks from performing.A Swiftie since she was 13, Shiffrin, like legions of other girls and women, sees herself in Swift and has come to recognize elemental parallels in their careers and lives. For perspective, Shiffrin, 28, turns to her idol.Shiffrin at Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour concert in Denver in July.Mike DawsonSwift onstage at Empower Field at Mile High, where Shiffrin watched from a luxury box and sang along.Tom Cooper/TAS23, via Getty ImagesIn July, Shiffrin rented a suite for Swift’s Eras Tour concert in Denver, an event Shiffrin described as “three hours of jumping up and down while singing every song at the top of my lungs.” Within that experience, Shiffrin pondered if there was a lesson that would help shape the next “era” of her own luminous career.Had Swift, the teen prodigy who is now 34, helped point the way from one stage to another?“Absolutely, because I’ve spent 15 years studying Taylor Swift and she has been guiding me a little bit every step of the way,” Shiffrin said in a recent interview in Vermont, where she claimed the 90th of her 93 career World Cup victories. “It’s why most Swifties become Swifties. It feels like her music is speaking directly to you. Her experiences resonate; I’ve always tried to learn from them.”Shiffrin’s mother, Eileen, a former ski racer who is also one of her coaches, insisted that Swift had provided guidance that is more multifaceted and sophisticated than it might seem.“Miki’s sport and career thrives on creativity,” Eileen wrote in an email last month, using Mikaela’s family nickname. She added that “every new Taylor Swift song, concert and video,” is an inspiration and motivation to her daughter.Eileen Shiffrin, right, celebrates with her daughter on the podium after Mikaela’s victory in a World Cup Slalom race in Semmering, Austria, in 2018.Christian Bruna/EPA, via ShutterstockEileen Shiffrin, who praised Swift’s “street smarts” and business acumen, continued: “She keeps Miki ticking like she does the whole world. And she stands her ground, as she should, and that’s a great role model.”As Mikaela Shiffrin, who has never met Swift, recalled various chapters of her public journey — stunning racing successes, ill-timed flops, the perils of fame, the accidental death of her father in 2020 — Shiffrin readily identified ways Swift had influenced her responses to each situation.That long-distance tutelage began when the preternaturally gifted Shiffrin, nurtured in the Colorado mountains and at a venerable Vermont ski academy, won three World Cup races and a world championship gold medal as a high school senior. A year later, in 2014, she became the youngest slalom champion in Olympic history, at 18, and was thrust into an international sporting spotlight that has only seemed to magnify with each season.But since her days as a 13-year-old listening to Swift’s 2008 album “Fearless” on repeat, she said, she has looked for clues on how to live as a celebrity.“Granted, Taylor is a big fish in a big pond and I’m more of a big fish in a small pond,” Shiffrin said. “But you can see how she’s handled the attention, because she was a teenager too. She was able to hold up and work on her music. And while she’s very comfortable sharing a lot of her life, she builds a layer of protection when she needs it. She can disappear. That does seem to give her energy.“I took all that in and kind of assimilated it. Although it was hard for me because I had to go from being an extreme introvert to being comfortable around a lot of cameras and microphones. It’s a bit funny having to go through life quantifying yourself as an introvert but having to live it in an extroverted way.”Shiffrin during her downhill run at the Beijing Olympics, where she did not win a medal, in 2022.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAfter winning gold and silver medals at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics, Shiffrin won an unprecedented 17 races in the following season. At the time, a five- or six-win Alpine season would have been considered prosperous. But at the start of the next season, Shiffrin did not match the astonishing pace she had set a year earlier.“People started to say that I’d lost my touch, that maybe I had peaked and my career was fading,” Shiffrin said with a look of exasperation as she slumped backward into a lounge chair. “I was like, ‘Oh, gosh, everybody’s saying all this stuff about me like I’m never going to be a good skier again.’ ”Shiffrin was reminded of Swift’s “Reputation” album from a few years earlier, and again saw parallels.“That album was built of basically having her reputation go incredibly downhill, or at least that’s how she perceived it with all the feuds that were going on at the time,” Shiffrin said. “But she came back in a big, big way. I related to the album because it made me feel like life is full of ebbs and flows. And that everything is probably going to be OK.”Shiffrin rallied in January 2020, with successive victories. But roughly a week after the second of those restorative triumphs, on Feb. 1, her older brother, Taylor, reached her by phone in Europe to say that their father, Jeff Shiffrin, had been seriously hurt at home in Colorado. Returning to Denver, Mikaela climbed onto Jeff’s hospital bed for several hours, a vigil that ended with his death on Feb. 2.The family has declined to reveal details of what happened; a coroner ruled the death an accident and listed the cause as a head injury.Shiffrin did not race for the next nine months.Shiffrin looks down at pictures of her late father Jeff Shiffrin in a locket on her necklace after winning a World Cup Giant Slalom race in Meribel, France, in February.Aleksandra Szmigiel/ReutersIn last month’s interview, without prompting, Shiffrin recalled that Swift’s 2020 album “Folklore” came out five months after her father’s death and that it included “Epiphany.” Swift has said the song explores the emotional distress of health care workers at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and of soldiers at war, a correlation that pays homage to one of Swift’s grandfathers, who was a battle-hardened U.S. Marine in World War II.Shiffrin played “Epiphany” over and over.“She literally addressed the most unforeseeable and horrific experience I ever have gone through,” Shiffrin said of Swift, whose parents have each dealt with cancer. “It speaks directly to the experiences I had in the hospital with my dad.“It was hard to listen to and heart-wrenching but also uplifting at the same time, which is something I really needed at that time.”Shiffrin’s return to competition in the 2021-22 season included a string of triumphant results, as well as a shocking, demoralizing outing at the Beijing Olympics, where she did not win a medal. Since then she has won 20 races, which puts her on pace for roughly 130 career victories if she were to race five more years. The previous World Cup wins record, which stood for 34 years, was 86. She has won 14 world championship medals, one shy of the most in a career.But whatever Shiffrin’s future holds, she is sure of two things. The first is that given her level of sporting fame, Shiffrin could likely arrange to meet Taylor Swift, but she is afraid to do so.“I’d probably trip over myself and be so tongue-tied,” Shiffrin said, laughing. “And then it’d be memorable to her because it’s the first time she’s experienced, like, a goofball.”The second certainty is that she will use Swift as a model to help define the next era of her career, regardless of how many Alpine skiing records she accumulates.“Taylor Swift has reset so many records and held so many titles in the music industry that they have had to create new ways to measure her success,” Shiffrin said. “And I’ve noticed that she just keeps going.”Does that help solve Shiffrin’s central dilemma: What to do next?“Well, there’s an entire universe inside Taylor Swift’s mind that we haven’t tapped into yet — maybe we’ve tapped into 1 percent of what she can accomplish because of her music,” Shiffrin said. “And I think about my skiing in a similar way. I’m closer now to reaching my potential, but it’s not about a record or another title.“I’ve noticed Taylor just keeps going. In a way, you never finish doing that work.” More

The latest success of “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” gives Swift 68 weeks atop the Billboard 200, surpassing Elvis Presley’s record.Given how much Taylor Swift dominated music and pop culture in 2023, it’s only appropriate that the year’s album chart ended with Swift on top.“1989 (Taylor’s Version),” the star’s remake of her pop crossover hit from 2014, led the Billboard 200 for the last two weeks of the year, notching the album’s fourth and fifth times at the top and helping Swift break yet another record.With the latest chart, Swift has now earned a total of 68 times at No. 1, over 13 of her LPs, which surpasses Elvis Presley for the most appearances in the top slot for a solo artist. Of all acts, only the Beatles have been at No. 1 more times — 132 — in the history of Billboard’s flagship album chart, which dates to 1956.In its latest week out, “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” had the equivalent of 98,000 sales in the United States, including 48.5 million streams and 61,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate. In the nine weeks since the new “1989” was released in late October, it has had the equivalent of 2.8 million sales and just over one billion streams in the United States alone.Half of the latest Top 10 is occupied by seasonal albums, led by Michael Bublé’s “Christmas” at No. 2. The others are Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song” (No. 4), “A Christmas Gift for You From Phil Spector” (No. 7), Mariah Carey’s “Merry Christmas” (No. 8) and Pentatonix’s “The Greatest Christmas Hits” (No. 10). Those titles are likely to plunge down next week’s chart, if not vanish from it entirely, as listeners tend to pack up their holiday streaming playlists with the ornaments and wrapping paper on Dec. 26.Also this week, Nicki Minaj’s “Pink Friday 2” is No. 3 and Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” holds at No. 5. More

An interview with one of the year’s surprise success stories in the music industry, who’s become known as much for emotional openness as for hit songs.Few artists had a more unexpected 2023 than Jelly Roll, the face-tattooed former Southern rapper turned country singer who became one of the year’s most promising new crossover pop stars.His album “Whitsitt Chapel,” which debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard all-genre chart in June, is a collection of pop-rock anthems with flourishes of country, and it spawned a pair of hits — the introspective “Need a Favor,” and the new version of his viral breakout “Save Me,” featuring Lainey Wilson. He is nominated for two 2024 Grammys at next month’s ceremony: best new artist, and best country group/duo performance.At 39, with many mixtapes under his belt, Jelly Roll (born Jason DeFord) isn’t a traditional new artist nominee, but his creative rebirth, and move from underground circles to the mainstream spotlight, makes him eligible by Grammy guidelines. His competition includes budding pop, rap, dance, R&B and country acts: Gracie Abrams, Fred again.., Ice Spice, Coco Jones, Noah Kahan, Victoria Monét, the War and Treaty. But Jelly Roll might have the most fascinating back story of them all.In addition to his radio and streaming success, he has also become something of a pop culture phenomenon. His Hulu documentary, “Jelly Roll: Save Me,” underscores the intense emotional connection that tethers him to his fans, who identify with his hardscrabble struggle tales. (Jelly Roll spent about a decade in and out of juvenile centers and prison beginning when he was 14.) When he won new artist of the year at the C.M.A.s in November, his acceptance speech — part Tony Robbins, part the Rock — went wildly viral. And he got to make an appearance alongside the returning W.W.E. favorite Randy Orton on “Monday Night Raw.”Jelly Roll recently appeared on the New York Times video show Popcast (Deluxe) to discuss his breakout year, and how he plans to build on it. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.JON CARAMANICA When you first started making music outside of Nashville in the 2000s, you were a rapper. Who were the people you were looking to for inspiration, coming up during this very rich era in Southern hip-hop?JELLY ROLL Cash Money Records dominated our mom and pop stores. No Limit. I mean, dude, I remember sitting in a state building where they transition you from one group home to another, shackled, and they have the TV on BET. It might have been the “Bling Bling” video. We were enamored by Southern rap like 8Ball & MJG, Three 6 Mafia, UGK, Outkast, the Dungeon Family, the Geto Boys. Even the earlier side of Swishahouse, Chamillionaire and Paul Wall. Of course, the locals like Haystak. We were just fixing to get our feet wet putting out mixtapes. So we were using every reference we could.CARAMANICA Were you listening to this stuff for the attitude or the storytelling?JELLY ROLL The lyrics, the storytelling and the feeling. I think about that whole 8Ball & MJG song [sings “Paid Dues”]: “Trapped in a trap till the mornin’ light/Ghetto ain’t left me no choices, I had to fight/ My mama and daddy was too young to raise me right.”COSCARELLI You were drawn to the bluesy stuff.JELLY ROLL I just felt it in my spirit. This is such a dramatic reference point, but it made me feel like when my mother would play “Coward of the County” or she would play Bette Midler’s “The Rose,” and we would all be in there just bawling and crying. I tell people, I think I ended up writing “Save Me” because I’ve been trying to write “The Rose” my whole life.COSCARELLI Was all of this music the soundtrack to your life as a teenager when getting into trouble with the law?JELLY ROLL The music always met me where I was. The streets — just to touch on this because I want to be open about it — I thought it was my only choice. I lived in a decently middle-class neighborhood, but I didn’t know one person on my street with a career. Everybody did drugs. People that had jobs were really blue collar. I just was like, I know it’s going to take money to get out of here. And the most obvious way to make money was what was happening in the neighborhood. And it’s no excuse. The music just followed Jason — wherever old Jelly Roll went, he just drug the music along like a Santa sack.COSCARELLI What did you bring from your rap life into your country music life that’s functioned as a secret weapon for you?JELLY ROLL That hip-hop hustle. They created DIY: J Prince, Tony Draper, Master P, Birdman. I feel like Southern hip-hop was my saving grace going into country music because I had built a business already. I had built a YouTube channel that had a billion views before I signed a record deal. Just walking into a building and going, Hey, man, I don’t want anybody’s money. What I want out of this building is resources. It was just a different mentality. I had a different negotiating power, and I really understood the importance of ownership.COSCARELLI You own your recent albums?JELLY ROLL 100 percent. I own every song I’ve ever released. I do not have a traditional record deal. I still get the lion’s share of my money on every single facet. I didn’t sign a publishing deal. I’m not bragging, but I’m proud of myself because I’m a kid that had zero education and didn’t get his GED till he was 24 in jail.COSCARELLI During the pandemic, “Save Me” started to go viral and you took a lot of meetings. Did you know you wanted to sign to a country label?JELLY ROLL I want to release music like a hip-hop artist. I want to write songs like a country music songwriter. And I want to tour like a rock ’n’ roll act. No label in town got it. I want to play the Grand Ole Opry, you know what I mean? And lucky for me, Morgan Wallen was bubbling at the time. He went on to be just the biggest star on earth, which is so deserved. I was like, I can sneak in right now. There’s a moment where I might be understood in this space. And that’s what happened.COSCARELLI You had these huge hits this year, but you crossed over in another way via your emotional speech at the CMAs, which became a meme.JELLY ROLL It’s the most viral moment of my whole life.COSCARELLI And then again on TikTok when you were nominated for the Grammys. How are you so comfortable baring your soul in that way when it’s the first time a lot of people are encountering you?JELLY ROLL To me, I’m just still me. So whatever’s actually happening in my life is what I’m putting out. I called my mother at the same time. It was me getting to call a woman I’ve called from jail. A woman I’ve called homeless, a woman I’ve called addicted. I got to call her and say I just got nominated for two Grammys. To me, that is the craziest call you can make.CARAMANICA In your documentary, there’s the really powerful scene with a young woman whose father had been killed. I’m struck by your willingness to be pained by other people, not simply sharing what you went through, but accepting what other people have gone through.JELLY ROLL Dude, I didn’t cry until I was 34 years old. I can’t quit crying now. I’m an empath for people, period. I genuinely felt that young lady. It’s the only scene I can’t watch in that documentary. I read an article about that scene and cried reading the article. I know what it feels like to be in the darkest moment of your life, man.To me that goes back to the Grammy post, because it’s like, I’m never going to be too cool to be a fan of something. I think it’s so important to still get excited about stuff.My wife asked me that day, “What’s this mean to you?” I was like, there is no more pinnacle in the music business than when you win a Grammy. Even just being nominated supersedes every award I’ve already won. That’s the headline the rest of my life — “Grammy nominated.” I’m lying there crying with my wife and we’re looking at all the other nominees. She was like, “You’ve got to post about this.” I was like, too emotional. She’s was like, “When has that stopped you?” And that’s just a good wife.CARAMANICA So much of this album is emotional bloodletting, but your life is evolving. When you go back for the next album, do you think that there’s a different emotional version of Jelly Roll that’s going to be in the music?JELLY ROLL I’m never letting what’s happening with the blessing of this thing working for me take me away from who I know I’m actually speaking to. As jovial as I am in real life, the music is a reflection of a very, very dark hallway between my ears. It’s the scariest place on earth for me. I dread going to sleep every night. The ghosts are there. But I’m going into my eighth year of marriage and I’ve never been more in love. I just want a wedding song — I’ve had so many funeral songs. I want to showcase that there are highs in life, too, and I want to figure out a way to incorporate them in the music. But ultimately, you know what I write about, and you know who I write for. More

In the only recent year in which Travis Kelce and the Kansas City Chiefs weren’t playing in the Super Bowl, the N.F.L. star was driving around Los Angeles in early February with his business managers, André and Aaron Eanes, marveling at billboards featuring Dwayne Johnson, the actor and entertainer better known as the Rock.“Man, I don’t think I’ll ever be as famous as the Rock,” Mr. Kelce said.His co-managers looked at each other. “We’re like, Yes, you can,” André Eanes said.The twin brothers had known since Mr. Kelce was at the University of Cincinnati that the 6-foot-5 athletic star with the Marvel-character physique, blue eyes and affable charm had crossover potential.But let’s be honest. Nobody imagined this.This was a year even The Rock might envy. Mr. Kelce, a tight end, won the Super Bowl (his second) in February. In March, he hosted “Saturday Night Live.” He’s starred in seven national television commercials. The podcast he co-hosts with his brother, Jason, is among the most popular on Spotify. He launched a clothing line with his team.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

He released more than 50 albums but had his greatest commercial success with “Compared to What,” a recording that came together at the last minute in 1969.Les McCann, a jazz pianist and vocalist who was an early progenitor of the bluesy, crowd-pleasing style that came to be known as soul jazz, and who, although he released more than 50 albums, was best known for a happenstance hit from 1969, died on Friday in Los Angeles. He was 88.His death, at a hospital where he had been admitted with pneumonia, was confirmed on Monday by Alan Abrahams, his longtime manager and a producer of several of his albums. Mr. McCann had lived for the past four years at a skilled nursing facility in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles.Mr. McCann’s earthy, uplifting approach to music was a product of his upbringing in a churchgoing family. As he came to emphasize his singing more and play electric keyboards, his albums, released from 1960 to 2018, influenced funk and R&B artists and became a rich vein for hip-hop artists to mine.His greatest commercial success, though, came purely by chance, in June 1969 at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.Already a recording veteran by then, with albums on Pacific Jazz, Limelight and, most recently, Atlantic, Mr. McCann was appearing at the festival for the first time. After he and the tenor saxophonist Eddie Harris, also an Atlantic artist, played separate sets, they gave an unscheduled performance together, with Mr. Harris as well as the expatriate trumpeter Benny Bailey joining Mr. McCann’s trio.Neither had played with Mr. McCann before, and there was no time for rehearsal. But the performance was to be recorded and filmed for broadcast.Despite the pressure, or perhaps because of it, as Mr. McCann recalled in the liner notes for the 1996 CD reissue of the concert album, which was released in 1969 as “Swiss Movement,” “Just before we went onstage, and for the first time in my life, I smoked some hash.”When he got to the bandstand, he wrote, “I didn’t know where the hell I was. I was totally disoriented. The other guys said, ‘OK, play, man!’ Somehow I got myself together, and after that, everything just took off.”The highlight of the concert was Eugene McDaniels’s protest song “Compared to What.” Stretching past eight minutes and featuring Mr. McCann’s churchy vocals, “Compared to What” would be released as a single and peak at No. 35 on the Billboard R&B chart. “Swiss Movement” was nominated for a Grammy Award and went on to sell a half-million copies.Mr. McCann and Mr. Harris reconvened in 1971 for the Atlantic studio album “Second Movement.” They also returned to Montreux for the 1988 festival, where they performed an obligatory reprise of “Compared to What.”Leslie Coleman McCann was born on Sept. 23, 1935, in Lexington, Ky., to James and Anna McCann. His father was a water maintenance engineer.His family was a musical one; he, his four younger brothers and his sister all sang in the Shiloh Baptist Church choir. Mr. McCann began playing piano at age 3 and a few years later had a music teacher, who charged 35 cents a lesson. (Those lessons did not last long: She died only six weeks after he began studying with her.) While attending Dunbar High School in Lexington, he played drums and sousaphone in the marching band.He left Kentucky at 17 when he enlisted in the Navy and was posted to the San Francisco area.Les McCann performing at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1974. He had been performing in clubs in Los Angeles when he was first offered a record contract.Tom Copi/Michael Ochs Archive, via Getty ImagesDuring his time in the Navy, he sang on “The Ed Sullivan Show” after winning a talent contest. On his nights off, he would spend time at the Black Hawk, a San Francisco jazz nightclub.After leaving the Navy, Mr. McCann moved to Los Angeles, where he studied music and journalism at Los Angeles City College and hosted a Monday night jam session at the Hillcrest Club. It was during that time that he first connected with Mr. McDaniels.In a 2017 interview for the magazine Oxford American, Mr. McCann was asked about Mr. McDaniels’s composition “Compared to What.” “When I heard him,” he said, “I hired him in my band — one of the best singers I’ve ever heard. And I found out he was also a writer. We stayed in touch for years after that, and he would always send me songs. I can’t tell you how many songs he sent me, but that one stuck with me.”Mr. McCann was performing in Los Angeles clubs when a representative of Pacific Jazz Records heard him and asked if he had a record contract. When told no, the representative pulled one from his pocket and offered it to him.Mr. McCann recorded more than a dozen albums for the label from 1960 to 1964, usually leading a trio under the businesslike moniker Les McCann Ltd., but sometimes adding guest horns or orchestral accompaniment and sometimes collaborating with the guitarist Joe Pass. He also took part in Pacific Jazz sessions led by the saxophonist Teddy Edwards, the Jazz Crusaders and others. Les McCann Ltd. backed the singer Lou Rawls on his debut album, “Stormy Monday,” released by Capitol in 1962.Mr. McCann then moved to Limelight, a subsidiary of Mercury Records run by Quincy Jones, for which he made six albums from 1964 to 1966. He signed with Atlantic in 1968; on his first album for the label, “Much Les,” he was accompanied by a string section.He would make 11 albums for Atlantic. On two of them, “Invitation to Openness” (1971) and “Layers” (1972), he played a host of keyboards and synthesizers, an avenue he had been inspired to explore after hearing the keyboardist Joe Zawinul’s work with Miles Davis. Those albums have been cited as seminal in popularizing electric keyboards.Later in his Atlantic years, Mr. McCann was featured more as a singer in a slicker, more pop-oriented context. This continued through the 1970s and ’80s on albums for the Impulse!, A&M and Jam labels. But he also remained committed to the piano. In 1989, when he was a guest on the NPR show “Piano Jazz,“ hosted by his fellow pianist Marian McPartland, it was as both a singer and a player. The two closed the broadcast with a duet on “Compared to What.”Mr. McCann had returned to emphasizing his piano playing by 1994, when he released “On the Soul Side,” the first of three albums for the MusicMasters label, which reunited him with Eddie Harris and Lou Rawls. But a stroke later that year forced him to once again focus on singing, which he did through the end of the decade.He later recovered fully and resumed recording. He released albums on a German label in 2002 and on a Japanese label two years later. His last recording was the holiday-themed “A Time Les Christmas,” which he released himself in 2018.In December, Resonance Records released the archival album “Les McCann — Never a Dull Moment! Live From Coast to Coast (1966-1967),” comprising concert recordings from Seattle and New York.Information about his survivors was not immediately available.Mr. McCann’s music has been sampled by nearly 300 hip-hop artists, including Eric B. & Rakim, A Tribe Called Quest, Cypress Hill, Nas, De La Soul, Snoop Dogg, the Notorious B.I.G. and Sean Combs.Mr. McCann performing at the 40th Montreux Jazz Festival in 2006. He also painted and was a photographer.Martial Trezzini/European Pressphoto AgencyIn 1975, Mr. McCann became the first artist in residence at Harvard University’s Learning From Performers program. He was also a devoted painter and photographer of jazz culture and Black history, and his images have been included with some of his albums. His work was collected in 2015 in the book “Invitation to Openness: The Jazz & Soul Photography of Les McCann 1960-1980.”In an interview for the preface to that book, Mr. McCann was asked how he had achieved intimacy with his photographic subjects. He responded: “I trust my intuition, you see,” adding, “I’m better off when I just do what I do on the piano: play.”Rebecca Carballo More

Starring a magnetic Aigul Akhmetshina, Carrie Cracknell’s lethargic staging updates Bizet’s opera to present-day America.The Metropolitan Opera says its new production of “Carmen” aims at “reinvigorating the classic story.”To that end, the director Carrie Cracknell has updated Bizet’s tale of a heedless, headstrong woman and her tragic fate from early-19th-century Spain to present-day America. It seems that the action has been placed somewhere along the border with Mexico, where guns are smuggled in long-haul trucks and rodeo riders (rather than the libretto’s toreadors) are local celebrities.But this change — intended “to find the relevance to contemporary concerns” in the piece, as Cracknell says in an interview in the program — ends up being little change at all. The bland, lethargic staging, which opened on New Year’s Eve, falls into the pattern of so many of the Met’s updatings: It is, almost gesture for gesture, the same as any extra-stale traditional “Carmen,” just dressed up in cutoff jeans and trucker hats instead of flamenco skirts and castanets.Don’t be fooled. The only truly impressive aspect of this “Carmen” is its Carmen: the 27-year-old mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina, in turquoise cowboy boots. Though this icon of the repertory is her first leading role at the Met, she seems unfazed by the pressure, singing with easily penetrating evenness and clarity, never needing to push. Her molten yet agile tone can be confiding one moment and extroverted the next, and she moves with magnetic naturalness onstage.But she suffers from a staging that lacks passion, wit, depth and variety. Cracknell, who is making her Met debut, describes her directorial approach as “looking through a feminist lens.” Perhaps because harshness or darkness in the title character could be perceived as antifeminist — as Carmen somehow provoking her ex-lover to kill her rather than lose her — Akhmetshina’s take on the part is fundamentally sweet and sincere, well-meaning and fun-loving. Even her seductiveness is gently nonthreatening, with the same old hand-on-hip mannerisms as the Carmens of a century ago.The other leading artists are still more at sea. As the opera’s ingénue, the soprano Angel Blue swings up to excitingly free high notes, but her voice pales a bit and wavers with vibrato lower down — and the production can’t decide whether it wants the standard meek Micaëla or a more assertive woman. As Escamillo, here a selfie-taking rodeo star rather than a bullfighter, the bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen swaggers just enough to remain sympathetic, his sound compactly resonant.Akhmetshina and the tenor Rafael Davila, who played Don José in the production’s New Year’s Eve opening.Ken Howard/Metropolitan OperaOn Sunday, the tenor Rafael Davila had the tough assignment of replacing Piotr Beczala, who was announced as ill just a few hours before curtain, as Don José, the soldier whose mania for Carmen drives him from decent country boy to murderous outlaw. Davila’s sturdy voice grew unreliable as it rose, and in a staging seeking to shift as much moral responsibility as possible onto José, he was, oddly, no more violent or volatile than the norm.The conductor Daniele Rustioni kept to moderate, well-judged tempos, and the train always stayed firmly on the tracks, including precise work by the chorus — although that came at the expense of ferocity and sensuality. In the preludes to the third and fourth acts were glimpses of a wilder, more expansive and more beautiful vision of Bizet’s score.Michael Levine’s sets are grandly spare and unevocative. With a high chain-link fence awkwardly shoving much of the action to a thin strip downstage, the first act takes place outside a factory making weapons, rather than the libretto’s cigarettes. Carmen and her merry band make off with a truck that then dominates the second and — crashed and burning on its side — third act. Skeletal, cagelike black bleachers rotate ominously in the fourth.Modern-day touches abound. Ann Yee’s choreography for a little second-act dance party echoes the finger-pumping-in-the-air style of the crowd at a pop show; the rodeo audience does the wave. Tom Scutt’s costumes are plausible Carhartt-ish evocations of today’s border country denizens; Guy Hoare’s lighting veers wildly, naturalistic to stark to frantic.Yet the 21st-century-ness is all on the surface, even if Cracknell’s goal is nothing less than a revolution in the opera’s sexual dynamics. “Ending violence against women and reimagining the depiction of violence against women,” she says, “live at the center of the feminist movement.”But this “Carmen” reimagines nothing. It seems from her interviews that Cracknell wants to emphasize the broader structures of gender and class that make Carmen’s death a societal tragedy instead of an individual crime of passion. But the director struggles to render that distinction legible to the audience.The bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen, as the rodeo star Escamillo, takes a selfie with Akhmetshina and a crowd.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSure, a security guard walks by during Carmen and José’s final confrontation and doesn’t intervene. And at the end, the women in the bleachers at the rodeo rise in solidarity while the men remain seated. But it’s all too little, too late for anything approaching a structural critique — or even just interesting, vibrant theater.Some of Cracknell’s choices, in fact, make the work less provocative. The children’s chorus mimics the changing of the guard in the opera’s opening act; if you’d like, society is training them for militarism. But rather than doubling down, Cracknell has the kids sing directly to the audience, choosing charm over menace.And it’s wrongheaded to imply, as Cracknell does, that the male chauvinism has been suppressed and the violence romanticized in previous “Carmen” productions. At the Met alone, I remember a performance of an old-fashioned Franco Zeffirelli staging around 2000, a few years after it premiered, in which the deadly final scene really did provide the queasy sensation of spying through a window on a murder, with all the attendant feelings of horror, excitement and shame.Richard Eyre’s production, which replaced the Zeffirelli in 2009 and set the work at the time of the Spanish Civil War, introduced a pervading sense of grimness, of the characters being thrown together by forces beyond their control. That was a show in which you certainly felt Carmen’s brooding fate more than her stereotypical insouciance or sex appeal. It made the stakes of the opera clearer and darker than they were on Sunday.And in removing the opera’s exoticizing of Spain as the playground of bandits and Gypsies, Cracknell, who is British, introduces a more insidious exoticizing. As in the Australian director Simon Stone’s 2022 Met staging of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” the frisson of this “Carmen” is its glib depiction of so-called flyover states — the part of the country that fascinates the operagoing elite as much as Seville fascinated 19th-century Paris.There’s something depressing, even corrosive, in taking such a superficial glance at our fellow Americans, when — especially as an election year dawns — our cultural institutions should be trying to help us understand one another.CarmenThrough Jan. 27, and returning in the spring with a new cast, at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

A close observer might have noticed the flicker of menace that passed between the man and the woman: how his hand, which had just cupped her cheek, slid down and opened to encircle her throat. But though her body grew still for a moment, it didn’t show fear. Instead, she seemed to give as good as she got during their heated exchange of words that occurs in full view of a crowd — a crowd that appeared to freeze when he grabbed her arm and roughly shoved her, sending her flying to the ground.Domestic abuse is often considered a private problem that happens behind closed doors. On New Year’s Eve, it will take center stage at the Metropolitan Opera in a new production of Bizet’s “Carmen,” conducted by Daniele Rustioni. The opening run stars the Russian mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina in the title role and the tenor Piotr Beczala as José, the soldier whose obsession with Carmen culminates in her murder. The modern-dress production, set near an unspecified border in America, includes scenes like this moment from Act II, rehearsed on a recent afternoon, that aim to shed light on society’s complicity in violence against women.The production’s director, Carrie Cracknell, said she wanted to question the view that Carmen’s death at the hands of José is a crime of passion, the result of her corrupting and discarding an innocent soldier. “We talk about domestic violence as these things which we understand to be a secret between a man and a woman,” she said. In the case of Carmen’s death, she added, “we’re trying to frame that as an outcome that feels as much about gender as about two individuals.”Akhmetshina rehearsing. The production is set not in Andalusia but at an unspecified American border.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe British Cracknell, 43, has made a name for herself in theater with acclaimed productions of works like Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” and Euripides’ “Medea” — stories, she said, “about women who find themselves caged by patriarchal structures and cause chaos as a way of dealing with it.” With “Carmen,” her Met debut, she takes on a reliable box office hit, one whose title character — with her teasing, chromatic melodies — came to define operatic sex appeal for generations.But these days the opera also leaves many uncomfortable with its French colonialist fantasies played out in an Andalusia peopled by licentious women and lawless smugglers, a place that risks luring a good man away from duty, family and the churchgoing girl his mother wants him to marry. When José stabs Carmen at the same moment that her new lover triumphs inside the bullfighting arena, it feels as if Bizet is not only killing off a character but restoring the hierarchical order of his time.In recent years, productions have put new spins on this ending. In Cologne, the director Lydia Steier had Carmen wrest back enough agency to kill herself. At the Royal Opera House in London, Barrie Kosky’s androgynous Carmen rose up after her death with a shrug. In a 2018 production in Florence, directed by Leo Muscato, Carmen turned the gun on José and shot him. (That drew disapproving tweets from the future prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni.)The musicologist Susan McClary, who has been publishing studies on class, race and sex in classical music since the early 1990s, said in a video interview that while the tensions in “Carmen” lend themselves to modern interpretation, the music makes the audience complicit in craving the destruction of Carmen and what she represents.“The problem is that final chord, which seems to shout ‘hurrah!’” McClary said. Up until then, she argues, the slippery chromaticism of Carmen’s music has been pitted against the more stable lyricism that characterizes José and Micaëla, the childhood sweetheart sent by his mother to bring him to his senses. At the moment in which the bullfighter triumphs and José moves in for the kill, McClary said, “all of the dissonances that have led up to that in the confrontation between José and Carmen are suddenly resolved in that chord.”Cracknell said of Carmen’s death: “We’re trying to frame that as an outcome that feels as much about gender as about two individuals.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCracknell said that while it is inevitable that audiences feel pulled toward the dramatic resolution of the opera — which here is the death of a woman — she wants to “de-romanticize” Carmen’s death. When women are killed by their intimate partners, “the reality of these things is that they’re chaotic and messy and horrific and that they destroy lives,” she said. “So we’ve tried to replicate that rather than allowing it to feel like a kind of intimate, central moment of transition.”In Akhmetshina, who is making her highly anticipated Met debut, Cracknell has an interpreter who brings deep experience with the work to the stage. At 27, Akhmetshina has already sung the role in so many productions — this is her seventh, and she has plans to star in two more, at London’s Royal Opera House and at Glyndebourne — that she can rattle off a list of different takes on the death scene. In an interview in between rehearsals, she spoke of Carmen as a character who continues to be unsettling.“What is fascinating is that women hate Carmen and men hate Carmen,” Akhmetshina said, still wearing her costume of black leather trousers, a black cutout top and turquoise cowboy boots. “Women because they cannot have the same power, men because they cannot control her.” Even today, she said, “our world is not ready for Carmen. She’s absolutely honest and truthful.”In one production, she said, her character willed José to kill her to put an end to his killing men he was jealous of. In another, she committed suicide in a desperate search for intense feelings. Earlier this season at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, in a staging set among organ traffickers, she joked that she spent so much time “cutting people in pieces” that she was ready to kill Carmen herself. “I was like, ‘just murder her,’” she said, “that’s it. Get rid of her.”Akhmetshina said she identified with Carmen’s outsider perspective and love of freedom. She grew up in a village in Bashkortostan, the daughter of a single mother of three. “Until I moved to the city, I never thought that we were not OK,” she said. “We had a farm and everything was enough.” When she moved to a city, she encountered a different reality — of steep rents and airfares so high, her mother’s salary could barely cover the cost of a flight to Moscow. “The whole structure is built so that people from the small places stay in their place,” she said.A scene from Cracknell’s “Carmen” with Akhmetshina (in blue cowboy boots), who said she identified with Carmen’s outsider perspective and love of freedom.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I needed space, I needed freedom,” Akhmetshina said. “I’m half Tatar, half Bashkir. If you look at the history of these small nations, we were constantly traveling around mountains, the forest, living in small communities that constantly moved around.” Her affinity with Carmen runs deeper than music, she said. “It’s kind of in my blood.”Ethnic difference is not a factor in Cracknell’s production, which instead highlights gender and class tensions. For the choreographer Ann Yee, this was an opportunity to develop dances free of castanets and flamenco clichés. She described Carmen’s allure as connecting more to psychological yearnings than to Orientalist fantasy. “We’ve hooked into this idea of liberation and wildness, about what is on the other side of the journey, the border,” she said in an interview. “It’s this wild appetite that exists in Carmen and which radiates through the people that she is a part of.”Yee said that removing “Carmen” from the Andalusian context also helped to sharpen its feminist message. “If you are looking too hard to situate it in one place, it becomes more difficult to realize that this could happen anywhere.” By the time Carmen meets her death, Yee suggested, “we can all hold ourselves accountable.”“Women are still killed by their partners on an enormous scale in most places in the world,” Cracknell said. “And we are obsessed with that narrative.” In her production, she emphasizes the number of witnesses who watch José’s jealousy turn progressively more menacing without intervening.In the Act III confrontation that results in Carmen being pushed to the floor, not one of her fellow smugglers steps in to help. Instead it is Micaëla, the character Bizet created as Carmen’s opposite and rival, sung here by the soprano Angel Blue, who offers a helping hand. Carmen accepts it, reluctantly, but lets go of it so quickly that she comes to her feet in an embarrassed stumble.Cracknell said it was Blue who had come up with the idea in rehearsal. “Angel just instinctively walked over and helped her up,” she said. “It became this incredible, simple moment of solidarity between these two stepping outside of the trope of two women being pitted against each other and fighting at all costs to win the man. And in that moment, Micaëla’s choice was to support another woman and to see her as a victim in her own right.” More

Ms. Abdul filed a lawsuit against Mr. Lythgoe, a producer of the reality show, that accuses him of assaulting her in an elevator.Paula Abdul filed a lawsuit on Friday against Nigel Lythgoe, a former longtime producer of “American Idol,” accusing him of sexually assaulting her when she was a judge on the reality show in the early 2000s.In the lawsuit, Ms. Abdul says that during one of the early seasons of “American Idol,” Mr. Lythgoe shoved her against the wall of a hotel elevator, grabbed her genitals and breasts and began “shoving his tongue down her throat.” Ms. Abdul said in the lawsuit that she tried to push Mr. Lythgoe away, and that when the elevator doors opened, she ran to her hotel room and called one of her representatives in tears.Mr. Lythgoe helped turn “American Idol” into a phenomenon in the United States in 2002 after developing an earlier iteration of the show in Britain. He was also a creator of “So You Think You Can Dance,” on which he appeared as a judge for 16 seasons.Representatives for Mr. Lythgoe did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Saturday.Both Mr. Lythgoe and Ms. Abdul, who rose to fame as a choreographer and pop star in the late 1980s, became fixtures of American reality television as judges with the power to turn promising singers and dancers into stars. Ms. Abdul spent eight seasons on “American Idol,” entertaining viewers with her gushing commentary and playful rivalry with her fellow judge Simon Cowell.After leaving “American Idol,” Ms. Abdul was a judge on “So You Think You Can Dance,” working alongside Mr. Lythgoe in 2015 and 2016. She says in the lawsuit that Mr. Lythgoe again made advances during this time, while she was at his home to discuss work.“Lythgoe forced himself on top of Abdul while she was seated on his couch and attempted to kiss her while proclaiming that the two would make an excellent ‘power couple,’” the lawsuit said. “Abdul pushed Lythgoe off of her, explaining that she was not interested in his advances, and immediately left Lythgoe’s home.”The lawsuit, which was filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, said Ms. Abdul did not speak publicly about the encounters because she feared retaliation from Mr. Lythgoe.Ms. Abdul is suing under a California law that allows people making sexual assault accusations to file claims outside the statute of limitations for a limited period of time.In her lawsuit, Ms. Abdul, 61, also accused Mr. Lythgoe, 74, of verbal harassment, saying that he called her at one point and told her they should celebrate because “it had been ‘seven years and the statute of limitations had run.’”Ms. Abdul also brought the lawsuit against production companies behind “American Idol” and “So You Think You Can Dance,” accusing them of negligence. Representatives for the shows and the production companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.When Ms. Abdul left “American Idol” in 2009, there was speculation that her exit was the result of disagreements about pay disparities with the show’s male faces.In her lawsuit, Ms. Abdul says that as a judge on “American Idol,” she was “discriminated against in terms of compensation and benefits.” She describes her relationship with the show’s producers and other judges as “strained from the start,” saying that she was the target of “constant taunts” from Mr. Lythgoe and others involved in the show and that selective editing made her appear “inept.”Mr. Lythgoe was a largely behind-the-scenes figure with “American Idol,” leaving as an executive producer of the show about a decade ago, but he has been center stage on “So You Think You Can Dance,” turning himself into a performing arts impresario and advocate for dance education. He is scheduled to return as a judge in the spring. More