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      Clarence Avant, Mighty Engine Behind Black Superstars, Dies at 92

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      Behind the scenes, he furthered the careers of numerous entertainers, as well as some athletes and politicians.Clarence Avant, a record executive who shaped the careers not only of Bill Withers, Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson and other Black singers, but also of politicians, actors and sports figures — exerting so much influence that a 2019 documentary about him was called simply “The Black Godfather” — died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 92.His family announced his death in a statement.Mr. Avant (pronounced AY-vant), born in a segregated hospital in North Carolina and educated only through the ninth grade, moved easily in the high-powered world of entertainment, helping to establish the idea that Black culture and consumers were forces to be reckoned with.He started out managing a nightclub in Newark in the late 1950s and moved on to representing some of the artists he met there. Joe Glaser, a high-powered agent who handled Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and many other top acts, took Mr. Avant under his wing; perhaps, the documentary suggested, Mr. Glaser, who was white, thought it would be advantageous to have a Black man representing some of his Black clients.In any case, Mr. Avant was soon handling artists including the jazz organist Jimmy Smith and traveling in rarefied circles. Not all his clients were Black; he said Mr. Glaser sent him to Los Angeles in 1964 with the Argentine pianist Lalo Schifrin, who was then working with Dizzy Gillespie, to try to get Mr. Schifrin started on a career composing for film and television. Though he knew nothing about the movie business, Mr. Avant worked his brand of magic on the West Coast: Mr. Schifrin has to date been nominated for six Oscars.In 1960 Mr. Avant formed Sussex Records — he said the name was his combination of the two things people want more than anything else, success and sex — which lasted only about half a decade but released, among other records, Mr. Withers’s early albums.“Clarence made some great choices musically,” Mr. Withers, who died in 2020, said in the documentary. “‘Lean on Me’” — Mr. Withers’s only Billboard No. 1 hit — “was not my choice for a single.”Later in the 1970s Mr. Avant founded Tabu Records, and for a time in the 1990s he was chairman of Motown. He also helped Jim Brown, the football player, build an acting career and negotiated an endorsement deal for Hank Aaron, the Hall of Fame baseball player, as well as supporting the political careers of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.“One of the things he understands is, there are different kinds of power,” Mr. Obama said in the documentary. “There’s the power that needs the spotlight, but there’s also the power that comes from being behind the scenes.”In 2013, accepting the entrepreneur award at the BET Honors, one of many he received in his career, Mr. Avant summed himself up.“I can’t make speeches,” he told the crowd while clutching his trophy. “That’s not my life. I make deals.”Clarence Alexander Avant was born on Feb. 25, 1931, in Greensboro, N.C., to Gertrude Avant Woods, a domestic worker. In the documentary, he said his mother was not married to his father, Phoenix Jarrell, whom he barely knew.Mr. Avant with Quincy Jones and Whitney Houston.NetflixHe grew up in Climax, N.C., in difficult circumstances and stayed in school only through ninth grade.“We were poor,” he said in the film. “I’m talking about poor, poor, poor. We had chicken-feet soup.”Racism was omnipresent, and the Ku Klux Klan loomed large.“My mother would just tell us, if you hear a car coming, run and hide; lay down flat,” he said.He grew up with a stepfather, Eddie Woods, who was abusive, and he said he left home when he was a teenager after his attempt to kill the man by putting rat poison in his food failed. He went to live with an aunt in Summit, N.J.For a time he held a low-level job at Martindale-Hubbell, publisher of a law directory. In his 20s he started working at a Newark nightclub that featured Black musicians. That was his introduction to the entertainment business, and he proved a natural.“I think Clarence exemplifies a certain cool,” Mr. Obama said in the documentary, “a certain level of street smarts and savvy that allowed him to move into worlds that nobody had prepared him for and say, ‘I can figure this out.’”As his career representing entertainers began to flourish, Mr. Avant met Jacqueline Gray, a model. They married in 1967, and as the couple prospered Ms. Avant became noted for her philanthropic work.In December 2021 a man burglarizing the Avants’ home, Aariel Maynor, shot and killed her. He pleaded guilty to multiple charges the next year and was sentenced to life in prison.In the documentary, friends remarked on their long marriage, somewhat unusual in the entertainment world.“They still look like they’ve got wedding cake on their feet,” the actor Jamie Foxx said, “like they just walked off a soul wedding cake.”Mr. Avant’s daughter, Nicole Avant, said in a phone interview that after the tragedy, her father made a conscious effort to press on.In 2013, Mr. Avant was presented with the entrepreneur award by the producers Jimmy Jam, center, and Terry Lewis at the BET Honors in Washington.Jonathan Ernst/Reuters“Music was, I think, the lifesaving force for him,” she said, especially that of Ellington, Frank Sinatra and other artists from his youth. “His mood changed when the music came on.”At about the time he was getting ready to marry Jacqueline, Mr. Avant was growing more vocal about racial matters. A 1967 article in The Pittsburgh Courier quoted a strongly worded letter he had written to the management of WLIB, a radio station in New York that was aimed at a Black audience but at the time was white-owned.“Is your station managed by Negroes,” he wrote, “and I am not referring to Negro disc jockeys?”“I think radio stations whose programs are supposed to appeal to the so-called Negro market,” he added, “should at least be staffed by Negro personnel.”He was also becoming active politically. He supported the early campaigns of Andrew Young, who made an unsuccessful run for a Georgia congressional seat in 1970 and a successful one two years later. It was Mr. Young who connected Mr. Avant to Hank Aaron when he was about to break Babe Ruth’s career home run record in 1974.“Clarence called me up and said, ‘Andy, do you know Hank Aaron?’” Mr. Young recalled in the documentary, which was directed by Reginald Hudlin. “I said, ‘Yeah, he lives around the corner.’ He said, ‘If he’s about to break Babe Ruth’s record, he’s supposed to make some money.’”Mr. Avant wanted to help Mr. Aaron secure some endorsement deals.“Will you tell him that I’m not crazy and I’m going to call him?” Mr. Avant asked Mr. Young.“I said, ‘Well, I can’t vouch for you not being crazy,’” Mr. Young said, “‘but I’ll tell him that you’ve been very helpful to me.’”It was fraught territory — Mr. Aaron was receiving death threats over the prospect that he would break a hallowed record set by a white player. Mr. Avant, though, according to the documentary, marched into the office of the president of Coca-Cola and told him, in unprintably blunt language, that Black people drink Coke.Mr. Avant’s guidance helped Mr. Aaron secure a substantial deal from Coke and otherwise market himself, which fueled his later charitable endeavors.“Henry Aaron would not be Henry Aaron if it were not for Clarence Avant,” Mr. Aaron, who died in 2021, said in the film.Mr. Avant also helped other athletes, including Jim Brown as he transitioned from football into acting in the 1960s. Interviewed for the documentary, Mr. Brown, one of the biggest Black stars of the 1960s and ’70s, had a hard time pinning down what Mr. Avant did — not an uncommon thing among those who knew and worked with Mr. Avant.“You have this guy called Clarence Avant that everybody’s talking about, but nobody seems to understand just what his official title was,” Mr. Brown, who died in May, said, recalling their early meetings. “I couldn’t tell you now exactly what he — was he an agent, a manager, a lawyer? — what he was.”Mr. Avant had rocky times in the mid-1970s, when the Sussex label went bankrupt and KAGB-FM, a radio station he had bought (making it one of the first Black-owned stations in the Los Angeles area), floundered. But, he said, friends were always his most important asset, and some of them helped him get back on his feet.Tabu Records, which Mr. Avant founded in 1975, released records by the S.O.S. Band, Cherrelle and others.In addition to his daughter, who was a producer of “The Black Godfather,” Mr. Avant is survived by a son, Alexander, and a sister, Anne Woods.The Avant home was always abuzz with A-list visitors. Nicole Avant recalled a day, when she was 12, that she and a friend got into trouble at school. The friend’s mother, driving Nicole home, was fuming — until she saw Harry Belafonte walking out of the Avants’ house.“Is that Harry Belafonte?” the woman asked her.”I said, ‘Yeah, how do you know Harry Belafonte?” — not realizing he was anyone other than a friend who would come around to visit her parents from time to time.Ms. Avant, who served as ambassador to the Bahamas during the Obama administration, said that Mr. Belafonte and others who would gather at the Avant home were serious about breaking down racial barriers, in the entertainment world and in society in general.“They knew that they were on a mission,” she said.The flood of tributes offered to Mr. Avant on Monday included many from younger performers who appreciated his legacy.“He is the ultimate example of what change looks like, what architecting change looks like, and what the success of change looks like,” the rapper and producer Pharrell said in a statement. “He stared adversity in the face in climates and conditions that weren’t welcoming to people that looked like him. But through his talent and relentless spirit in the pursuit to be the best of the best, he garnered the support and friendship of people who otherwise wouldn’t look in our direction.” More

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      Magoo, Rapper and Former Timbaland Collaborator, Dies at 50

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      Melvin Barcliff, who rapped under the name Magoo, was a teenager in Virginia when he joined a hip-hop scene that still influences music today.The rapper Magoo, a foundational member of a groundbreaking hip-hop scene that emerged in Virginia in the 1990s and that included his collaborators Timbaland, Missy Elliott and Pharrell Williams, has died at 50.Magoo, whose birth name was Melvin Barcliff, died this weekend in Williamsburg, Va., according to his wife, Meco Barcliff, and a statement from his family. Barcliff said that he had no known health problems other than asthma, but that he had not been feeling well in the past week. The coroner’s office was still investigating the cause, she said.Magoo was a child when rap music was first broadcast on the radio, and he credited it with helping save him from a difficult early childhood in Norfolk, Va. At first, he thought hip-hop was something he could dance and listen to, but was made only by people in the Northeast, he said in an April 2013 interview for the hip-hop oral history collection at the College of William & Mary.As rap music began to drift from the coasts and Atlanta to radios and record stores in Virginia, Magoo realized at 14 years old that it was an art form he could practice, too. At Deep Creek High School in Chesapeake, he made friends with other teenagers who also wanted to rap including Timothy Mosley, also known as Timbaland, who became a renowned music producer.Magoo and his associates in the Virginia Beach area, including Pharrell Williams and Missy Elliott, would go on to exert a heavy influence on music in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Magoo and Timbaland formed a duo and between 1997 and 2003 put out three albums. “Welcome to Our World,” their first collaboration, included the track “Up Jumps da’ Boogie,” featuring Elliott and Aaliyah, which reached No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100, their highest charting effort. Critics noted the project as a step in Timbaland’s development as a producer, and compared Magoo to Q-Tip, one of the rappers in the Queens group A Tribe Called Quest.On Monday morning, Timbaland posted on Instagram several videos and photos of the two together and said in one caption: “Tim and Magoo forever.”Elliott wrote on Instagram on Monday that she met Magoo when they were teenagers and that he gave her the nickname “Misdemeanor,” telling her it was because “it’s a crime to have that many talents.”Though Magoo faded from the spotlight as his early collaborators’ stars continued to rise, Barcliff said that her husband had always preferred to be behind the scenes.She said that they separated five or six years ago but that they were still family.The couple met on Aug. 10, 1996, at a club, she said. Even though Magoo was a great dancer, she said, she would learn a few months later that he did not like to go out because it was too much like being at work. “That’s when I found out: No more clubbing for me,” she said.Magoo met Tim Mosley, also known as Timbaland, in 10th grade. They were part of a group of friends who started rapping together in the 1990s.Johnny Nunez/WireImage, via Getty ImagesBarcliff said that she had a 2-year-old daughter, Detrice “Pawtt” Bickham, when they met, and that Magoo raised her as his own. As a family, they loved going to theme parks, including Busch Gardens and Kings Dominion.Magoo’s survivors include the aunt and uncle who raised him and whom he considered his mother and father, Magdaline and Hiawatha Brown, and his two sisters, Portia Brown and Lynette Hawks.In the William & Mary interview, Magoo said that his aunt, who went by Mag, inspired his rap name, Mag-an-ooh, which he then shortened.He said in the interview that his aunt took him in when he was 4 years old. He said he most likely would have been taken into state custody without his aunt’s care and he “probably would have ended up away from family and wouldn’t have been in the position to become what I was able to become.”He treasured the memory of the first time he heard a rap song, he said. He could still remember where he was standing, in another aunt’s house, when he heard the track, “Rapper’s Delight,” by the Sugarhill Gang.“It just changed my whole perspective on life because, like I said, I was, 6 or 7 at the time,” Magoo recalled. “I was only three years away from being with my real mother who had abused me, so I hadn’t completely get over that abuse, but rap music became my blanket.”Alain Delaquérière More

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      A Farewell to Mostly Mozart, and to Its Music Director

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      Louis Langrée led a week of concerts to conclude his two-decade tenure with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra.After 21 years, Louis Langrée’s tenure as music director of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra has ended. As a farewell, he conducted two programs across four evenings last week, and the music he made was uplifting, staggeringly beautiful and, finally, triumphant.The ensemble used to be associated with a festival of the same name, but that was quietly shuttered after the 2019 season. Next year, the players will have a new name and a new music director. But the sound of the orchestra — which draws its musicians from the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, Orchestra of St. Luke’s and several other groups — as it is known today was built by Langrée.“What I have learned and shared has made life more beautiful,” Langrée told the audience on Friday, during an evening that became an extended goodbye, with breaks for recollections, reflections and even musical demonstrations à la Leonard Bernstein (whom he cited as an influence). Langrée struck up the band as he explained the deceptive simplicity of Mozart’s melodic writing or the off-kilter minuet of the 40th Symphony. But he caught himself: “It’s a concert, not a lecture,” he said with a chuckle.His first program of the week, on Tuesday, was a motley assortment of pieces by Lully, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Kodaly and Valerie Coleman, taking the orchestra’s tasting-platter approach to an extreme. Coleman’s “Fanfare for Uncommon Times,” written without strings or woodwinds, was a study in layered, graduated brass timbres. The orchestra dug into the saturated colors and whiz-bang energy of Kodaly’s “Dances of Galanta” and brought a bountiful tone to a Mozart overture and selections from Lully’s “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.”The 27-year-old violinist Randall Goosby, making his Mostly Mozart debut, was luminous in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto — his tone luscious, elegant and sweet without being syrupy. His unforced ease and alluringly relaxed vibrato gave his legato suppleness, and his trill was an act of gracefulness instead of athleticism. When the orchestra re-entered with the first movement’s main theme, it felt like a catharsis of the joy Goosby had cultivated.Compared with the stylistic whiplash of Tuesday, Friday was magnificently lucid: a jubilant tour through Mozart’s final three symphonies. Langrée referred to the pieces as the “holy trinity” of Mozart’s symphonic output, all written in the summer of 1788. The program’s sense of occasion, its feeling of culmination, turned Langrée wistful; he thanked the ushers, stage crews and security personnel and expressed pride in the Mostly Mozart players, most of whom he hired himself. “This place will stay magical for me,” he said.At the final program, Langrée was presented with a bouquet of roses that he then gave out to each member of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra.Lawrence Sumulong/Lincoln CenterLangrée is a Mozartean of vibrancy, potency and efficiency. Mozart is about harmoniousness — requiring an orchestra to balance color, style and execution in a reflection of the music’s essential consonance — but Langrée treats that quality as a starting point. Then he finds expressive freedom, something like romance, but attacks it incisively. The music bursts with feeling as it flies by in tidy fashion.The works came in chronological order, starting with the Symphony No. 39, in which the players unleashed sonorous drama in the Adagio-Allegro and wholly conceived melodic statements in the Andante con Moto (which featured Christopher Pell’s dreamy clarinet). Langrée didn’t shortchange the minuet’s clipped phrases, and the concluding Allegro had a windswept quality.He brought expansiveness to these late symphonies without distending them and let them breathe without slowing them down. In the 40th, Langrée crafted a fast, finely wrought opening filled with slender sound that kept anxiety and release in constant tension. The Allegro Assai, full of life, had dash as well as elegant form.After intermission on Friday, Langrée got candid. He pushed back against the way “Lincoln Center wants to present less classical because it’s elitist,” adding that the center can and should embrace hip-hop and R&B without abandoning Mostly Mozart fare. He pleaded with the audience to return next year to support the musicians, even if Mozart’s name is being “erased from the orchestra.”Langrée located the greatness of the “Jupiter” Symphony in its compassion rather than its grandeur. He cushioned the assertive opening and deftly scaled back to something human — a sly smile, a sense of generosity. The winds peeked through with their peculiar colors, and the fugato finale churned briskly.There will invariably be lapses in music whose finery never allows players to hide. Occasionally, the violins turned gray, or the horns lost their gleam. The endless runs of the Andante Cantabile in the “Jupiter” had an admirable singing quality most, if not all, of the time.On Saturday, for Langrée’s last concert with the orchestra, the audience greeted him with a standing ovation when he entered, and applauded him and the players for nearly 20 minutes at the end.The previous night, Langrée had talked — and sung — through the five parts that make up the “Jupiter” fugue before leading the orchestra in an even more effervescent encore of it. At each of the final two concerts, he was presented with a bouquet of red roses and gave out stems to each of the players. He tossed one to the audience, then kept one for himself. More

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      Travis Scott’s ‘Utopia’ Repeats at No. 1

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      The rapper’s latest solo album is the first hip-hop release to spend more than a single week atop the Billboard 200 in over a year.Travis Scott is No. 1 on the Billboard album chart for a second time this week, while Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night” logs its 16th time as the top single.“Utopia,” Scott’s first new solo album in five years — and the first since his Astroworld Festival in 2021, where 10 people were crushed to death — holds the top spot on the Billboard 200 with the equivalent of 147,000 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate. That total includes 146 million streams and 37,000 copies of the LP sold as a complete package.With fewer rap albums topping the charts these days — country, pop, R&B and Latin have been more in favor — “Utopia” is the first in over a year to notch more than a single week at No. 1. In April 2022, Tyler, the Creator’s “Call Me if You Get Lost” logged its second time at the top, thanks to the delayed release of that album’s vinyl version. (“Call Me” had opened at No. 1 nine months before.) The last rap album to spend at least its first two weeks at No. 1 was Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy” in September 2021; it held at the top for three weeks, then later returned for another two.Wallen’s album “One Thing at a Time” is No. 2, while his song “Last Night,” a monster hit on streaming services and pop radio, holds at No. 1 on the Hot 100. With 16 weeks atop the singles chart, “Last Night” is on a rare streak, tying Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito,” from 2017, and “One Sweet Day,” by Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men, from 1995. Only Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” with 19 weeks in 2019, had a longer run at the top.Also this week, the “Barbie” soundtrack, featuring Dua Lipa, Billie Eilish and Lizzo, is the No. 3 album, and Taylor Swift logs four albums in the Top 10: “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” (No. 4), “Midnights” (No. 5), “Lover” (No. 6) and “Folklore” (No. 9). More

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      At Time Spans Festival, New York Shows Off New Music

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      The festival is a bright spot on the August calendar, with casual yet tightly plotted concerts of modern and contemporary music.Classical music’s global summer season is full of destination-worthy presentations. In August, New York makes a contribution: The Time Spans Festival, a modern and contemporary-music event that is the equal of anything on the international circuit.So after a couple weeks covering operas and starry premieres in Europe, I made sure to be home in New York for the first shows in this year’s festival, which runs through Aug. 26. It all takes place in the refreshingly cool, subterranean hall of the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in Hell’s Kitchen.Saturday’s opener was dedicated to works by the 20th-century composer Luigi Nono. This Italian modernist worked frequently with the resident electronic specialists of the SWR Experimentalstudio, a German public radio electronic studio from Freiburg. At the DiMenna Center, this group collaborated with musicians in Ensemble Experimental, giving these performances the feeling of deep investment and institutional know-how.Brad Lubman conducting the Nono concert.George EtheredgeFirst up was “Omaggio a Emilio Vedova” from 1961. A fixed-media piece — for tape only — it was spatialized in the hall by the SWR technicians, with eight speakers surrounding the audience. And though just over four minutes in length, this slashing, vertiginous work made a strong impression: its brief metallic shards of prerecorded sound revolving around audience-member eardrums with a grace that made Nono’s supposedly harsh aesthetic seem balletic.The short presentation also blasted into dust the recent, expensive and much-ballyhooed spatial-music presentation at the Shed, the Sonic Sphere. There, audience members were hoisted up into a giant dome, only to listen to a surround-speaker system with blurry low-end sonic fidelity. At the DiMenna Center, listeners kept their feet on the underground floor, but the whirling sound production was pristine — and transporting.When live instrumentalists from Ensemble Experimental joined the fray, this sense of fun continued, even during gnomic works with generally quiet dynamics, like Nono’s “A Pierre. Dell’azzurro silenzio, inquietum” (1985).Maruta Staravoitava (flute) Andrea Nagy (clarinet) and Noa Frenkel on Saturday.George EtheredgeJozsef Bazsinka.George EtheredgeHere, the subtle electronic processing of live instrumental playing was a consistent delight: When astringent live notes, played by a bass flutist and a bass clarinetist, came back around in the electronic part, they seemed somehow softened by the electronic merging and transformation. With those newly mellowed-out sounds crawling across the back of your head — courtesy of speakers in the rear of the room — the piece then turned its bass clarinetist loose, by asking for yawping but controlled overblowing from the reed player. (Here it was Andrea Nagy making those striated and punchy sounds.)That piece and one that came next — “Omaggio a Gyorgy Kurtag” — have been recorded on a fine SWR release on the Neos imprint. But that’s a two-channel stereo recording. Here, as led by the guest conductor Brad Lubman, both took on greater depth in the immersive surround-sound setting.The festival’s second night kept the European-experimentalist trend going, but in a fully acoustic fashion, with the JACK Quartet’s renditions of the second and third string quartets by Helmut Lachenmann.Electronic processing of live instrumental playing in the Nono concert was a consistent delight.George EtheredgeSpeaking from the stage between pieces, the violist John Pickford Richards described Lachenmann’s reputation as someone who makes Western classical instruments seethe and twitch in ways previously inconceivable. (His influence can be felt on other German composers of his generation, as well as adventurous American composers like David Sanford.)Richards also noted that “Grido,” the third quartet, which the ensemble had just played, was one that the JACK instrumentalists had performed together before they were a formal group. And so they think of Lachenmann as a father of the ensemble.That deep familial relationship was already apparent in JACK’s reading of that third quartet. That performance seemed to say: Forget everything you think you know about how weird this guy’s sound-production techniques are; just get lost in the confident, persuasive flow of these unusual ideas.

      Complete String Quartets (mode267) by Helmut LachenmannAs on a recording for the Mode label, the JACK players proved they know how to get the most out of this pathbreaking music, savoring the crisscrossing flurries of steely motifs. (They did it with enviable clarity, creating a spatialized feel through purely acoustic means.) At other points, the violinist Christopher Otto in particular seemed to relish the brief touches of more familiar vibrato that Lachenmann allows into the piece.Lachenmann’s second quartet, which on Sunday followed the third, came across more like a notebook of ideas — ideas that would later find their ideal expression in the third quartet. Still, it was a pleasure to experience such a focused, hourlong tour through this composer’s string writing.George EtheredgeAnd audiences seem to have caught on to the Time Spans model — of casual yet tightly plotted concerts, usually lasting an hour to 90 minutes, with no intermission. This weekend’s programs looked close to sold out. And affordable tickets, just $20, are still available to most remaining shows.There are no dress codes, and no complicated advance-festival planning is required. In this way, Time Spans is part of the (necessary) genre-wide effort to make classical music more approachable. Crucially, the festival does that assuming that new audiences can handle new music. More

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      Fans Celebrate Hip-Hop’s 50th Anniversary

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      The start of hip-hop dates to Aug. 11, 1973, when DJ Kool Herc created continuous break-beats by working two turntables during a party in a rec room at 1520 Sedgwick Ave in the Bronx. On Friday night, exactly 50 years later, a concert was held at Yankee Stadium — roughly a mile and a half from hip-hop’s birthplace — to honor the occasion, featuring Run-DMC, Slick Rick, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, Lil’ Kim and Nas. DJ Kool Herc, 68, also appeared onstage to accept an award.Before the show, which was billed as “Hip Hop 50 Live,” the scene outside the stadium was heavy with fans of the sounds from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. Middle-aged couples on date nights arrived wearing matching Adidas track suits. A man strolled the promenade carrying a boombox and wearing a Kangol hat. Hawkers sold pins with pictures of Biz Markie and The Notorious B.I.G.Outside a McDonald’s opposite the stadium, a street musician performed Tupac Shakur hits, while an in-line skater entertained the crowd with basketball tricks. Stationed beside a subway entrance was an 8-year-old rapper, Hetep BarBoy, who, accompanied by his father, was selling CDs of his album. “I prefer old-school hip-hop,” Hetep said. “I like Rakim because of his flow and the clean message he was putting into the world. He rapped about positivity, and that’s also what my music is about.”In the edited interviews below, attendees reflected on hip-hop’s 50th. Some recalled witnessing the park jams and parties that defined the genre’s beginnings.Tamika TalbotExecutive assistantJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesPick a side: Old-school hip-hop or new? Old-school all day. I was at the rap battles in the parks. Hip-hop came from the dirt. You had to be a lyrical assassin then. If you weren’t, you were trash. I feel if you have something to say now, you’re seen as wack. Back then your flow had to be intact.Your old-school hero? Big Daddy Kane was once the prince of hip-hop. He had crazy lyrical flow. He was super-duper fly. He was unmatched.Richard ByarsCelebrity chefJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesWhich old-school hero are you here to see? Ice Cube. To me he represents the beginning of hip-hop’s renaissance. But I’d never use the term “old-school.” I call artists like him “true-school.”What’s a significant hip-hop history moment for you? The public access television show “Video Music Box” was essential to hip-hop’s growth in the 1980s. All the forefathers appeared on that show.Adam JenkinsFiber optics specialistJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesOld-school or new? I saw the birth of hip-hop as a kid growing up in the Bronx. I was at those Sedgwick Avenue parties. I saw Cold Crush Brothers and Afrika Bambaataa. So this all goes way back for me. It’s amazing to see how hip-hop has become a global force, but when I was a kid, it was just about having fun in the park. It wasn’t about how nice your car was or how much money you had.Do you ever boast about seeing hip-hop’s birth? I do sometimes tell young people that I saw the beginning of all this, but it usually falls on deaf ears, and they don’t get it. But that kind of response is also part of hip-hop to me, because it’s a genre that’s supposed to be always evolving from its past.Lesley SmithHome-care aideJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesOld-school or new? For me it’s still all about Melle Mel, the Sugarhill Gang and Kurtis Blow. They’re the originals. Back in the day hip-hop was wholesome and fun. I don’t even understand it now. Primo GonzalezSecurity guardJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesWhat’s a significant hip-hop history moment for you? I remember seeing “Beat Street” in the movie theater in the 1980s. It was a world I already knew from seeing B-Boys on University Avenue, but for many people, that was the first time they ever saw break dancing culture.Mary Olivette BookmanFordham University music studentJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesWho do you consider a pioneer? Missy Elliott. She had something to say. What she was doing was sonically unique, and her skill and individuality were always immediately visible in her rap style.Who are you here to see tonight? I’m here to see them all. I want to see hip-hop history. Tonight is music education for me.Gearni ThompsonMusic marketing professionalJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesWhat’s a significant hip-hop moment for you? I can still remember riding in a car with my friends when I heard “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang for the first time.Old-school or new? I love the old-school. I feel like the new school is about all the wrong stuff, like buying jewelry and expensive cars. Grandmaster Flash was reaching the kids in a good way. Old-school rap was about community and where we came from. It changed our lives.Ricardo VaronaStreet ball entertainerJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesYour old-school hero? Snoop Dogg. When he and Dr. Dre came out with “The Chronic” it shook the world. Everyone followed their way after that.What’s a significant hip-hop moment for you? An important artist who I feel is too little known now is Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam. Her hit “Can You Feel the Beat” was impossible to not want to sing and dance to when it came out.Wisdom McClurkinHospitality professionalJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesWho do you want to see tonight? Lil’ Kim. She’s a pioneer. She’s from the block. She’s the queen of everything. She was the blueprint. If it wasn’t for her, there would be no Nicki Minaj.William GainesRetired chefJutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesOld-school or new? I grew up in the boogie-down Bronx, so I went to all those legendary park jams. They’d hook up the turntables and speakers, and the cops would eventually come to turn it all off. You’d see Biz Markie and Doug E. Fresh. It was a good time. It all started from nothing and became something. But it all began with us just saying to each other: “Yo, they’re having a party on Sedgwick Avenue tonight. Want to go?” More

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      Taking in Jennifer Walshe and Anthony Braxton at Darmstadt

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      In between the four operas of the “Ring,” a critic traveled to take in world premieres by Jennifer Walshe and Anthony Braxton.It’s not a typical week in Germany when a staging of Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung” on the composer’s own turf at the Bayreuth Festival finds itself outdone for world-consuming sadness, rage and the possibility of redemption.But that’s what I experienced recently when I traveled between the four operas of the “Ring” at the festival and the Darmstadt Summer Course, a hotbed of avant-garde works since 1946.On Wednesday in Darmstadt — during a day off between “Siegfried” and “Götterdämmerung” in Bayreuth — Ensemble Nikel backed the Irish experimental singer and composer Jennifer Walshe in the world premiere of the complete song cycle “Minor Characters,” which she co-wrote with Matthew Shlomowitz.The morning after “Minor Characters,” I traveled back to Bayreuth for “Götterdämmerung” as staged (to much polarization) by Valentin Schwarz. Experiencing both back-to-back, I had the feeling that the song cycle had managed to steal the fire of the “Ring” cycle.I had expected “Minor Characters” to have a keyed-up, smash-cut musical aesthetic. Shlomowitz’s “Popular Contexts” series, for piano and “sampler keyboard,” after all, uses snatches of vocal growls, drooping water sources and Ping-Pong volleys, plus piano and beat-work, to create a disorientating, groovy effect; then nervier piano marches, alarming synths and distorted guitar samples.

      Popular Contexts / Performed by Mark Knoop by Matthew Shlomowitz / Peter AblingerWalshe’s compositional practice often revolves around her wide range of vocal inflections. Her approach incorporates extended technique experimentalism and free improvisation in addition to composed elements.But also many, many accents. In a 2020 profile, the New Yorker critic Alex Ross celebrated her ability to channel “Irish bard” and “California surfer girl” alike — a style which reaches a high state of refinement on solo Walshe efforts like “All the Many Peopls.”

      ALL THE MANY PEOPLS by Jennifer Walshe“Minor Characters” hits a new level of development for Walshe and Shlomowitz. He seems to pull her a bit closer toward more typical song forms; she puts some critical distance between his synths and the way they can seem to self-consciously emulate Muzak. And they put to use, through the piece’s dramatic interrogation of the pleasures and ills of our too-online present, the ferocious chops of Ensemble Nikel — a group made up of a percussionist, guitarist, saxophonist and keyboardist.Walshe’s text moves fast, and the music moves at the speed of thought. One moment, her vocals may seem to be celebrating internet memes — or the “minor characters” who become “main characters” for a day on social media. But before long, she’s chiding the world, or herself, for ignoring weightier matters. The music rockets back and forth between amiable, unhurried rhythms and black-metal blast beasts; between ad-jingle saxophone riffs and free-jazz skronk; between even-keeled, Eddie Van Halen-style finger-tapped motifs on electric guitar and less orderly plumes of distorted noise.She toys with audience expectations, too. Early on, she begins in a confessional mode, relating a #MeToo-style narrative involving a professor luring one of his students down to his basement. But before long, Walshe leaves the audience there, narratively, with no resolution and the professor screaming to no one in particular, in perpetuity.Instead, “Minor Characters” pivots to new fascinations and horrors — an exorcism in a rural country field, reports on a burning planet — as online life tends to do. When Walshe gave wild voice to lines like “they knew, we all knew, and we did nothing about it,” her self-implicating understanding of the climate crisis had a Brünnhilde-like edge — with traces of grace and good humor leavening her grave understanding, similar to Wotan in the “Ring,” of a world order’s undoing by its own designs.Walshe has a wide range of literary inspiration, Wagner included; her contributions to the liner notes for “Peopls” refer to “certain sections from ‘Watt’ by Samuel Beckett,” the rapper KRS-One and “the cast of ‘Lohengrin.’” That Wagnerian citation is no joke. “I don’t do anything ironically,” Walshe said in a brief interview after the performance of “Minor Characters.” “I don’t like any music ironically. But it has to mean something. There has to be something at stake.”“Minor Characters” seems to ask: If everyone is distracted online, following their own taste, how do we solve problems together? Even though the show feels complete, there is no true resolution.It felt more satisfying, even, than the “Götterdämmerung” in Bayreuth. Schwarz’s risky staging seems to run aground in the final opera. He has interesting ideas in the lead-up: making Wotan an even bigger cheater than usual; depicting Fafner’s dragon form as a hospice patient at home, sitting on the hoard of gold as a member of the gerontocracy.And Schwarz offers bleak humor, such as in Mime trying to teach Siegfried fear by introducing him to sex through pornography. But by “Götterdämmerung” none of that seems to have mattered as the opera’s telling sputters in its final moments.Still, there was much fine singing and orchestral playing. The bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny’s Wotan had some of Walshe’s gloriously unhinged energy. In both “Die Walküre” and “Siegfried,” during moments of self-pity, he would crumple to the ground, offering aspirated whimpers; the next moment he would be raging, spurred on by a just as quickly extinguished explosion from the orchestra, led with fire by Pietari Inkinen.And Inkinen’s way with quieter textures provided a ravishing experience of Bayreuth’s fabled acoustics: He and the orchestra produced soft-grained marvel after marvel in the second, contemplative act of “Walküre,” then, as if with whip in hand, he blazed through the final act of that opera and the first act of “Siegfried” with what seemed like one complete surge of momentum.Anthony Braxton, whose new “Thunder Music” system debuted in Darmstadt.Kristof LempIn between those two shows, I traveled to Darmstadt for another world premiere: the debut of American saxophonist-composer Anthony Braxton’s new “Thunder Music” system, which came courtesy of a performance, led by him, of his Composition No. 443.While not strictly dramatic in nature, “Thunder Music” suggested a stagelike feel. In this new category of his compositional practice, individual musicians are responsible for making choices about how to merge their own sound with prerecorded sounds of thunder and nature.At Darmstadt, the musicians in this chamber ensemble — including singers, woodwinds, brasses, an accordion and two double basses — prerecorded a take on No. 443 the day before the concert. Then, at the show, the performers could control the extent to which their own prerecorded material was mixed with thunderstorms or swarms of birds (controlled through an app designed for their phones). Simultaneously, they played Composition No. 443 again — live, this time with the ability to network with other musicians in improvisations, or interpolations of past Braxton pieces.At one point, when the saxophonist James Fei and the trombonist Roland Dahinden collaborated on the theme of Braxton’s Composition No. 131 — in which frenetic riffs are capped with a sashaying figure that seems to wink at listeners — they put a jolt of Braxton’s bebop-tinged catalog into what had been an airy stretch of No. 443.Braxton has in the past declared himself “a complete fool for the music of Richard Wagner” — something that you can sense in operas like “Trillium X,” which I reviewed earlier this month from Prague. But you can also sense Braxton’s affection in the way he encourages musicians to layer his various compositions during the same moment in performance. That bit of No. 131 that cropped up during No. 443? Call it a Braxtonian leitmotif for Charlie Parker. More

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      Taylor Swift’s Viral Era: a Timeline

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      Fan demand broke Ticketmaster, and that was just the prologue. These are the moments that turned the Eras Tour into a phenomenon: March 17 Glendale, Ariz. Taylor returns to the stage. After five years away, she dives right in. Taylor Swift, wearing a long green gown, takes a swan dive pose and jumps into a […] More