Music

The 24-year-old English songwriter moves beyond sleek pop-soul songwriting on “Messy.”Olivia Dean could easily have stayed in one lane for her debut album, “Messy.” She has been on a glide path to a career in smooth English pop-soul. She’s a creamy-toned, jazz-tinged singer and a heartsore but resilient lyricist, grounded in classic verse-chorus-bridge songwriting.Dean, 24, has been releasing songs since 2018 — long enough to make her first album feel like a turning point instead of an introduction. It reaffirms what she’s been doing right; it also claims new possibilities.She was born in London — to a Guyanese-Jamaican mother and an English father — and soaked up music from her father’s album collection. (Her middle name is Lauryn, after Lauryn Hill.) She sang in a gospel choir and took musical-theater classes. And like Amy Winehouse, Adele, Leona Lewis, Raye, Jessie J and Imogen Heap, Dean showed enough youthful talent to attend the star-making BRIT School of performing arts.Like other newcomers, Dean gained attention for a featured vocal with an electronic act, performing “Adrenaline” with Rudimental in 2019. She was already building her own songs with collaborators. By now, with a series of EP releases and two million Spotify followers, Dean has amassed enough fans — among them Elton John — to have performed at the 2023 Glastonbury festival.“Messy” makes clear Dean’s pop-soul expertise. She gives vintage Memphis soul a sleek electronic gloss in “The Hardest Part,” a song she released in 2020 that has been streamed tens of millions of times and reappears on “Messy.” (She also released a remix that has her trading verses with Leon Bridges.) The song is about understanding — with regret and relief — that she has outgrown a youthful romance. “Lately I’ve been growing into someone you don’t know,” she sings. “You had the chance to love her, but apparently you don’t.”The album also flaunts soul craftsmanship with “Dive,” a plush, string-topped ballad about giving in to infatuation. The push-and-pull melody shows the influence of Winehouse, one of Dean’s obvious models. But in Dean’s songs, she usually reaches toward positive thinking and self-care instead of Winehouse’s dark humor.Another retro soul song, the Motown-flavored, cowbell-tapping “Ladies Room,” offers a decidedly post-Motown idea: that even as part of a couple, a woman is entitled to independence and time by herself. “I love being in your space/But sometimes I need some room,” she explains.While Dean doesn’t abandon pop-soul, “Messy” determinedly tests other possibilities. The title song — which allows that a little imperfection is OK and insists, “I’m on your side” — approaches psych-folk, with low-fi guitar and piano and apparitional sounds and voices. “No Man” bemoans an emotionally distant partner in a moody, time-warped ballad, layering electronic percussion and mournful strings. She opens the album with “UFO,” which merges folky strumming with Vocoder-processed vocal harmonies, as Dean plays an alien: “I need somewhere to land/I might as well fall into your earthly hands.”Throughout the album, the songwriting stays old-school: straightforward melodies and lyrics, clear structures, no jump-cut transitions, not even a guest rapper. And while Dean’s songs concentrate on relatable matters of the heart, she ends the album with a declaration of her own distinct identity.“Carmen” is a tribute to Dean’s grandmother, who came to England from Guyana in the wave of Caribbean immigration that’s now called the Windrush generation. It’s an upbeat march, with steel drum and carnival horns in the mix. “No way to know, how to make a home/In someone else’s motherland,” Dean sings. “You transplanted a family tree/And a part of it grew into me.” The song is as polished as everything else on the album. But it’s willing to get a little personal, too.Olivia Dean“Messy”(Island) More

Philip Venables and Ted Huffman’s latest work adapts a utopian, fantasy cult favorite by Larry Mitchell.Many operas in the standard repertoire are based on fairy tales and fantasy. But few of those describe a global queer-feminist revolution, and fewer still have main characters whose names begin with “Warren” and end with an unusual moniker for a genital appendage.Both can be found in “The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions,” a new piece of music theater by the composer Philip Venables and the writer-director Ted Huffman. After premiering at the Manchester International Festival on Thursday, it will travel, with its original roster of 15 performers, to the Aix-en-Provence Festival in early July, then elsewhere, including NYU Skirball in New York this fall.Venables and Huffman’s two previous collaborations — the operas “4.48 Psychosis,” based on Sarah Kane’s play about mental illness and suicide, and “Denis & Katya,” about teenage lovers in Russia who died in a 2016 livestreamed standoff with Russian police — have won them acclaim as artists who find beauty at the extremes of form and subject matter.Their new show, freely adapted from a gay liberation fantasy novel of the same name that was self-published by the activist Larry Mitchell in 1977, is both a continuation of that broader project and, as Venables said dryly in a video interview, “a tonal shift.”The piece, like the novel, covers thousands of years of human history, telling the story of the rise of an imperialist capitalist patriarchy called Ramrod; the resistance to that patriarchy by the sexual and racial Others it has created; and its eventual defeat by a revolutionary queer coalition.Katherine Goforth, front left, with Eric Lamb in rehearsal for the show, which will travel to NYU Skirball this fall.Tristram Kenton“There are two important things to remember about the coming revolutions,” this fairy tale reads, on the page and onstage. “The first is that we will get our [expletive] kicked. The second is that we will win.”Over the show’s 90 minutes, Rosie Elnile’s deceptively simple, bare stage becomes a model of this improvisatory, revolutionary utopia. Everything you hear, you see: The 15 performers play a largely memorized score on a mixed ensemble of baroque and modern instruments. A harpsichord, a theorbo and a viola da gamba sound alongside an upright piano and an electric organ.The result is a romp through history that’s both joyous and politically serious. “These stories of oppression and resistance are performed with and for each other,” Venables said, “as part of our processing of and resistance to oppression.” And the piece proposes and enacts the destruction of what it calls “the men’s categories” — the classifications of race, gender, expertise and taste that, it argues, stop the global majority from becoming free.“We all, at some stage in a utopia, want to get past identity politics to this universalism,” Venables said.The actor-choreographer Yandass, who narrates large portions of the show, said in a video interview that the show’s form echoes its politics: “Everyone is multiskilled in so many ways. I would imagine that’s how the utopia that’s dreamed of in this piece would be, everyone having different talents, having to rely on each other for cues, engaging in real teamwork.”The actor-choreographer Yandass, who narrates portions of the show.Tristram KentonWhen Mitchell wrote his book, he was inspired by Lavender Hill, a gay commune that he was a founding member of in Ithaca, N.Y. Such communes, which rejected both straight society and a gay movement that they saw as consumerist and assimilationist, peppered late 1970s and early 1980s America. They were places filled with political theorizing, collective cultural expression, and folk and baroque music. “Carl later gave the visiting harpsichordist a copy of ‘Eros and Civilization,’” reads a representative quote from a diary of life at a mid-1970s commune in the gay liberation journal RFD.Activists — many of whom, like Mitchell, settled on the word “faggot” to imply a gender-expansive, sex-positive and politically radical gay subjectivity — believed that collective movement had the power to change the world, and that folk and baroque dances were forms infused with political radicalism.In a video interview, Venables called this a “politics of pleasure and joy and play and community,” one he has sought to express in a musical style in which “form and genre are a way of putting on costumes and telling stories, with folk and baroque music references having to do with community music making, social gatherings and social rituals.”One aria, for example, starts as a duet between the soprano Mariamielle Lamagat and the harpist Joy Smith, before the gambist Jacob Garside joins in — on glockenspiel, and wearing a multicolored evening gown — helping to initiate a transformation of the tune into a swinging bossa nova, and eventually an accordion-accompanied shanty.Kit Green said that the production gives the sense “that we are a part of something bigger.”Tristram KentonThe book that inspired all this — despite, or perhaps because of, how rooted it is in its specific political moment — has had a recent revival. After years of being out of print, with copies and PDFs circulating among gay artists and activists like samizdat, it was republished in 2018.“I had questions about how Ted wanted to stage it because it felt uncomfortable doing some halcyon utopian thing set in the 1970s,” said Kit Green, one of the show’s narrators. “He is doing it in a way, though, where we are not part of the book. We’re telling it; there’s a distance. We’re on this massive time continuum, and when things feel hopeless, this sense that time rolls on, that we are a part of something bigger, feels different and exciting. We need that revolutionary zeal — but what does it mean now? We should all be asking that question.”As the performers gathered onstage during a dress rehearsal this week, Yshani Perinpanayagam — the music director, as well as a member of the cast — said: “There have been so many beautiful moments of connection today on- and off-set. If something doesn’t go as expected, just yes/and it. Go with it.”In the show, feats of technical bravado — in one early scene, Garside plays complex music on gamba while lying on his back on a blanket being dragged across the stage — are paired with simpler collective actions, like an aria accompanied both by the trained violin playing of Conor Gricmanis, as well as by much of the cast playing on the open strings of violins, a simple echoing of harmonies. Perinpanayagam gives some cues, but mostly the musicians play without a conductor.From left, Kerry Bursey, Collin Shay, Conor Gricmanis and Yshani Perinpanayagam in rehearsal.Tristram Kenton“We wanted to make it feel like a community onstage, to try to break down some of the hierarchies and traditional relationships that different art forms have onstage, especially classical music stages,” Huffman said in a video interview. “Asking everyone onstage to participate in everything is not a spirit of amateurism but of willingness to test one’s creativity, of finding beauty in simple things.”The challenge of the score, the flutist Eric Lamb said, is in “the physicality, the movement.” He added that he hoped audiences would “witness this love and understanding of 15 people onstage who inhabit various spaces within the queer community holding each other up and caring for each other.”These artists believe that the revolutions the piece aims to incite are both current and urgent. “Everything that I’d thought about my life made sense,” Yandass said, describing reading the book for the first time. “This is how I should have been living. I felt called out in terms of not sticking to my queerness, not sticking to my being. It helped me understand my thinking and my instincts.”Green mentioned the final section — in which the performers scream, “And the third revolution engulfs us all!” — and added, “I had a proper feeling of ‘Let’s do this! Let’s go out and start it!’” More

The 64-year-old pop icon was hospitalized for several days and remains under medical care, her agent said. A new start date for her tour has not been announced.Madonna was hospitalized for several days with a “serious bacterial infection,” forcing her to postpone her forthcoming “Celebration” tour, her manager said on Wednesday.The 64-year-old pop icon developed the infection on Saturday, leading to a stay in an intensive care unit, her manager, Guy Oseary, wrote on Instagram.“Her health is improving, however she is still under medical care,” he said. “A full recovery is expected.”Madonna’s world tour was set to begin on July 15 in Vancouver and to last seven months, highlighting songs from the past 40 years of her career.A new start date for her tour has not been announced.Madonna announced her tour, which would be her 12th, in January, with a five-minute black-and-white video that showed her speaking at a dinner party with a group of famous friends. Her conversation and party games made references to her some of her songs, like “S.E.X.” and “La Isla Bonita,” as well as her documentary and concert film “Truth or Dare.”“I am excited to explore as many songs as possible in hopes to give my fans the show they have been waiting for,” Madonna said in the video.Tickets for her “Celebration” shows in New York, London, Paris and Amsterdam sold out in minutes, according to Billboard.The tour, produced by Live Nation, was to span about 40 cities before concluding in Mexico City on Jan. 30, 2024.In North America, she had stops planned in Detroit, Chicago, New York, Miami and Los Angeles. In Europe, she was scheduled to perform in London, Barcelona, Paris and Stockholm.Caldwell Tidicue, a New York comedian better known as Bob the Drag Queen, was slated to appear as a guest on all dates of the tour.“The Celebration Tour will take us on Madonna’s artistic journey through four decades,” the tour announcement said.After announcing the tour, Madonna collaborated with the pop and R&B singer The Weeknd and rapper Playboi Carti on the single “Popular.” The collaboration brought her back to Billboard’s Hot 100 chart for the first time in years. More

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:The new album from Young Thug, released as his trial has yet to seat a juror after six months; plus word of a new album from Drake, pegged to the release of a new poetry bookThe conclusion of the ongoing legal battle between Kesha and Dr. LukeThe new album from the meta-pop singer Kim PetrasA check-in on “The Idol,” the louche HBO show about the wages of pop stardom, which is on the verge of its season finale“No Hard Feelings,” the May-December quasi-romance that’s serving as a lighthearted comeback vehicle for Jennifer LawrenceA new collaboration from Juice WRLD and Cordae, and a new song from glaiveSnack of the weekConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at [email protected]. More

“It’s adjustable, yes?” Standing in a dressing room in the opera house in Montpellier, France, in May, the soprano Maya Kherani tugged at the waistband of her tiered skirt. A draper kneeling behind her shook out the hem while the costume designer looked on with satisfaction.“We’re lucky,” she said, cupping her hands around the smooth orb of her belly. “It works for the character.”Kherani considered herself fortunate not because she had landed the role of Autonoe, a lead in “Orfeo,” by the Baroque composer Antonio Sartorio. Instead, Kherani, who gave birth on Sunday, was relieved to discover that her costumes in this modern-dress production came with elasticated waists and flat shoes that would make it bearable to sing and act while 32 weeks pregnant.Better yet: The stage director Benjamin Lazar decided to incorporate her pregnancy into the staging, making it the driving force behind her character’s quest to win back her errant lover.“It works dramaturgically really well for my character,” Kherani said in a FaceTime interview from Montpellier. “In my gestures and in the staging, I am referencing the pregnancy. Everyone’s really supportive, which is not always the case.”In most musical professions, pregnant women — not their employers — determine how long they continue to work. When opera singers want to perform pregnant, however, they rely on the good will and skill of a creative team: drapers who add strategic ruching to costumes; stage directors who might change a risky piece of stage business or adapt their concept to include the pregnancy.All too often, though, pregnant singers lose work. And yet opera is a rare business in which pregnancy and childbirth can directly and positively affect the core product — the voice. The science behind the phenomenon is still poorly understood, but it is such a noticeable and common occurrence that it has become something of a truism in opera: After childbirth, the voice seems enriched with warmth, creaminess and depth of color.Kherani found her voice improved after becoming pregnant. “You learn to use a wider base of breath support including the back muscles,” she said, “which I think every singer is trying to access, but I have been forced to.”Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesChanging bodies, of course, go along with the changing voices. A growing number of women in the industry are speaking out about what they feel are cancellations motivated by their appearance rather than sound. Officially, opera houses say they are concerned about safety. Francesca Zambello, the artistic director of Washington National Opera, said, “As a general rule we are interested in the safety and well-being of all artists working for us.” The Metropolitan Opera said in a statement that “if a pregnant singer wishes to perform, we make sure it is safe for them to do so.”But not all cancellations reflect the wishes of the pregnant singer. The mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke said in a video interview she was removed from a production weeks before opening when the company learned she was pregnant, and that she lost a role at another opera house after her management told the company she would be in her second trimester during the performances. A fellow singer later told her the production would have required Cooke to go down a slide, but Cooke said safety was not mentioned in the cancellation, nor was she consulted.“The industry still views you as their property,” Cooke said. “Your choices are their choices.”Like other singers who were eager to speak about pregnancy and motherhood in opera, Cooke asked me not to name the companies that canceled her contracts. In part, this was because of fear of retribution. But also, as the soprano Kathryn Lewek told me before her last performance in the Met’s recent run of Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” the goal was not to shame or remove certain administrators or directors. “We want to help bring about change,” she said.More than five years after the #MeToo movement sparked an overdue investigation of sexual harassment and misconduct in classical music, the field is buzzing with voices calling for more equity around pregnancy and parenthood. The soprano Julia Bullock, who gave birth to her first child last year, has taken to Instagram to post about performing as a lactating mother. The mezzo J’Nai Bridges publicly shared her decision to freeze her eggs at a time in her career when she is a sought-after Carmen — a notably physical role. Social media is especially vital for singers because so many are freelancers, lacking the organized lobbying power of unions and working much of the year on the road.After a singer gives birth, Kherani said, “All the support and alignment creates a stronger foundation for the breath, and that can result in a richer tone.”Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesOn Facebook, the Momology private discussion groups for mothers in the performing arts are bursting at the seams. The classically trained Broadway singer Andrea Jones-Sojola, who created the first group in 2010, caps membership at 500 for each group to create a cohesive support network. This year, she opened a fifth. Jones said pregnancy-related cancellations are an important thread. “A lot of women were afraid to make it known publicly,” she said. “They were afraid to fight for themselves.”Singers also turn to each other for advice on how to navigate technical challenges during pregnancy. Many report doing their best work in their second and sometimes third trimesters, after symptoms like nausea and fatigue have abated and other physiological changes enhance their vocal power. Much of that power comes from the muscles and tissue singers learn to activate for what is known as appoggio, the internal support they lean on to control the breath flow. For some women, the presence of the unborn baby is like a corset they can push against.Dr. Paul Kwak, an ENT specialist who works with opera singers, said voices are affected by the hypervascular state the body enters in pregnancy as it creates more blood vessels and increases blood flow through tissue. Because the tissue and muscle in the vocal folds can become engorged with that extra blood, he said, “it can change the ways the vocal folds themselves oscillate.” At the same time, changes to the abdominal cavity create pressure on the bottom of the diaphragm. “Some women like it,” Dr. Kwak said, “they feel they have a support there, a shelf to push against.”Lewek, who sang the role of Queen of the Night in “The Magic Flute” through two pregnancies, described the experience as one of adjusting “to the fact that a human is taking up square footage in this very delicate part of my anatomy where I work.” By the second trimester, she said she felt as if she were performing “on steroids.” “Everything was so easy,” she said, “high notes just came shooting out of me.”Many singers said the improvement of the voice after childbirth may be the result of integrating tools used during pregnancy into their vocal technique. “You learn to use a wider base of breath support including the back muscles,” Kherani said, “which I think every singer is trying to access, but I have been forced to.” The changes in her body’s center of gravity also made her hyperaware of her posture, another important factor in singing. After a singer gives birth, she said, “All the support and alignment creates a stronger foundation for the breath, and that can result in a richer tone.”Dr. Kwak said richness was a difficult factor to study scientifically. A singer’s vocal tone, or timbre, is shaped by the tissue in her mouth, tongue, pharynx and face, he said, adding that it was possible this tissue became more supple after pregnancy. But studying its changes during and after pregnancy isn’t easy. “That’s why it’s such a mystery,” he said.Many female singers report doing their best work in their second and sometimes third trimesters, after symptoms like nausea and fatigue have abated and other physiological changes enhance their vocal power.Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesRecovering from childbirth can be traumatic for many singers, who have to reacquaint themselves with a body that has changed most radically in the very area that is the powerhouse of their art. The soprano Erin Morley said she lost 30 pounds in the first week after each of her three deliveries. “I found it much easier to sing during my second and third trimesters than I did during the fourth trimester,” she said, echoing many mothers I asked about their recovery following childbirth.Six weeks after delivering her first child by cesarean, Lewek performed the Queen of the Night at the Met. (Morley sang the role of Pamina, the Queen’s daughter, having just given birth to her third, and the two singers spent their breaks breastfeeding in the same dressing room.) The week before rehearsals started, with her “entire support system slashed in half” by surgery, Lewek was still able to sing only up to a high G, a full octave below what Mozart’s music required.With the help of a physical therapist, she devised a workaround. “I found a diaphragmatic rather than muscular way of supporting staccati in Queen of the Night,” she said, “that, overall, I would never want to sustain my entire singing career. But it got me through that gig and it opened up a new set of skills.” Her tone, too, opened up, after the births of each of her children, when she said she noticed “a blossoming of the tone quality of my voice that now has lent itself to bigger repertoire.”She wondered: “Was it the pregnancies that really changed my voice, or was it the recovery?”Lewek said she was fortunate that she was able to perform her star role in the “Magic Flute” up until being eight and a half months pregnant with her first child. But during that same pregnancy, she was abruptly removed from a different role, shortly after she had shown up to rehearsals with a visible baby bump. Citing safety concerns involving the set, the company urged her to withdraw, she said, even though she felt comfortable with what the production required of her. When the company added financial incentives and promises of a future role, she relented.“It wasn’t my decision,” Lewek said, “but my agent said I should grab the offer and run.”Morley said she lost a major role because of concerns she wouldn’t fit through a trap door in the set. And during a later pregnancy she lost a role because it required singing an aria standing on a chair in what would have been her second trimester. “I was really considering making a statement,” she said, “but these were companies I wanted to work with again, and I was very worried that there would be repercussions.” Besides, her contract was paid, which she knew was not always the case in such situations. “It felt kind of like dirty money,” she said. “Like they were paying me so I would not talk.”One singer who went public was Julie Fuchs, after she was booted from a production of “The Magic Flute” two years ago at Hamburg State Opera, where she would have sung the role of Pamina four months into her first pregnancy. When Fuchs announced on social media that she was out of the production, her feed lit up with outrage. Many commentators suggested misogyny was to blame for the company’s decision, although the director, Jette Steckel, was a woman. After arbitration, Fuchs settled with the company under terms that do not allow her to speak about the case.The company said the production’s flight scenes made it unsafe for a pregnant Pamina. “The legal situation for the protection of the expectant mother is clear,” its director of artistic management, Tillmann Wiegand, said in a statement at the time, “and we will never take a health risk, even if only a risky scenic action could take place on the stage.”Kherani at home with her daughter Eila and husband Zaafir.Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesInnovations in set design and technology can make opera stages a risky work environment. Wagnerians are especially likely to find themselves airborne. Morley said she came to an agreement with the Met to bow out of a planned Ring Cycle during her first pregnancy because as one of the Rhinemaidens she would have had to fly in a harness. But when Zambello learned of the pregnancy of a Valkyrie in a Washington National Opera production, she adapted her concept. While the other Valkyries made their entrance by parachute, she had this singer run onstage trailing hers. “I said, ‘OK, you are the nonflying Valkyrie,’” Zambello said. “They were all wearing flight jumpsuits and I said, ‘we’ll just make yours baggier.’”The mezzo Isabel Leonard was in her first trimester when she sang Cherubino in “Marriage of Figaro” at the Met, a trouser role — a male character sung by a woman. A dancer from childhood, she said she wasn’t showing at the time and told no one.Leonard said reconciling the rights of pregnant singers and theatrical standards required a more honest and open conversation. “We are storytellers,” she said. “How far into realism are we going? There has to be a bigger discussion within companies, production by production.”Those channels of communication may open up as more singers enter the administrative suites of opera houses. Bullock, a founding member of American Modern Opera Company, said her organization was looking into formalizing financial support for artists who needed to travel with young children. For a recent tour in Europe, her contract included a per diem, accommodations and travel fare for her infant and designated caregivers.“I can’t really expect that from every arts institution where I work,” Bullock said. “But if you want my presence fully, so that I can really do the job that you’ve hired me to do, this is a part of it.”The soprano Christine Goerke joined Detroit Opera as associate artistic director in 2021. She credits motherhood with propelling her into the dramatic lead roles in Wagner and Strauss she is now known for. “It allowed me to reach into these bigger roles in a way that suddenly felt like that’s where I belonged,” she said of the changes to her voice postpartum.A vocal champion of parents’ rights in opera, she said she recognized the complexity of the situation. “Now that I am on both sides of the desk, I can see the different sides of this. It is difficult to have a pregnant Octavian,” she said, referring to a trouser role in Strauss’s “Rosenkavalier.” However, she continued, “before a snap decision is made, I would like to see conversations between the artist who is pregnant and the director and bring in other people. It may be that you can come up with a different solution.”Many singers said opera houses were beginning to be more attuned to the needs of singers who are traveling with children. They might provide information on local nanny services and playgrounds or retain the services of a pediatrician along with the ENT who is on call in every theater. Lewek said together with other mothers she was preparing a list of best practices to improve equity for pregnant artists and parents in opera houses. She would like to see unilateral cancellations become a thing of the past.“This is not Hollywood. There is another priority why we’re hired to do the job,” she said. “It’s the voice.” More

The sanctuary of Northside church in Charlotte, N.C., is built for joyous adoration. Enormous speakers hang from its domed ceiling, along with an elaborate system of colored lights. Its semicircular stage has wide, carpeted steps that lead down on all sides to rows and rows of wine red pews, which hold about 2,700 people. The evening I visited last February, they filled to capacity with Latino families who had come to see the evangelical superstar Marcos Witt.Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

Shahzad Ismaily cannot regulate his body temperature. He was born without sweat glands, or at least, not very many.When he was a month old, his parents rushed him to the hospital because he was beyond feverish and struggling to breathe. They learned their only child had ectodermal dysplasias, a rare genetic disorder that produces abnormalities at the body’s surface, including fingernails and teeth. Five decades later, Ismaily has become one of music’s most in-demand collaborators, flitting like a mischievous butterfly through genres as diverse as honeyed folk, rambunctious free jazz and spectral meditations sung in Urdu. He does not think these facts are unrelated.“Since I move with the temperatures of the outside world so readily, is it possible that I have an extra sensitivity to the tone of the world around me?” Ismaily, 51, recently wondered by phone from a tour stop in the Netherlands, as he briefly warmed himself in his hotel room’s bedside bathtub, during one of several extended interviews. “The hardest part of playing music with people is a kind of nonverbal, total empathetic awareness of how another person feels, how a room feels. I’m moving with the world around me. I’m not a sealed object.”Though he’s never released a solo album, Ismaily has played on or produced nearly 400 records since moving to New York in February 2000, including work by Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Yoko Ono. His Brooklyn studio, Figure 8, remains an affordable and inclusive hub for experimental musicians, even as Ismaily becomes a marquee session player.This year alone, his subtle keyboards lit the darkened corners of Feist’s “Multitudes”; his elastic bass provided the combustible matter inside “Connection,” a rock record from Ceramic Dog, his trio with the iconoclastic guitarist Marc Ribot; and his prismatic keyboards and askance rhythms shaped “Love in Exile,” the acclaimed debut from his improvisational group with the singer Arooj Aftab and the pianist Vijay Iyer. But summarizing exactly what Ismaily does — let alone, how he’s so good at it — can feel a little like bottling wind.“If you listen to my last record, you could not know he’s on it, because he’s not the most present musician,” Sam Amidon, the soft-voiced singer who has worked with Ismaily for nearly 20 years, said by phone. “But every moment he was in the room, he brought out the most beautiful stuff in other people through his energy. He’s just sneakily there.”For Ismaily, the invitation to play may be the most important part. “Since 30, I have been asked to walk into a room and be myself musically — an incredibly intense, intensely fortunate situation,” he said. “My preferred way to work is to walk into a room and feel, intuitively, what we should do today.”The self-confidence to play the part of himself did not come easily for Ismaily. Soon after that early emergency room visit, surgeons split his prematurely fused skull, adding space for it to expand as he aged. The scar cuts horizontally across his head, a reminder of his tenuous health as a child. Intense allergies and asthma often caused him to wake up in panics about catching his next breath. For several months, he was blind.When Ismaily was 4, his mother became a psychiatrist for the state of Pennsylvania, and the family shuttled among the campuses of mental hospitals where they stayed for years at a time. Ismaily quickly learned not just to live with people whose worldview he could not comprehend, but to communicate with them, to try and glimpse their reality. He befriended the bipolar, the depressed, the manic.“Since I move with the temperatures of the outside world so readily, is it possible that I have an extra sensitivity to the tone of the world around me?” Ismaily said.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesFriends his own age, however, were much harder for the lanky Pakistani boy with, as he put it, “a very thin amount of hair, no teeth or one tooth or dentures, and a compressed head” in small-town Pennsylvania. Kids would tease him about why he dressed for Halloween all year. His mother worked long hours on hospital grounds, and his father battled cancer when Ismaily was 3, leaving him emotionally withdrawn. Left alone, Ismaily slipped into science fiction, particularly the postapocalyptic escape of Terry Brooks’ “Shannara” series. These books taught him to drift into other realms beyond his physical surroundings.“When something opens up in front of you that you love, you dive headfirst into it,” he said.Music soon revealed the world he has spent his lifetime since exploring. His home was very quiet, with no instruments or even a stereo. Still, when Ismaily was 2, he began to crave the act of making sound. He specifically wanted rhythm, banging spoons against hot radiator coils until his parents relented and bought a tiny Muppets drum kit. A high school marching band was the source of his only childhood friends, offering respite from judgment.He shipped off for a lifesaving stint at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Massachusetts, which he called “a school of misfits, of 300 oddballs.” He headed to Arizona to join friends in bands and, ultimately, study biochemistry; too busy playing music to attend class, he stopped one credit short of his masters. Playing in bands there, he realized he could get just enough shows to pay his meager bills. Making the same scenario work in New York, however, presented new challenges, and Ismaily filled every ostensible day off with an extra recording session or one-off concert. The over-commitment kept him afloat; it also cost him romantic partnerships and rankled bandmates. But after almost two decades together in Ceramic Dog, which is Ismaily’s longest-running relationship, Ribot understands the need.“It’s not a coincidence, the challenges Shahzad had growing up and the way he plays rock. It’s about being forced into confrontation with mortality,” Ribot said in a phone interview. “He’s the most natural-born anarchist I ever met, because he has the natural desire to exceed whatever limit he’s standing next to.”“It’s crazy to be 51 and still have so much unresolved trauma. That’s keeping me from making a record,” Ismaily said.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesIsmaily is an expert at lending others that superpower, or reminding them that they have it. Beth Orton recalled the frustrating process of making her 2022 album, “Weather Alive,” and how label woes and abandoned sessions prompted her to believe she no longer belonged in the music business. But then she began sending demos to Ismaily, who replied to her uncertain hymns with tizzies of pre-dawn gut reactions. “I was so down, and I think he knew how tender I felt,” Orton said in an interview. “There was a sense of being met during a very cold winter.”Ismaily is still, however, trying to muster such temerity within his own work. He has often played shows in the nude, including memorable gigs on a very hot boat on the East River or covering the Counting Crows at a Brooklyn benefit cloaked only by an acoustic guitar. These stories stem in part from the body temperature troubles that will last him a lifetime and in part, he admitted, from confronting the shame of the body that long caused him grief.“I feel ecstasy when those performances are over,” Ismaily said. “It’s the ecstasy of feeling good in your own skin, just showing someone who you really are and surviving it.”He worried, though, that he still lacks the conviction — or “artistic depth,” as he called it — to put something permanently on record that takes his own name. For a decade, he has run a record label that shares a name with his studio. The imprint specializes in first albums by veteran collaborators and role players, the musicians who make albums by the more famous better. Ismaily knows that description encapsulates so much of his work. He hopes someday to be brave enough to own that mantle for himself, to make his own record in his own studio for his own label.“It’s crazy to be 51 and still have so much unresolved trauma. That’s keeping me from making a record,” Ismaily said, still energetic after nearly five hours of conversation about that very trauma. “It still feels like a non-mountaineer casually driving past the bottom of Mount Everest, but I would be so excited about that outcome.” More

The band he led with his brother broke new ground with an unusually broad repertoire, unorthodox instrumentation and untraditional vocal harmonies.Bobby Osborne, the singer and mandolin player who with his younger brother, Sonny, led one of the most groundbreaking bands in the history of bluegrass, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Gallatin, Tenn., a suburb of Nashville. He was 91.His death was confirmed by Dan Rogers, the vice president and executive producer of the Grand Ole Opry.Formed in 1953, the Osborne Brothers band habitually flouted bluegrass convention during its first two decades. They were the first bluegrass group of national renown to incorporate drums, electric bass, pedal steel guitar and even, on records, string sections. They were also the first to record with twin banjos, as well as the first to amplify their instruments with electric pickups.Employing a wider repertoire than the Appalachian wellspring from which most of their peers drew, the Osbornes also worked with a more expansive musical palette, embracing country, pop and rock material associated with the likes of Ernest Tubb, Randy Newman and the Everly Brothers.“We caught lots of flack from the die-hard bluegrass fans,” Mr. Osborne said of the group’s sometimes fraught relationship with bluegrass purists in a 2011 interview with the online publication Mandolin Café.Perhaps nothing the Osbornes did rankled the bluegrass orthodoxy more than the three-part vocal harmonies they patented on their 1958 recording of the lovelorn ballad “Once More.”At the time, bluegrass arrangements typically featured one voice singing the melody, with a tenor and a baritone supplying harmonies above and below it. By contrast, the Osbornes positioned Bobby’s voice, singing the melody, above the two other voices. The result was the bright, euphonious blend that became the group’s trademark.Mr. Osborne told NPR in 2017 that the group discovered this sound while rehearsing “Once More” as they drove home from a show one night. “We knew then,” he said, “that we caught onto something that we had never heard before.”“So we got the guitar out of the trunk and found out what key we was in,” he continued. “We sang that song all the way home so we would not forget that type of harmony.”The trio that perfected this new approach consisted of Mr. Osborne, his bold high-pitched lead the focal point; his brother, Sonny, on baritone; and the singer and guitarist Red Allen on another part beneath them both, adding a third layer of harmony.A formative member during the group’s early years, Mr. Allen had previously appeared on the Osbornes’ popular 1956 recording of “Ruby, Are You Mad?,” an unbridled two-banjo romp written by the old-time country singer Cousin Emmy, a.k.a. Cynthia May Carver.To the surprise of some people, the Osbornes were vindicated over the next decade and a half for steadfastly breaking with tradition. Among other accomplishments, they were named vocal group of the year by the Country Music Association in 1971. They were also one of the few bluegrass bands to consistently place records on the country singles chart.Along the way they built a bridge between first-generation bluegrass royalty like Bill Monroe and the duo of Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs and intrepid latter-day inheritors like New Grass Revival and Alison Krauss.Mr. Osborne performing at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville in 2019.Jason Kempin/Getty Images for Country Music Hall Of Fame And MuseumMaybe the best known of the Osbornes’ 18 charting singles was “Rocky Top,” an unabashed celebration of mountain culture that reached the country Top 40 in 1967. Written by the husband-and-wife team of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, who also wrote hits like “Tennessee Hound Dog” for the Osbornes — and even bigger hits for the Everly Brothers — “Rocky Top” was adopted as one of Tennessee’s official state songs and as the fight song of the University of Tennessee football team, the Volunteers.Robert Van Osborne Jr. was born on Dec. 7, 1931, in Thousandsticks, an unincorporated Appalachian enclave near Hyden, Ky., where he and his brother grew up. Their parents, Robert and Daisy (Dixon) Osborne, were schoolteachers; Robert Sr. supplemented their teaching income by moonlighting in his parents’ general store.Young Bobby took up the electric guitar as a teenager after the family moved to Dayton, Ohio, where he also began playing in local country bands and working as a cabdriver.The Osborne brothers started their own band after Bobby completed two years of service with the Marines in Korea, where he was wounded in combat and earned the Purple Heart. He and Sonny had previously worked for bluegrass luminaries — Bobby with Jimmy Martin and the Stanley Brothers, his brother with Bill Monroe.In 1956 the Osbornes joined the WWVA Jamboree in Wheeling, W.Va. Four years later they became one of the first bluegrass bands to perform on a college campus, appearing at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. They subsequently took their music to universities and clubs in the Northeast and performed at the Newport Folk Festival.In 1963 the brothers signed with the Nashville division of Decca Records, then run by the pre-eminent music producer Owen Bradley. In 1964 they became members of the cast of the Grand Ole Opry.The Osbornes recorded extensively for Decca (which later became MCA Records) before they parted with the label in 1974, disillusioned that their initial success at country radio did not extend into the 1970s.A return to a more time-honored approach to bluegrass revitalized their career, which over the next 30 years found them consolidating their place alongside pioneers of the genre like Mr. Monroe and the Stanleys. They were inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Hall of Fame in 1994.Sonny Osborne retired from performing in 2005, after suffering a shoulder injury, and died in 2021. Bobby, who had previously undergone quintuple bypass heart surgery, formed a new group, Rocky Top X-Press, with his son, Bobby Jr. (known as Boj), and continued to perform and record.Besides Bobby Jr., Mr. Osborne is survived by his wife, Karen Osborne; two other sons, Wynn and Robby; a daughter, Tina Osborne; a sister, Louise Williams; five grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. He lived in Portland, Tenn., another suburb of Nashville.Much has been made of the innovations in production, arrangements and repertoire that the Osbornes introduced to bluegrass. Less, however, has been said of how Mr. Osborne, whose syncopated, lyrical playing was inspired by the jazz-derived solos of old-time fiddlers, broke new ground as a mandolinist.Speaking to the website Bluegrass Situation in 2017, he explained: “Since I always liked fiddle tunes and the mandolin is tuned like a fiddle — and I was good with a flat pick from guitar — I got completely wrapped up playing fiddle tunes with the mandolin.”In the process Mr. Osborne earned a reputation as one of the first bluegrass mandolin players to expand the instrument’s vocabulary beyond what Mr. Monroe, the father of Bluegrass, had established early on.Alex Traub More