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      As Florence Price’s Music Is Reconsidered, She Turns 135. Again.

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      The work of Florence B. Price is having a renaissance, and new, foundational details about her life and racial identity are still being discovered.By any measure, a Florence B. Price renaissance is well underway.Seven decades since her death, and nine since the groundbreaking premiere of her Symphony in E minor, her luminous music is enrapturing audiences worldwide. Most recently, the London-based Chineke! Orchestra highlighted that symphony on its debut North American tour, which has included stops at Lincoln Center and Jordan Hall in Boston, where Price herself performed as a New England Conservatory pupil. She has amassed a recorded catalog that includes recent Grammy Award-winning albums by the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Youth Symphony.This excitement stems from a half-century of scholarly and artistic work built on foundations laid by the late musicologists Barbara Garvey Jackson and Rae Linda Brown. A fluke discovery of dozens of Price’s unpublished scores at her abandoned Illinois summer home in 2009, which was then publicized in 2018, added significant momentum that has grown unabated since.While the explosion of attention is welcome, it has far outpaced a careful assessment of the historical record that may reshape how we view Price and her world. Brown, the leading authority on Price, died in 2017, before she could fully integrate the new discoveries into her magisterial biography that was published in 2020. But, knowing that there was still a great deal more to uncover, she remarked in a 2015 speech, “It is for the next generation of music scholars to tell the rest of the story.”As we take up the task of writing a new Price biography that draws on materials that were once lost, we have responded to Brown’s invitation by starting at the beginning. Here are just a few of the revelations that have led us to rethink what we know of Price, her music and the world she inhabited.To start, April 9 happens to be Price’s 135th birthday — again. The current scholarly consensus holds that she was born in Little Rock, Ark., in 1887. We believe that a preponderance of evidence, corroborated by a recently uncovered government document housed in the Library of Congress, now points to her true birth year as 1888.This small change would be a significant inconvenience for those invested in complete biographical accuracy, such as library cataloging teams. Yet such an otherwise slight discrepancy articulates the broader reality that basic facts about Price remain vexingly difficult to grasp and have emerged only through painstaking analysis of scattered and often disorganized records. Four decades ago, the historian Deborah Gray White described this dimension of Black women’s historiography as “mining the forgotten.”Through our meticulous research, we have also created a new sketch of the winding and at times traumatic multigenerational experience of racial ambiguity for Price and her family.Newly available photographs whose labels include Price’s maternal grandmother, Mary McCoy, and great-grandmother, Margaret Collins, appear to confirm that they would have been perceived as white according to post-bellum racial thought. Although no photograph of Price’s maternal grandfather, an Indianapolis barber named William Gulliver, is known to survive, local newspapers described him as “colored.” Curiously, the 1860 census lists the entire Gulliver family as “mulatto,” while the 1870 census lists them as “white.”That year, Gulliver sued Indianapolis City Schools for rejecting his daughter, Florence Irene (Price’s mother), from the white high school on racial grounds. Rather than seeking racially equitable admission, he argued that she was white by virtue of mixed European, African and Cherokee ancestry. The court disagreed, and a photograph from the time suggests that her racially ambiguous appearance placed her in the fissures of a hardening color line.In 1876, Florence Irene married a prominent dentist named James H. Smith and moved with him to Little Rock, where they both lived openly as members of the city’s Black elite. Despite their racial ambiguity, the Smiths clearly aligned themselves with Black political causes and at times continued to use the courts to resist tightening Jim Crow constructions of race, largely without success.After Dr. Smith died in 1910, however, Florence Irene deserted the family altogether to pass as white, entering what the historian Allyson Hobbs has called “a chosen exile.” The musicologist Michael Cooper has recently uncovered that she likely passed as white until she died in 1948, only five years before her daughter’s own death.One of Florence B. Price’s two daughters, Florence Louise, openly resented that sense of abandonment, passed down in family lore. Florence Irene “wasn’t the one who shouldn’t have married my grandfather,” she once wrote, “just the opposite.” No evidence currently suggests any reconnection between Florence Irene and the rest of the Price family.Price herself was well aware of racial interstices. In her final year of conservatory study in Boston, she falsely registered as a Mexican resident to avoid harassment from vocally segregationist, Southern white students — a longstanding problem for students of color.Much later in her career, on July 5, 1943, race, gender and American identity all ran through Price’s mind. In a now-famous letter to Serge Koussevitzky — her second to the influential Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor — she closed with a contemplative assertion, “I have an unwavering and compelling faith that a national music very beautiful and very American can come from the melting pot just as the nation itself has done.” And, repeating a hitherto unanswered call, “Will you examine one of my scores?”Earlier in the letter, she had written of the “two handicaps of sex and race,” the “Negro blood in my veins,” and how her Arkansas upbringing had shaped her understanding of African American folk music. Knowing of Koussevitzky’s keenness to champion American composers in wartime, Price then introduced the melting pot, not as an idealistic metaphor, but as her reality. He declined to program any of her music.Here and elsewhere, Price’s vocabulary paints a distinct self-understanding. In a document in Price’s handwriting, likely dating from 1939, she describes her maternal ancestry as “French, Indian and Spanish,” obscuring William Gulliver’s African descent. In contrast, she labeled her paternal ancestry as “Negro, Indian and English.” From this perspective, to tell Koussevitzky that she had “some Negro blood” was a sensible turn of phrase embracing an unclassifiable racial identity.In our reading, Price’s description punctured “one-drop” ideologies while affirming the creolization of her background. She wanted to complicate rigid conceptions of race, following the stance that her family had clearly taken for generations. As Hobbs has argued, the mutability of racial self-identification open to racially ambiguous people “reveals the bankruptcy of the race idea” while “offering a searing critique of racism” and “disarming racialized thinking.”And so, as we work to construct Price’s genealogical portrait and her recognition as the first African American woman composer of her stature, we consider how the dynamics of racial passing, ambiguity, colorism and — most important — her self-definition, factored into the path she charted as a creative artist.Notably, Price explained her musical style to Koussevitzky in terms of ambiguity and fusion. “Having been born in the South and having spent most of my childhood there,” she told him, “I believe I can truthfully say that I understand the real Negro music. In some of my work I make use of this idiom undiluted. Again, at other times it merely flavors my themes. And at still other times thoughts come in the garb of my mixed racial background.”Price’s capacious sense of self generated an equally capacious horizon of expression captured most clearly in her series of four solo piano works called “Fantasie Nègre.” From the first in the set, which draws upon the spiritual “Sinner, Please Don’t Let This Harvest Pass,” to the last, which weaves an original theme into rhapsodic declamations, each uses different strategies for sounding the folkloric and the fantastical of Black pasts, presents and futures.Price’s engagement with Black folk idioms in her symphonies and chamber music has also entered the spotlight as listeners have encountered these works for the first time. Often extracted for family performances, her dance-inspired “Juba” movements are especially popular. But limiting engagement to Price’s folkloric music is a mistake. As the composer George E. Lewis has argued, expanding conceptions of the possibilities in Black music must accompany an expanding understanding of Black life.A prolific song composer, Price was deeply inspired by the outstanding Black poets of her era, including Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson and Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr. She even set some of her own poetry. She was a voracious and eclectic reader who could bring extraordinary musical dynamism to texts across styles and themes. Her setting of “Debts,” by Jessie Belle Rittenhouse, is a profound meditation on the inward experience of love, while “Tobacco,” her setting of a comic poem by Graham Lee Hemminger, shows off her dry wit.Price’s approaches to the piano and organ, her principal instruments, were equally voluminous. Large-scale works like her Piano Concerto and organ suite display her virtuosic skills as a performer. Her picturesque character pieces — such as “Flame,” “Clouds” and “In Quiet Mood” — reveal a supreme colorist with an imaginative harmonic vocabulary and firm narrative sense.While recordings of these pieces display the breadth of Price’s creativity, many of her compositional ambitions went unfulfilled at the time of her death, in 1953. Drafts of two symphonies (one of which formed the basis of her tone poem “The Oak”), two piano concertos and a handful of chamber pieces are incomplete, while other major scores for chorus, piano and solo voice remain unpublished. Even so, as Price’s life and works come into sharper focus, the world will continue to find that her music cannot be contained. More

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      Angela Gheorghiu, Diva of the Old School, Is Back at the Met Opera

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      A fight was brewing recently at the Metropolitan Opera, and Angela Gheorghiu was in the thick of it.She and some other singers were rehearsing the second act of Puccini’s “Tosca,” and the moment had arrived when Cavaradossi, the passionate tenor lead, scuffles with the henchmen who are restraining him.Gheorghiu — the glamorous, veteran Romanian soprano singing the opera’s title role in two performances, on Saturday afternoon and Wednesday evening — was standing in such a way that the melee was driving right toward her. Sarah Ina Meyers, the revival’s director, began to pause to give her a new position out of the fray, but Gheorghiu practically shouted at everyone to keep going; she would figure out where to move on the fly.“I will respond; I’m quick!” she told them in an excited, heavily accented tumble of words. “Go, go! Action, action!”“Generally my colleagues say, ‘Angela, relax!’” she said in an interview later. “But I cannot relax. Even when I study at home, I’m there. When I open a score, I’m there. My skin, my cells, they’re all there. I’m alive; I have the fire on me.”Where Gheorghiu, 57, has not been of late is the Met. Though she was long a frequent presence with the company after her debut in 1993, these performances of “Tosca” are her first appearances on its stage in eight years.“It’s an unfair gap,” she said of her time away. “It’s unfair because I know I have my public here, and it’s part of my life.”Grand of manner and demanding, but also generous and gregarious, taking grinning selfies for Instagram with everyone in the room, Gheorghiu is well known — and generally well liked, even by colleagues she exasperates — for being one of the few remaining divas in the larger-than-life, old-school mold of Geraldine Farrar, Maria Callas and Jessye Norman.Gheorghiu’s former manager described her as “always interesting, no matter what — onstage, offstage.”Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesOld-school in the tumult that has tended to accompany her: cancellations, firings, willful behavior, a long marriage of ups and downs to the star tenor Roberto Alagna (until their divorce 10 years ago). And old-school in her voice, which as she was gaining renown was full and dark-hued, flexible and free to the top of its range.“She is a serious artist,” said Jack Mastroianni, who spent years as her manager. “I think sometimes people forget that because of the sensational news that comes out of her cancellations, or whatever. She’s always interesting, no matter what — onstage, offstage.”Because Gheorghiu was joining a “Tosca” run already in progress, she wouldn’t be getting any rehearsal time onstage, with the orchestra, or in costume.“I don’t know what was on his mind,” she said of Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “First of all, he offered me one performance. And I said, for one performance, I will not come. Just one? Come on. I would spend it all on my flight! And of course I need a hotel. So, two.”But why accept a mere two?“Because,” she said, with a sigh, “I must tell you the truth. I adore this city. I adore this theater, from the very beginning.”At the beginning, it was a love affair. Of Gheorghiu’s 1993 debut, in “La Bohème,” Alex Ross wrote in The New York Times that “the preternatural beauty of the voice made a lingering impression.”Ovations at the Met were a long way from small-town Adjud, Romania, where she was born in 1965 to a dressmaker mother and a train operator father. The Soviet-backed regime of Nicolae Ceausescu was then just beginning, an era that later informed her depiction in “Tosca” of life in early-19th-century Rome amid the repressive forces of the police chief Scarpia.“Tosca, it’s myself,” Gheorghiu said. “I’m an opera singer, like her. And I’m not a killer, but I lived in a situation in Romania where you had no right to say something, where you were all the time afraid.”From left, Gheorghiu, Plácido Domingo and Waltraud Meier in “Carmen” at the Met in 1996.Sara KrulwichAs a child, she was obsessed with Leonard Bernstein’s television specials, and began to study voice seriously in her early teens.“I was an opera singer, all my life, from the beginning,” she said. “It was so clear. I didn’t have a Plan B. Never, never. And for all my roles, from when I was 18, I had no teacher, no coach, no pianist. I am my own everything.”Mastroianni said: “What she went through to get from where she was, it takes guts and moxie. And she has that in spades.”Gelb first heard her sing Violetta in Verdi’s “La Traviata” in the early 1990s, then tried (unsuccessfully) to sign her to Sony Classical when he ran the label.“When she was singing ‘Traviata’ in her prime,” he said, “I think hers was the greatest ‘Traviata’ of that time. She was a throwback to the kind of glamorous divas of previous generations, with incredible artistic personality and charisma.”Her voice — clean and pure, with alluring depths but without heavy vibrato or overwhelming size — was perfect for capture on CDs. It was the tail end of the classical recording industry’s heyday, and she was lavishly promoted.“It was a voice that microphones loved,” Gelb said. Gheorghiu still comes across as valuing recordings more urgently than do some singers — “We have to leave a testimony,” she said — and there are certain roles she has sung for albums but never onstage, like an exquisite Cio-Cio-San in “Madama Butterfly.”Almost as soon as she entered the international scene, she became a star at the Royal Opera House in London, a home base in those early years. She divorced her first husband and married Alagna; in a curtain speech before they appeared together in “La Bohème” at the Met in 1996, Joseph Volpe, then the company’s general manager, announced that the two had been wed the previous day. Rudolph W. Giuliani, the mayor of New York at the time and an opera aficionado, officiated.The following year, on tour with the Met in Japan, Gheorghiu refused to wear the blonde wig for her character, Micaëla, in “Carmen,” and Volpe uttered what became an immortal line among opera fans: “The wig goes on, with or without you.” (For one performance, she chose without, and an understudy replaced her.)Appearing and recording frequently as a duo, she and Alagna grew notorious for their hubristic demands. They attempted to veto Franco Zeffirelli’s designs for a new Met “Traviata” in the late 1990s; the show went on, without them. Gheorghiu still sang in New York, but from 2003 to 2005 she was absent for two seasons in a row, which hadn’t happened since her debut.“I feel home here,” Gheorghiu said of the Met.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesWhen Gelb took over, in 2006, he tried to rectify this and bring her back in full force. Gheorghiu said that he eventually offered a contract that required her to sing at least 18 performances a year, which would have restricted her ability to take on engagements in Europe.“And finally, I said no,” she said. “And from this moment, I think he was upset. That’s why I was more rare here.”(“I have no recollection of that,” Gelb said. “If I spent my life being offended by opera singers, I would have ended my career a long time ago.”)She abandoned a new Met production of “Carmen,” in which she was to sing the title role, as well as a new staging of “Faust” whose updated concept she disliked.A new production of Puccini’s “La Rondine,” a rarity for whose wistful mood Gheorghiu was well suited, did go forward, in 2009. But over the following decade, there were just a pair of “Bohème” performances in 2014 and the brief stint in “Tosca” in 2015 — in which her voice, never huge, sometimes seemed perilously slender.“When she was last here, there were mixed results,” Gelb said. “Like many members of the audience, she did not like the Luc Bondy production, and she decided to do her own staging. So she kind of defied the directorial team; she sort of went off the reservation.”The current Met “Tosca,” a throwback to Zeffirelli-style realistic splendor, is more to Gheorghiu’s taste, but she is just as headstrong as ever about taking direction. There was, throughout the recent rehearsal, the sense that she wanted to leave as much of the blocking as possible to what her impulse might end up being in the moment.“I like acting,” she said as Meyers, the director, tried, to little avail, to guide her toward setting in stone a sequence in which Scarpia mauls Tosca onto a divan. “But so you don’t see the acting. Reality.”Gheorghiu would like for this not to be her Met farewell; she’d love to sing Fedora here, and Adriana Lecouvreur.“I feel home here,” she said. “I really adore each centimeter: the dust, the smell, the sweating onstage, the costumes, the atmosphere in rehearsal. So I had some friendly discussion with Peter, and I feel like, of course, give me this, then what else? Let’s see how this goes.”Gelb didn’t commit. “But I’ve always admired her and I always will admire her,” he said. “She’s part of opera history, and part of opera history at the Met.” More

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      The Friendship Harmonies of boygenius

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicIn 2018, the rising indie rock singers Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus teamed up to form boygenius, a collaborative side project that quickly took on outsized importance. For fans, it reinforced the characteristics that made each singer so appealing individually, and also created a new layer of lore.The debut boygenius EP was released in 2018, but it wasn’t until last week that the group released its first full-length project, “The Record.” It continues the group’s familiar combination of emotionally acute songwriting, rich harmonies and inside-joke banter.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about how the music of boygenius overlaps with the solo work of its three members, the ways in which friendship can be rendered in musical terms and how even the most beloved artists can be subject to a backlash cycle.Guests:Jon Pareles, The New York Times’s chief pop music criticCat Zhang, an associate editor at PitchforkConnect 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 popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Mary Lou Williams

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      We asked a dozen musicians, scholars and critics to help take us on a tour of the music and mind of a pianist whose decades-long career made her a Mount Rushmore figure in jazz.Over the past few months, The New York Times has asked experts to answer the question, What would you play a friend to make them fall in love with jazz? We’ve gotten plenty of answers, with selections of favorites for artists like Duke Ellington, Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra and styles from the bebop era to the modern day.This time, we’re turning to Mary Lou Williams, who fell in love with music as a toddler, sitting on her mother’s knee at the organ and learning by ear. Williams’s grandfather liked Western classical music, so she learned to play sonatas with an elegant touch; her stepfather liked boogie-woogie, so she developed a steam-engine left hand; her uncle liked Irish folk songs, so she memorized that repertoire, too.Soon the “little piano girl” of Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood was a local celebrity, renowned among musicians even in the piano-player-packed city and in demand as an entertainer of wealthy white families. As a teenager she joined Andy Kirk and His 12 Clouds of Joy, a Kansas City big band on the make; her compositions and arrangements — not to mention her bravura playing style — helped make it one of the era’s leading bands.In the coming decades, Williams stayed abreast of the major developments in jazz, following her ear and leading by example. She wrote briefly for both Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, then became a mentor to the young bebop musicians rising up in Harlem.But as artistically successful as she was, life for Williams never really got easy. Things have rarely been simple for genius Black musicians in America, but for a woman in jazz, things were especially tough. She wasn’t signed by a major label, and rarely received star billing. In 1954, while living in Paris, she stepped away — literally, midperformance — from jazz. She converted to Catholicism and stayed away from the music for three years. When she returned, she was as an activist and an educator as much as a pianist and composer.Today, Williams is a Mount Rushmore figure in jazz, possibly the greatest multiplier of openness and mastery the music has yet known. Below, we asked a dozen musicians, scholars and critics to help take us on a tour of the music and mind of Mary Lou Williams. Enjoy listening to their choices, check out the playlist at the bottom of the article, and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Helen Sung, pianistIt is fascinating to hear this live performance (from one of Williams’s last recordings) of “Roll ’Em,” a composition from early on in her career. One hears a broad swath of jazz history in her playing: boogie-woogie, swing, big-band riffs, subtle chromaticism in her left-hand chords when the band settles into a more modern trio format. Williams’s artistry is steeped in the blues and full of sass and rhythmic swagger. Her soloistic approach here recalls folks like Fats Waller, Art Tatum and Erroll Garner, where the bassist and drummer simply come along for a thrilling ride with the piano maestra.◆ ◆ ◆Courtney Bryan, pianist and scholarIn 1945, Williams, a pathbreaking genius composer, recorded her first extended composition, “Zodiac Suite.” Soon afterward, she presented chamber and full orchestra versions of the suite. The 12 movements are based on zodiac signs, each honoring creative people and friends.Williams, a Taurus, dedicated this movement to Duke Ellington, Joe Louis and Bing Crosby. “Taurus” takes you on an adventure — starting with the solo piano opening statement in major and minor alternating with open tempo whole-tone figures, to the trio swinging in time with chromatic and bluesy themes with exciting detours, and then ending, as Williams explains in the liner notes, “with the same theme to indicate the personality that ‘only changes when it is forced to do so.’”Following a music sabbatical and conversion to Roman Catholicism with a focus on charity, her return to music was in 1957 with Dizzy Gillespie at Newport Jazz Festival, where she performed movements from “Zodiac Suite.” She went on to compose several jazz-inspired Masses. The afterlife of “Zodiac Suite” can be heard in contemporary takes by a range of artists.◆ ◆ ◆Fredara Hadley, ethnomusicology professorI learned who St. Martin de Porres is through Williams’s 1964 album “Black Christ of the Andes.” The album opens with a (mostly) a cappella choral piece named for the saint. It is part chant and part hymn but is rife with a reverence that reveals Williams’s expansive bebop and blues harmonic ingenuity. My favorite moment happens over three minutes after the song begins. It is right where I’m tempted to slip into the contemplative world Williams creates, but then she begins her brief piano solo with an awakening glissando and a habanera rhythm that reminds me that she’s not honoring just any saint, but St. Martin de Porres, an Afro-Peruvian priest who represents social justice and interracial harmony. This is soul music. “St. Martin de Porres” and all of “Black Christ of the Andes” is Williams’s spiritual offering to her chosen patron saint, and it is a gift of hope and reflection to our listening ears.◆ ◆ ◆Jason Moran, pianistWilliams’s “Night Life” is a blistering three-minute dance. It’s the kind of song that raises your heart rate because Mary Lou creates so much drama by pressurizing the syncopation between her perfect hands. In those hands we hear the drama of a night: A scene seems to unfold here with laughter and clinking glasses, and we can almost hear the dancers emerge onto the floor. (I practice my Lil Uzi Vert dance to this track.) This is an excellent example of her vocal quality as a pianist, describing a night out. Midway through, around 1:42, the scene changes; it’s as if someone had come in to rob the patrons of the club, but heard Mary Lou’s playing and changed their mind, joined the dance and bought everyone a round. By the end, Mary Lou is shoulder-dancing us all out into the street at daybreak. Time for work. I’ll always love Mary Lou.◆ ◆ ◆Tammy Kernodle, musicologistThis performance of “A Grand Night for Swinging” is taken from a 1976 live album of the same name. Written by her close friend and fellow pianist Billy Taylor, the tune became a staple in Williams’s repertory after 1957. She first recorded it in 1964 for the “Black Christ of the Andes” album, and it is featured on a few of the live albums she recorded during the last five years of her life. This rendition, however, is my absolute favorite as it displays how the richness of her artistry as a pianist had deepened during this late chapter of her career. It is funkier and grittier than the others that precede it, no doubt because of the chemistry that existed between Williams, the bassist Ronnie Boykins and the legendary drummer Roy Haynes.Mary Lou had a reputation for pushing bass players and drummers. She wanted a particular kind of rhythmic drive and often coached her sidemen in real time by stomping her left foot or moving her head. But it is clear from the opening motive to the last chord that Boykins and Haynes knew exactly what Mary Lou wanted. They established a rhythmic pocket that allowed Williams to effortlessly weave line after line of blues-tinged improvisation. It is a reminder that when Mary Lou said she had played through every era of jazz, that she indeed had played and mastered many of the different iterations of jazz piano. This performance situates her squarely in the sonic genealogy of the East Coast hard bop aesthetic. But the unique hallmarks of Williams’s style are also very evident, especially her driving left hand, and the strong chord clusters she would periodically bang out in the lower register of the piano to break up the continuity of her comping. This is Mary Lou at her best!◆ ◆ ◆Seth Colter Walls, Times music criticOne mark of an influential artist is the ability to speak through modern-day disciples. When latter-day pianists on the level of Geri Allen and Aaron Diehl offer us informed and inventive takes on Williams’s 1940s “Zodiac Suite,” that’s a sign of its own. But what was Williams herself thinking about, when completing that ambitious composition in its various editions for small combo and chamber orchestra alike? On the evidence of sides cut for the Asch label, she was enjoying a wide range of styles — including Harlem stride and the beginnings of bop. A solo approach to W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” from this period reflects her composer’s sense of proportion as well as her wide-ranging ear; she starts at a stately pace, and adds delirious ornaments as she goes — eventually throttling into a thrilling, boogie-woogie gear.◆ ◆ ◆Carmen Staaf, pianistOne of the astonishing things about Williams is the number of musical eras during which she continued to break new ground. “Olinga” (from 1974’s fascinating “Zoning” album) exemplifies her ability to sound fresh, even after mastering so many earlier styles. Williams’s version of this Dizzy Gillespie composition is relaxed, soulful and grooving, yet constantly surprising. Her touch remains beautiful and lush across a wide dynamic and textural range. By bringing out individual notes within voicings and contrasting big chords with single-note lines, she creates a topography of sound, the music alive in multidimensional space. In the improvisation, her right hand freely pushes and pulls against the time over funky left-hand chords. Bluesy licks, long a central part of her sound, lead fluidly into bebop lines and more modern language; her soloing seems to encapsulate the history of jazz piano while looking ahead into its future.◆ ◆ ◆Daphne Brooks, Black studies scholarThe genius of Williams’s take on the Gershwins’ “It Ain’t Necessarily So” lies in both the context of this recording as well as its rich, ambling and contemplative content. Appearing as track No. 2 on her pivotal “Black Christ of the Andes” album, her post-Catholic conversion masterpiece, Williams’s cover of the “Porgy and Bess” trickster-villain Sportin’ Life’s ode to religious skepticism eschews the original’s vaudevillian flash in favor of offering a brooding ramble, a gently swinging peregrination that traverses hills and moves in and out of dark valleys to the rhythm of philosophical questioning and questing. Less Cab Calloway and Sammy Davis Jr. and more midnight Mary at the altar working out the complexities of faith, her reading of “It Ain’t Necessarily So” expands the lexicon of jazz spirituality.◆ ◆ ◆Ethan Iverson, pianist and writerA fast piano blues is usually a “boogie-woogie.” That’s a rhyme, “boogie” and “woogie.” Rhymes repeat sound, and the musical characteristics of boogie-woogie include riffs and rhythms that constantly replicate. On the glorious 1939 side of “Little Joe From Chicago,” Williams suavely varies both the top and bottom patterns in a notably carefree fashion. Musicians call that kind of initiative “mixing it up.” Williams mixes it up, but her performance still has more than enough hypnotic, danceable repetition to make it classic boogie-woogie. (On the full band version with Andy Kirk, the lyrics turn out to be a sardonic appraisal of Louis Armstrong’s manager Joe Glaser: “Little Joe from Chicago wears a big blue diamond ring. Little Joe from Chicago never wants for anything. He handles plenty money and he dresses up like a king.”)◆ ◆ ◆Cory Smythe, pianistIt’s hard to top the opening of “Lonely Moments” — the way its spare octaves, separated at first by bewilderingly long silences, gather momentum and burst into rousing, syncopated harmonies. I imagine solitude might have been something like this for Williams, whose lonesome moments yielded so much thrilling invention. But I might like what comes next even more: a glissando that swings up past the “right” note and sounds, magically, like the piano in its exuberance is singing just a little sharp. The whole track is like this, suffused with flourishes that transform the solo piano into the sounds of an entire band. Notice the chords in her right hand that begin and end with little tremolos, perfectly calibrated to make the decaying piano tones do something they should not — shake, flutter, growl.◆ ◆ ◆Damien Sneed, pianist and professorI first heard Williams’s recording of her original song “What’s Your Story Morning Glory” in my first year at Howard University in Washington, D.C. I immediately fell in love with her piano playing and was mesmerized by her voicings as well. This track showcases her effervescent melodic content combined in her right hand and her passionate comping in her left hand. Williams was a pianist, composer and arranger well ahead of her time. One of the things that stands out to me about her pianistic excellence is the subtle yet virtuosic quality in the development of her solos.◆ ◆ ◆Giovanni Russonello, Times jazz criticOK. Now that you’ve gotten to know Mary Lou Williams’s brilliance, her generosity and her range, let’s learn a bit about how she sparred. Williams and the great avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor were mutual admirers until she organized a joint concert at Carnegie Hall in 1977. So-called “free jazz” was one style of the music she never embraced, but the depths of Taylor’s talent and knowledge of musical traditions won her over. When the time came for the concert, however, he revolted: Taylor hated that she had chosen the rhythm section without him, and he felt she wasn’t giving his 12-tone approach enough room to run. The concert was titled “Embraced” (as was the resulting album), but the actual affair felt more like a joust. And yet, by the end, Williams had managed to establish some balance; on “Back to the Blues,” their last tune together, she digs a deep trench of boogieing rhythm and challenges Taylor in the upper register, where he often lit his brightest fires. As the bassist Bob Cranshaw and the drummer Mickey Roker lock in with her, around the 11:00 mark, Taylor’s two-handed flurries finally start to sound like they fit.◆ ◆ ◆Brandee Younger, harpistThis bass line pulls you right in. It’s grooving, it feels really good, and then the melody comes in and instantly makes your head turn. It makes you wonder, too, because harmonically it is sort of peculiar against the bass, yet still fits perfectly. It’s almost like the blending of two different worlds. The drummer and composer LaFrae Sci introduced me to “Ode to St. Cecile” while on the road with her band, the 13th Amendment. Learning how Williams composed this after converting to Catholicism, retreating and returning to music was a real eye-opener. It made me think about what the melody may have represented in her life at that moment. And musically, just the contrast between the thick, consistent groove and the contemplative melody is enough to keep you on the edge of your seat.◆ ◆ ◆ More

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      Review: In ‘Shucked,’ a Glut of Gleeful Puns and ‘Cornography’

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      A countrified musical about corn, and filled with it, too, transplants itself to Broadway, with songs by Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally.Puns, the pundit John Oliver has said, are not merely the lowest form of humor but “the lowest form of human behavior.” The academy agrees. In the 1600s, no less a literary luminary than John Dryden denounced lowbrow verbal amusements that “torture one poor word ten thousand ways.”You may know how that one poor word feels after seeing “Shucked,” the anomalous Broadway musical about corn that opened on Tuesday at the Nederlander Theater. For more than two hours, it pelts you with piffle so egregious — not just puns but also dad jokes, double entendres and booby-trapped one-liners — that, forced into submission, you eventually give in.Many of the puns, which I will not try to top, are of course about corn, from the title on down. The story is after all set in the fictional Cob County, where the locals, long isolated from the rest of the world by a wall of “cornrows,” live in the perfect “hominy” of entrenched dopiness. Or at least they do until the corn, like some of those puns, starts dying.That’s when our plucky heroine — obviously called Maizy (Caroline Innerbichler) — dares to seek help in the great beyond. Jeopardizing her imminent wedding to the studly but xenophobic Beau (Andrew Durand) and ignoring the advice of her cousin, Lulu (Alex Newell), she heads to Tampa. In that decadent metropolis, she seeks agricultural assistance from Gordy, a con man posing as a podiatrist she misconstrues as a “corn doctor.” Being grifty, Gordy (John Behlmann) returns to Cob County with Maizy not so much to cure the crop as to reap the wealth he thinks lies beneath it: a vast outcropping of precious gemstone.Like Gordy, the audience may have difficulty extracting the gems from the corn. For one thing, there is so much corn to process. It’s not just the relentless puns. The musical’s book, by Robert Horn, embracing what one of the genial songs (by the country music team of Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally) calls “cornography,” trades on all kinds of trite wisdom and low humor.Ashley D. Kelley and Grey Henson play a couple of winky storytellers who steer the audience past potholes in the story, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLow but hard not to laugh at. Beau’s brother, Peanut (Kevin Cahoon), a fraction of a half-wit, fires off bullet lists of random jokes for no apparent reason. Many adhere to the formula X + Y = Pun Z. (“Like the personal trainer said to the lazy client: This is not working out.”) Others sound as if the cerebral comedian Steven Wright had been lobotomized by the rubes of “Hee Haw.” “I think if you can pick up your dog with one hand,” Peanut twangs, “you own a cat.”“Hee Haw” is relevant here. “Shucked” was originally developed as a stage version of that television variety hour, first broadcast in 1969. Set in Kornfield Kounty, it featured country music and down-home comedy at a time when rural America was becoming ripe for spoofing by urban elites such as Eva Gabor. And though the rights holders eventually backed out of the venture, and all but three of the songs were discarded, the interbred DNA of Broadway and the boonies lives on.It makes for a strange hybrid. Somehow framed as a fable of both communal cohesion and openness to strangers, “Shucked” has very little actual plot, and what there is, much of it borrowed from “The Music Man,” is rickety. (The effect is echoed by Scott Pask’s lopsided barn of a set.) Minor love complications, as Lulu falls for Gordy even though Gordy is romancing Maizy, are only as knotty as noodles. And using a pair of winky storytellers (Grey Henson and Ashley D. Kelley) to speed past potholes does not exactly make for cutting-edge dramaturgy.Andrew Durand and Caroline Innerbichler as the betrothed Beau and Maizy.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesEvidently the authors — and the director, Jack O’Brien — meant to glue the show together with groaners, a gutsy if not entirely successful move. As the jokes wear down your resistance, they also wear you out. Nor do they provide the narrative structure that typically gives characters in musicals reasons to sing. Maizy and Beau have some nicely turned, strongly hooked numbers, and Innerbichler and Durand perform them well, but we aren’t invested in them enough to care. With their needs so flat, the extra dimension of song seems like overkill.Oddly, it’s only the secondary characters who are complicated enough for music — well, really just one of them. Newell turns Lulu, a whiskey distiller and freelance hell-raiser, into a full-blown comic creation, which is to say a serious person who puts comedy to a purpose. If her dialogue is wittier than the others’, that’s partly because it engages the story, however thin, but mostly because of the intentionality of Newell’s delivery. Flirting with but also threatening Gordy, Lulu says, “The last thing I wanna do is hurt you.” She pauses and locks eyes with him. “So we’ll get to that.”Lulu also gets the show’s best song, a barnburner of a feminist anthem called “Independently Owned.” (“No disrespect to Miss Tammy Wynette,” she sings, “I can’t stand by my man, he’ll have to stand by me.”) Newell — having absorbed the whole vocal thesaurus of diva riffs, shouts, gurgles and growls — stops the show. But after the ovation, I found myself wondering what such a huge talent could do with a more commensurate role, like Effie in “Dreamgirls.”John Behlmann as Gordy and Alex Newell as Lulu, whose barnburner of a feminist anthem has been getting standing ovations.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOr for that matter what “Shucked” might have done if it had set its sights a bit higher. O’Brien’s staging is deliberately old-fashioned, filled with simple effects and modest outlays meant to match the content but that somehow undershoot the mark. Tilly Grimes’s costumes, though apt enough, look as if they were thrifted. Sarah O’Gleby’s choreography reaches its zenith right at the start, and not even with humans: A mini-kickline of plastic corncob Rockettes slays.Still, with all its fake unsophistication, “Shucked” is what we’ve got, and in a Broadway musical season highlighted by an antisemitic lynching, a murderous barber and a dying 16-year-old, some amusing counterprogramming is probably healthy. You may even find its final moment moving, as the paradox of separation and inclusion is resolved in a lovely flash.Just don’t expect intellectual nourishment; forgive me, I’m breaking my promise, but it’s mostly empty calories you’ll find in this sweet, down-market cornucopia.ShuckedAt the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan; shuckedmusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      Ruston Kelly Survived Addiction and Heartbreak. It’s in His ‘Dirt Emo.’

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      The singer-songwriter has been making his way in Nashville and reckoning with his past. On his third album, “The Weakness,” he leans into his love of Americana and pop-punk, and rebuilds.PORTLAND, Tenn. — When the singer-songwriter Ruston Kelly’s marriage to Kacey Musgraves ended, he sought solace in old houses.First, at the invitation of his friend John Carter Cash — Johnny and June’s son — he retreated to the bungalow in the mountains of Virginia that had belonged to Maybelle Carter, the family’s matriarch. “I just wept on Mother Maybelle’s kitchen floor for three days,” Kelly said.Then he bought and set about restoring a 120-year-old home, first owned by the mayor of this Tennessee farming community 40 miles north of Nashville, where he knew no one.“This house saved me,” Kelly said on a recent gray afternoon, as he sat in a guitar-lined songwriting studio that would normally be the living room. It’s where he wrote most of “The Weakness,” his third and most assured and expansive studio album.It wasn’t intentional, but it was “poetic,” he added, “rebuilding a house, and also restructuring my identity as a person and artist at the same time.”“The Weakness,” out Friday, charts the fragile stability that Kelly, 34, has carved for himself, after an unusual path to music that included training to be a competitive figure skater and a decade of drug addiction. He briefly relapsed midway into his three-year marriage to Musgraves, the pop country star. (He was already sober when they divorced in 2020.) The album’s dozen songs, propelled by his Americana and pop-punk tastes, thread the tension between downbeat and shimmery; he calls his style “dirt emo.” Its title track features reverb-heavy vocals and a slow build to guitar peels, finding power in fallibility.“I wanted this record to sound like you’re in this field,” he said, “when the air blows hot. It might be twilight. And it’s about to really storm.”He shot the video for “Mending Song” at his home, wearing paint-splattered overalls among his power tools. It’s an achingly personal and finespun track plucked out on baritone ukulele. “I will forgive what I’ve done out of despair,” he sings. “I’m trying to find the happiness and healing, in the things that still need some repair.”The multi-instrumentalist Nate Mercereau (Lizzo, Leon Bridges, the Weeknd), who helped produce the album, said Kelly’s journal-entry style of songwriting often led to catharsis. “You’re putting these details of your life into something that is going to create what your next life is going to be — the future, after the record,” he said. That’s true for any artist, “but Ruston really puts it on display.”Kelly and Mercereau recorded in Mercereau’s Los Angeles studio, lit by 40 electronic candles, just the two of them on nearly every note. Kelly abandoned both his usual collaborators and some of the instrumentation, like the pedal steel guitar (played by his father) that had featured on his previous work, and turned up influences like the National, Sufjan Stevens, and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver. “I had to take a couple risks on this record,” he said.“The Weakness,” Kelly’s third album, charts the fragile stability he’s carved for himself, after an unusual path to music that included training to be a competitive figure skater and a decade of drug addiction.Avery Norman for The New York TimesThough some of the songs deal directly with his marriage unraveling, and some have oblique references that fans may read into, it is not a divorce record, according to Mark Williams from Rounder Records, who worked on it — the first time Kelly engaged with an A&R rep. “We talked about it more as a transformative record, one of transition,” Williams said.In Kelly’s wood-paneled home studio, surrounded by talismanic images of crows, angels, a taxidermy bird and stacks of composition notebooks, his ambition, and self-help plan, was on full display. White boards listed his daily goals: vocal exercises; workouts with cardio; 10,000 steps; follow a meal plan; four bottles of water; whiten teeth; free write three pages a day. “I want to give myself the best opportunity to win,” he said, unguarded and resting a leg on his tattered wooden desk.Williams, who is now the president of Rounder, said that the songwriter “was very different than I’d thought he’d be,” given that his first two albums focus, often intimately, on his addiction and sobriety. “He was very personable and funny, and had a sort of sense of joy and optimism about him that I didn’t get from the music. And I was really fascinated by that,” Williams said. He encouraged Kelly to put that into his sound “so the art could reflect on the life, and vice versa.” (One stoner track, “Michael Keaton,” hinges on a joke about the 1996 comedy “Multiplicity.”)Kelly was born in South Carolina, the youngest of three siblings, but grew up all over; his father, Tim, was a high-flying executive at a paper company. Their household was always musical: Tim played the steel guitar expertly — not country-twangy but “highly emotional, washy, heavy reverb,” Kelly said — and harmonized with Kelly’s mother, Sherre. “They would sing Jackson Browne songs and Linda Ronstadt; Bonnie Raitt; older folk songs. It was wonderful.” By junior high, Kelly was plotting his own albums.When Kelly was 8 or 9, he also started figure skating, following his sister, Abigail, to a rink. Soon he was competing and winning awards, and as a young teen, he went alone to live with married coaches in Michigan, his eye on the Olympics. But they didn’t take care of him, he said, and the coaching program ended in a sex scandal with another young skater. As Kelly’s life there was imploding, he hid out in his room, and wrote a song.“It was the first time that I was using creative expression as a tool to feel better — to make sense of a situation,” he said. “I felt like I unlocked something, like I had this safe space in this house. I was invincible. Music became like a tangible weapon.”It helped him through what he described as the lifelong emotional fissure that led to an addiction in his 20s to amphetamines and cocaine. “There was a crack somewhere that just never quite could close,” he said.Three months after an overdose, following a performance at the storied Nashville songwriter venue Bluebird Cafe, he met Musgraves.“I fell so in love,” he said, “in such a cleareyed way. And that was sustenance for me.”Their union seemed like a honeyed country music matchup: They duetted on a June and Johnny Cash tribute, and Musgraves wrote the floaty love song “Butterflies” for her breakthrough Grammy-winning album “Golden Hour.”Kelly went cold-turkey from pills at the beginning, and was fully sober later. For a time, the relationship filled all his needs — “which is really beautiful, but it’s not sustainable,” he said.Kelly has been carefully preparing for the release of his new album: “I want to give myself the best opportunity to win.”Avery Norman for The New York TimesMusgraves released her own divorce album, “Star-Crossed,” in 2021, which included sentiments that she said she hadn’t shared with him. (He didn’t fare so well in some accountings.) Apart from a track or two, Kelly said he hadn’t listened to it. “I don’t know her intention,” he said. “I know her heart, and it’s a wonderful one.”In 2021, he produced the debut album by his father, now 66, who won a major songwriting competition as a young man but had abandoned music for a more stable career. The younger Kelly called in friends like the hit songwriter Hillary Lindsey, one of his dad’s favorites, to guest on it. In the studio the day Lindsey was recording, there was more elation etched on his father’s face than he’d ever seen, Kelly recalled. “I can win every Grammy in the world, and it won’t compare to the sense of accomplishment that I felt for him.” Both his father and his sister, Abigail, who sings with Dashboard Confessional, perform with him on tour.Kelly credits his family and support network — including his girlfriend, Tori Barnes, a model — with reorienting him toward joy and experimentation.At Mercereau’s suggestion, the track “Better Now,” a circumspect meditation on hope late in the album, ends with audio of Kelly walking around Maybelle Carter’s mountain bungalow. He first visited pre-divorce, when John Carter Cash told him, “There’s a lot of secrets in that house, and I really think you should go and find them.” He opened drawers and rifled through books, discovering Johnny Cash’s handwritten notes to his family and to country luminaries like Kris Kristofferson. It was a lineage — and an industry — that Kelly hadn’t felt quite ready to step up to before.His foundation is as firm as it’s ever been: “I feel very ready now.” More

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      Springsteen Comes Alive

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      With the E Street Band electrifying audiences on the road for the first time since 2016, listen to live versions of songs from the current tour.Nils Lofgren and Bruce Springsteen onstage at Madison Square Garden on Saturday.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesDear listeners,In October 2020 — a time when a lot of touring musicians were wondering when, and if, they’d ever play live again — I interviewed Bruce Springsteen over video chat.* He was preparing to release “Letter to You,” his first album with the E Street Band in six years, and he knew that putting out an E Street Band album without an accompanying tour was, to his fans, a total tease.He’d just turned 71; the fleeting nature of time was on his mind and all over his album, from the elegiac ballad “One Minute You’re Here” to “Last Man Standing,” a rocking tribute to the late members of the band he joined as a teenager, the Castiles. After the 2018 death of the guitarist and vocalist George Theiss, Springsteen was the group’s last surviving member.In our conversation, Springsteen was palpably antsy to get back on the road — he knew precious time was wasting. “My band is at its best,” he said, “and we have so much accumulated knowledge and craft about what we do that this was a time in my life where I said, ‘I want to use that as much as I can.’”He told me that the original plan had been to tour with the E Street Band in 2021, but “I would say we’ll be lucky if it’s 2022” — a year that, at that time, felt impossibly far away. (As it turned out, Springsteen would take the stage in 2021, albeit a smaller and less populated one than he’d imagined; his solo “Springsteen on Broadway” show, which had its initial, 236-date run in 2017 and 2018, returned for a limited, 31-date run in New York from June to September.)His prediction wasn’t far from the mark: On Feb. 1, 2023, Springsteen and the E Street Band finally kicked off a 90-date international tour, playing their first show together in seven years. I caught them at Madison Square Garden on Saturday night, and they sounded every bit as tight and spirited as they did the last time I’d seen them there, on the River Tour in 2016.An E Street Band show is an ensemble performance, a veritable rock ’n’ roll circus of eclectic personalities — at its most crowded, there were 18 musicians onstage — each receiving a solo moment in the spotlight. I would personally like to shout out Curtis King for his angelic falsetto vocals on the cover of the Commodores’ “Nightshift,” Max Weinberg for — still! at 71! — being a drummer of exceptional steadiness and flair; and Little Steven, for the continued glory of just being Little Steven, day in and day out.Maybe you’ll get to see Springsteen on this tour. And maybe you won’t — some people still don’t feel comfortable sharing a respiratory experience with 20,000 strangers, and let’s not forget that these shows are happening during a particularly rocky moment for ticket buyers. So if you can’t make it out to one of the concerts — or if you did and want to keep reliving it — I have a playlist for you.It’s culled from my favorite live versions of Springsteen songs that the band played on April 1 at Madison Square Garden. There are only 10, but it’s still well over an hour long, because it’s Bruce. It represents a variety of venues and eras in the band’s five-decade run, including what a lot of Springsteen aficionados believe to be the greatest live recording of “Born to Run,” from an August 1985 show at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. (Every one of them who doesn’t believe that is probably drafting me an email right now.)It includes a wild, 16-minute (!) rendition of “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” and the sparse, poetic solo reading of “Thunder Road” from the 2018 recording of “Springsteen on Broadway,” which blew me away when I was lucky enough to see it in 2021. If you’re avoiding set-list spoilers, I will say: This is only about a third of the material that the band has been playing on this tour, and most of these songs were likely to make the set list anyway — but you do you.Of course, even the all-time greatest playlist of Bruce Springsteen live cuts will not replicate the experience of seeing him — or anybody, really — in concert. I’ll give the last word to the Boss himself, who, at the end of our interview, was bemoaning the loss of live performances (in quotes that didn’t make the final piece). “It’s still important, and it’s an experience that cannot yet be simulated,” he said. Even then-trendy livestreams didn’t cut it: “It’s not the same as being in a little room, or even a stadium, wherever you are, and having that music wash over you while standing next to your neighbors and friends. There’s still just that.”Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night,Lindsay*I am from New Jersey, so telling this to anyone in my family was sort of like saying I was going to Skype with Shakespeare. The assignment came together at the last minute, and as I was prepping I decided I could not tell my mother about it until after it had happened, because she was going to freak out in such a way that would have made me even more nervous than I already was. Her reaction — “no … no …. NOOOOO!” — when I called her after the interview confirmed that this was indeed the right decision. Hi, Mom!The Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Springsteen Comes Alive” track listTrack 1: “No Surrender” (Live at the Wachovia Spectrum; October 2009)Track 2: “Out in the Street” (Live at Madison Square Garden; June/July 2000)Track 3: “Trapped” (Live at the Meadowlands; August 1984)Track 4: “Johnny 99” (Live at Giants Stadium; August 1985)Track 5: “Backstreets” (Live at the Roxy Theater, July 1978)Track 6: “Because the Night” (Live at Nassau Coliseum, December 1980)Track 7: “Jungleland” (Live at Madison Square Garden, June/July 2000)Track 8: “Thunder Road” (“Springsteen on Broadway” version)Track 9: “Born to Run” (Live at Giants Stadium, August 1985)Track 10: “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” (Live at Madison Square Garden; June/July 2000)Bonus tracks“This, too, is the promise that has always been sold in Bruce Springsteen’s music. The ability to make the most out of your life, because it’s the only life you have.” I love this essay that the great critic and poet Hanif Abdurraqib wrote upon seeing the River Tour in 2016, reflecting on music, American myths and the experience of being Black at a Springsteen show.Also, here’s a June 2021 dispatch from the reopening of “Springsteen on Broadway” by me and our chief theater critic Jesse Green, debating whether it was live theater or a rock concert. Writing it the next day, I was still in awe of that rendition of “Thunder Road” — which is why I included this version on today’s playlist — and reassessing a song I thought I knew inside and out. More

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      John Kander’s Major Chord, Undiminished

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      It’s not that John Kander wasn’t touched by John Kander Day. The composer of the song “New York, New York” — played at every Yankees home game and known worldwide from its first five notes — was obviously moved when the city’s mayor handed him a framed proclamation in front of the St. James Theater in Midtown Manhattan. Nor was he jaded, he later said, about having that block of West 44th Street, from Broadway to Eighth Avenue, christened Kander & Ebb Way in recognition of his work and that of Fred Ebb, his longtime lyricist, who died in 2004.Still, of Kander’s thousands of songs, seven movie scores and 20 major musicals, including “Chicago” and “Cabaret,” not one bar was written with the idea of getting a piece of pavement named for him. If Ebb, with his brasher, needier personality, would have eaten up the honor, Kander seems at best to withstand it, embarrassed by too much attention or praise. He is so militantly unassuming that the highest compliment he will pay himself is the one his mother used to offer: “A horse can’t do any better.”So on March 24, as a choir sang and a crowd cheered and his friend Lin-Manuel Miranda read Ebb’s beautiful lyric for the song “First You Dream,” Kander, who had turned 96 days earlier, was thinking less about what was going on outside the St. James than what was going on inside it. There, a few hours after the ceremony, his 16th new Broadway musical, “New York, New York” — named for “that song,” which he doesn’t even like — would offer its first public preview. Directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, it is set to open on April 26.Anna Uzele, center, as a singer whose troubled romance with a musician is one of the many stories told in the musical “New York, New York,” at the St. James Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThough the plot is only tangentially related to that of the 1977 Martin Scorsese film starring Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli, the stage musical, with a book by David Thompson and Sharon Washington, naturally includes its big numbers. Others are from the Kander and Ebb trunk, some never previously performed onstage. But much of the score is new. Six songs are collaborations with Miranda, who said the problem with writing lyrics for Kander is “just keeping up” as the melodies pour out, sometimes via voice memo at 3 in the morning. The rest, whether swingy or Schuberty or uncategorizable, are by Kander alone.At an age when most artists are resting on their laurels, or beneath them, Kander, the last of the great Golden Age composers, just keeps going. Other than arthritis in his hands, he is unimpaired physically; he trots up and down the three-story spiral staircase to his studio faster than I dared when I spent a few hours there with him. To the annoyance of his husband, Albert Stephenson, and everyone around him, he eats dessert regularly and generously, with no ill effect. “I do my chores, too,” he said: washing the dishes and making the bed, tight as a drum, as he was taught at Camp Nebagamon when he was 10.Well, lots of people remain spry seemingly forever. What worries artists, and especially composers, is the possibility of drying up creatively. Even musical theater titans like Rodgers and Berlin succumbed to harmonic meekness and rhythmic sclerosis as they approached their 70s. Certainly after Ebb’s death, and after fulfilling a promise to shepherd as many of the team’s unfinished musicals to Broadway as he could — “Curtains” in 2007, “The Scottsboro Boys” in 2010 and “The Visit” in 2015 — Kander might have been expected to coast into retirement on tributes and revivals.But no: Even before that job was finished, he’d jumped back into the water. In 2013 came “The Landing,” in 2017, “Kid Victory,” and in 2018 a dance play based on the Henry James novella “The Beast in the Jungle.” All three pieces, produced Off Broadway at the Vineyard Theater, were experimental in a way you might expect from someone at the start of a career, not seven decades into it. And now, even as “New York, New York” opens, another show is aborning.Kander and the lyricist Fred Ebb in 1987. Their 45-year partnership yielded works like “Cabaret” and “Chicago,” and was more intense and monogamous than many marriages.So it seems almost Sisyphean that while a music assistant is busy digitizing Kander’s archive and preparing the paper assets for eventual donation to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the man himself is sitting nearby at a keyboard, cranking out more every day.That’s not the right phrase, though. Even if he were in fact profoundly lazy, as Ebb insisted and Kander does not deny, composing is hardly drudgery for him. It’s more of a geological process, water rising from an aquifer, desperate to be tapped. If he doesn’t let the music out through his hands — or block it by listening to somebody else’s — it might drown him.Which means he is always listening: Music plays in his head, he said, “like a radio you can’t turn off.” It began, he believes, some 35,000 John Kander Days ago, when, as a baby in Kansas City, Mo., he contracted tuberculosis. Isolated on a sleeping porch and able to sense his family only when they approached the screen door, he learned to associate the sound of footsteps coming toward him with the imminence of loved ones. “I think I began to organize sound in my head then, out of necessity.”FOOTSTEPS GO BOTH WAYS though. If, as he said, a “residue of loneliness” remains from that experience, it’s a loneliness for which “the most fortunate antidote” has been companionship and collaboration. Though many people assumed that Kander and Ebb were a couple — their 45-year partnership was more intense and monogamous than many marriages — the men were not socially close. But he and Stephenson, a dancer in Kander and Ebb’s “The Act,” have been together since 1977, married since 2008. Some of Kander’s loveliest songs were written not for any show but for him.As for collaboration, it’s no accident that Kander surrounds himself with a rotating roster of familiar names. “Next to the greatest sex you can imagine, making art with your friends is as good as it gets,” he said. He’s worked with Stroman six times, Thompson eight times and Washington, a featured performer in “The Scottsboro Boys,” twice. Half the music team are old Kander hands too, making the March 14 sitzprobe — the first rehearsal with the cast and the orchestra — a reunion and, as it happened, a party. You haven’t really heard “Happy Birthday” until a Broadway chorus of 37, accompanied by 19 crack musicians, sings it in a crowded, reverberant room.“There are a lot of really gorgeous places to be on this earth,” Kander told them, “but none as gorgeous as this.”Kander in his apartment with a 1963 painting by Camille Norman. The painting, depicting a scene from “Cabaret,” was given to him as a gift on the show’s opening night in 1966.Photograph by Vincent Tullo for The New York Times; painting by Camille NormanThat a love parade attends him wherever he goes — I’m part of it, having worked for him 40 years ago, sleuthing for a lost score — doesn’t mean he’s a pushover. At the sitzprobe he spoke rarely but made his points. Wanting a song called “A Simple Thing Like That” to be “less waltzy,” he suggested removing the triangle from the downbeats. For “Light,” one of the new Kander-Miranda songs, painting in ethereal music a portrait of Manhattanhenge, he asked for a more unpredictable spacing of the dissonant chords that bring it to such a startling close. And “Gold,” a flamboyant conga sequence, needed more schmaltz. “Lower your standards,” he instructed the orchestra.As that sampling of song types attests, “New York, New York” tells many stories, about people from many backgrounds. The main one is the troubled romance between a Black singer (Anna Uzele) and an Irish musician (Colton Ryan). Secondary ones concern a Polish refugee and his violin teacher; a Cuban drummer and his mother; and a Black trumpet-playing GI. Most have come to New York after World War II to make art or save their souls — or both at once. As a new song called “Major Chord” puts it, they seek the trifecta of “music, money, love.”“Maybe you get one, maybe you get two,” Stroman said. “But it’s hard to get three.”Still, Kander adds, summing up the theme, “New York is where you have the best chance of being who you see yourself as.”He would know, having come here for just that reason, in 1951, after college and military service. The banners welcoming his transport ship from the Pacific — “Welcome Home! Well Done!” — immediately made sense: This was where he was meant to be.The “well done” part he does not take as seriously; his service was mostly spent playing piano for officers and at one point running $400,000 worth of Canadian Club whisky to Manila — along with 11 cows.Yet “well done” surely applies to him now. “He lives his life correctly,” Stroman observed. Perhaps that’s why no one speaks invidiously of him, even though few major chords are as undiminished as his. Music, he has abundantly; money, in spades — “Chicago” alone, the longest-running American musical ever on Broadway, has grossed more than $1.6 billion worldwide. And love, absolutely, even if it had to wait until his 50s. “Happiness is one of the last things you learn, if you ever do,” he said.Joel Grey, center, atop a platform, as the master of ceremonies of the Kit Kat Club in the original Broadway production of “Cabaret.”PhotofestChita Rivera as the film star Aurora in “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” which debuted on Broadway in 1993.Michael Macor/The San Francisco Chronicle, via Getty ImagesCharlotte D’Amboise as Roxie Hart in the Broadway revival of “Chicago,” which has been running since 1996.THAT HE IS ADORED by younger colleagues is partly because he serves as a beacon of the possibility of lifelong growth. (Taking them to lunch when they are barely known, as he took Miranda, doesn’t hurt either.) Stroman marvels at the muscle of his musical storytelling, built up by decades of doing it. “If I say to him ‘I imagine a girl walking down the beach and she meets the love of her life,’” she said, “he can leap up to the piano and that is exactly the story you hear in his melody.”But for Kander, aging as an artist is less about the expansion than the concentration of skill. “By the time Verdi wrote ‘Falstaff,’ when he was almost 80,” he said, “he had learned to do in 16 measures what in ‘Nabucco’” — 50 years earlier — “would have taken him a big aria and a cabaletta and all that. There’s nothing wasted, no decoration, just the thing itself. I’m not lucky enough to have had that experience a lot, but I recognize it when I see it and it almost makes me laugh.”There’s that modesty again, reflexive but also pragmatic. Stroman summarizes the two biggest things she’s learned about collaboration from Kander as “no bad ideas” — which actually means plenty of them, freely offered and freely rejected — and “leave egos at the door.” Kander wants his drama onstage only.“What we do is a craft,” he insisted. “I mean you can have a great inner talent, and a lot of people do, but without craft it’s very hard for the talent to emerge. Also the reverse is true. You may not feel particularly inspired by a commitment you’ve made, or a moment you’re supposed to create, but you still have to write those 12 bars to cover someone crossing the stage.”Even worse, you might have to write a second version of “New York, New York.” When De Niro complained that the first was too “light,” Kander and Ebb, in a snit, tossed off the famous one in 45 minutes. “Which does the job and audiences like it and De Niro was right and it’s a great piece of luck,” Kander said ruefully. “But I just don’t get it.”At the sitzprobe, they got it. When the brass and saxes swung in big at the top of the tune, the cast reared back, as if hit by a tornado. Tears of something like joy flew from their eyes, if not from Kander’s. When I later forced him to name some songs he’s actually proud of, he admitted only to ballads, not Ebb’s beloved “screamers.” “I Miss the Music” from “Curtains.” “I Don’t Care Much,” written as a dinner boast between coffee and dessert. And a new one, set in the Whispering Gallery at Grand Central Station, perhaps inevitably called “Can You Hear Me?”Off the top of my head, I could name 30 others he ought to include.“I appreciate that, but it’s independent of me. My fingers find something, as if they have little brains of their own. The keyboard is my friend, since I was 4. Being an artist is much more like being a carpenter than like being God: Something will happen. Or you tear it up. And start again.”A horse can’t do any better. More