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      Prosecutors Say Young Thug’s YSL Is Both Gang and Rap Label

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      Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.ATLANTA — Day after day, the young men came before a judge, handcuffed, clad in county jumpsuits and answering to their government names rather than their rap monikers: Slimelife Shawty, Unfoonk, Lil Duke and even the chart-topper Gunna, who is nominated for two Grammy Awards at next month’s ceremony in Los Angeles.Each pleaded guilty to a racketeering charge, some to other crimes. And each agreed, in open court, that the famed Atlanta rap crew they were associated with — YSL, headed by the enigmatic star Jeffery Williams, or Young Thug — was not only a renowned hip-hop collective, but also a criminal street gang.At the hearing for Slimelife Shawty, born Wunnie Lee, a prosecutor prompted him to acknowledge that his associates “have committed at least one of the following acts in the name of YSL: murder, aggravated assault, robbery, theft and/or illegal firearms possession.”“Yes, ma’am,” Mr. Lee, 24, said.The case has pitted law enforcement officials who say they are determined to stamp out a violent gang problem against those who see it as yet another moral panic inspired by rap, in a city with one of the most vibrant scenes in the nation. And it has once again raised questions about whether lyrics should only be taken as artistic expressions meant to portray a harsh reality, or as evidence of crimes.The guilty pleas by the four Atlanta rappers and four other men associated with YSL, all of whom are now free after seven months in jail on probation or with requirements that they meet special conditions, may have bolstered prosecutors’ blockbuster case against 14 other alleged members of the group, who are accused of conspiracy to commit racketeering, gang statute violations and more. Jury selection began last week, and the judge estimates that the trial could last six to nine months.Most remarkable among the remaining defendants is Mr. Williams, 31, whose iconoclastic mystique and psychedelic flow have landed him on pop hits, the “Saturday Night Live” stage and in Vogue. With a maximum 120-year sentence hanging over his head, the man who fans worldwide have come to love as Young Thug — but whom prosecutors describe as a cutthroat gang leader — is now facing the prospect of growing old in prison.Young Thug performed with Gunna (seated on piano) on “Saturday Night Live” in 2021, the year two albums headlined by Young Thug hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart.Will Heath/NBC, via Getty ImagesThe indictment charges Mr. Williams with participation in criminal street gang activity and of furthering the interest of a criminal conspiracy through a number of illegal acts; it does not charge him individually with most of those acts, which include accusations that he rented the car used in the murder of a rival gang leader and provided safe harbor for those responsible after the killing.Mr. Williams has denied everything. “Jeffery is a kind, intelligent, hard-working, moral and thoughtful person,” his lawyer, Brian Steel, said in a statement, arguing that the rapper had been wrongly targeted by law enforcement because of his fictional persona. “Despite the unthinkable oppressive, impoverished and cruel conditions of his upbringing, he has been able to cultivate his creative genius to lawfully and ethically attain phenomenal worldwide success.”The case has deeply shaken the pop culture universe, especially in Atlanta, Mr. Williams’s hometown, which can stake a claim as the hip-hop capital of the world. Fans, fellow artists, record executives and influential figures including Stacey Abrams, who was the Democratic nominee for governor last year, have sounded notes of concern, even outrage.Some have accused the prosecutor, Fani T. Willis — the aggressive district attorney for Fulton County, a Black Democrat who is best known for pursuing the criminal investigation into postelection meddling in Georgia by former President Donald J. Trump — of applying a “gang stereotype” to Atlanta’s rap community, and putting Black art on trial.The case has prompted an outcry, given how artists from the poorest parts of Atlanta have shaped global popular music. Young Thug’s nickname and YSL’s slang term of choice — slime — has gone international, its “wipe your nose” hand gesture a popular N.F.L. celebration.But the recent admissions in court point to a parallel reality: In Atlanta, law enforcement officials say, it has become increasingly difficult to discern the difference between some rap crews and street gangs, and to disentangle where exactly the credibility-obsessed art form overlaps with criminality.Ms. Willis contends that Atlanta is suffering from a plague of gang violence, estimating — with a hazy explanation for the figures — that up to 80 percent of violent crimes in the area are committed by gang members. She says that an eight-year war between YSL and a rival gang known as YFN, headed by another major-label rap artist, has accounted for more than 50 incidents.But in a city with a well-established path from the hardest streets to a world of fame, fortune and major awards shows — often via songs that chronicle, and some argue glorify, an outlaw life of drugs and guns — the nature of gang culture is also mutating, according to the authorities, with social media and music increasingly important to establishing dominance and influence.So while many young Black men in Atlanta see an escape in turning their dire circumstances in neglected communities into hard-edged rap music, investigators say some of it serves to establish clout, inspire fear, recruit members and fund illegal activity.“We believe that Mr. Williams doesn’t sing about random theoretical acts — he sings about gang acts he’s a part of,” Don Geary, then a lawyer for the district attorney’s office, said in court last year.Authenticity, an always slippery but foundational concept in hip-hop, has taken on even greater significance in the internet age. In places like Atlanta, it is a crucial selling point for the unflinching style of hip-hop known as trap music, which builds on earlier iterations of gangster rap and centers on the drug trade.And on social media, fans follow not just the music, but the lives of rappers and their associates, keeping scorecards of beefs and scores settled, even rooting them on.“It feels like they’re playing Grand Theft Auto in real life, and people are commenting on a video of them playing Grand Theft Auto,” said Gerald A. Griggs, president of Georgia’s conference of the N.A.A.C.P.Blurring the lines between gangs and musicAtlanta was not traditionally a stronghold of the major national gangs that took root in prisons and cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. But as a rapidly gentrifying city with some of the highest income inequality in the nation — and in a state with some of the laxest gun laws — gang culture has changed.Most common now, experts say, are what are known as “hybrid gangs”: looser constellations mixing members from various national sets, local crews and neighborhood cliques. These groups may have connections to the Bloods, Crips or Gangster Disciples, but often without their rules and hierarchies.While some traditional gangs, like the Mafia, are strict, top-down enterprises earning money through illicit business, the chief mission of today’s groups may be simply bolstering the brand.“That lack of structure makes it dangerous and unpredictable,” said Cara Convery, a former deputy district attorney for Fulton County who now runs a statewide unit targeting gangs. Money and territory remain important, she added, but “respect is still the primary currency of all of these gangs — it’s everything.”In places like Atlanta, law enforcement officials contend, it has become commonplace to align primarily with homegrown stars, who can offer aspirants prestige and money.“The new color lines,” said Marissa Viverito, a gang investigator in Ms. Willis’s office, “are the rappers.”The authorities say they are not targeting famous individuals or rap, a varied art form, writ large. Instead, they say, prosecutors hope to hold those at the top of the criminal food chain accountable, even when they overlap with a beloved, city-defining cultural product.Recent high-profile crimes said to be gang-related include the July 2020 killing of an 8-year-old girl; home break-ins targeting celebrities that have been tied to a recently indicted group called Drug Rich; and the December shooting deaths of two boys, ages 12 and 15, near the popular Atlantic Station mall.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, contends that Atlanta is suffering from a plague of gang violence.Ben Gray/Associated PressMs. Willis is a seasoned prosecutor who took office in January 2021, amid a spike in homicides and growing unease about violent crime. Her work investigating Mr. Trump, which could result in indictments this year, has earned plaudits from liberals. But her focus on gangs has also made her a de facto ally of conservative leaders who have raised alarms about a statewide problem.Ms. Willis has expanded her anti-gang team and promised to make vigorous use of the state’s Street Gang Terrorism and Prevention Act and its Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act, or RICO. She charged Mr. Williams, or Young Thug, under both laws, and has done the same for his rival Rayshawn Bennett, the rapper known as YFN Lucci, and his associates.Her beefed-up focus on gangs stands in contrast to other prosecutors, like George Gascón, the Los Angeles County district attorney, who in 2021 reduced, renamed and reorganized his office’s famous Hardcore Gang unit, moving away from a “purely prosecutorial model.”Ms. Willis has faced criticism for her hard-line approach to gangs, especially her office’s use of rap lyrics in indictments, which critics say raises First Amendment concerns.“People can continue to be angry about it,” Ms. Willis said at a news conference announcing the racketeering indictment against Drug Rich, which also included lyrics. “I have some legal advice: Don’t confess to crime on rap lyrics if you do not want them used. Or at least get out of my county.”Lawyers for Mr. Williams have called the practice unconstitutional, arguing it is “racist and discriminatory because the jury will be so poisoned and prejudiced.”Ms. Abrams, the prominent Democrat, said at a campaign appearance with the rapper 21 Savage last year that while “bad actors should be held accountable,” she did not believe that lyrics should be used as the basis for criminal charges. “The reality is we cannot thwart the entertainment industry in pursuit of justice,” she said.But the authorities argue that songs are no different than a text message or a confession, if the content can be tied to real-life events. (Prosecutors, for example, say that after YSL members fired on the home of YFN Lucci’s mother, Young Thug rapped, “I shot at his mommy, now he no longer mention me.”)“It’s a dangerous line,” said Ms. Convery, the gang prosecutor. “Art and expression and exaggeration surround all of this stuff.” However, she added: “If you are making music about the crime that you committed, I think it’s evidence. It would be crazy to leave that on the table.”Some critics are concerned that the justice system’s focus on young Black men seems to come at the expense of other issues, including Georgia’s white nationalist groups, and worry that Ms. Willis’s aggressive use of RICO statutes, which give prosecutors wide leeway, could wrap up innocent people.“When you blur the line between a criminal street gang and a music label, that could bring a lot of people into the net that don’t have anything to do with furthering criminal acts,” said Mr. Griggs, of the N.A.A.C.P.In a video interview from jail before his guilty plea, Mr. Lee, better known as Slimelife Shawty, said he had been wrongly ensnared by the scope of the case.Unlike other YSL defendants, some of whom were charged with murder, drug dealing and assault, he was accused of a single count: racketeering, or furthering YSL’s criminal enterprise by making music videos, posting online and rapping vague but threatening lyrics.At his Dec. 16 plea hearing, however, Mr. Lee confirmed that he had sent a message containing rat and brain emojis to a witness in a YSL-affiliated suspect’s murder case. Prosecutors interpreted this as a threat of violent retaliation.Mr. Lee was one of many young people who grew up along Cleveland Avenue, a desolate South Atlanta corridor, and were inspired by Mr. Williams and his transformation into the global star Young Thug.Rapping the often-violent content audiences wanted to hear, Mr. Lee said from jail, became “our main go-to to get out of this place.”A rap innovator on trialAccording to court documents, YSL was founded along Cleveland Avenue in late 2012 by Mr. Williams and two other men, both of whom have pleaded guilty in the case.But while the rapper’s defense team argues that he was repping Young Stoner Life, a fledgling record label and lifestyle brand, prosecutors say it was first Young Slime Life, an upstart criminal organization with ties to the national Blood offshoot Sex Money Murder.The battle with crosstown rivals YFN was sparked in 2015 with the murder of Donovan Thomas, known as Nut, a behind-the-scenes connector instrumental in the rap careers of YFN Lucci and Rich Homie Quan, a once-frequent collaborator of Young Thug.In the aftermath of the killing, the authorities say, many in the city picked sides as retaliatory shootings spilled across Atlanta.Prosecutors say Mr. Williams rented the car used during the fatal shooting of Mr. Thomas and then urged those involved to “lay low,” giving them cash and traveling with them to Miami, according to the guilty plea last month of a YSL founder charged in the case, Antonio Sledge.As law enforcement opened its investigation into the murder, Mr. Williams’s profile as a whimsical, genre-shifting musician — with attention-grabbing fashion sense that includes, in defiance of macho gangster stereotypes, wearing dresses — only grew.Last January, not long before the indictment, 300 Entertainment, the label that had signed Young Thug and his YSL imprint, sold to Warner Music for a reported $400 million.At a bail hearing last year, Kevin Liles, the chief executive of 300, was brought to tears on the stand describing Mr. Williams and “how good this guy is,” pointing to the rapper’s generosity and mentorship. He said in a statement on Wednesday: “Young Stoner Life Records is and always has been exclusively a recorded music partnership with Jeffery Williams. Nothing I’ve seen has changed my point of view.”But the authorities say Mr. Williams’s good deeds were a cover for his dark side. The case seeks to tie him to a spate of other violent crimes, including a 2015 tour bus shooting that targeted Lil Wayne, a one-time idol turned rival.Whether or not Young Thug is found to be YSL’s mastermind, there may be lasting consequences for members who publicly identified it as a gang. Artists who came up under him, like Mr. Lee and Gunna, born Sergio Kitchens, now face accusations of being snitches — a potentially fatal label for rappers who trade in toughness and loyalty.Mr. Kitchens, who like the others had agreed to testify as part of his plea deal, released a statement saying he would claim his Fifth Amendment privilege if called. And on Instagram, Mr. Lee said his plea did not tell the authorities anything they did not already know.“I admitted Young Slime Life was a gang ’cause it ain’t illegal for no group to be a gang,” he said, adding that he did not know anything about specific crimes. “Look it up.”As Slimelife Shawty, he teased, he would soon be rapping about all of it.Audio produced by More

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      26 Years After Its Singer’s Sudden Death, Brainiac (Briefly) Returns

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      The indie-rock band from Ohio was poised for a breakout when it lost its frontman, Tim Taylor, in a 1997 car accident. Now the group is releasing an EP of demos and taking the stage once again.On a late May morning in 1997, a mangled lamppost surrounded by the wreckage of a 1977 forest-green Mercedes-Benz stood near Lawn and North Main Streets in Dayton, Ohio. Tim Taylor, the 28-year-old leader of Brainiac, the city’s swiftly ascending synth-punk band, had been driving home alone from a local nightclub at about 3:25 a.m. when his car spun out of control, crashed and exploded in flames.Brainiac — often stylized as 3RA1N1AC — had recently toured with Beck, played Lollapalooza and recorded with Kim Deal, John Peel and Steve Albini. The group was known for its hyper-energetic live performances, where Taylor writhed across the stage. According to the band’s surviving members — the bassist Juan Monasterio, the guitarist John Schmersal and the drummer Tyler Trent — major labels, including Interscope and Elektra, were wooing the group with seven-figure offers. But when Taylor, the son of the cellist Linda Taylor and the jazz guitarist Terry Taylor, died in the accident, so did Brainiac, and the opportunities awaiting the band.In the ensuing years, the group’s influence was cited by figures as varied as Trent Reznor and Fred Armisen. “I still can’t think of an artist that approaches their flavor of mad science — clanging, clashing, vibrant, silly, scary, unafraid,” said Sadie Dupuis of the band Speedy Ortiz, who named her solo project Sad13 as a Brainiac tribute. She called the band’s mix of guitar heroics, processed screams and other experimentation “pure genius.”A 2019 documentary, “Brainiac: Transmissions After Zero,” revived interest in the group and helped reunite Monasterio, Schmersal and Trent. “The documentary was really cathartic,” Schmersal said in a phone interview. “Once the band was done, we all scurried away like ants from a magnifying glass. But we realized how much we enjoyed our friendship that dissipated by Timmy leaving.”With momentum from the documentary and downtime during the pandemic, Schmersal decided to finally open the Brainiac archives — old suitcases filled with cassettes, photos and ephemera. “In the past, whenever I’d open the suitcases, I’d spiral out of control, then run away,” he said. “But I started thinking about why I’ve held on to them for so long. And where they should go.”Now, 26 years after Taylor’s death, Brainiac is releasing “The Predator Nominate EP,” featuring nine never-before-heard demos, on Friday. “There’s an eight-track reel-to-reel floating around with old recordings, but no one knows where it is,” Schmersal said. “But ‘Predator Nominate’ is Brainiac’s last concerted effort, our last complete thought, before the end.”During the band’s brief run from 1992 to 1997, it released three full albums of chugging and sometimes sprawling punk that relied mostly on traditional rock instruments. Taylor, a singer, guitarist and keyboardist, also played a Moog, and often modulated his vocals with synths and effects, inspired by the Dayton funk innovator Roger Troutman. For its final EP, “Electro-Shock for President,” which arrived only weeks before Taylor’s death, Brainiac employed a more fully realized electronic palette that continues on “Predator Nominate.”“Brainiac went electronic when harsh rock music wasn’t really being interpreted via electronics,” said Kelley Deal of the Breeders, whose sister and bandmate, Kim, produced the 1995 Brainiac EP “Internationale.” “They were always more liberal with song structure, but they still made radio-friendly music. Only they made it electronic. And so aggressive.”“Predator Nominate,” which clocks in under 13 minutes, is more haunting than harsh. The title track channels early Cure recordings; “Smothered Inside” recalls Brainiac’s indie-rock beginnings; lighthearted synth vignettes like “The Game” balance sad, jarring songs like “Going Wrong”; and “Kiss the Dog” is a pop gem.The band’s unexpected release of previously unheard music comes with another surprise: a return to the road. Brainiac is playing a handful of U.S. dates and a brief tour of the United Kingdom with Mogwai, whose singer and guitarist, Stuart Braithwaite, shared a bill with the band in the mid-90s as a budding musician. “They were hands down the weirdest and most engaging band I’d seen,” Braithwaite wrote in his recent memoir. “Super melodic but incredibly obtuse.”Schmersal, who traditionally sang backup, will now serve as lead singer. “No one understands the nuances of this music like we do,” he said. “If we don’t perform it, you’ll never hear it this way.” The Dayton guitarist, vocalist and synth player Tim Krug, a student of the band for some 30 years, will join for the tour.Trent, the band’s drummer, emphasized that Taylor is irreplaceable. “For us, this is a way to still be in awe of Tim, to honor him, or else we wouldn’t do it. And I wish people could see how much joy and life and healing Tim’s mom gets out of this,” he said. “Tim was one in a million.”In the years since Brainiac’s premature end, Schmersal, who is now based in Palm Springs, Calif., founded the band Enon and went on to play with Caribou, Crooks on Tape and Vertical Scratchers. Monasterio, a freelance motion-graphics designer, moved to Los Angeles. Trent still lives in Dayton, where he serves as associate pastor at Lifepointe Church and director of a local nonprofit, Hope4 Kettering.Monasterio, who befriended Taylor in fifth grade, called the release “probably the final chapter on Brainiac,” and suggested others might take inspiration from it: “Maybe someone will tap into Tim’s genius and make something beautiful. I think Tim would want that, too.”He recalled a conversation with his bandmate that has eerie resonance today. “One time, I was out with Tim, and I remember him saying, ‘We have to rise like a phoenix from the flames,’” Monasterio remembered. “He was saying Brainiac had to be reborn in some way.” More

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      SZA’s ‘SOS’ Holds No. 1 for a Fifth Week

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      The R&B singer-songwriter remains in Billboard’s top spot with help from a music video inspired by Quentin Tarantino. The latest LP by the rapper YoungBoy Never Broke Again arrives at No. 9.With no major new challengers, “SOS,” the sophomore album by the R&B singer-songwriter SZA, holds at No. 1 on Billboard’s chart for a fifth straight week.Helped by a new music video for SZA’s song “Kill Bill,” inspired by Quentin Tarantino’s pair of films with the same title, “SOS” had the equivalent of 125,000 sales in the United States, unchanged from the week before, according to the tracking service Luminate.Since it came out, “SOS” has had the equivalent of 876,000 sales, and racked up about 1.1 billion streams. The last title to notch five times at No. 1 was Taylor Swift’s “Midnights,” over a six-week stretch last fall.“Midnights” holds at second place this week with 81,000 equivalents, followed by Metro Boomin’s “Heroes & Villains” (No. 3), Drake and 21 Savage’s “Her Loss” (No. 4), Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” (No. 5) and Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” (No. 6).YoungBoy Never Broke Again, the super-prolific Louisiana rapper — he released a studio album, a compilation and six mixtapes last year alone — lands at No. 9 with his latest, “I Rest My Case,” which opened with the equivalent of 29,000 sales, including 40 million streams.Swift’s “Anti-Hero” holds at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, becoming her longest-running No. 1 single. More

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      A Mighty Generation of Musicians. A Moving Final Chapter.

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      The conductors Michael Tilson Thomas and Daniel Barenboim have continued to perform as aging and illness loom.LOS ANGELES — At the beginning of the final movement of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, the strings play a mellow, stirring hymn. Then a solo bassoon silences the warmth: A funeral dirge is passing through. But just a few moments later, the strings flood back, violas and violins swooping up through a sudden chord that conjures folk fiddling, energy, passion, life itself.No, they seem to cry. Not death. Not that. Not yet.I have rarely heard the strings’ rich, defiant answer to the bassoon as effusive, as certain, as it was on Sunday afternoon, in the last of three performances of Mahler’s Ninth at Walt Disney Concert Hall here, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic led by Michael Tilson Thomas.It has been nearly a year and a half since Thomas, at 78 one of the world’s leading musicians for more than half a century, announced he would be undergoing treatment for an aggressive form of brain cancer. And five months since he told The New York Times that he had been contemplating the music he wants played at his memorial service.Yet M.T.T., as he is widely known, is still with us, and still vital. Conducting Mahler’s valedictory masterpiece, whose ending is the repertory’s great evocation of letting go, he took his time on Sunday but refused to wallow in the obvious, unbearable emotions.The performance came just days after another miracle of a concert from an eminent maestro lately forced to reckon with mortality. On Jan. 6, Daniel Barenboim, 80, stepped down from the podium of the Berlin State Opera, a position he has held since the early 1990s, after a year buffeted by health problems. The following day, he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in a program streamed live.Thomas comes from a generation of older musicians who have long ruled the classical music landscape, but who are reaching the twilights of their careers.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesLike Thomas’s Mahler, Barenboim’s Schumann and Brahms were autumnal but vigorous, more present-tense than elegiac. While neither man seemed interested in denying reality, both made clear their intention to affirm life while it lasts.Not that. Not yet.Together, these were among the most poignant spectacles I’ve witnessed as a concertgoer. However sketchy and inevitably arbitrary such milestones are, the recent struggles and remarkable late-career concerts of these two men will always mark for me the passing from the scene of their generation of artists — a generation that has loomed over the musical landscape, and stubbornly refused to cede it, for decades.Although in fine health, Riccardo Muti, 81, is stepping down as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra this season. The pianist Martha Argerich, also 81, who grew up with Barenboim in Buenos Aires and joined him in Berlin, has lately had her own health issues. At the Salzburg Festival last summer, the pianist Maurizio Pollini, yet another 81-year-old, canceled a recital because of heart trouble after the audience was already in its seats. Last year, a fall caused Herbert Blomstedt, 95, to briefly interrupt his calmly authoritative, jaw-dropping tour of the world’s top orchestras, which will continue at the New York Philharmonic in two weeks.The fact that more attention is being paid to Blomstedt now than 30 or 40 years ago is telling about the field. While classical music has always been fascinated by child prodigies, it is a performing art in which older performers truly hold sway. Even as audience draws: Brian Lauritzen, the host of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s radio broadcasts, wrote on Twitter that Sunday afternoon’s concert was the most full he had seen Disney Hall since before the pandemic.So audiences are sometimes witness to aging bodies pressing up against their limits. I was at Carnegie Hall in 2000 when the great tenor Carlo Bergonzi, who had never sung the title role of Verdi’s “Otello,” finally had to admit, after two painful acts, that his 75-year-old vocal cords were no match for the part and bowed out of the rest. At Salzburg this summer, Barenboim appeared a frail shell of his former self, straining to mount the podium as he led the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the youth ensemble he founded with Edward Said.But while his physical infirmity was disconcerting, what has stayed with me most was the sensitivity showed him by the superstar pianist Lang Lang, the soloist that evening. As they walked on and off and as they played, Lang both deferred to and deftly guided his maestro mentor in a way that did not ignore what was happening but granted Barenboim a full measure of dignity, and provided him the opportunity to make music as best as he was capable.Martha Argerich, left, and Daniel Barenboim — musical companions since the 1940s — appeared together with the Berlin Philharmonic as Barenboim announced his resignation from the Berlin State Opera.Monika RittershausIt was a moving reminder that even amid the little humiliations — when Thomas first returned to the podium after his cancer treatment, in November 2021, his slipping pants had clearly not yet been tailored to the changes in his body — aging and illness open a space for both performers and us in the audience to be vulnerable and graceful. To be connected to a long line of transmitted knowledge and beauty. To be grateful.After he canceled a much-anticipated new production of Wagner’s “Ring” in October, it seemed possible that Barenboim might not conduct again. And when he did return, in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on New Year’s Eve, critics’ accounts painted a grim picture, focusing mainly on the performance’s distended length.But a week later, with the Berlin Philharmonic, he balanced natural flow and robust urgency in Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto and Brahms’s Second Symphony. Without lacking vividness, the Brahms had a gentle cast in its opening; the Allegro finale sent off bright energy, but its colors were the blaze of a sunset rather than daylight brashness. It was just the right amount of goodbye.And after the high-spirited delicacy of the Schumann, Barenboim joined Argerich, a musical companion of his since the 1940s, at the keyboard for Bizet’s four-hand piece “Little Husband, Little Wife” from the suite “Children’s Games”: a moment of aching tenderness.Barenboim took the handful of stairs to the stage carefully but without relying on the handrail, and his motions on the podium were sometimes wide and sweeping. But he often seemed to be overseeing as much as conducting: leading with watchful eyes but keeping his arms down, experienced enough to know what the orchestra didn’t need from him.Thomas, too, told The Times in August that his illness had forced him to be more efficient in his gestures. On Sunday he was fluent but restrained, sometimes keeping a simple beat; sometimes slicing his baton horizontally; sometimes pumping his arms firmly downward; sometimes raising his hands, cupped around an invisible ball, as if both to summon and catch the sound.There was the straightforwardness that has always characterized his Mahler. (Among many recorded cycles of the symphonies, his no-nonsense, beautifully performed set with the San Francisco Symphony, which he led for 25 years, was my choice to play straight through on a long road trip last year.) Here in Los Angeles, his pace was patient even in the middle movements, which, more than sardonic or sour, felt proud and feisty. Here I am, they seemed to say. Take me or leave me.The work’s glacial final minutes, with the strings slipping past one another as the beat grows amorphous, seemed, more than ever in my experience, to describe the haziness of the end of consciousness.But there was not, in the silence that follows the dying of the sound, the usual game of chicken between an audience raring to applaud and a conductor unwilling to release. On Sunday there was no battle of wills, no self-indulgence, before the ovation. Thomas let the quiet come, then let it go. More

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      Review: Met Opera’s ‘Dialogues des Carmélites’ Revival

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      This revival of John Dexter’s production of “Dialogues des Carmélites” features a tightly knit cast led by the full-voiced soprano Ailyn Pérez.True to its name, Francis Poulenc’s “Dialogues des Carmélites” is an opera built on conversations, specifically ecclesiastical ones, about spiritual heroism, martyrdom and crises of faith. But in the Metropolitan Opera’s searing revival, which opened on Sunday, much was left unsaid, too — to stunning effect.Blanche de la Force, a nervous, fretful young aristocrat, seeks to join an order of Carmelite nuns to quiet her mind and find refuge amid the chaos of the French Revolution. As the Reign of Terror takes hold and religious communities are outlawed, the nuns take a vow of martyrdom that ultimately conveys them to the guillotine.The vow requires a unanimous vote, tabulated in secret. When Mother Marie announces that there was one nay, Constance, a young, fun-loving sister, steps forward to say that it was hers and that she wishes to retract it.At the Met, Ailyn Pérez’s Blanche, utterly beside herself, shot disbelieving looks of terror and exasperation across the stage at Sabine Devieilhe’s Constance, who met her gaze with loving reassurance.Such moments abounded in the company’s revival of John Dexter’s long-running production, staged on this occasion by Sarah Ina Meyers. It’s rare to see an opera so focused on women and their relationships to one another, and rarer still to see those relationships explored so profoundly.Pérez ingeniously deployed her warm, vivacious soprano as a Blanche who could hide in a convent from the world but not from herself. Her fragile nerves shot, Pérez’s Blanche often attempted to maintain a composed, pallid front, but her voice betrayed her, surging with feelings she had yet to master.Constance, Blanche’s fellow novice and dramatic foil, is easily cast with a perky coloratura voice. Devieilhe, with a smooth tone like light cream, gave Constance’s prattling utterances an air of ingenuous wisdom, beautifully balancing Pérez’s tightly wound, self-conscious Blanche.Poulenc individuates the female roles using vocal weight and range, and with Pérez’s full-voiced Blanche, the Met turned to dramatic voices for the more mature characters. Jamie Barton’s Mother Marie couched difficult truths in a plush voice — warm and consoling but also exacting and uncompromising. In one scene, she chews out an officious commissar without so much as removing her hands from the pockets of her vestments. Christine Goerke, her tone formidable and mettlesome, was a magisterial Madame Lidoine capable of leading the nuns in their darkest moments.The Old Prioress, who precedes Lidoine as the order’s Mother Superior, comes to a grisly end early in the opera, with a bang-up death scene that some singers approach with Meryl Streep-like meticulousness. Alice Coote gave an intense performance, more in-the-moment than grandly stylized, her nervy mezzo taking on the growl of a woman whose ox-like strength only prolonged her agony.The supporting male roles included Laurent Naouri, who rendered Blanche’s father as a vehement, indignant relic of another time; Piotr Buszewski, who, in his Met debut, sang Blanche’s brother with solicitude and an appealing tenor; and the chameleonic tenor Tony Stevenson as a comforting, charitable chaplain.The conductor Bertrand de Billy refined the score’s occasionally astringent harmonies and piquant climaxes. He took a broad view in mapping each scene’s dynamics, underscoring the singing with sumptuous patience and moving toward one big moment.“Dialogues” ends with one of opera’s great coups de théâtre. As the nuns make their way to the scaffold, singing “Salve Regina,” their voices, approaching exultation, drop out one by one with each swipe of the guillotine.But there is a quieter ensemble moment I won’t soon forget. Stripped of their habits and dressed in plain clothes, the nuns, having received their death sentence in a prison cell, circle around Goerke’s Lidoine for a laying of hands. In a reversal of the spectacular finale to come, they join her one by one — aching, wordless, holding fast to each other, not as proud martyrs, but as uncertain women shored up by faith and by one another.Dialogues des CarmélitesThrough Jan. 28 at the Metropolitan Opera; metopera.org. More

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      At 80, the Saxophonist Billy Harper Is Still a Towering Force

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      He spent years playing with Art Blakey, Lee Morgan and Max Roach, earning praise for his sax’s piercing cry. He’s still composing and turning heads live.Billy Harper grew up in front of an audience. Every Sunday, his family buttoned him into a suit and tie with a freshly starched shirt and drove to Saint Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church in Houston, where his grandfather preached and young Billy sang. “They were having me onstage when I was 3, singing solos,” he said. “The music was getting inside me.” Surrounded by great vocalists, he thought he was going to be a singer, too: “Until I got the horn.”Harper moved to New York in 1966, when he was 23, and began turning heads with the piercing and songful cry of his saxophone. It didn’t take long for him to become a prized collaborator for members of the jazz pantheon like Art Blakey, Max Roach and Lee Morgan. One of the last standing from his generation, Harper, who turns 80 on Tuesday, is still revered in the jazz world as both saxophonist and composer.Earlier this month, he played four nights at Smoke, the Manhattan jazz club, where attendees got a blast of his singular sound, which summons the urgency of John Coltrane and the power of the Black church. A charismatic presence onstage, dressed entirely in black leather, Harper calls his listeners to attention. His improvisations are torrential, dance-like and swinging, spiraling upward to mountaintop pronouncements that can leave listeners in a sweat.“His music is bracing,” said the pianist Francesca Tanksley, who has performed in Harper’s bands since 1983. She credits him with opening doors of inspiration, so that the music “becomes less of a craft and more of an adventure. He’s a man on a mission, he always has been — a knight of sorts.”The drummer Billy Hart, who plays with Harper in the all-star hard bop group the Cookers, said Harper’s music reflects the divine. “I’ve known Harper for 50 years, and we don’t even talk that much,” he said. “I don’t know exactly what he believes, but I can hear it. It’s rhapsodic. He’s praying on the bandstand.”Harper said that music comes to him in his sleep or while walking down the street: “Suddenly I’ll hear a tune in my head, and sometimes I’ll hear a whole choir of voices, singing it.”Scott Rossi for The New York TimesHarper shrugs off praise. “I just want to be a pure musician,” he said, speaking by phone from his apartment in Harlem, where he lives with his wife, the singer Morana Mesic, and their 11-year-old son, Prince. His mission at 80 is the same as when he was 25: “The idea is to make a mark in the creative music world — not anything commercial — just add something to what has already been done by the guys who came before me. If I can just do that, then I’ve done my part. I’m doing it.”He has long flown under the media’s radar, perhaps because his career took off as rock grew dominant in the music industry and independent jazz labels struggled. His debut album, “Capra Black,” recorded 50 years ago with a hotshot band and a choir, is a classic of what’s come to be known as spiritual jazz. Harper has never played anything but spiritual jazz. You can hear it in his stirring tunes, stretching back to the 1970s: “Cry of Hunger,” “The Awakening,” “Trying to Make Heaven My Home.”As a composer, he bears comparison with more famous musicians like Wayne Shorter and McCoy Tyner. Some of his compositions seem to unfold across vast landscapes, majestic and haunting, as if Harper were traveling through epochs of time. “Billy is a griot, a storyteller,” said T.K. Blue, the saxophonist and flutist who performed with Harper for 30 years in bands led by the pianist Randy Weston. “I can hear the history of where he comes from in that music. It’s regal. I hear Africa. I hear Texas. I hear the blues.”Harper spent much of his childhood in Houston’s Third Ward, a historically Black neighborhood filled in those days with blues joints. Walking past a music shop when he was 11, he spotted a shiny tenor saxophone in the window and was intrigued by its complexity — its multitude of buttons and keys. Returning home, he announced that he wanted either a pony or a saxophone for Christmas. (He got the horn.)Harper’s Uncle Earl, an old schoolmate of the bebop trumpeter Kenny Dorham, introduced him to albums by Dorham, Horace Silver and Sonny Rollins. Harper, self-taught, played along with the records and in school marching bands, and soon began sitting in with blues bands around town.By 1961, when Harper arrived at North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas), his playing “had the soul stuff, the feeling,” he said. “But I had to get the technical stuff, and they made me get it together.” Enrolled as a music major, he took his first-ever saxophone lessons and developed a grueling regimen. Holing up in a practice room for 10 or 12 hours at a time, daily, he garnered a reputation: “People thought I was crazy — or that I was going crazy,” he recalled, with a laugh.Harper has recorded 20 or so albums with the quintet, and is planning a new one. He’s been writing songs inspired by his 11-year-old son.Scott Rossi for The New York TimesToward the end of his junior year, Harper won a seat in the school’s prestigious One O’Clock Lab Band, known for its polish and professionalism. It was 1964, and Harper became the first Black student ever accepted into the ensemble: “It was a big thing to get in, though I hadn’t really thought about it back then,” he said. The other musicians “were open and warm, and the band was off the charts. After that, I was ready for anything.”After graduating in 1965, he spent a year or so in Dallas, jamming with big-time saxophonists like James Clay and Claude Johnson, veterans of Ray Charles’s band. Then in 1966, Harper jumped into his black Mustang fastback and drove to Manhattan. His second night in the city, he parked in front of the Five Spot Cafe on St. Marks Place and rushed inside with his horn to hear Thelonious Monk. He forgot to lock the car, and was robbed of nearly everything he owned. That first year in New York was a challenge. He tried sitting in nightly at Slugs’ Saloon, a jazz mecca on the Lower East Side, but rarely got a paid gig.But in 1967, a chance meeting on Broadway with Gil Evans, the composer, arranger and Miles Davis collaborator, led to an invitation to rehearse with Evans’s big band. Harper would become one of its important soloists. Word spread and his résumé grew.Harper — himself an accomplished drummer — spent years playing with the drummer Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. He was a member of the trumpeter Lee Morgan’s final band and was at Slugs’ the night Morgan was fatally shot there in 1972. He spent much of the ’70s in a quartet led by the drummer Max Roach, and held the first tenor chair in the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra. Its leaders would keep him glued to his seat until the end of a set — at which time, like a pent-up thoroughbred leaving the gate, he would rise to deliver a scarifying blizzard of a blues-drenched solo.His A-list collaborations continued over the decades; since 2010, Harper has recorded half a dozen albums and toured widely with the Cookers while also maintaining his own group, which he described as authentic: “We have a soul-heart-mind connection when we play together,” he said.Typically, members stick with the quintet for years, if not decades, as in the case of Tanksley. To this day, she said, when the band plays one of Harper’s compositions, the musicians seem to enter “a small universe with its own state of being.”Harper has recorded around 20 albums with the quintet, though it’s been a while — the group’s most recent disc, “Blueprints of Jazz Vol. 2,” came out in 2008. His recordings can be as hard to find as they are musically definitive.He plans to make a new album this year and has been composing a set of tunes inspired by his son. He said that music comes to him in his sleep or while walking down the street: “Suddenly I’ll hear a tune in my head, and sometimes I’ll hear a whole choir of voices, singing it. So I run home and write it down, fast.”Not every 80-year-old maintains this level of creativity; playing a tenor saxophone for hours at a time requires a serious degree of physical conditioning. But Harper — who used to jog miles daily and trained as a martial artist — finds that his energy doesn’t flag much.“Inside, I feel 25, maybe 26,” he said.And he’s still turning heads with the singing sound of his saxophone. His friend Hart compares him to the Pied Piper of Hamelin: “People want to hear that sound. Charlie Parker had it. John Coltrane certainly had it. It’s a sound that doesn’t change the notes, it makes the notes, and that’s the sound that Billy has.” More

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      Barclays Center Drops SeatGeek and Returns to Ticketmaster

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      The Brooklyn venue replaced Ticketmaster, the industry leader, in 2021 in favor of SeatGeek, a competitor. It is not clear why it changed direction again.In 2021, Barclays Center in Brooklyn made a surprising announcement about its business: After nearly a decade with Ticketmaster, the industry leader, as its ticketing vendor, the arena was switching to SeatGeek, an aggressive upstart.Now, barely a year into what had been a seven-year contract, BSE Global, the parent company of Barclays — the home of the Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty basketball teams, and a destination for major concert tours — is canceling its partnership with SeatGeek and returning to Ticketmaster.The change was revealed on Friday when Barclays announced a concert by the singer and producer Jackson Wang on May 11 with a link to Ticketmaster. SeatGeek, which remains the ticketer for many events already on Barclays’s calendar, will gradually be replaced by Ticketmaster in coming months as new concerts and sporting events go on sale.The abrupt switch, at a high-profile venue in one of the biggest markets in the world, is head-spinning news in the lucrative ticketing business, where Ticketmaster’s dominance has long been a matter of debate and scrutiny.“It’s very rare for such a cancellation,” said Larry Miller, the director of the music business program at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development.“Ticketing platform deals with venue owners are not of short duration,” Mr. Miller added. “I can’t think of a time over the last decade where a major venue has dropped a ticketing platform early on in the deal cycle.”The reasons for the change at Barclays were not immediately clear. Neither BSE Global nor SeatGeek would comment about whether there were any problems with ticketing that may have prompted a switch.In a statement, a spokeswoman for BSE Global said that SeatGeek “provided our fans with a first-class game day ticketing experience, and we’re appreciative of the time and energy they put into our work together.”The president of SeatGeek, Danielle du Toit, expressed no upset at Barclays’ change of direction. “It’s never easy to part ways with a client,” she said in a statement, “but as we look to the future, SeatGeek is grounded in our strategy and road map that are geared towards solving the challenges that plague the live entertainment experience.”Since its founding in 2009, SeatGeek has positioned itself as an industry disrupter. Initially just a resale platform, it has sought to challenge Ticketmaster’s dominance in the so-called primary market — sales directly from a venue’s box office, on behalf of sports teams or performing artists. When BSE Global announced its SeatGeek deal, which took effect in October 2021, the venue company praised its new partner’s “best-in-class mobile platform.”SeatGeek’s clients include major sports franchises like the Dallas Cowboys and the New Orleans Saints, as well as Jujamcyn Theaters, one of Broadway’s major theater owners.But SeatGeek, and other ticketing companies, all still lag far behind Ticketmaster, which sold 485 million tickets in 2019, the last year of business unaffected by the Covid-19 pandemic, an amount that swamps its competitors. Regulators have been monitoring Ticketmaster’s market share since it merged in 2010 with the concert giant Live Nation in a deal that critics suggested would damage competition in the ticketing industry, a consequence that Live Nation has denied.As a condition for its approval of the merger, the Justice Department entered into a regulatory agreement with Live Nation that, among other things, prohibited it from retaliating against venues that do not sign with Ticketmaster by withholding shows it controlled. The agreement, known as a consent decree, was extended by five years in 2020 after federal regulators found that Live Nation had “repeatedly” violated it. At the time, Live Nation did not admit to any wrongdoing, and said that extending the decree was “the best outcome for our business, clients and shareholders.”In an interview, Joe Berchtold, the president of Live Nation, acknowledged that the company is always under scrutiny for its actions in the marketplace. In recent weeks, for example, lawmakers have expressed concern over Ticketmaster’s botched ticket sale for Taylor Swift’s latest tour, and the company was widely condemned for its mishandling of a Bad Bunny concert in Mexico City.But Mr. Berchtold was unequivocal in stating that the company did not break any of its regulatory guidelines with Barclays Center.“I can absolutely confirm,” he said, “that there was no retaliation at Barclays for not using Ticketmaster, in terms of the routing of any concerts.”Tracking the blips and dips in tour dates for concert venues can be an inexact science. But data from Pollstar, a trade publication that covers the live music business, shows that Barclays Center received 13 Live Nation-promoted tours in the year after SeatGeek took over the venue’s ticketing business — a drop for Barclays, which in the years before the pandemic had tended to get about two dozen Live Nation events annually.However during the same period, from 2016 through 2019, the data also indicates the venue hosted fewer shows from independent promoters — those not associated with Live Nation or its major competitor, AEG Presents — from an average of more than 50 a year to less than 20 in the year after SeatGeek took over.SeatGeek and BSE Global declined to comment on the data.Barclays Center competes with Madison Square Garden, as well as the Prudential Center in Newark and the new UBS Arena in Elmont, N.Y., for major concert tours to fill out its schedule. Since 2019, BSE Global has been owned by Joseph Tsai, a Taiwanese-born tech billionaire, who bought out its previous owner, the Russian mogul Mikhail Prokhorov. More

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      John Cale’s Musical Journey Knows No Limits

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      LOS ANGELES — Just a few years after he’d left the provincial Welsh mining town where he was born, a 23-year-old John Cale was invited — along with his friend Lou Reed and their budding band the Velvet Underground — to Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York.“The first day you walked in, you joined the Academy,” Cale said in the industrial but cozy lounge of his studio on a recent afternoon, recalling the first meeting with the pop-art power broker who would become the band’s manager. “The atmosphere of that place was really special,” he added; artists from all over “came in and unzipped a bag of magic.”The musician, now 80, was reminiscing on an uncharacteristically gloomy January day in Los Angeles. Cale seemed to have summoned the Welsh weather along with his memories, and sat bundled up in a black puffer jacket and wool socks. “That’s the first thing you remember: all the work that was being done,” Cale said. “Andy was nonstop. We were nonstop. And it paid off.”It was, however, just the beginning of one of the most accomplished résumés in rock history, if not 20th-century culture. Cale studied under John Cage and Aaron Copland, and later learned about the transformative power of drone from the avant-garde musicians La Monte Young and Tony Conrad. He had a fling with Edie Sedgwick and a short marriage to Betsey Johnson. After he was unceremoniously booted from the Velvet Underground in 1968, he became a prolific, risk-taking producer, helming trailblazing albums by the Stooges, the Modern Lovers, Nico and Patti Smith. His catalog as a solo artist is unbelievably rich, tonally varied and full of buried treasure. He is arguably responsible for plucking a little-known Leonard Cohen deep cut called “Hallelujah” out of obscurity. He is inarguably the most important electric viola player rock has ever seen.“Something snapped, in a good way,” Cale said of a creative streak during the pandemic.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesIt’s possible to chart the eras of Cale’s vast career by his succession of iconic haircuts: the chic, chin-length pageboy of his Velvet Underground days; the greasy bed head of his proto-punk ’70s; an asymmetric art-crop as the ’80s became the ’90s; and the feathery, birdlike style in which he now wears his distinguished, white-gray locks, set off by a playfully Mephistophelian soul patch. Two months before his 81st birthday, he is still spry, sneaking in a pre-interview workout in his studio’s gym. (He’s been a disciplined exerciser since the late 1980s, when he kicked drugs by taking up the most physically demanding sport he could think of: squash. “It got me through,” he said.)On Cale’s new album, “Mercy” — his 17th as a solo artist, due next week — he occasionally glances back, on songs that honor late friends like David Bowie and Nico. But more often he’s making art focused firmly and defiantly in the present, responding to the political turmoil of the day (one song is titled “The Legal Status of Ice”) and collaborating with a supporting cast of younger avant-garde and indie artists: The celestial crooner Weyes Blood, the punky provocateurs Fat White Family and the art-rock dreamers Animal Collective all make guest appearances.“I consider it an honor to watch little decisions he makes,” said the Animal Collective multi-instrumentalist Brian Weitz (who records as Geologist), in a phone interview. “He’ll throw out one or two sentences to explain it, and it means the world.”Cale has always been a man of contradiction: a classically trained violist with a penchant for chaos. In our conversation, he casually referenced such thinkers as John Ruskin, Bertrand Russell and Henri-Louis Bergson, but was just as quick to ad-lib a flatulence joke. When interrupted midsentence by a deafening gurgling coming from the building’s pipes, Cale grinned impishly and said “Excuse me” with impressive comic timing.“He could be so formal in a certain way — he’s so learned and classical,” Smith said in a phone interview. (Cale produced her landmark debut album, “Horses,” in 1975.) “But he could also be as wild as any of us.” She recalled a kinetic 1976 gig in Cleveland when Cale played bass with her band during a cover of the Who’s “My Generation,” and “it got to such a fever pitch and the ceiling was so low that John put his bass through the ceiling of the club.” Cale in 1963, studying a musical score.Eddie Hausner/The New York TimesThe breadth of Cale’s accomplishments has left his collaborators and admirers in awe. “If you had one part of his career, you’d be a legend,” LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy said in a phone interview. “If you were only the producer that John Cale was, you’d go down in history. If you were only in the Velvet Underground, your ticket’s punched to rock ’n’ roll heaven. But then you did all those Island solo records, and the Eno collaboration, and then ‘Songs for Drella,’” he added, referring to Cale’s 1989 reunion with Reed, before trailing off.For all his creative triumphs, Cale never quite became a household name like Reed, his collaborator and sometimes antagonist. Todd Haynes’s acclaimed 2021 documentary “The Velvet Underground,” though, served as a corrective, arguing that Cale was the band’s secret weapon.“There was no way to overstate John’s absolutely primary role as a conceptual and creative partner with Lou Reed,” Haynes said in a phone interview, describing Cale as “the most elegant flamethrower of ’60s utopianism that I can think of.”Cale loved the film (“The minute I heard Todd was going to be doing it, I relaxed”), but he’s not one to sit around and think too hard about his legacy — he still has work to do. “I think that came to me from Wales and my mother,” he said. “She was a teacher, and I got it all basically from her: You don’t sit on your laurels. You get on with whatever it is that you haven’t done yet.”In recent years, Cale has become a generous collaborator with younger artists, and a kind of living conduit to avant-garde history and wisdom.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesCALE, THE ONLY child of a coal miner and a schoolteacher, spent the first 18 years of his life in Garnant, a small village in South Wales, “a strange, remote, some said mystical land,” as he wrote in his autobiography, “What’s Welsh for Zen.” When he was 7, he started learning English, and classical piano. A few years later, the BBC came to his school and recorded the precocious youngster playing a composition he’d written himself. The sheet music went missing, so Cale had to wing the ending. It was a thrill: his first improvisation.“Creatively it liberated me,” he wrote. “I started to take chances.”The viola, the crucial element that would later transform the Velvet Underground’s sound, came into Cale’s hands by chance: When it came time to choose an instrument for the school orchestra, it was the only one left. The local library was his portal to other worlds, especially when he realized he could request sheet music. “I was able to put my fingers in all these scores of the avant-garde,” he said at his studio, citing Webern, Berg, Haubenstock-Ramati and, of course, John Cage.When Cale was 15, he caught “Rock Around the Clock” at the local cinema; all his classmates rushed the screen and started to bop. He was electrified, bewildered — up until then, Stravinsky had been his idea of rock ’n’ roll — and a little scared that everyone was about to get in trouble. After that, he said, “I was confused. Did I want to go into the avant-garde, or did I want to go into rock ’n’ roll?”He went to Goldsmiths’ College in London, a suitable place to figure that out. Cale’s incendiary student performances — including one that involved playing a piano with his elbows — scandalized some of the faculty, but he was already dreaming of America. After exchanging letters with Cage and Copland, Cale received a scholarship from Leonard Bernstein to study at the prestigious Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts. In 1963, he came to New York and quickly fell in with Conrad, Young and the boldly minimalist Theater of Eternal Music, joining them frequently to play meditative drones that lasted for hours. At last he’d found community, and the mind-expanding experiences he’d always longed for.“I knew what I wanted from New York,” he said. “And I got it.” Meanwhile in Brooklyn, Lou Reed had been born exactly a week before Cale; “I always knew he had an edge on me!” Cale quipped in his memoir. So began one of the most generative and — still, almost a decade after Reed’s death — tumultuous partnerships in rock.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesEach time I asked Cale about Reed, he slyly rerouted the conversation: “We drifted apart,” he finally said. But maybe everything that needs to be known is right there in the music. As he wrote in a statement shortly after Reed’s 2013 death, “Unlike so many with similar stories — we have the best of our fury laid on vinyl, for the world to catch a glimpse.” Last year, the archival label Light in the Attic released a collection of 17 previously unreleased tracks from Reed’s earliest recordings, including a May 1965 tape that features folky, self-recorded demos of future classics like “Heroin” and “I’m Waiting for the Man.” (Cale, who was Reed’s roommate in a drug-fueled Ludlow Street loft at the time, sings backup on some of them.) It’s revelatory to hear the material in this larval stage: They are unmistakably Lou Reed songs, yes, but they’re not yet Velvet Underground songs. “You see that he really hadn’t begun to imagine the potential of this music,” Haynes said of Reed, “and that what he was doing in content and lyrics hadn’t found a correlative energy and sensibility yet in the music.” Enter Cale, with his interest in drone, his connection to the avant-garde, and the low, sonorous viola that melted down traditional rock-song structures like molten lava.“That dialectic, that tension, that attraction, that romance that brought the two of them together,” Haynes said, “therein lies the mystery of this music.”THE GLORY DAYS didn’t last long. “I didn’t quite know how to exist outside the environment of the Factory,” Cale said. Warhol spent the latter part of 1968 recovering from a gunshot wound; by the end of the summer, Reed had given the rest of the Velvet Underground a Cale-or-me ultimatum, and insisted that the guitarist Sterling Morrison break the news. For all their merits, the albums that the V.U. released without Cale are quieter and more conventional. (“Who gets kicked out of the Velvet Underground for being too avant-garde?” Murphy mused. “I love that. That’s John Cale.”)Cale, left, and Lou Reed performing in the Velvet Underground. In 1968, Cale was forced out of the band he had helped found.Adam Ritchie/Redferns, via Getty Images“It made some other people in the band unhappy, but it was just a challenge to me,” Cale said of his ousting. That Welsh work ethic, and his mother’s humble advice, saved him: “I decided, well, OK, you can sit on your hands and do nothing, or you can get up, move your butt and produce some things.” The first album he worked on would change Nico’s image forever, the stark, harrowing “Marble Index.” The second was the Stooges’ 1969 self-titled debut, one of the founding documents of punk.After the refined chamber-pop of his great 1973 album “Paris 1919,” Cale’s solo work grew increasingly feral, too. He unleashed lacerating screams on the 1974 album “Fear” (the recording that made Smith seek him out as a producer) and embraced post-punk on the adventurous “Honi Soit,” from 1981. “There’s this counterpoint of Lou going and doing Zen,” he said and laughed, referring to Reed’s interest in meditation and tai chi, “and then I’m going and doing rock ’n’ roll.”Cale and Reed hadn’t spoken in years when they ran into each other at Warhol’s funeral in 1987. The old spark was back, and they began work on a tribute to their former manager, which would become the theatrical, confidently sparse “Songs for Drella.” By the time it arrived in 1989, they were no longer speaking. A Velvet Underground reunion in the early 1990s was similarly short-lived, also owing to creative differences between Cale and Reed.Cale cleaned up his rock ’n’ roll lifestyle when his daughter, Eden, was born in 1985. He released more classically minded albums and continued to exert an inconspicuous influence on musical culture. In the early 1990s, a small French record label asked him to contribute to a Leonard Cohen tribute album. He chose “Hallelujah” — a song from the quietly received 1984 album “Various Positions” that he’d first heard Cohen perform at the Beacon Theater — and made some tweaks to the lyrics and simplified the song’s arrangement. His version certainly struck a chord. When Jeff Buckley first began playing the song, a magazine editor in the audience told him backstage that he liked his Cohen cover. “I haven’t heard Leonard Cohen’s version,” Buckley is said to have replied. “I know it by John Cale.”Cale said he inherited his work ethic from his mother: “You don’t sit on your laurels. You get on with whatever it is that you haven’t done yet.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesCale has remarkably open ears for an octogenarian: He often speaks of “what a boon to music” hip-hop is and, in our conversation, expressed admiration for rap producers like Mike Will Made-It and Dr. Dre. “Hey guys, do you know what’s going on here?” he said to his imagined peers. “Better ideas of mixing, better ideas of melodies — it’s like, get on the train or get off.”In recent years, Cale has become a generous collaborator with younger artists, and a kind of living conduit to avant-garde history and wisdom. “I jokingly tell people that it’s like a friendly godfather-type relationship that I have with him,” Animal Collective’s Weitz said. Cale has long been an admirer of the band, and Weitz described their reciprocal appearances on each other’s records — Cale played on the band’s 2016 album “Painting With,” and Animal Collective appear on a track from “Mercy” — as a kind of “music-for-music swap.”Cale still makes art on the edge. In June 2019, he headlined the DMZ Peace Train Festival on the border between North and South Korea. (The wildlife surprised him: “Korean rattlesnakes!”) In 2014, at London’s Barbican museum, he conducted the first-ever orchestra of flying drones. A certain defiance also courses through “Mercy,” a slow, meditative album. The songs have immediate emotional resonance, but they ask the listener for patience, too.LCD Soundsystem’s Murphy admires that. “He always approaches it as, ‘What’s interesting to me right now?’ rather than being careerist,” he said. “Songs made by people like that last in a very different way,” he continued. “They feel alive and current for much longer, because they’re made with respect.”There are plenty more of them coming, too. Cale spent much of the pandemic holed up in his studio, and he estimates that he’s written around 80 new compositions in the past few years. “Something snapped, in a good way,” he said. “It was like, you can’t turn your back on this, this is something that’s going to go on. And I want to go on.” More