Music

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Sakamoto, whose work with Yellow Magic Orchestra influenced electronic music, composed scores for “The Last Emperor” and “The Revenant.”Ryuichi Sakamoto, one of Japan’s most prominent composers, who scored the films “The Last Emperor,” “The Sheltering Sky” and “The Revenant” and was a founder of the influential Yellow Magic Orchestra techno-pop band, died on Tuesday. He was 71.His Instagram page announced the date of his death, but it did not provide further details. Mr. Sakamoto said in 2021 that he had received a diagnosis of rectal cancer and was undergoing treatment.Equally comfortable in futuristic techno, orchestral works, video game tracks and intimate piano solos, Mr. Sakamoto created music that was catchy, emotive and deeply attuned to the sounds around him. Along with issuing numerous solo albums, he collaborated with a wide range of musicians across genres, and received an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Grammy and two Golden Globes.His Yellow Magic Orchestra, which swept the charts in the late 1970s and early ’80s, produced catchy hits like “Computer Game” on synthesizers and sequencers, while also satirizing Western ideas of Japanese music.“The big theme of him is curiosity,” the musician Carsten Nicolai, a longtime collaborator, said in a phone interview in 2021. “Ryuichi understood, very early, that not necessarily one specific genre will be the future of music — that the conversation between different styles, and unusual styles, may be the future.”Mr. Sakamoto was beginning to achieve wide recognition in the early 1980s when the director Nagisa Oshima asked him to co-star, alongside David Bowie, in “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” a 1983 film about a Japanese P.O.W. camp. Mr. Sakamoto, having no background in acting, agreed under the condition that he could also score the film.The movie’s synth-heavy title track remained one of Mr. Sakamoto’s most famous compositions. He often adapted it, including for “Forbidden Colors,” a vocal version with the singer David Sylvian, as well as piano renditions and sweeping orchestral arrangements.Mr. Sakamoto in 1988. He won an Oscar for his work on “The Last Emperor.”Kyodo News, via Associated PressThen came music for films by the director Bernardo Bertolucci, including “The Last Emperor” (1987) “The Sheltering Sky” (1990) and “Little Buddha (1993). Mr. Bertolucci was demanding — he would shout “More emotional, more emotional!” at the composer, and made him rewrite music on the fly during recording sessions with a 40-person orchestra — but “The Last Emperor” won Mr. Sakamoto an Oscar in 1988. Mr. Sakamoto returned to his classical roots in the late 1990s with the album “BTTB,” or “Back to the Basics,” a collection of sentimental, delicate piano arrangements that evoked Claude Debussy, alongside more experimental wanderings into the innards of the piano in the spirit of John Cage.That release included “Energy Flow,” originally written for a commercial for a vitamin drink and released as a single after television viewers called in en masse to ask how they could find of the music. Amid Japan’s Lost Decade — a term for the economic stagnation that followed years of technology-driven growth — the tender piano ballad seemed to offer solace.“Perhaps it’s because people are looking for healing, for some answer to the stress of their country’s recession,” Mr. Sakamoto speculated, when “Energy Flow” became the first instrumental track to reach No. 1, in 1999, on Japan’s Oricon charts.After the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in 2011, Mr. Sakamoto became an activist in Japan’s antinuclear movement, organizing a No Nukes concert in 2012 at which a reunited Yellow Magic Orchestra, and the band Kraftwerk, one of Yellow Magic’s major influences, performed.The day before the concert, he spoke at a protest outside the residence of Japan’s prime minister. “I come here as a citizen,” he said. “It’s important that we all do what we can and raise our voices.”Mr. Sakamoto learned he had throat cancer in 2014. During treatment, he halted work but made an exception when the director Alejandro G. Iñárritu asked him to write music for his film “The Revenant.” With Mr. Nicolai, who performs under the name Alva Noto, Mr. Sakamoto produced a score of luminous dread that was widely acclaimed.He conceived a new project in homage to Andrei Tarkovsky, one of his abiding influences, which became the 2017 “async,” his first solo album in eight years and a summation of his career, with haunting chorales, ethereally synthesized soundscapes, and a recording of the writer Paul Bowles reciting a passage on mortality from “The Sheltering Sky.”Mr. Sakamoto, second from left, had a role in the film “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” and also wrote the music. With him, from left, are Jack Thomas, the film’s. producer; David Bowie, who starred, and Nagisa Oshima, the director.Jacques Langevin/Associated PressIn later years, Mr. Sakamoto’s music became increasingly spacious and ambient, attuned to the flow of time. In an interview with The Creative Independent website, he described why he played his older music so much slower than he used to. “I wanted to hear the resonance,” he said. “I want to have less notes and more spaces. Spaces, not silence. Space is resonant, is still ringing. I want to enjoy that resonance, to hear it growing.”Ryuichi Sakamoto was born on Jan. 17, 1952, in Tokyo. His father, Kazuki Sakamoto, was a well-known literary editor, and his mother, Keiko (Shimomura) Sakamoto, designed women’s hats.He began piano lessons at age 6, and started to compose soon after. Early influences included Bach and Debussy — whom he once called “the door to all 20th century music” — and he discovered modern jazz as he fell in with a crowd of hipster rebels as a teenager. (At the height of the student protest movement, he and his classmates shut down their high school for several weeks.)Mr. Sakamoto was drawn to modern art and especially the avant-garde work of Cage. He studied composition and ethnomusicology at Tokyo University of the Arts and began playing around with synthesizers and performing in the local pop scene.In 1978, Mr. Sakamoto released his debut solo album, “Thousand Knives,” a trippy amalgam that opens with the musician reciting a poem by Mao through a vocoder, followed by a reggae beat and a procession of Herbie Hancock-inspired improvisations. That year, the bassist Haruomi Hosono invited him and the drummer Yukihiro Takahashi to form a trio that became Yellow Magic Orchestra. (Mr. Takahashi died in January.)The band’s self-titled 1978 album was a huge hit, and influenced numerous electronic music genres, from synth pop to techno. The group broke up in 1984, in part because Mr. Sakamoto wanted to pursue solo work. (They have periodically reunited since the 1990s.) Mr. Sakamoto continued tinkering with outré, high-tech approaches in his 1980 album “B-2 Unit,” which included the otherworldly electro single “Riot in Lagos.”Mr. Sakamoto performing in Rome in 2009.Domenico Stinellis/Associated PressAfter the Bertolucci films, Mr. Sakamoto was seemingly everywhere — appearing in a Madonna music video, modeling for Gap, and writing music for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. His collaborators for the eclectic albums “Neo Geo” (1987) and “Beauty” (1989) included Iggy Pop, Youssou N’Dour, and Brian Wilson, and he toured with a world-fusion band from five continents. By the mid-1990s, Mr. Sakamoto had refashioned himself as a classical composer, touring arrangements of his earlier music in a piano trio. His work simultaneously became grandiose in scale and themes: he wrote a symphony, “Discord,” exploring grief and salvation (with spoken word contributions by David Byrne and Patti Smith), and an opera, “LIFE,” a meditation on 20th century history that received mixed reviews.Along with writing music for video games and designing ringtones for the Nokia 8800 phone, Mr. Sakamoto oversaw live streams of his concerts that featured a “remote clap” function, in which online viewers could press their keyboard’s F key to applaud. The strokes would be registered on a screen in the auditorium.In the 21st century, he began to focus again on more experimental work, inspired by a new generation of collaborators including the producer Fennesz and Mr. Nicolai, who layered glitchy electronics over Mr. Sakamoto’s piano.“He taught me that I should not be afraid of melody,” Mr. Nicolai said, “that melody has the possibility of experimentation as well.”Mr. Sakamoto became outspoken as an environmentalist, recording the sounds of a melting glacier for his 2009 record “Out of Noise.” For portions of “async,” he performed on an out-of-tune piano that had been partly submerged in the 2011 Tohoku tsunami. He recorded what became his final album, “12,” as a kind of diary of sketches, following a lengthy hospitalization, through 2021 and 2022. “I just wanted to be showered in sound,” he said of the record. “I had a feeling that it’d have a small healing effect on my damaged body and soul.”In December, he gave a career-spanning, livestreamed solo piano concert at Tokyo’s 509 Studio.Mr. Sakamoto married Natsuko Sakamoto in 1972, and they divorced 10 years later. His second marriage, to the musician Akiko Yano in 1982, ended in divorce in 2006. His partner was Norika Sora, who served as his manager. Information about his survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Sakamoto greets fans after a performance in New York in 2010.Hiroko Masuike for The New York TimesMr. Sakamoto’s attention to sound suffused his daily life. After many years of eating at the Manhattan restaurant Kajitsu, he recalled in a 2018 interview with The New York Times, he wrote an email to the chef saying, “I love your food, I respect you and I love this restaurant, but I hate the music.” Then, without fanfare or pay, he designed subtle, tasteful playlists for the restaurant.He simply wanted better sounds to accompany his meals. More

Born in Ethiopia, she seemed headed for a career as a concert pianist before she chose a monastic life. Her intricate piano recordings gained a cult following.“Honky tonk” and “nun” are words not often seen in combination, but in 2017, when the BBC broadcast a radio documentary about the pianist and composer Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, “The Honky Tonk Nun” was the title of choice.It was a testament to the music she made, both before and after she became a nun in the 1940s, music that drew on her classical training but seemed to partake of rhythm and blues, jazz and other influences. The relatively few who discovered it knew they had found their way to something singular.The musician Norah Jones was one who did, especially after hearing the album “Éthiopiques 21,” a collection of Sister Guèbrou’s piano solos that was part of a record series spotlighting folkloric and pop music from Ethiopia.“This album is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard: part Duke Ellington, part modal scales, part the blues, part church music,” Ms. Jones told The New York Times in 2020. “It resonated in all those ways for me.”The documentarian Garrett Bradley used Sister Guèbrou’s music in the soundtrack of “Time,” her acclaimed 2020 film about a New Orleans woman’s fight to get her husband out of prison. Alex Westfall, writing in Pitchfork about that movie and its soundtrack, called the music “the sonic equivalent to infinity — untethered by conventional meter or rhythm, as if Guèbrou’s instrument holds more keys than it should.”Fana Broadcasting, Ethiopia’s state-run news agency, announced on March 27 that Sister Guèbrou had died in Jerusalem. She was 99. The announcement did not specify when she died.“Hers were some of the most extraordinary 99 years ever lived on this earth,” Kate Molleson, who made “The Honky Tonk Nun” and wrote about Sister Guèbrou in her book “Sound Within Sound: Radical Composers of the 20th Century” (2022), said on Twitter.Sister Guèbrou (the title emahoy is used for a female monk) was born Yewubdar Guèbru on Dec. 12, 1923, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. (She changed her name when she became a nun.) Her father, Kentiba Gebru Desta, held several titles, including mayor of Gondar, and her mother, Kassaye Yelemtu, was socially prominent as well. At age 6, Sister Guèbrou was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland. There, she said in the BBC documentary, she saw a concert by a blind pianist that made a strong impression.“It remained in my mind, in my heart,” she said. “After that, I was captivated by music.”She studied violin and piano and then returned to Ethiopia in 1933 to attend the Empress Menen secondary school. After Italy, under Benito Mussolini, invaded Ethiopia in 1935 and forced its emperor, Haile Selassie, into exile, Sister Guèbrou and her family were deported to the Italian island of Asinara and then were relocated to Mercogliano, east of Naples.When the Italian occupation ended and Selassie was restored to power in 1941, Sister Guèbrou, still a teenager, accepted an offer to further her music studies in Cairo, though the Cairo climate did not agree with her. She eventually returned to Ethiopia, working for a time as an assistant in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.Ms. Guèbrou in an undated photo. After studying music in Italy and Cairo, she underwent a spiritual reassessment and became a nun, joining a monastery in Ethiopia. “I took off my shoes and went barefoot for 10 years,” she said. via Buda MusiqueShe had a chance to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London and seemed on the way to a career as a concert pianist, the BBC documentary says, but that prospect fell through for reasons Sister Guèbrou would not detail. That led her to a spiritual reassessment of her life, and by her early 20s, she was a nun. She spent 10 years in a hilltop monastery in Ethiopia.“I took off my shoes and went barefoot for 10 years,” she told Ms. Molleson. “No shoes, no music, just prayer.”She returned to her family and by the 1960s was recording some of her music; her first album was released in Germany in 1967, according to the website of a foundation established in her name to promote music education.She made several other records over the next 30 years, donating the proceeds to the poor. In the mid-1980s, she left Ethiopia and settled into an Ethiopian Orthodox monastery in Jerusalem, spending the rest of her life there. Information on her survivors was not available.Sister Guèbrou came to much wider attention in 2006. The French musicologist and producer Francis Falceto, who had been releasing albums of Ethiopian music from the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s in a series called “Éthiopiques” on the Buda Musique label, made a collection of her solo pieces No. 21 in that series.“While the sound of this musician’s pensive, repetitive drawing-room études owes something to Beethoven, Schumann and Debussy — although they are studded with little arpeggios special to Ethiopian music — there is a dusky, early-blues quality to much of it,” Ben Ratliff wrote in a review in The Times. “If you’ve heard some jazz, you could think it was written by Mary Lou Williams or Duke Ellington in their own moments of making their own quiet, original drawing-room music.”Ilana Webster-Kogen, an ethnomusicologist at SOAS University of London with an expertise in Ethiopian music, broke down one track from the “Éthiopiques” album, the inviting yet complex “The Story of the Wind,” which is less than three minutes long.“First, there is a lot of classical technique in there, particularly in the interplay between the right and left hands,” she said by email. “You might think you’re listening to a sonata for those first few seconds because there is so much harmony between the right and left hand. But then it becomes immediately clear that she’s improvising, so the genre signals jazz.”And then there’s the meter of the piece.“Most Ethiopian music is written in 6/8, which you can count either as duple meter or triple meter (1-2-1-2 or 1-2-3-1-2-3),” Dr. Webster-Kogen wrote. “If you try to count, you’ll see that she really fluctuates between duple and triple pulse. This would be innovative coming from any musician, and sure, there are other Ethiopian musicians who do this — now — but the idea that they got it from a woman who has dedicated her life to prayer and charity … anyone can see that this is unusual.” More

After more than two decades at the forefront of electronic dance music (while in a robot-style helmet), the French artist is releasing “Mythologies,” a score for traditional symphony orchestra.The most shocking part of “Mythologies,” a ballet that premiered last summer in Bordeaux, France, came after the dance was over. It was a seemingly normal moment: The composer of the music came out and took a bow.What was surprising was that his face and his wild halo of dark curls were showing. After spending more than 20 years in public behind shiny, opaque robot-style helmets as half of the pathbreaking dance-music duo Daft Punk, Thomas Bangalter was ready to be seen without barriers.“There’s nothing sensational about it,” Bangalter, 48, said on a recent video call. “It’s down to earth, my relationship to physical appearance that I feel now.”“Mythologies,” Bangalter’s first major solo project since Daft Punk announced its dissolution in February 2021, is arriving on Friday as an album on Erato, the distinguished French classical label. Conceived in 2019, long before Daft Punk’s breakup, it is a 90-minute instrumental score for traditional symphony orchestra, with nary an electronic sound in the mix.“With electronic music, it’s so hard and it takes so much time to infuse emotion in the machines,” the soft-spoken and thoughtful Bangalter said from his home in Paris. “So to write a chord or a melody and have the performers — human beings — play it and have this instant emotional quality to it, is really quite exhilarating. It’s not the fight you have against machines.”“Mythologies” revels in the palpably human effects of an acoustic ensemble: the trembling friction of bows on strings; the exhalations of breath into brasses; the grumble of bassoon, with audible clicks of fingers on keys. The ballet is a stylized parade of myths from the distant past, but for Bangalter the project also has a kind of post-apocalyptic, back-to-basics optimism: “After everything, the violin will remain.”“I’m very grateful for the freedom and the creative latitude that I was able to explore with my partner,” Bangalter said. “The only thing it’s farewell to is Daft Punk, because that is in the past, but beyond that, there are many different things yet to explore.”Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesEven without the buffed, gleamingly artificial sheen and pumping tempos of Daft Punk’s trademark sound, much of the sprawling, 23-track new album does have the clean, poised formality and propulsive rhythmic regularity of Vivaldi and Bach — and of techno.“It was definitely a journey of learning and experimenting,” Bangalter said. “How to orchestrate, as well as the value of trial and error, and also exploring the ’70s or the ’80s. But not the 1970s or 1980s — the 1880s, or the 1780s.”The 1970s and ’80s are very much in the score, though, in the form of brooding, endlessly cycling small cells of material, like that in the work of Philip Glass or Michael Nyman, both favorites of choreographers. Relentlessly repeating small cells of material is also the way many electronica songs, including Daft Punk’s, are built.No one will mistake “Mythologies” for Bangalter’s work with his longtime musical partner, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. But this new project is as much a continuum with Daft Punk as it is a break or rejection. The duo’s “Tron: Legacy” soundtrack, from 2010, blended electronic sounds with a symphony orchestra (though, unlike “Mythologies,” Bangalter didn’t arrange those orchestrations himself).A sense of ambivalence about technology permeates the slouchy, melancholy mood of “Random Access Memories” (2013), the group’s last album, which was lauded for “restoring a human touch to dance music” and celebrating liveness over computerized composition. “Mythologies” is, in a sense, another step in that direction.“It’s a break of medium, but he’s the same person,” said Romain Dumas, who has conducted the work in its live performances and on the new album.A large-scale dance score is also a return of sorts to Bangalter’s youth in Paris, where he was surrounded by choreography, both classical and modern. His mother was a ballet dancer, and his father was a songwriter and producer; as a child, Bangalter took piano lessons from a member of the music staff of the Paris Opera.But from his late teens, he and Homem-Christo began to explore a style they thought of as retrofuturist, borrowing elements from the past — disco, ’80s electropop, R&B — to build an increasingly grand vision of joyful populism, touring with an enormous pyramid-shape stage set and taking on their robot personas in a spectacle simultaneously ironic and sincere. Thanks in large part to Daft Punk, dance music went fully mainstream.Daft Punk, Bangalter’s duo with Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, announced its breakup in February 2021.Michael Falco for The New York TimesIt had been six years since the release of “Random Access Memories” when Bangalter was approached, in mid-2019, by the choreographer Angelin Preljocaj, who had used Daft Punk’s music in his work in the past.“At first, I was interested to mix electronic music and symphonic, like they did in ‘Tron,’” Preljocaj said. “But I think Thomas wanted to have a completely new experience. He proposed to me to write a completely orchestral score, and obviously I respected his desire.”Marc Minkowski, the renowned Baroque maestro who until last year directed the Opéra National de Bordeaux, where the ballet premiered, recalled: “Angelin said, ‘I have a friend who’s one of the Daft Punks.’ And they were so popular in France, it was like Abba. He told me that his friend was about to start composing, and wanted to do something completely different. And I said, ‘Wonderful.’ I love crossover; I’m a conductor, and my dream is to accompany Lady Gaga in musicals.”The ballet’s mythology theme and its music arose in tandem: Bangalter sought a kind of story scaffolding from Preljocaj to begin to structure his writing, and Bangalter’s initial sketches inspired in Preljocaj the idea of exploring a range of myths, rather than a single narrative.Bangalter read classic treatises on orchestration — the art of how to properly use the different instruments and balance them — by Berlioz and Rimsky-Korsakov. To write the score, he not only abandoned the computer, but also the keyboard, at which he would compose during the Daft Punk years.“Right away, I said I’m going to write everything at the desk,” he recalled. “I don’t want to be limited, both harmonically and rhythmically, by my own limitations at the piano.”After so many years working with machines, “to write a chord or a melody and have the performers — human beings — play it and have this instant emotional quality to it, is really quite exhilarating,” Bangalter said.Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesBut old habits died hard. “He was coming from an electronic world,” said Dumas, the conductor, “so some ideas were very odd and very difficult to do for humans. For example, in ‘Zeus,’ that’s one cell that’s repeating for like three or four minutes; that was very hard to do for an orchestra.”It’s a paradox: Bangalter clearly relished the human touch and immediacy of classical music, the sound of dozens of musicians playing together, unamplified, in Bordeaux’s 18th-century opera house. (Alain Lanceron, the head of Erato, said that Bangalter insisted on going back to the label’s original logo — “very, very classical and old-fashioned and traditional” — for the album cover.)But he also, just as clearly, missed the minute control he was used to — and the effects that only technology makes possible. When it came time for making tweaks, Dumas said, they weren’t big ones.“It was tiny elements that were changing: ‘We’re going to add a dot at this point, or change it to another dynamic and mix it with this little thing,’” he said. “As human interpreters, this kind of subtlety was kind of hard to do sometimes; it’s the kind of precision you can only have with machines.”Deep in the collaboration on “Mythologies” when Daft Punk’s split was announced, Preljocaj was surprised by the news. “I think these two guys are very, very demanding with themselves,” he said. “They are perfectionist, precise. I think they are not sure they will do something higher than the point where they were. I’m not sure of that, but it’s an intuition. And that shows the honesty of their work. They don’t want to produce something which is less than what they did.”Bangalter still shares a studio and equipment with Homem-Christo, who saw “Mythologies” in Bordeaux. (He declined to be interviewed for this article.)“I’m very grateful for the freedom and the creative latitude that I was able to explore with my partner,” Bangalter said. “So it’s behind me now, but I’m really happy about it. I’ve always liked the idea of adding facets and possibilities more than shutting down ideas. The only thing it’s farewell to is Daft Punk, because that is in the past, but beyond that, there are many different things yet to explore.”Those things might involve more film scores — he has collaborated several times with the director Gaspar Noé — as well as work that is released with greater frequency than the sometimes glacial expanses between Daft Punk albums.And “Mythologies” does not represent goodbye to electronics. “I feel I’ve learned some things in this process that I would be happy to integrate in my future creative projects,” he said. “But what has always driven me is to go in one direction and then to do the opposite.”There is one thing, though, that he has abandoned, irretrievably and happily.“My priorities in the world in 2023 are on the side of the humans, not the machines,” he said. “I have absolutely no desire or intentions to be a robot in 2023. There is absolutely not one reason I would want to be one.” More