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      Book Review: ‘The Farewell Tour,’ by Stephanie Clifford

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      In her second novel, “The Farewell Tour,” Stephanie Clifford follows a veteran singer who’s wrapping up a long career on her own terms.THE FAREWELL TOUR, by Stephanie Clifford“The Farewell Tour,” by Stephanie Clifford, is the story of Lillian Waters, a fictional country music singer in the vein of Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn. I loved Clifford’s debut novel, “Everybody Rise,” a vibrant explosion of a book set among graduates of elite prep schools in 2006 Manhattan, so I was eager to follow Clifford into the world of what one character calls “hillbilly music.”As the novel opens, Lillian (also known by her stage name, “Water Lil”) is hitting the road one last time, planning a summer tour through “the county-fair circuit” and ending up in the town she fled as a child, Walla Walla, Wash. Unbeknown to her fans and band members, Lillian has a polyp on her vocal cord and plans to retire for good after Walla Walla; she’s not interested in treatments that could prolong her career. “As for surgery,” she says, “I knew one gal with the prettiest voice, sweet and clear as a flute, who went under the knife and sounded like Orson Welles afterward.”Lillian is 56 years old in 1980 and washed up — her life full of struggles, mistakes and unrequited love, without much hope on the horizon. But as we follow Lillian’s farewell tour, we are also given alternating chapters that bring us back in time, starting in 1924. Water Lil’s rise to stardom is breathtaking; I enjoyed being immersed in a world of suede and fringed costumes, cowboy boots and giant wigs. I appreciated the look into the process of songwriting and one woman’s struggle to earn a place in the man’s world of Nashville in the late 1960s and ’70s, not to mention the even steeper hills faced by Lillian’s nonwhite friends and fellow musicians.“The Farewell Tour” is a shimmering paean to the deeply flawed American West, which feels real and vital thanks to Clifford’s gift for description. Of Bakersfield, Calif., in 1960, Lillian says, “In the day, the light was harsh and flat and brought out the scuffs and dust.” At night, though, “When the heat receded and the sky grew dim, Bakersfield came alive in neon and rhythm guitar.”An account of Water Lil’s early shows reads like a found poem: “We played the Hidy-Hody Ranch Bar, and the Circle-M Saloon, the Round-Up Rodeo and the Boiler Room, the Gunshot Lounge and Gunshot Bar and Gunshot Club.” When she checks in with her manager Coy Roy via pay phone, he reminds her to sing about topics like “lost love,” which put her in a sympathetic light. “That meant: no songs about the road, about ambition, about men I tumbled into hotel beds with when I was drunk enough.”Even as her tour stops leap off the page, Water Lil herself remains a cipher. Perhaps this is inevitable — she has spent her life dressing up in costumes and writing songs about a false persona, one created for commercial appeal and stripped of agency and messy desires. But something breaks loose when she visits Tule Lake, Calif., where the parents of Lillian’s Japanese American fiddle player, Kaori, were interned during World War II. When Kaori asks why Lillian didn’t do anything to protest the internment camps, she responds, “I didn’t know what to do.” And thinks: “I didn’t have a good answer for her. My generation didn’t protest like hers did, but I wasn’t sure if it was because we weren’t aware that we could, or because we were scared to risk what we had, or we — I — just didn’t care enough to get involved.”In the final pages of the novel, Lillian dares to acknowledge that her beloved West is an imperfect place: “It has been flawed since Juan Pérez and Charles William Barkley thought it needed to be discovered. Since Vancouver and Gray sailed in, and Lewis and Clark came overland and started naming things in their own language, after their own people.” And so on, all the way to Kaori’s parents’ internment, to the stories of “all-Black regiments and redlined neighborhoods.”With only two shows left, Water Lil begins to find her purpose: “I could brush the snow from the crevasses, and show how we, imperfect, broken, lost, gone, silenced, were always part of the story.” Water Lil may be saying farewell, but after she performs the song she has written about her own life, she has an epiphany: “And then I knew where I would go, what I would do. For in the end, I had sung my song.”Amanda Eyre Ward is the best-selling author of “The Jetsetters” and “The Lifeguards.” Her new novel, “What We Did for Love,” will be published in 2024.THE FAREWELL TOUR | By Stephanie Clifford | 352 pp. | Harper/HarperCollins Publishers | $29.99 More

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      Steve Mackey, a Mainstay of the Britpop Band Pulp, Dies at 56

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      Shortly after he joined that long-running group in 1987, it rose from obscurity to chart-topping success in what came to be called the Cool Britannia era.Steve Mackey, the lauded bassist, songwriter and producer who made his name laying down dance-floor-friendly grooves for the British band Pulp during its 1990s pinnacle, as it transformed itself from a little-known art-rock collective to a festival-headlining Britpop powerhouse, died on Thursday. He was 56.His death was announced on social media by his wife, Katie Grand. She did not say where he died or cite a cause, although she noted that he had died “after three months in hospital, fighting with all his strength and determination.”With Hollywood-worthy looks and an image of tailored cool, Mr. Mackey provided the pulsing bass lines that helped whip audiences into a frenzy as Pulp cycled through glam-rock, acid-house, disco and indie-pop influences on 1990s anthems like “Common People” and “Disco 2000,” two of the five Top 10 singles the band notched in Britain.Pulp also had five Top 10 albums, including the celebrated “Different Class” in 1995.Mr. Mackey recorded five studio albums with Pulp over the course of a decade, starting with “Separations” in 1992. His tenure coincided with the most commercial and critically acclaimed era for this long-running, ever-evolving band, as it emerged from obscurity in Sheffield, England, and, after a series of false starts, took its place in the English pop firmament along with Oasis, Blur and other supernovas of the so-called Cool Britannia era.In 1995, the influential British music magazine Melody Maker anointed Pulp the band of the year — a notable accomplishment in a year that also saw the release of Oasis’s era-defining album “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?” That same year, the band headlined the star-studded Glastonbury rock festival after the scheduled headliners, the Stone Roses, dropped out.It was a meteoric rise for a garage-band bassist who had started his association with the band as a mere fan.Stephen Patrick Mackey was born on Nov. 10, 1966, in Sheffield, a historically industrial city in South Yorkshire, England. He was in his late teens when he started catching gigs by Pulp, which was already a respected band on the local scene.Jarvis Cocker, the band’s lead singer, made an immediate impression with his haunted air and chiseled looks. “I was amazed by Jarvis,” Mr. Mackey said in a 2021 video interview. “He was really a striking frontman, and the songs were really powerful; they’re quite dark as well.”It was while he was playing in band called Trolley Dog Shag that Mr. Mackey befriended Mr. Cocker, although he did not entertain thoughts of lobbying to play with Pulp. “They seemed self-contained, quite aloof,” he said in a 1996 interview for the band’s website. “I was into really noisy bands, garage bands, and Pulp were like an art band.”Besides, the band, formed in 1978, hardly seemed on a fast track to stardom. By the time Mr. Mackey joined in 1987, Pulp had cycled through multiple lineups and had failed to generate much of a stir with its first two albums, “It” (1983) and “Freaks” (1986).The band began developing a more pop-friendly sound, and the first single from “Separations,” the ice-cool dance track “My Legendary Girlfriend,” finally gave Pulp a taste of mainstream success. The British music newspaper NME named it a “single of the week.”Pulp would continue to chart for the rest of the decade, but disbanded after its 2001 album, “We Love Life.” In the ensuing years, Mr. Mackey, who had contributed to the writing of the band’s songs along with Mr. Cocker and the other members, kept busy as a producer and songwriter, working with bands like Arcade Fire and Florence + the Machine.He had a cameo role in the 2005 film “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” as the bassist for a wizard supergroup called Weird Sisters, alongside Mr. Cocker, as well as Jonny Greenwood and Philip Selway of Radiohead.Mr. Mackey was an avid photographer, and he spun out a side career in the 2010s shooting fashion campaigns for brands like Armani Exchange and Marc Jacobs while collaborating with his wife, a stylist and fashion journalist, on her fashion magazine, Love.He joined Pulp on a reunion tour in 2011 and 2012, but declined to join one scheduled for this year, explaining on social media last October that he desired “to continue the work I’m engaged in — music, filmmaking and photography projects.”In addition to his wife, he is survived by his son, Marley; his parents, Kath and Paul; and his sister, Michelle.After Mr. Mackey’s death, Mr. Cocker posted on Instagram a photo of Mr. Mackey trekking up a rocky trail in the Andes in 2012.“We had a day off & Steve suggested we go climbing in the Andes,” Mr. Cocker wrote. Calling it a “magical experience,” he continued: “Steve made things happen. In his life & in the band. & we’d very much like to think that he’s back in those mountains now, on the next stage of his adventure.” More

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      Review: The Philharmonic Departs From Business as Usual

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      “The March to Liberation” offers a rarity that should be more regular: a world premiere, a symphony and an oratorio, all by Black composers.Gustavo Dudamel, recently named, to cheers, as the New York Philharmonic’s next music director, will arrive to lead the orchestra officially in 2026. But the time before then shouldn’t be thought of something to be endured or, at worst, a slog.Just look to the Philharmonic’s program this week — titled “The March to Liberation” and conducted by Leslie B. Dunner — which on Thursday had a streak of urgency and plenty of orchestral splendor.A world premiere from Courtney Bryan, “Gathering Song,” with text by Tazewell Thompson, opened the show; William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 2 followed; and, after intermission, a 45-minute, oratorio-style work by the veteran composer Adolphus Hailstork, “Done Made My Vow, A Ceremony.” Squint at this sequence — a premiere from an up-and-comer, a venerable half-hour symphony, a dramatic finish — and you could almost see the outlines of a typical subscription concert.Yet an all-Black roster of composers is hardly business as usual at a mainstream institution like the Philharmonic. William Grant Still’s 1937 symphony, subtitled “Song of a New Race,” is the kind of chestnut we should be hearing American orchestras playing regularly. But his music remains a rarity. Hailstork is also too infrequently heard, despite a prolific, half-century career.A program like this ought to be big news on its own. But the Philharmonic amped up the proceedings by inviting the video artist Rasean Davonté Johnson to create a visual accompaniment for each work, multimedia playing in parallel with the music. (Thompson, the librettist for Bryan’s premiere, was credited as the show’s director.)More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.This was tastefully done, but I tended to feel that the music didn’t need the help. From the outset, Bryan’s work proved thrilling in its polish and expressive range. In its early going, triumphal writing for brass was tugged at — and moodily complicated — by descending string motifs that traipsed across unpredictable intervals. It had the calmly challenging poise of the composer and saxophonist Wayne Shorter, who died on Thursday at 89.Thompson’s text is voiced by a griot character, on Thursday the bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green, who calls out to the audience and initiates the piece’s titular sense of gathering. The lines unfurl in short lines, which Bryan paces generously in the music. Green relished every morsel, with a bright sound in his higher range and burnished roundness in lower-slung passages. (He is soon to be heard in Terence Blanchard’s “Champion” at the Metropolitan Opera, so his performance here was also something of a promising preview.)Later in the Bryan, there are fillips of Afro-Cuban rhythm and moments of thick orchestral modernism, as well as traces of stentorian, post-Minimalist American opera. But the score does not come off as a stylistic grab bag. Though prismatic, it feels carefully woven as it touches on gospel and jazz traditions as well as contemporary idioms.In Still’s Second Symphony, the Philharmonic strings in particular seemed to savor the down-home, pastoral airs of the first movement — even as flutes (one doubling on piccolo) executed their oscillations and divebombing phrases with terrific energy and articulation. Dunner sagaciously managed the call-and-response qualities of the score, though his suave, controlled reading also seemed to glide past stray bursts of piquant personality in Still’s writing.Toward the end of the second movement, Still alternates between brief flecks of lush, 40s-style Hollywood romance and noir. When Neeme Järvi recorded this work with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, he played up those contrasts, whereas Dunner seemed to sand off the contrastive edges with the Philharmonic. But because I’ve heard this music in person so rarely, I’m of the mind to say: Let a thousand interpretations bloom.During Hailstork’s piece — structured as a Black American history lesson given by a character named Toil — I felt that some sparer moments were less than ideally balanced in the auditorium. Given that Toil is an amplified speaking part, those questions of balance could have something to do with the orchestra finding its acoustic footing inside the recently retrofitted Geffen Hall. Yet the climatic moments, during which the New York Philharmonic Chorus navigated the Hailstork’s setting of various psalms, came across as grandly cosmic.So forget the Philharmonic’s distant future for now. This program only runs through Saturday, and who knows how long it will be before New Yorkers can hear the music of these three composers again on the same evening?New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Nicki Minaj Returns Ready to Rumble, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Kali Uchis and Summer Walker, Arlo Parks, 6lack and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Nicki Minaj, ‘Red Ruby Da Sleeze’Calm arrogance is Nicki Minaj’s gift. There’s no need to decipher all her allusions because her delivery and production say it all. The track of “Red Ruby Da Sleeze,” based on Lumidee’s “Never Leave You (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh),” juggles near-flamenco handclaps, trap drums and choral vocals going “Uh-oh.” Her percussive rhymes are competitive in every realm — linguistic, sexual, financial, culinary (“guacamole with the taco”) — and their utter confidence is still convincing. JON PARELESKali Uchis and Summer Walker, ‘Deserve Me’“Red Moon in Venus,” the third studio album by the cheerfully bilingual Colombian American songwriter Kali Uchis, moves between sensual romance and fierce recriminations. “Deserve Me” is blunt: “I like it better when you’re gone/I feel a little less alone.” Uchis and Summer Walker take turns bad-mouthing the thoughtless lover who’s getting dumped, and harmonize sweetly to remind him, “You don’t deserve me.” The track starts out light and tinkly but keeps adding bassy layers, literally showing the depth of their contempt. PARELESboygenius, ‘Not Strong Enough’The indie-rock trio boygenius — Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker — formed in 2018, under a cheeky moniker that, Dacus said in an interview, was meant to harness some macho overconfidence: “We were just talking about boys and men we know who’ve been told that they are geniuses since they could hear, basically, and what type of creative work comes out of that upbringing.” The group’s stirring, acoustic-guitar-driven new single “Not Strong Enough” once again finds the women in provocative but poetic drag, as they harmonize on a chorus that answers Sheryl Crow: “I don’t know why I am the way I am, not strong enough to be your man.” On a steadily galloping bridge, Dacus leads the trio in a chant that expresses frustration at being “always an angel, never a god.” But by the end of the candid “Not Strong Enough,” boygenius has generated its own kind of strength in vulnerability — and in numbers. LINDSAY ZOLADZArlo Parks, ‘Impurities’The English songwriter Arlo Parks has absorbed Joni Mitchell, hip-hop and much more; it’s no wonder she is willing to enjoy her “Impurities.” Her new track revolves around echoey loops and samples, but she has a paradoxical lesson to impart: “When you embrace all my impurities, then I feel clean again.” PARELESMandy, Indiana, ‘Pinking Shears’On the echoey, percussion-forward “Pinking Shears,” the Manchester art-rockers Mandy, Indiana forcefully and exhaustedly reject an increasingly mechanized world: “J’suis fatiguée” (“I’m tired”) becomes a kind of mantra when chanted by the band’s vocalist Valentine Caulfield. But there’s catharsis and resistance in the industrial abrasion of the sound they create, like a rogue machine created from cobbled-together parts suddenly learning how to talk back. ZOLADZWater From Your Eyes, ‘Barley’The hypnotic “Barley,” from the Brooklyn duo Water From Your Eyes, sounds a bit like a playground chant reimagined by Sonic Youth: “One, two, three, counter, you’re a cool thing, count mountains,” Rachel Brown drones in a charismatic deadpan. The song — and first single from the forthcoming album “Everyone’s Crushed,” which comes out on May 26 — is full of loopy left-turns and unexpected riffs that jut out at odd angles, but Brown and bandmate Nate Amos are, at all times, utterly in command of their strange and alluring sonic universe. ZOLADZ6lack, ‘Since I Have a Lover’6lack positions himself between singer and rapper on “Since I Have a Lover,” which has a looped feeling. He barely projects his voice, but he rides the rhythm of a loping, two-chord guitar track as he promises more than a passing attraction. Will it last? The song suggests a woozy maybe. PARELESPrincess Nokia, ‘Lo Siento’Steady, wistful piano chords carry Princess Nokia through “Lo Siento” (“I’m Sorry”) from her EP due March 14, “I Love You But This Is Goodbye.” It’s not really an apology; as the production blooms into lush, pillowy harmonies, she switches from singing in English to calmly rapping in Spanish, cursing her lover for betrayal and noting, “Thanks for the pain, the pain in my song.” PARELESyMusic, ‘Zebras’A seven-beat rhythm percolates through “Zebras,” a minimalistic but eventful romp by the chamber sextet yMusic. The rhythm hops from key clicks on a bass clarinet to pizzicato strings; it’s juxtaposed with sighing melody lines and hints of a circus band, making the most of its three-and-a-half minutes. PARELES More

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      My Father’s Death, an Envelope of Cash, a Legacy in Music

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      The first time a photo of me appeared in The New York Times, my father sent a thumbs-up emoji. So my sister told me a month later at his burial.She’d sent him an article over Facebook. I didn’t know he saw it, or that he knew about the piano recital the article covered. At the time of his death, we saw each other in person maybe once a year, during the holidays, and talked three times over the phone — his birthday, my birthday, Father’s Day — though there had been times in recent years when I didn’t know his phone number or email address. Both changed unpredictably. Still, our interactions were always warm, if brief. We weren’t estranged but seemed to lack the impulse to stay in touch; I often wondered if that was the one thing we had in common. I found it comforting.So, when I received a call at home in Brooklyn from my stepmother, telling me he’d died in their living room in New Hampshire, I felt mostly confused, as if there had been some mistake. It was as if he’d decided to move to another planet without telling me. I spent my whole life with him absent in some sense, even if in my childhood, particularly the decade after my parents’ divorce, he was still sporadically present. But now, my access to him was gone.In the days surrounding his funeral, I felt like a stage manager, helping with logistics and family mediations. I wandered my hometown in Vermont, visiting our old haunts: a waterfall where we fished, the Burger King where my family had gone for special Sunday dinners, our old house, with blueberry bushes that he planted, still there. The day of his burial, I returned to Brooklyn. That night, I cried in the kitchen, partly for my dad, but mostly because I didn’t want that terrible day to end. It would mean moving forward and leaving behind an event that I wasn’t even sure I had experienced.Tendler as a child, right, with his father. Later, they weren’t estranged but seemed to lack the impulse to stay in touch.via Adam TendlerAn inheritance was the last thing on my mind. My dad was financially ambiguous and notoriously frugal, so I thought that if there even was one, it would be weird. I was right. Around Christmas, my stepmother told me that, along with provisions like bottled water, my father had stored and hidden three wads of cash for my two sisters and me as our inheritance.On New Year’s Day, while in Vermont, I arranged to meet her and my half-brother at a Denny’s on the New Hampshire border, just a few steps from the McDonald’s where I was transferred between parents as a kid. I was handed a manila envelope full of cash. Even if I’d never held that amount of cash before, it was a sum that could disappear easily into a couple months of rent and bills in New York City.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.Would that be my father’s legacy?A few weeks later, I attended a show at Roulette in Brooklyn. While I was sitting alone in the balcony, my usual perch, something happened. The music just hit me. I know that sounds corny, but it’s true. I thought to myself, This is why I’m alive. Music. Alive. It was an epiphany. The ideas collided and a whole project manifested in an instant: I would use my inheritance to commission a program of new piano works about inheritance itself — a project that arrives at the 92nd Street Y, New York, on March 11.I drafted an email to some of my dearest friends, who also happen to be brilliant composers. Admitting I had very little idea what I was doing, I wrote a message that read in part:In October my father died. It was unexpected and the circumstances aren’t entirely clear. … We had a close relationship in my childhood which grew more distant, or perhaps just quieter, for a number of reasons, loss of love not among them. … I know [this] is more a favor than a commission. … If you do accept, I trust your instincts [to take] the piece in any direction you choose. … The only thing I ask is that you let me live with these works until I find them a home, together — somewhere.Everyone said yes, among them Nico Muhly, Missy Mazzoli, Christopher Cerrone, Pamela Z, Ted Hearne, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Timo Andres and John Glover. It was 2020, and I began to dig into the task of finding a presenter just as face coverings began appearing throughout New York. Within a couple weeks, the pandemic had shut down much of the city and any semblance of the performing arts that I knew. All around, there was now a staggering backlog of performances to reschedule, often from much more established artists than me.I wondered whether I had made a mistake sending that email. Maybe I could’ve used the money after all. Only toward the end of that first Covid summer, as livestreaming seemed to hit its saturation point and my future as a concert pianist seemed especially uncertain, did I start thinking pragmatically about my still-unnamed project.Darian Donovan Thomas’s “we don’t need to tend this garden. they’re wildflowers” incorporates family photos and is designed as a kind of therapy session.via Adam TendlerThe first thing I abandoned was the idea that it had to debut in New York. For years, I’d sent unsolicited pitches to Kate Nordstrum, the founder and director of the Minneapolis-based new music presenter Liquid Music, but this project felt different. It was promising that Kate replied to my email saying she wanted to talk, but I‌ remember‌ ‌pacing‌ my bedroom during our call. The project had still seemed somewhat hypothetical to me, but in one phone conversation it was being ushered into reality: She said yes, and thought we should bring in more composers.I wanted to invite more, too, but had already promised away my entire inheritance to those already onboard. This meant finding more money. I hesitated at first, but finally asked for support from Anthony Creamer, a friend and arts patron in Philadelphia whom I’d never asked for anything. He said yes; and we had a show. I had a presenter, a premiere date of spring 2022, and even a name for the project: Inheritances.Those additional composers joined, including Devonté Hynes, Laurie Anderson, Angélica Negrón, inti figgis-vizueta and Mary Prescott. In all, the Inheritances program would feature 16 new solo works by 16 composers.The pieces started trickling in. One of the composers, Scott Wollschleger, wrote to me with a series of questions about my father. “Who was he as a person?” “What about him do you feel is still with you now?” “What was your relationship like and did it evolve over time?” I had always emphasized that I didn’t want these pieces to be about my dad, nor for the program to be necessarily about death. Still, if answering Scott’s questions would give him an entry point, I’d do it. I wrote sprawling responses and reluctantly shared the document with the rest of the composers. Many of them, to my surprise, used it as a catalyst for their own pieces; it triggered their own memories, their own sense of inheritance and place. Several titles come from the depths of that confessional.More and more works came in, all of them surprising to me in some way. Each composer seemed to stretch for this project — or, as Andres once put it, “let their freak flag fly.” Marcos Balter, in the program note for his piece, “False Memories,” wrote, “You’ll see that the musical idiom I’ve chosen to explore is not my ‘usual,’ per se.”Often, the composers would share their inspiration with me, and ask that I keep that information between us. Mazzoli’s “Forgiveness Machine,” to be played “mechanical and heartbreaking,” grinds in the extreme registers of the piano. She declined to provide a program note, telling me the piece spoke for itself.Tendler writes that Inheritances has became a kind of sacred space and gathering.Lila Barth for The New York TimesLaurie Anderson’s “Remember, I Created You” used text from an artificial intelligence program she developed, creating an eerily accurate narrative of my entire project. Hynes’s “Morning Piece” enters such a space of stillness that I could barely move while listening to his demo on my headphones, riding the B46 bus home. Cerrone wrote “Area of Refuge,” an understated echo chamber of a piece, in the wake of his own father’s sudden passing, and dedicated it to his memory.Nico Muhly adapted John Wycliffe’s translation of Proverbs 13:22 — about inheritance between fathers and sons, and the balance between righteousness and sin — weaving a melodic line with that text on a middle staff “not to be sung, but to be played in as cantabile a fashion as possible.” Pamela Z’s “Thank You So Much” has the piano playfully mimicking audio from interviews she found of me speaking about John Cage, but the words could easily have been about my dad, toying with a question I had often asked myself: Did I care to know more about the composers I played than about my own father?“I had some fun,” she wrote, “with intermingling and blurring the lines between those relationships.”In Darian Donovan Thomas’s piece, “we don’t need to tend this garden. they’re wildflowers,” designed as a kind of on‌stage therapy session, I would finally speak about my dad for the first and only time in the program. Through a series of instructions, personal questions and tonal shifts, interspersed with family photos, the score probes the psychological terrain of my relationship with my father, and what it felt like to lose him. I feared at first that this all might be too literal for a program that I intended to be largely symbolic, but the result has become a necessary release for me, an emotional climax and an acknowledgment of the person and event that brought this whole program together.Inheritances became a kind of sacred space, a gathering, a ritual. I might have been Venmo-ing away my inheritance, but these pieces felt like bereavement gifts sent from friends.I don’t remember much from that Minneapolis premiere, aside from the feeling afterward of fulfillment — a rarity for me. The theater seats remained occupied long after the recital ended. People stayed and talked, to one another and to me. Different pieces touched different people in different ways.The goal for Inheritances, from the start, had been to provide a vessel through which I could connect to my elusive father, process my grief and reconcile with my past. But I also hoped that writing these pieces would provide a similar vessel for the composers, and ultimately that this shared experience would extend to our listeners. When audiences responded so powerfully, in Minneapolis and then a Los Angeles performance co-presented by Liquid Music and the new-music collective Wild Up, I felt like the long road that had begun with a manila envelope in a Denny’s parking lot over two years earlier had all been worthwhile.Now Inheritances is having its New York premiere at the 92nd Street Y in a co-presentation with Liquid Music. Many of the composers will hear their works live for the first time, and although I’ve performed in this city for over a decade, it feels like something of a debut: the most personal, and most important, program I’ve ever played. I like to think that my dad would be proud. I’d settle for a thumbs-up emoji. More

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      Wayne Shorter: 9 Essential Songs

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      The saxophonist, who died on Thursday at 89, redefined jazz composition by embracing the unknown. Listen to nine of his recordings with Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell, Esperanza Spalding and more.In the last decade or so of his life, it had become a commonplace to call Wayne Shorter jazz’s greatest living composer. There was simply no ambiguity about it, he was the one.Now that the saxophonist has left the earthly realm, at the age of 89, does that distinction become eternal? It’s hard to think of another musician whose writing style worked its way so indelibly into the DNA of jazz: how the music is composed, how it’s played, how we think about it.Shorter wrote melodies at a slant, doing a lot with a little. He packed harmonies with so much tension, they relieved a lot of the pressure that had been put on the rhythm section in the bebop era — allowing it to loosen its grip on the groove without sacrificing suspense. When he joined the Miles Davis Quintet in 1964, after a lengthy stint as Art Blakey’s musical director, Shorter’s impact was succinct and immediate: The group stayed cool and steady, even as Shorter’s compositions lured its five members into a state of constant combustion.Like John Coltrane, his mentor and predecessor in Davis’s previous quintet, Shorter wasn’t flashy or spotlight-hungry. But his presence was commanding. Davis sometimes started concerts without him onstage; when Shorter came on, playing his way up to the microphone, it was an event.In the early ’70s, partly responding to the direction Davis’s music was taking, jazz steered toward a marriage with rock and funk. Shorter and the pianist Joe Zawinul teamed up to start Weather Report, arguably the quintessential band of the fusion era, and kept it going for 15 solid years. In that time, Shorter also made it into the studio with rock and Brazilian popular musicians, like Joni Mitchell, Santana and Milton Nascimento. Maybe Shorter’s mind took to fusion not just out of aesthetic affinity, but because he was always a high-tech thinker and an alchemist; electronics never scared him, and authenticity felt relative. Synths? Amp stacks? Jaco Pastorius’s flanged-up electric bass taking the melody out of your hands? What was the harm?Growing up in downtown Newark, Shorter read and wrote comics about superheroes confronting threats from the cosmos, and he and his brother Alan, also a musician, caught every movie they could at the local theater. He listened on the radio to the newest sounds in bebop, Western classical and popular music. “As weird as Wayne” became a saying in the neighborhood, as the poet and critic Amiri Baraka famously remembered, and Shorter turned it into an honorific, dubbing himself “Mr. Weird.”Throughout his life, Shorter was a fierce and articulate defender of the right to stand alone — or better yet, to take risks in reliable company. Speaking in 2018 about his approach to playing with his quartet, Shorter was (as usual) both metaphorical and direct. “It’s a little thing we call trust and faith,” he said. “To me, the definition of faith is to fear nothing.”If there is one immortal distinction Shorter can certainly claim, it’s that of being jazz’s all-time greatest aphorist. That’s not an easily earned title, in a music community full of philosophers. Blakey, for one, famously said that jazz “washes away the dust of everyday life.” Davis reminded us that it’s about “the notes you don’t play.”But as he grew older, Shorter was a seemingly bottomless font of mystic wisdom. One of his favorite lines was: “Jazz means, I dare you.” The title of his longtime quartet’s 2013 album, “Without a Net,” was a reference to his description of how the band improvised. That band operated for close to 20 years without, he said, ever holding a rehearsal. “How do you rehearse the unknown?” he asked.Late in his career, Shorter developed a creative partnership with one of his biggest admirers, Esperanza Spalding. They performed often together, and over a period of years they took on his last herculean goal: composing a full-length opera, “Iphigenia,” which turned Euripides’s classic Greek tragedy upside-down and adorned it with a wildly expansive score. Frank Gehry, a longtime friend of Shorter’s, designed the set, with a looming, shimmery backdrop that seemed to harmonize with the saxophonist’s vaulted arrangements.“Iphigenia” premiered in late 2021, to a mix of rapturous raves and quizzical responses — both of which must have delighted Shorter. But the enormity of his achievements as a composer were just as apparent at a completely different opera, Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which had its debut at the Metropolitan Opera around the same time. With Shorter’s passing, Blanchard becomes a candidate to assume that mantle of “greatest living jazz composer.” But at “Fire,” it was clearer than ever that he wouldn’t have gotten there without the influence of Shorter; it was in the way his harmonies spread their wings out wide, hang gliding from beginning to end, asking you to ride along — daring you.Here are nine tracks that showcase the sly invention and dark poetics of Shorter’s compositions and saxophone sound.Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, “Sakeena’s Vision” (1960)“Sakeena’s Vision” is one of many tunes that Shorter wrote for Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, the group from which he launched his career. His later work was never as straightforwardly propulsive and blues-driven as the charts he gave to Blakey, but on “Sakeena’s Vision” you’ll hear some of his soon-to-be signatures. At the end of the melody, Shorter introduces a catchy fillip of a phrase, repeats it, then turns it over in a few different harmonic contexts. It’ll get stuck in your head — the melody, the rhythm of it, the bounce of it — but then it’ll slip away from you.Wayne Shorter, “House of Jade” (1965)For “Juju,” arguably the most indispensable album from Shorter’s golden period with Blue Note Records in the 1960s, he was joined by a rhythm section of Coltrane quartet veterans: McCoy Tyner on piano, Reggie Workman on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. “House of Jade” is the gentlest of the LP’s six Shorter originals, but Jones’s ever-propulsive beat and Workman’s staunch bass playing vest Shorter’s slow, elliptical melody with heavy, grinding force.Miles Davis Quintet, “Fall” (1968)Miles Davis’s so-called second great quintet — for which Shorter was the primary composer — quite distinctly falls into this composition, with the trumpeter acting as if he’s just remembered the melody as he goes along. The emotion of this piece, as in so many of Shorter’s tunes, is both stark and shrouded: Is it mournful? Longing? Simply dazed? Whatever that feeling is — nameable or not — you’ll find it exerts a pull.Wayne Shorter, “Beauty and the Beast” (1975)Somewhere between funk, jazz, MPB and a slow jam, “Beauty and the Beast” comes from “Native Dancer,” Shorter’s first album-length collaboration with the star Brazilian vocalist Milton Nascimento, and an undisputed classic in both musicians’ catalogs.Weather Report, “Palladium” (1977)In Weather Report, Shorter was actually the group’s secondary composer, after Joe Zawinul, but he still got in some good licks. “Palladium” is one of the group’s most fun tunes; just when you think it’s resolving, it keeps flying on, transposing up a key and ultimately finishing on a cliffhanger.Steely Dan, “Aja” (1977)Steely Dan was a rock band with jazzy aspirations — until the group made “Aja,” a milestone of the fusion years and their first encounter with Shorter’s slippery saxophone playing. After an impressive guitar solo by Denny Dias, Shorter’s unmistakable tenor sound comes barreling out of the darkness, like a black car emerging from a tunnel at night with its lights turned off; less than a minute later he’s finished, and the track is in a new ZIP code.Joni Mitchell, “Paprika Plains” (1977)Shorter joined up with Joni Mitchell for the first time in the late 1970s, and they remained lifelong friends and collaborators. On many tracks, he offers color and complement, but on “Paprika Plains” — Mitchell’s epic tribute to the Indigenous community near her Saskatchewan hometown — he doesn’t appear till almost 14 minutes in, ready to carry the song skyward to its close.Wayne Shorter Quartet, “Adventures Aboard the Golden Mean (live)” (2005)The quartet that Shorter assembled around the turn of the new millennium was his first attempt as a bandleader to revisit and expand upon the all-things-must-explode m.o. of Davis’s 1960s quintet. Alongside the drummer Brian Blade, the bassist John Patitucci and the pianist Danilo Pérez, Shorter leans heavily on the soprano saxophone (another nod to Coltrane’s influence), and on “Adventures Aboard the Golden Mean” he uses the band at once like a meditative space and a wild loom, spinning small, motif-like themes until they are frayed and stretched and fully unspooled.Wayne Shorter, Terri Lyne Carrington, Leo Genovese and Esperanza Spalding, “Endangered Species (live)” (2022)Esperanza Spalding and Terri Lyne Carrington have been among the most prominent advocates for Shorter’s legacy, and in 2017 they teamed up with him — and the pianist Leo Genovese — for a major performance at the Detroit Jazz Festival. “Endangered Species” is an ’80s-era gem from Shorter’s fusion catalog, written at the tail end of his time with Weather Report, built on the tonal toggling and crooked-angle grooves that he’d often worked out with Weather Report, but released on his 1985 solo album, “Atlantis.” In 2012 Spalding set it to words and did her own version. Their performance together in Detroit was released last year, and Shorter’s gusty, restrained solo on “Endangered Species” won him the 12th — and final — Grammy in an immortal career. More

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      Wayne Shorter, Innovator During an Era of Change in Jazz, Dies at 89

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      His career as an influential tenor saxophonist and composer reached across more than half a century, tracking jazz’s complex evolution during that span.Wayne Shorter, the enigmatic, intrepid saxophonist who shaped the color and contour of modern jazz as one of its most intensely admired composers, died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 89.His publicist, Alisse Kingsley, confirmed his death, at a hospital. There was no immediate information on the cause.Mr. Shorter had a sly, confiding style on the tenor saxophone, instantly identifiable by his low-gloss tone and elliptical sense of phrase. His sound was brighter on soprano, an instrument on which he left an incalculable influence; he could be inquisitive, teasing or elusive, but always with a pinpoint intonation and clarity of attack.His career reached across more than half a century, largely inextricable from jazz’s complex evolution during that span. He emerged in the 1960s as a tenor saxophonist and in-house composer for pace-setting editions of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and the Miles Davis Quintet, two of the most celebrated small groups in jazz history.He then helped pioneer fusion, with Davis and as a leader of Weather Report, which amassed a legion of fans. He also forged a bond with popular music in marquee collaborations with the singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, the guitarist Carlos Santana and the band Steely Dan, whose 1977 song “Aja” reaches a dynamic climax with his hide-and-seek tenor solo.Mr. Shorter wrote his share of compositions that became jazz standards, like “Footprints,” a coolly ethereal waltz, and “Black Nile,” a driving anthem. Beyond his book of tunes, he was revered for developing and endlessly refining a modern harmonic language. His compositions, sleek and insinuating, can convey elegant ambiguities of mood. They adhere to an internal logic even when they break the rules.His recorded output as a leader, especially during a feverishly productive stretch on Blue Note Records in the mid-1960s — when he made “Night Dreamer,” “JuJu,” “Speak No Evil” and several others, all post-bop classics — compares favorably to the best winning streaks in jazz.Mr. Shorter produced “Night Dreamer,” “JuJu,” “Speak No Evil” and several other post-bop classics in the mid-1960s.James Nieves/The New York TimesSince the turn of the 21st century, the Wayne Shorter Quartet — by far Mr. Shorter’s longest-running band, and the one most garlanded with acclaim — set an imposing standard for formal elasticity and cohesive volatility, bringing avant-garde practice into the heart of the jazz mainstream.Mr. Shorter often said he was drawn to music because it has “velocity and mystery.” A lifelong fan of comic books and science fiction, he kept a shelf crowded with action figures and wore T-shirts emblazoned with the Superman “S” logo. In his later years, he cut the figure of a sage with a twinkle in his eye, issuing cryptic or elliptical statements that inevitably came back to a sense of play.“Don’t throw away your childish dreams,” he said in 2012. “You have to be strong enough to protect them.”Throughout his career he refused to hew too closely to any tradition except that of fearless expedition. “The word ‘jazz,’ to me,” he liked to say, “only means ‘I dare you.’”‘The Newark Flash’Wayne Shorter was born in Newark on Aug. 25, 1933. His father, Joseph, worked as a welder for the Singer sewing machine company, and his mother, Louise, sewed for a furrier.Growing up in Newark’s industrial Ironbound district, Wayne and his older brother, Alan, devoured comic books, science fiction, radio serials and movie matinees at the Adams Theater. Wayne won a citywide art contest at age 12, which led to his attending Newark Arts High School, the first public high school in the country specializing in the visual and performing arts.There he encountered several teachers who cultivated his interest in music theory and composition. At the same time, bebop — an insurgent, often frenetic strain of modern jazz, typified by virtuosos like the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and the pianist Bud Powell — was a source of endless fascination for him.Bebop had a strong foothold in Newark: Savoy Records, the label most committed to the young movement, was based there, and local radio carried live broadcasts across the Hudson River from clubs like Birdland and the Royal Roost. Mr. Shorter, who had been taking private lessons on clarinet, switched to the tenor saxophone. Along with his brother, a trumpeter, he joined a local bebop group led by a flashy singer named Jackie Bland.Onstage and off, the Shorter brothers took as much pride in bebop’s stance of iconoclastic rebellion as in the swerving intricacies of the music; they would perform in intentionally rumpled suits and rubber galoshes, propping newspapers on their stands instead of sheet music. The poet Amiri Baraka, a classmate, famously recalled that such outré behavior sparked a local shorthand: “as weird as Wayne.” Mr. Shorter wore that slight as a badge of honor, at one point painting the words “Mr. Weird” on his saxophone case.He acquired a more heroic nickname, the Newark Flash, around the jazz scene of the 1950s, while earning a degree in music education at New York University. After serving two years in the Army — at Fort Dix in New Jersey, where he distinguished himself as a sharpshooter — he re-entered the scene, making a strong impression as a member of Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, the shining exemplar for the down-to-earth yet combustible style known as hard bop.Mr. Shorter shared the band’s front line with a bravura young trumpeter, Lee Morgan, forming a musical kinship that soon extended to his own albums, and eventually to Morgan’s. But in addition to his saxophone playing, Mr. Shorter brought to the Jazz Messengers a new degree of compositional sophistication, writing tunes, like “Ping Pong” and “Children of the Night,” that spiked a familiar hard-bop formula with dark harmonic elixirs.Mr. Shorter performing with Miles Davis in London in 1967. Davis, in his autobiography, called Mr. Shorter “the conceptualizer of a whole lot of musical ideas we did.”David Redfern/Getty ImagesMr. Shorter joined the second Miles Davis Quintet in 1964, after deflecting Davis’s overtures for several years out of loyalty to Blakey. His arrival cinched a brilliant new edition of the band, with the pianist Herbie Hancock, the bassist Ron Carter and the drummer Tony Williams. Davis, in his autobiography, called Mr. Shorter “the conceptualizer of a whole lot of musical ideas we did.”Once he joined, Mr. Shorter contributed new compositions to every studio album made by the Miles Davis Quintet, beginning with the title track of “E.S.P.” in 1965. During an engagement at the Plugged Nickel in Chicago later that year, his tenor solos were marvels of invention, turning even a songbook standard like “On Green Dolphin Street” into a portal for shadowy intrigue.But on the scale of intrigue, there could be no topping “Nefertiti,” the title track of a Davis quintet album released in 1968. A 16-bar composition with a slithery melody and a shrewdly indeterminate harmonic path, it was so holistic in its effect that Davis decided to record it with no solos, just the melody line played over and over. In Michelle Mercer’s 2004 book “Footprints: The Life and Work of Wayne Shorter,” Mr. Shorter described “Nefertiti” as “my most sprung-from-me-all-in-one-piece experience of music writing,” like someone recalling a trance.Most of Mr. Shorter’s storied output on Blue Note unfolded while he was working with Davis, often with some of the same musical partners. He chronicled some aspects of his life on these albums: “Speak No Evil,” recorded in 1964, featured his wife, Teruko Nakagami, known as Irene, on the cover, and contained a song (“Infant Eyes”) dedicated to their daughter, Miyako. The marriage ended in divorce in 1966; “Miyako” would be the name of another composition the next year.The Mysterious TravelerUnlike the other members of the Miles Davis Quintet, Mr. Shorter remained through Davis’s push into rock and funk — on the terse 1969 album “In A Silent Way,” featuring the Austrian keyboardist and composer Josef Zawinul, and on the epochal sprawl of “Bitches Brew.”Together with Mr. Zawinul and the Czech bassist Miroslav Vitous, Mr. Shorter then formed Weather Report, which released its debut album, called simply “Weather Report,” in 1971. Over the next 15 years, the band changed personnel several times, with Mr. Zawinul and Mr. Shorter as the only constants. Weather Report also changed styles, tacking away from chamberesque abstraction and toward danceable rhythms. Its most commercially successful edition, featuring the electric bass phenom Jaco Pastorius, became an arena attraction, and one of its albums, “Heavy Weather,” was certified gold (and later platinum).Mr. Shorter was the instrumental voice out front in Weather Report, and second only to Mr. Zawinul as an engine of original material. Among the enduring tunes he wrote for the band are “Tears,” a color-shifting tone poem; “Palladium,” a funk tune with Caribbean flair; and “Mysterious Traveler,” a rhythmic saga named after a popular radio show from his youth.Mr. Shorter and Josef Zawinul, the Austrian keyboardist and a central member of Weather Report, played at a jazz festival in France in 1984.Eric Gaillard/Agence France-PresseWhile in Weather Report, Mr. Shorter made precious few solo albums — but “Native Dancer,” a 1974 collaboration with the Brazilian troubadour Milton Nascimento, inspired more than one generation of admirers, notably the guitarist and composer Pat Metheny and the bassist and vocalist Esperanza Spalding, who in 2008 recorded a version of the album’s opening track, “Ponta de Areia.”The idea of working with Mr. Nascimento had come from Mr. Shorter’s second wife, Ana Maria (Patricio) Shorter, who spent her childhood in Angola under Portuguese rule. (Mr. Shorter noted her influence in the album notes, and included a wistful ballad called “Ana Maria.”)It took more than a decade for Mr. Shorter to release his next album, “Atlantis,” a complex sonic canvas that met with a tepid response, critically and commercially. One of its most vocal champions at the time was the critic Robert Palmer, who praised it in The New York Times as “an album of tunes in which everything — texture, color, mood, meter, tempo, instrumentation, density, you name it — seems to be in perpetual transformation.”Mr. Shorter held to a similar ideal after Weather Report disbanded in 1986. His next few albums featured a broad range of collaborators and a heavy quotient of synthetic timbres. The ambitious culmination was “High Life,” which met with scathing criticism on its release in 1995, notoriously from Peter Watrous in The Times, who declared it “a pastel failure.”Personal tragedy visited Mr. Shorter soon after, and not for the first time. Iska, his daughter with Ana Maria, had lived with brain damage before dying of a grand mal seizure in 1985 at age 14. The loss had led Wayne and Ana Maria to delve into Nichiren Buddhism. Then, in 1996, Ana Maria and the Shorters’ niece Dalila Lucien were among the 230 people killed when TWA Flight 800 crashed shortly after takeoff from Kennedy International Airport in New York.“We practice in Buddhism that we’re able to have an eternal dialogue with the ones we lose temporarily,” Mr. Shorter told The Guardian several years later. “When my wife left, she was in a state of enlightenment.”In 1999 he married Carolina Dos Santos, a Brazilian dancer and actor whom he had met through Ana Maria. She survives him, along with his daughters, Miyako and Mariana Shorter, and a grandson. Alan Shorter died in 1987.The Rogue PhilosopherAs he entered a phase of late eminence, Mr. Shorter deepened his bond with Mr. Hancock, with whom he shared not only several decades of musical history but also a common foundation in Buddhist practice. Both artists served on the board of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, a nonprofit educational organization (now called the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz) that administers a series of programs, including a long-running international competition.Mr. Shorter and Mr. Hancock released an introspective duo album, “1+1,” in 1997; it won Mr. Shorter a Grammy for best instrumental composition for “Aung San Suu Kyi,” a heraldic theme dedicated to the activist and future leader of Myanmar, who was under house arrest at the time.In total, Mr. Shorter won 12 Grammy Awards, the last bestowed this year for best improvised jazz solo, for “Endangered Species,” a track, written with Ms. Spalding, from the album “Live at the Detroit Jazz Festival,” where he performed in a quartet with her, Terri Lyne Carrington and Leo Genovese.He also received a lifetime achievement honor from the Recording Academy in 2015. He was a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow and a 1998 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master. He received the Polar Music Prize, an international honor recognizing both pop and classical music, in 2017. And he was among the recipients of the 2018 Kennedy Center Honors, in a class that also included the composer Philip Glass.Mr. Shorter ushered in a profound new stage of his career in 2000, when he formed an acoustic quartet with the pianist Danilo Pérez, the bassist John Patitucci and the drummer Brian Blade. These were broad-minded musicians capable of following his every twitch and prompt, and they came from the generation that had grown up with his tunes.The new Wayne Shorter Quartet started out playing versions of those tunes, like “Footprints” and “JuJu,” often modified or abstracted to the point of near unrecognizability. Jon Pareles, reviewing a concert for The Times in 2013, observed that Mr. Shorter “treats bass lines or single phrases as clues and implications, toying on the spot with tempo, crosscurrents, inflection and attack; anything can be up for grabs, yet the composition retains an identity.”Mr. Shorter’s own quartet started off playing versions of his old tunes before he eventually composed new music for the group, including “Scout” and “Pegasus.”Chad Batka for The New York TimesMr. Shorter eventually composed new music for the group, like “Scout,” which had its premiere in 2017, and “Pegasus,” for which he also orchestrated parts for the quintet Imani Winds. The Los Angeles Philharmonic commissioned his “Gaia,” a symphonic tone poem that doubles as a concerto for Ms. Spalding and suggests a classical tradition deftly redrawn in Mr. Shorter’s hand.Together, Mr. Shorter and Ms. Spalding boldly expanded on this promise in “Iphigenia,” an opera loosely based on the Greek myth, featuring his music and her libretto, with set designs by the architect Frank Gehry. It had a series of performances in 2021 and 2022, notably at the Kennedy Center in Washington, with Mr. Shorter in the audience.He was still straining against preconceptions and aesthetic prescriptions when, at 85, he released “Emanon,” a suite that he recorded in two separate versions: one with his quartet and the other also featuring the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, with his soprano saxophone darting through. The album received broad critical acclaim, topping year-end lists in The Times and JazzTimes.Mr. Shorter, who created a hand-drawn 58-page comic book called Other Worlds as a teenager, also fulfilled a lifelong ambition with “Emanon.” The albums came with a comic that he wrote with Monica Sly, illustrated by Randy DuBurke. Set in a sci-fi dystopia, it hinges on the actions of Emanon, a “rogue philosopher” urging resistance to fear and oppression.“There are a myriad of realities in the multiverse,” reads the first panel, setting a familiar theme in a bold new key.Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      Yo-Yo Ma Makes His Encore a Call for Peace, With a Nod to Casals

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      The celebrated cellist capped a concert with the New York Philharmonic with a work that Pablo Casals often played to protest war and oppression.Listen to This ArticleAfter a rousing performance of Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto with the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday, the celebrated cellist Yo-Yo Ma returned to the stage for an encore.But rather than rush into a familiar crowd-pleaser, Ma began speaking from the stage of David Geffen Hall to the sold-out crowd. He explained the work he would play: “Song of the Birds,” a Catalonian folk song that was a favorite of the eminent cellist Pablo Casals, who performed it as a call for peace and to evoke his native Catalonia, which he had fled when he went into exile after the Spanish Civil War.“Ladies and gentlemen, the Elgar Cello Concerto was written in 1919, right after the Great War — the Great War that we said would never happen again,” Ma told the audience of about 2,200 people, speaking without a microphone.Then he spoke of Casals who, after World War II, suspended his concert career to protest the decision of the Allies not to try to topple Franco in Spain. “And the only times he would play would be to play this piece,” Ma noted, “which is from his native Catalonia, a folk song that he thought symbolized freedom.”In a telephone interview, Ma said his aim was to remind people of their shared humanity at a time when there is so much strife and suffering in the world, including in Ukraine.“The question is, why do we keep doing this to ourselves?” he said.Ma said that music was a way of coping “in a world where we have both empathy deficit and empathy fatigue.”“How many of us think about World War I or World War II?” he said. “How many of us think about Rwanda or about the Rohingya? These all become distant very quickly in our first world. But for people in other parts of the world, it’s constant, it doesn’t go away.”“I don’t have an answer,” he added. “I’m trying to find a way of coping myself. And maybe at some level playing music is a way of engaging people in the common search of who we are, and who we want to be.”Ma has long been fond of “Song of the Birds,” which he has often performed in the past.In the interview, he said the piece was powerful in part because it highlighted the special abilities of birds.“They literally can have altitude and perspective on our world and have the freedom to cross all our boundaries and borders,” he said. “There is something just wondrous about that. And we’re part of the same world. Can we learn from that and hopefully not make the same sort of mistakes over and over again?”Since the Russian invasion last year, Ma has used music to show solidarity with Ukraine. He performed the Ukrainian national anthem last year with the pianist Emanuel Ax and the violinist Leonidas Kavakos before a concert at the Kennedy Center. He also played a Bach cello suite on the sidewalk outside the Russian Embassy in Washington.Casals, regarded as one of the greatest cellists of all time, fled Spain in the late 1930s, saying he would not return until democracy was restored. Living in the French border town of Prades, he worked to raise money for refugees of the Spanish Civil War, writing letters to officials, charities, journalists and others seeking support.He would perform “Song of the Birds,” or “El Cant dels Ocells,” at the end of his music festivals in Prades and the scattered concerts he played in exile. He played it in 1961 at the White House for President John F. Kennedy. And he performed it again when he visited the United Nations in 1971, two years before he died, to deliver an antiwar message.“The birds in the sky, in the space, in the space, sing ‘peace, peace, peace,’” Casals said. “The music is a music that Bach and Beethoven and all the greats would have loved and admired. It is so beautiful and it is also the soul of my country, Catalonia.”Ma has often paid tribute to Casals, calling him a hero. He played for the eminent cellist in 1962, when he was 7 and Casals was 85. Casals helped launch Ma’s career when he brought the prodigy to the attention of Leonard Bernstein, then the music director of the New York Philharmonic, who introduced Ma at a performance at the White House that same year before an audience that included President Kennedy.In the interview, Ma recalled visiting Casals’s summer home in Spain in 2019, which now houses a museum, where he saw his letters of protest and pleas to help refugees.“Casals showed me, even as a young boy, that he had his priorities,” he said. “He was a human being first, a musician second and a cellist third.”Audio produced by More