Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Opera’s Lack of Diversity Extends to Offstage, a Study Shows

      by

      Opera America’s study found a striking dearth of minorities in the administrative ranks of opera companies.Opera has long grappled with a lack of racial diversity. Black, Latino and Asian singers have struggled to be cast in principal roles. Works by composers of color have rarely been performed.And, according to a study released on Thursday, there is also a striking dearth of minorities behind the scenes, in the ranks of opera administration.The study, by Opera America, a service organization for opera companies, found that only about a fifth of employees and board members at opera companies in the United States and Canada identify as people of color, compared with 39 percent of the general population.The findings underscore the challenges many companies face as they work to attract new and more diverse audiences, challenges that gained fresh urgency after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, which brought renewed attention to questions about representation in the arts.“It shows there is a great deal of work to do for opera companies to more consistently reflect our nation and their communities,” Marc A. Scorca, the president and chief executive of Opera America, said in an interview. “For opera to truly be the connected, contemporary cultural expression that we want it to be, we have to reflect this country.”The study showed some signs of progress: Women now hold 61 percent of positions in administration in opera, and they account for 54 percent of leadership posts.And opera companies have taken steps in recent years to bring more racial diversity to the stage.The Metropolitan Opera, the nation’s largest performing arts organization, last year staged Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the first opera by a Black composer in its history. The Houston Grand Opera last year premiered “The Snowy Day,” based on the 1962 book, one of the first mainstream children’s books to feature a Black protagonist.Wayne S. Brown, a chair of the Opera America board and the president and chief executive of the Detroit Opera, which this year staged Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” said it was important that companies worked to attract people of different backgrounds to administrative posts, through mentoring programs and other efforts.“It’s a time of awakening,” he said in an interview. “We have to ask ourselves, ‘Are we reflecting who we are? Is this the image that we choose to project?’ ”The study, based on surveys of about 1,200 administrative staff members and 1,500 trustees at 97 different companies, is one of the first of its kind in the industry. More

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      ‘Elvis’ Review: Shocking the King Back to Life

      by

      Austin Butler plays the singer, with Tom Hanks as his devilish manager, in Baz Luhrmann’s operatic, chaotic anti-biopic.My first and strongest memory of Elvis Presley is of his death. He was only 42 but he already seemed, in 1977, to belong to a much older world. In the 45 years since, his celebrity has become almost entirely necrological. Graceland is a pilgrimage spot and a mausoleum.Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” — a biopic in the sense that “Heartbreak Hotel” is a Yelp review — works mightily to dispel this funerary gloom. Luhrmann, whose relationship to the past has always been irreverent and anti-nostalgic, wants to shock Elvis back to life, to imagine who he was in his own time and what he might mean in ours.The soundtrack shakes up the expected playlist with jolts of hip-hop (extended into a suite over the final credits), slivers of techno and slatherings of synthetic film-score schmaltz. (The composer and executive music producer is Elliott Wheeler.) The sonic message — and the film’s strongest argument for its subject’s relevance — is that Presley’s blend of blues, gospel, pop and country continues to mutate and pollinate in the musical present. There’s still a whole lot of shaking going on.As a movie, though, “Elvis” lurches and wobbles, caught in a trap only partly of its own devising. Its rendering of a quintessentially American tale of race, sex, religion and money teeters between glib revisionism and zombie mythology, unsure if it wants to be a lavish pop fable or a tragic melodrama.The ghoulish, garish production design, by Catherine Martin (Luhrmann’s wife and longtime creative partner) and Karen Murphy, is full of carnival sleaze and Vegas vulgarity. All that satin and rhinestone, filtered through Mandy Walker’s pulpy, red-dominated cinematography, conjures an atmosphere of lurid, frenzied eroticism. You might mistake this for a vampire movie.It wouldn’t entirely be a mistake. The central plot casts Elvis (Austin Butler) as the victim of a powerful and devious bloodsucking fiend. That would be Col. Tom Parker, who supplies voice-over narration and is played by Tom Hanks with a mountain of prosthetic goo, a bizarre accent and a yes-it’s-really-me twinkle in his eyes. Parker was Presley’s manager for most of his career, and Hanks portrays him as part small-time grifter, part full-blown Mephistopheles.“I didn’t kill Elvis,” Parker says, though the movie implies otherwise. “I made Elvis.” In the Colonel’s mind, they were “the showman and the snowman,” equal partners in a supremely lucrative long con.Luhrmann’s last feature was an exuberant, candy-colored — and, I thought, generally underrated — adaptation of “The Great Gatsby,” and the Colonel is in some ways a Gatsbyesque character. He’s a self-invented man, an arriviste on the American scene, a “mister nobody from nowhere” trading in the unstable currencies of wishing and seeming. He isn’t a colonel (Elvis likes to call him “admiral”) and his real name isn’t Tom Parker. The mystery of his origins is invoked to sinister effect but not fully resolved. If we paid too much attention to him, he might take over the movie, something that almost happens anyway.Luhrmann seems more interested in the huckster than in the artist. But he himself is the kind of huckster who understands the power of art, and is enough of an artist to make use of that power.Butler with Tom Hanks, left, as Col. Tom Parker, Presley’s manager. The film depicts him as a small-time grifter and full-time Mephistopheles.Warner Bros.As a Presley biography, “Elvis” is not especially illuminating. The basic stuff is all there, as it would be on Wikipedia. Elvis is haunted by the death of his twin brother, Jesse, and devoted to his mother, Gladys (Helen Thomson). Relations with his father, Vernon (Richard Roxburgh), are more complicated. The boy grows up poor in Tupelo, Miss., and Memphis, finds his way into the Sun Records recording studio at the age of 19, and proceeds to set the world on fire. Then there’s the Army, marriage to Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge), Hollywood, a comeback broadcast in 1968, a long residency in Las Vegas, divorce from Priscilla and the sad, bloated spectacle of his last years.Butler is fine in the few moments of offstage drama that the script allows, but most of the emotional action is telegraphed in Luhrmann’s usual emphatic, breathless style. The actor seems most fully Elvis — as Elvis, the film suggests, was most truly himself — in front of an audience. Those hips don’t lie, and Butler captures the smoldering physicality of Elvis the performer, as well as the playfulness and vulnerability that drove the crowds wild. The voice can’t be imitated, and the movie wisely doesn’t try, remixing actual Elvis recordings rather than trying to replicate them.At his first big performance, in a dance hall in Texarkana, Ark., where he shares a bill with Hank Snow (David Wenham), Snow’s son, Jimmie (Kodi Smit-McPhee), and other country acts, Elvis steps out in a bright pink suit, heavy eye makeup and glistening pompadour. A guy in the audience shouts a homophobic slur, but after a few bars that guy’s date and every other woman in the room is screaming her lungs out, “having feelings she’s not sure she should enjoy,” as the Colonel puts it. Gladys is terrified, and the scene carries a heavy charge of sexualized danger. Elvis is a modern Orpheus, and these maenads are about to tear him to pieces. In another scene, back in Memphis, Elvis watches Little Richard (Alton Mason) tearing up “Tutti Frutti” (a song he would later cover) and sees a kindred spirit.The sexual anarchy and gender nonconformity of early rock ’n’ roll is very much in Luhrmann’s aesthetic wheelhouse. Its racial complications less so. “Elvis” puts its hero in the presence of Black musicians including Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Yola), Big Mama Thornton (Shonka Dukureh) and B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), who offers career advice. An early montage — repeated so often that it becomes a motif — finds the boy Elvis (Chaydon Jay) simultaneously peeking into a juke joint where Arthur Crudup (Gary Clark Jr.) plays “That’s All Right Mama” and catching the spirit at a tent revival.There’s no doubt that Elvis, like many white Southerners of his class and generation, loved blues and gospel. (He loved country and western, too, a genre the film mostly dismisses.) He also profited from the work of Black musicians and from industry apartheid, and a movie that won’t grapple with the dialectic of love and theft that lies at the heart of American popular music can’t hope to tell the whole story.In the early days, Elvis’s nemesis is the segregationist Mississippi senator James Eastland (Nicholas Bell), whose fulminations against sex, race-mixing and rock ’n’ roll are intercut with a galvanic performance of “Trouble.” Later, Elvis is devastated by the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (who was killed “just three miles from Graceland”) and Robert F. Kennedy. These moments, which try to connect Elvis with the politics of his era, are really episodes in his relationship with Colonel Parker, who wants to keep his cash cow away from controversy.Alton Mason as Little Richard in the film. Early rock’s sexual anarchy and gender nonconformity are in Luhrmann’s wheelhouse, our critic writes, but the music’s racial complications are not.Kane Skennar/Warner Bros.When Elvis defies the Colonel — breaking out in full hip-shaking gyrations when he’s been told “not to wiggle so much as a finger”; turning a network Christmas special into a sweaty, intimate, raucous return to form — the movie wants us to see his conscience at work, as well as his desire for creative independence. But Luhrmann’s sense of history is too muddled and sentimental to give the gestures that kind of weight.And Elvis himself remains a cipher, a symbol, more myth than flesh and blood. His relationships with Vernon, Priscilla and the entourage known as “the Memphis mafia” receive cursory treatment. His appetites for food, sex and drugs barely get that much.Who was he? The movie doesn’t provide much of an answer. But younger viewers, whose firsthand experience of the King is even thinner than mine, might come away from “Elvis” with at least an inkling of why they should care. In the end, this isn’t a biopic or a horror movie or a cautionary parable: It’s a musical, and the music is great. Remixed, yes, and full of sounds that purists might find anachronistic. But there was never anything pure about Elvis Presley, except maybe his voice, and hearing it in all its aching, swaggering glory, you understand how it set off an earthquake.Like a lot of people who write about American popular culture — or who just grew up in the second half of the 20th century — I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Elvis. “Elvis,” for all its flaws and compromises, made me want to listen to him, as if for the first time.ElvisRated PG-13. Rock ’n’ roll, sex, drugs. Running time: 2 hours 39 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 75 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Inside New York’s Throwback Roller-Skating Extravaganza

      by

      Music is the key to a summertime experience for pros and amateurs called the DiscOasis in Central Park. Its curator: the funk-disco guru and lifelong skater Nile Rodgers.To some people, a roller rink is just a place to skim around in a circle, not even very fast, going nowhere. But to its devotees and to the creators of the DiscOasis, a new skate experience in Central Park, it is transformational, spiritual — time travel on four wheels.On Saturday night, more than a thousand skaters packed Wollman Rink, laced up their quads and spun off into sparkling nostalgia. Spotlights shone onto the surrounding trees, as a concert-level light show bathed the space in cyan, fuschias and golds. “Good Times,” that 1970s party staple, blared from D.J. Funkmaster Flex’s booth, as the crowd — some wobblies, some more expert — parted for the pros: One roller dancer in flared jeans dropped to a split, while another flipped off her wheels, uncoiling into a headstand. For 10 minutes, it was all hot pants and acrobatics, and then regular New Yorkers — many with a style not far-off — slid back in.Hovering over this opening night like a sequined demigod was Nile Rodgers, the Chic guitarist, funk-disco eminence and lifelong skater. He curated music for the DiscOasis, and, with voice-over introductions, provides its cultural through line from 1970s and ’80s New York, when he used to frequent the city’s now shuttered, once legendary rinks with Diana Ross and Cher. Kevin Bacon and Robert Downey Jr. too. (The ’80s were wild.) With some skill on wheels, “You feel like you have special human powers,” Rodgers said in a recent video interview. “You feel like you can fly.”Scenes from the opening night of the DiscOasis, which will be open through October.Thao Nguyen from Constellation Immersive (in purple sequins) and Lynná Davis of the Central Park Dance Skaters Association (in blue sunglasses) join the set designer David Korins (second from left in back row) and more DiscOasis stakeholders at its ribbon cutting.OK McCausland for The New York TimesRoller-skating is having another flash of popularity, but the DiscOasis sets itself apart from the city’s other rinks and pop-up events (Rockefeller Center is temporarily hosting wheelers, too) through its production value, theatricality and pedigree. There’s blossoming disco balls as big as eight feet in diameter, and a multitiered stage, created by the Tony-nominated set designer David Korins, who did “Hamilton” and shows for Lady Gaga. The cast of 13 includes legends of New York roller disco, like the long-limbed skater known as Cotto, a fixture in the city’s parks for more than four decades, whose signature leg twirls and pivots have influenced scores of skaters.“We call it jam skating,” he said. the DiscOasis coaxed him out of retirement — he’s had both hips replaced — for choreographed shows, five nights a week.The energy is ecstatic, and infectious. “Being on wheels is paradise to me,” said Robin Mayers Anselm, 59, who grew up going to Empire, the storied Brooklyn emporium. “I feel more connected to myself and my spirit when I skate.”That’s true even for the newbies, like Robin L. Dimension, an actress wearing an embellished jumpsuit and a chunky “Queen” necklace with her psychedelic-patterned skates. “I got a really nice outfit,” she said, “so I look good going down.”Billed as “an immersive musical and theatrical experience,” the DiscOasis began last year outside of Los Angeles.OK McCausland for The New York TimesBilled as “an immersive musical and theatrical experience,” the DiscOasis began last year outside of Los Angeles, the pandemic brainchild of an events company led by a C.A.A. agent. But its foundational home was always New York, and it will be open through October.“For us, DiscOasis is a movement, it’s a vibe — we want as many people to be able to experience it,” said Thao Nguyen, its executive producer, and chief executive of Constellation Immersive, its parent company, which partnered with Live Nation and Los Angeles Media Fund to stage the series.For New York’s skate community, it is first and foremost a good floor. “You know, we’re not impressed by the accouterments of the illusion,” said Tone Rapp Fleming, a New York native and skater for 50 years, who came for a preview on Thursday. That’s mostly because ride-or-die skaters like him and his friend Lynná Davis, vice president of the Central Park Dance Skaters Association, would skate on a trash can lid, as she put it. But they praised the rink’s glidable new surface, painted in primary shades of blue, yellow and red.The DiscOasis’ creators knew that if they won over the old-school skate crew, the world would follow; Davis, an ageless wonder in rainbow-flecked braids and custom bejeweled, be-fringed wheels, helped with casting. “Work it out, kids!” she cheered on the younger dancers, as they cartwheeled their routine, to a soundtrack that spun from Queen to “Rapper’s Delight.”For David Korins, who created the stage for the DiscOasis, the space is a Studio 54 throwback, but fresher. OK McCausland for The New York TimesRodgers created the playlists for the performances, which happen throughout the night, interspersed with live D.J.s (the daytime is for more relaxed skating). A longtime New Yorker, Rodgers coined his skate style as a 12- or 13-year-old on a brief sojourn in Los Angeles, when he tore up the town with other kids, performing little routines. “I had this wobbly leg way of skating,” he said. He still does, “even though I’m going to be 70. And it looks cool.”His crew stood out even then: “We used to skate to jazz,” he said, recalling their grooves to the guitarist Wes Montgomery’s 1965 classic “Bumpin’ on Sunset.”Fast forward 30 years, and Rodgers had largely hung up his skates. But he has been so energized by his association with the DiscOasis, which approached him for the Los Angeles event, that it reignited his devotion. Now on tour in Europe, he has been conjuring minirinks wherever he goes, one hotel ballroom at a time.“They lift up the rugs for me and create a big dance floor,” he said. “I can skate in a little square. There’s nobody in there, because I skate at such weird hours — 4 or 5 in the morning.” (He doesn’t sleep much. As befits a disco-era fashion legend, he also has personalized skates — orange, green, iridescent — which got stuck in customs on their way to Europe. His favorite are a classic pair of black Riedells.)Even for someone well-versed in skate culture, the Los Angeles version of the DiscOasis offered some lessons. Most skaters only stick to the rink for about 45 minutes, Rodgers said. The space around Wollman has a nonskate dance floor and a few Instagram-ready installations inspired by his music. The giant half-disco ball stuffed with oversize wedding bouquets, pearls and askew mannequin legs, for example, is supposed to symbolize Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” which he produced.For Korins, the production designer, the space is a Studio 54 throwback, but fresher. “We’re leaning into this oasis idea — if you think about mirrored balls and foliage coming together to have a child, that’s what we’re making,” he said. (Think discofied palm trees and cactuses.) And the Central Park location, with the Manhattan skyline rising above it, brings its own magic. “It takes all the best things about roller-skating and disco and it literally rips the roof off,” he said.Amateurs and pros alike fill the floor at the DiscOasis.OK McCausland for The New York TimesSome attendees (including Davis), come dressed in their skating finest.OK McCausland for The New York TimesThe cast of 13 that performs at the DiscOasis includes legends of New York roller disco.OK McCausland for The New York TimesLike other skate habitués, Korins has a theory about why it remains to addictive. “It’s really hard to find an experience in life that’s both kinetic and dynamic,” he said — you can flex your solo style and also get the communion of “an organism moving around together.”Shernita Anderson, the choreographer, saw that in action. For solos, the cast was on its own. “We were like, ‘Go off, live your best life!’” she said. “And that’s what they did.”Pirouetting and high-kicking his way through the act was Keegan James Robataille, 20, a musical-theater-trained dancer who only began skating two years ago as a pandemic outlet. A swing in the company, this is his first professional, contracted gig. He grew up near a rink in Amsterdam, N.Y. “I remember going there all throughout middle school and being like, ‘Wow, I wish I could skate backwards and do these cool tricks,’” he said. “And here I am performing in New York City, doing what little me would have dreamed of doing.”A closing number — set to Donna Summer’s “Last Dance,” naturally — came on and he sailed away for his cue. It had the skaters in capes dotted with LEDs, like luminescent butterflies.“I have never seen anything like this in New York,” said Samantha O’Grady, a 24-year-old native. The rinks she started learning at all closed “by the time I was a tween,” she said, but the retro ambience of the DiscOasis gave her a flicker of how the scene looked before her time. “I sent a picture to my mother; she was so jealous.”First-time visitors were already planning to become regulars, like Robbin Ziering, whose wedding was on wheels. “We love to work, we love to dance, we love music — but we live to skate,” she said. “And that’s what it’s all about.”Kalia Richardson contributed reporting.OK McCausland for The New York Times More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      For a Kyiv Techno Collective, ‘Now Everything Is About Politics’

      by

      Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the team behind Cxema parties have shifted its focus, but political engagement is nothing new for the artists.When Slava Lepsheiev founded the Ukrainian techno collective Cxema in 2014, “I thought it should be outside politics and just a place where people can be happy and dance,” the D.J., 40, said in a recent video interview from Kyiv.Until the pandemic, the biannual Cxema (pronounced “skhema”) raves were essential dates in the techno calendar of Ukraine, which has become an increasingly trendy destination for club tourists over the past decade. These parties — in factories, skate parks and even an abandoned Soviet restaurant — united thousands on the dance floor to a soundtrack of experimental electronic music.But as the Cxema platform grew bigger, and Ukraine’s political climate grew more tense, “I realized I had a responsibility to use that influence,” Lepsheiev said, and to look beyond escapism on the dance floor. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February deepened that commitment, and the war has transformed how Lepsheiev and his team think about their priorities and work.“I think this war has destroyed the statement that art could be outside politics,” said Amina Ahmed, 25, Cxema’s booking and communications manager. “Now everything is about politics.”As shelling intensified in Kyiv, the city’s tight-knit electronic music community abandoned clubs and synthesizers to shelter with families, volunteer or enlist in the armed forces.For Maryana Klochko, 30, an experimental musician who was scheduled to play her Cxema debut in April, it now “feels much more important to be a good person than to be a good musician,” she said in a recent video interview from outside Lviv. Klochko has rejected two invitations to perform in Russia since 2014, and now she has decided to stop singing in Russian. “It hurts to sing in the language of the people who are killing my people,” she said.A 2019 party Cxema organized in Kyiv in collaboration with Pan, a Berlin-based record label. Vic BakinMany members of the Cxema team have recently been volunteering in humanitarian efforts, like Oleg Patselya, 21, who has been delivering medicine and food to soldiers at the front lines in Donetsk. Ahmed has been using Cxema’s social media channels to share information about the war. She called countering Russian propaganda with facts from inside Ukraine “working on the informational front line.”Throughout the history of electronic music, from the 1980s house scenes in Chicago and New York, to Britain’s 1990s rave culture and the techno explosion in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, clubs have created safe spaces for marginalized communities and so have been, implicitly or explicitly, political spaces.Lepsheiev started to D.J. in 1999 as part of the buzzy arts scene that emerged in Kyiv after the fall of the Soviet Union. Everything ground to a halt with the 2014 Maidan revolution, when violent clashes between protesters and the police led to the ousting of President Viktor F. Yanukovych, swiftly followed by Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Lepsheiev saw this “cultural vacuum” as an opportunity to start something new, founding Cxema to help revive the city’s arts scene and contributing to Kyiv’s emergent position on the European culture map over the past decade.Now, the war is changing the Cxema artists’ relationship with music itself. “If you hear explosions once or twice, you become afraid of every loud sound,” Klochko said. “It’s stressful to wear headphones because you are isolated, so you could miss an attack.”In the rare moments artists feel safe to listen, they now prefer ambient or instrumental music to their previous diet of club tracks. “At the moment I don’t see the sense of electronic music,” Patselya said. “I feel nothing when I listen to it.”A new micro-genre of patriotic club tracks has even emerged, where President Volodymyr Zelensky’s speeches are grafted wholesale onto a throbbing techno beat.When Russia invaded Ukraine, “I felt this existential question about my skills, like they were no help to anybody,” the producer Illia Biriukov said.Eugene StepanetsThe electro producer Illia Biriukov, 31, has continued to write music through the war. “In the difficult first days in Kyiv, electronic music seemed like a decadence of peacetime,” he said. He left town with his synthesizers and attempted to work on an album. “But against the backdrop of brutal events it was very difficult to focus,” he said. “Making music seemed useless. I felt this existential question about my skills, like they were no help to anybody.”Still, he continued making music, partly as a sonic journal of his emotional state. “But when I listen back to those tracks now,” he said, “they feel too aggressive. I’d like to bring a little less aggression into the world.”Artem Ilin, 29, who has played at Cxema three times, has also kept creating music. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, I could die,” he said. “This pushed me to make music because if I die, it’s OK, but my music will be here and people can listen to it.”How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 6Gavriel Heine. More

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Soccer Mommy's ‘Tidal Wave’ of Feelings on ‘Sometimes, Forever’

      by

      The songwriter Sophie Allison finds new sonic frontiers alongside Oneohtrix Point Never on her third studio album, “Sometimes, Forever.”“I don’t know how to feel things small,” Sophie Allison, the songwriter behind Soccer Mommy, sings in “Still,” which closes her third studio album, “Sometimes, Forever.” She continues, “It’s a tidal wave or nothing at all.”With each album, she has expanded the ways she conjures those tidal waves. Allison, 25, started releasing home-recorded Soccer Mommy songs on Bandcamp as a teenager, layering her vocals and guitars, and she dropped out of N.Y.U. in 2017 after her dorm-room recordings landed her a recording contract.She formed a band and toured extensively, and on her studio albums “Clean” (2018) and “Color Theory” (2020), she confidently tapped a legacy of guitar-driven 1990s indie rock: Liz Phair, the Breeders, the Cure, Alanis Morissette, Smashing Pumpkins. Her tunes maintained a sturdy, old-fashioned clarity, even as her lyrics faced disorder, determinedly exposing her fears, depression and self-destructive impulses. “I am the problem for me, now and always,” she sang in “Royal Screw Up” on “Color Theory.”The same struggles run through “Sometimes, Forever,” pushing toward new extremes of misery and (possibly delusional) rapture. “Wherever you’re going I’m going too/Nothing else matters when I’m with you,” Allison vows in “With U,” amid a stately swell of Beatles-esque chords that could promise bliss. But there’s a streak of masochism in her devotion: “I’ll take the pain, feel it every day/Just to have you look at me,” she sings.Even a seemingly happy situation holds ominous undertones. “Shotgun” is the album’s more-or-less poppiest song. Its verse rides a grungy bass line as Allison recalls “coffee and menthol on your breath” and problems with drugs. But she realizes, “This feels the same without the bad things,” leading into a chorus that switches to euphoric major chords and promises “Whenever you want me I’ll be around.” Yet why is she thinking about weapons?Allison writes orderly tunes, with neatly delineated verses and choruses. Her melodies often rise and fall symmetrically and her singing stays levelheaded, almost reserved. But she chose a chaos agent as her producer: Daniel Lopatin, who makes albums as Oneohtrix Point Never and composed the white-knuckled score for “Uncut Gems.”Lopatin knows how to weaponize nebulousness. Working with Soccer Mommy, he used reverb, distortion, synthesizer tones and guitar feedback, at every volume level from subliminal to overpowering, to create backdrops that can easily warp from sumptuous to menacing. Allison fully unleashes him in “Unholy Affliction.” She sings, with a sinking melody, about a compulsive, unattainable, all-consuming perfectionism: “Carve me up and let the colors run,” she offers. Behind her, the production deploys distorted bass lines, salvos of drums, bleary Mellotron notes and down-tuned guitars, all battering just under her voice, clawing at her.In “Darkness Forever,” she confronts suicidal feelings. “Head in the oven didn’t sound so crazy,” Allison sings, alone amid echoes; then a lurching dirge rises around her like a haunted castle. The music is much more upbeat in “Don’t Ask Me,” a galloping rocker with gusts of guitar noise recalling My Bloody Valentine, but the best the lyrics can hope for is temporary numbness. “No more fire in my veins/My will is gone I don’t feel a thing,” she sings; later, she concedes, “I know it comes back around.”Throughout the album, Soccer Mommy staves off despair with musical craftsmanship. The modestly titled “Newdemo” — billed as just another work in progress — is a ballad that starts with Allison singing and strumming a lo-fi guitar. She sings about impending storms and destruction, but the music ascends into a glimmering psychedelic wonderland, with simulated cellos and sitar. Wistfully, warily, Allison observes, “What is a dream but a hope you hold onto?/A lie that you wish would come true.” She doesn’t expect it to last, but for the moment, she’s singing.Soccer Mommy“Sometimes, Forever”(Loma Vista) More

    • 75 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Judge John Hodgman on Phish Shows

      by

      A woman’s fiancé wants to drag her along. Must she go?Rachel writes: My fiancé, Steve, wants me to go to a Phish show — he has been to more than 60 — but every time he turns on Phish, it puts me to sleep. I don’t want to pay for an expensive nap. Please order that he stops asking me to go to his hippie festivals.This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this dispute, so before you get married, you should know the law: In heterosexual marriages, every wife owes her husband one Phish show. Now, some husbands may never collect on this deal. But you are — and I’m sorry to write this for many reasons — on the hook. Phish is a whole world to its fans, and Steve deserves the chance to show what makes it special to him. If after this you decide Phish isn’t for you, the matter is closed. (Unless Steve buys an unused Compulsory Phish Show off some other husband. I like Phish fine, but you can have mine, Steve. Find me on Venmo. $5,000.)To submit a query: Send an email to ethicist@nytimes.com; or send mail to The Ethicist, The New York Times Magazine, 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018. (Include a daytime phone number.) More

    • 125 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      Meghan Stabile, Who Linked Jazz and Hip-Hop, Dies at 39

      by

      Shows that she produced on a shoestring sought to energize the jazz scene by connecting with younger audiences accustomed to D.J.s and turntables.Meghan Stabile, who saw jazz and hip-hop as genres that could cross-pollinate and who, hoping to bring jazz to younger audiences, started a shoestring business producing concerts that explored the intersection of the two, died on June 12 in Valrico, Fla. She was 39.Maureen Freeman, her grandmother, said the cause was suicide. She said that Ms. Stabile had recently relocated to Valrico hoping that might help in her struggles with depression.Ms. Stabile began producing shows while still a student at Berklee College of Music in Boston. She took to calling them Revive Da Live, a name that, at a time when turntablists were dominant, captured her interest in backing hip-hop artists with jazz musicians performing live.“It’s an organic hybrid,” she told The Boston Globe in 2012. “Jazz is in hip-hop’s DNA.”Once she relocated to New York in 2006, she continued to organize Revive Da Live events and formed the Revive Music Group, which produced shows, created an online forum called the Revivalist and released several albums in partnership with Blue Note Records, the noted jazz label.Ms. Stabile generally worked outside the jazz mainstream, booking shows in small clubs, but she gradually became something of a force in New York.“In the last year and a half,” The New York Times wrote in 2013, “she has emerged as a presence around the city — booking, promoting, cajoling, advising and herding young musicians, many of whom are still finding their way.”Don Was, now the president of Blue Note Records, told The Times then that he had first encountered Ms. Stabile two years earlier, when he joined the label as chief creative officer and went looking for the hot new things in jazz.“I started going online, four or five hours a night,” he said.“And invariably,” he continued, “every thread I was following led back to Meghan’s site. So night after night, she appeared to be at the center of the energy.”She was also producing shows in Boston and elsewhere. The goal, as she explained to The Globe, was to energize the jazz scene and connect it to audiences schooled on hip-hop. A Revive Music show at Berklee in 2012, for instance, was called “Hip Hop 1942” and featured ensembles playing jazz tunes, then showing how they had been sampled by hip-hop artists.“It’s important to honor the tradition of the music, and we still have shows that do that,” she told The Globe. “But we also have to honor the music of today and make it more relevant.”Blue Note posted a tribute to her on Twitter.“Beloved by the musicians she worked so hard for,” the post said, “she was a passionate advocate for jazz who built a vibrant scene around the music & gave a platform to so many deserving artists.”Ms. Stabile at the Village Underground in Greenwich Village in 2013. “It’s important to honor the tradition of the music,” she said. “But we also have to honor the music of today and make it more relevant.”Piotr Redlinski for The New York TimesMeghan Erin Stabile was born on July 26, 1982, in Grand Prairie, Texas, to Gina Marie Skidds. Her father was not part of her upbringing, and she was raised largely by Ms. Freeman and an aunt in Dover, N.H. Her relationship with her mother, who died last year, was difficult, she told The Times in 2013, and that gave her a certain irascible quality.“I got kicked out of four schools — three high schools and a middle school,” she said. “For fighting. I went through a lot, and I made it through. It didn’t break me. So always having that strength has been able to pull me through any type of situation.”She entered Berklee as a singer and guitarist, but, Ms. Freeman said in a phone interview, she could not overcome stage fright and soon focused on the business of music. She also got a bartending job at Wally’s Cafe, a jazz club in Boston, and began absorbing the jazz scene.She started producing, her grandmother said, “with nothing except her brain and pencil,” adding that she especially liked to help up-and-coming musicians, even though she never had much money.“She did everything she did,” Ms. Freeman said, “but it was always a scramble.”As Ms. Stabile’s reputation grew, some of her shows were in good-sized venues. In 2013, for instance, she booked the 19-piece Revive Big Band into the Highland Ballroom in Manhattan and lined up the dancer Savion Glover to appear with it. But an event like that belied her staff-of-one operation.“The outside illusion is great,” she told The Times. “Everyone thinks we’re this huge business. But look — it’s me sitting right here.”In 2013 Ms. Stabile struck a deal to produce and curate records for Blue Note, resulting in “Revive Music Presents: Supreme Sonacy Vol. 1,” released in 2015.“The idea of a strain of modern jazz that’s conversant with hip-hop — as a matter of course, rather than calculation — holds sway over much of this music,” Nate Chinen wrote in reviewing that record in The Times.Ms. Stabile had reduced her producing activities in recent years, focusing on her own health. But in a 2017 interview with the website CQP, she said that she thought her work over the years had helped connect two disparate worlds.“When I first started promoting shows, I had to learn how to promote specifically to the jazz heads and specifically to the hip-hop heads,” she said. “I had to find ways to lure them in. If I called it a jazz show, then the hip-hop heads wouldn’t buy tickets. If I called it a hip-hop show, jazz heads wouldn’t buy tickets.“So I had to create a new narrative early on. Once we got them in the room, once they heard the music, there was just no denying how fresh it was.”In addition to her grandmother, Ms. Stabile is survived by a brother, Michael Skidds, and a sister, Caitlyn Chaloux.Ms. Freeman said that though Ms. Stabile had reduced her producing activities, she had a long-term goal inspired by her own difficulties.“She wanted to promote a wellness center for jazz musicians,” she said, “so when they didn’t have a gig and they were struggling, they could go to her center.” More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      James Rado, Co-Creator of the Musical ‘Hair,’ Is Dead at 90

      by

      Working with his fellow writer and actor Gerome Ragni and the composer Galt MacDermot, he jolted Broadway into the Age of Aquarius.James Rado, who jolted Broadway into the Age of Aquarius as a co-creator of “Hair,” the show, billed as an “American tribal love-rock musical,” that transfigured musical theater tradition with radical ’60s iconoclasm and rock ’n’ roll, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 90.The publicist Merle Frimark, a longtime friend, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was cardio-respiratory arrest.So much of the power of “Hair” resided in its seeming raw spontaneity, yet Mr. Rado (pronounced RAY-doe) labored over it for years with his collaborator Gerome Ragni to perfect that affect. Contrary to theatrical lore, he and Mr. Ragni were not out-of-work actors who wrote “Hair” to generate roles they could themselves play, but rather New York stage regulars with growing résumés.They met as cast members in an Off Broadway revue called “Hang Down Your Head and Die,” a London transfer that closed after one performance in October 1964. Mr. Rado bonded with Mr. Ragni and was soon talking to him about collaborating on a musical that would capture the exuberant, increasingly anti-establishment youth culture rising all around them in the streets of Lower Manhattan — a musical about hippies before hippies had a name.A musician before he’d become an actor, Mr. Rado began writing songs with Mr. Ragni, which they sometimes sang in what were then beatnik coffee houses in Greenwich Village.Moving to an apartment in Hoboken, N.J., where rents were even cheaper than in downtown Manhattan, they borrowed a typewriter from their landlord and went to work writing their musical in earnest, transcribing into song the sexual liberation, racial integration, pharmacological experimentation and opposition to the escalating Vietnam War that was galvanizing their young street archetypes. In solidarity, Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni let their short hair grow long.A museum stroll in mid-1965 brought them face to face with a painting of a tuft of hair by the Pop artist Jim Dine. Its title was “Hair.”“I called it to Jerry’s attention, and we were both knocked out,” Mr. Rado later recalled. Their nascent musical now had a name.A moment from the original production of “Hair,” at the Public Theater in Manhattan in 1967.DagmarWhat happened next would become the stuff of Broadway legend, albeit in fits and starts. In October 1966, on a train platform in New Haven, Conn., Mr. Ragni recognized Joseph Papp, impresario of the then-itinerant New York Shakespeare Festival, and handed him a bound script of “Hair.” Mr. Papp took it, read it and resolved to consider making “Hair” the opening production at his Public Theater, just nearing completion in what had been the old Astor Library on Lafayette Street in the East Village.Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni, meanwhile, had decided that their lyrics needed better melodies than the ones they had written, and embarked on a search for a legitimate composer to improve the songs. The search yielded the Canadian-born Galt MacDermot, a most unlikely choice: He was slightly older than his colleagues and a straight arrow with an eclectic musical background but scant Broadway experience. Mr. MacDermot wrote the melody for versions of “Aquarius” and several other songs, on spec, in less than 36 hours. It instantly became clear that he was the ideal choice for setting Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni’s lyric ruminations to rocking show music.A demonstration soon ensued in Mr. Papp’s office, with Mr. MacDermot singing and playing the trio’s new songs. Impressed, Mr. Papp announced that he would open the Public with “Hair.”Yet, second-guessing himself, he soon rescinded his offer, only to reconsider after a return office audition, this time with Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni doing the singing. “Hair” did, in fact, open the Public Theater on Oct. 17, 1967, with the 32-year-old Mr. Ragni leading the cast as George Berger — a hippie tribe’s nominal leader — but without the 35-year-old Mr. Rado, who was deemed too old by the show’s director, Gerald Freedman, to play the doomed protagonist, Claude Hooper Bukowski, even though the character was based almost entirely on Mr. Rado himself.“Hair” — an impressionistic near-fairy tale of a flock of flower children on the streets of New York taking LSD, burning draft cards, shocking tourists and making love before losing their conflicted comrade, Claude, to the Vietnam War — ran for eight weeks at the Public’s brand-new Anspacher Theater, generating ecstatic word of mouth and reviews that ranged from perplexed to appreciative.A wealthy young Midwesterner with political ambitions and strong antiwar politics named Michael Butler stepped in to move the show, first to Cheetah, a nightclub on West 53rd Street, and then — much rewritten by Mr. Rado and his collaborators, and with a visionary new director, Tom O’Horgan, now in charge — on to Broadway, where Mr. Rado was restored to the cast as Claude.Mr. Rado, second from left, with, from left, the actor Paul Nicholas, Mr. Ragni, the actor Oliver Tobias and the director Tom O’Horgan in London shortly after “Hair” opened there in 1968.Getty“Hair” was a Broadway sensation, hailed for its irresistible rock- and soul-driven score, its young cast of utter unknowns, its often-searing topicality and its must-see 20-second nude scene. It ran for 1,750 performances after opening at the Biltmore Theatre, on West 47th Street, on April 29, 1968. (It is now the Samuel J. Friedman Theater.)“Hair” quickly conquered the culture at large — though there were naysayers, who found its nudity, flagrant four-letter words and flouting of the American flag objectionable. It played all across America and ultimately the world, engendering a 1979 film adaptation directed by Milos Forman — which was disavowed by Mr. Rado — and a Tony Award-winning Broadway revival in 2009 that Mr. Rado helped guide. The original cast album won a Grammy Award and was the No. 1 album in the country for 13 straight weeks in 1969. (It was inducted into the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2019.)The score generated ubiquitous cover versions. In 1969 alone, the Fifth Dimension’s medley of “Aquarius” and “Let the Sunshine In” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 (it went on to win the Grammy Award for record of the year), while the Cowsills’ version of the title song reached No. 2, Oliver’s “Good Morning Starshine” hit No. 3 and Three Dog Night’s “Easy to Be Hard” got as high as No. 4. Among the many others who recorded songs from the “Hair” score was Nina Simone.“From the start, I envisioned that the score of ‘Hair’ would be something new for Broadway,” Mr. Rado later reflected, “a kind of pop-rock/show tune hybrid.”“We did have the desire to make something wonderful and spectacular for the moment,” he added. “We thought we’d stumbled on a great idea, and something that potentially could be a hit on Broadway, never thinking of the distant future.”James Alexander Radomski was born on Jan. 23, 1932, in Los Angeles to Alexander and Blanche (Bukowski) Radomski. His father was a sociologist who taught at the University of Rochester in upstate New York. Mr. Rado grew up in a Rochester suburb, Irondequoit, and then in Washington. He graduated from the University of Maryland, where he majored in speech and drama. A lover of Broadway musicals since childhood, he began writing songs in college and co-wrote two musicals that were produced on campus, “Interlude” and “Interlude II.”After serving two years in the Navy, he returned to pursue graduate theater studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington, writing both music and lyrics for a revue there called “Cross Your Fingers.” After moving to New York, he wrote pop songs; recorded with his band, James Alexander and the Argyles; performed in summer stock; and did office work while studying method acting with Lee Strasberg.He landed his first Broadway job in 1963 in the ensemble of “Marathon ’33,” written by the actress June Havoc and produced by the Actors Studio. Following their initial encounter in 1964, he and Mr. Ragni were cast by Mike Nichols in his 1965 Chicago production of Ann Jellicoe’s comedy “The Knack.”In 1966, Mr. Rado appeared on Broadway in James Goldman’s “The Lion in Winter,” originating the role of Richard Lionheart, the oldest son of Henry II of England. His mainstream theatrical focus, however, was being redirected to the downtown avant-garde by Mr. Ragni, who, through his involvement with the Open Theater and Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa E.T.C., introduced Mr. Rado to the experimental aesthetic that became central to the experience of “Hair” onstage.“The truth is, we unlocked each other,” Mr. Rado wrote in a foreword to the book “Hair: The Story of the Show That Defined a Generation” (2010), by Eric Grode. “He was my creative catalyst, I probably his. We were great friends. It was a passionate kind of relationship that we directed into creativity, into writing, into creating this piece. We put the drama between us onstage.”Mr. Rado in 2017 at a Jazz at Lincoln Center celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Off Broadway opening of “Hair.”Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesIn the immediate aftermath of “Hair,” Mr. Rado’s fellowship with Mr. Ragni fractured. “We couldn’t be in a room together, we would burst into an argument,” he recalled. Mr. Rado wrote the music, lyrics and book (with his brother, Ted) for a “Hair” sequel he called “The Rainbow Rainbeam Radio Roadshow,” which ran Off Broadway in 1972, just as Mr. Ragni and Mr. MacDermot were suffering an ignominious Broadway flop with their post-“Hair” musical, “Dude.” Mr. Rado then reunited with Mr. Ragni to write “Sun (Audio Movie),” an environmental musical, with the composer Steve Margoshes, and “Jack Sound and His Dog Star Blowing His Final Trumpet on the Day of Doom,” also with Mr. Margoshes.Mr. Ragni died in 1991. Mr. MacDermot died in 2018.In 2008, Mr. Rado confirmed in an interview with The Advocate what had long been an open secret among his “Hair” castmates and collaborators: that he and Mr. Ragni had been lovers.“It was a deep, lifelong friendship and a love of my life,” Mr. Rado stated simply. “Looking back,” he later elaborated about “Hair,” “what was really underlying the whole thing was the new way men were relating to each other. They were very openly embracing each other as brothers. It wasn’t gay; it wasn’t repressed… We suddenly realized this was a musical about love in the larger sense.”Mr. Rado, whose brother is his only immediate survivor, never married and did not identify as gay, but rather as “omnisexual.” Asked before the 2009 “Hair” revival opened if the show was based on his relationship with Mr. Ragni, Mr. Rado answered yes.“We were in a love mode,” he said, “and this whole love movement started happening around us, so the show got it. ‘Hair’ was our baby in a way, which is pretty cool.”Maia Coleman contributed reporting. More