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      Teodor Currentzis and MusicAeterna Face Scrutiny Over Russian Ties

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      Teodor Currentzis and the ensemble MusicAeterna have faced backlash in the West over their partnership with a state-owned bank in Russia.SALZBURG, Austria — Teodor Currentzis is revered as one of classical music’s most original voices, a rebellious conductor who can breathe fresh life into well-known works. In this European cultural capital, where artists, agents and impresarios gather each summer, he is omnipresent, his name emblazoned on banners and brochures. His fans travel from around the world to hear his performances.But this summer, it is not just his music that is the talk of the Salzburg Festival, one of classical music’s premier events. Currentzis — who is conducting a new double bill of Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” and Carl Orff’s “De Temporum Fine Comoedia” here beginning Tuesday — and his ensemble, MusicAeterna, are drawing attention for another reason: their ties to Russia.Amid the war in Ukraine, Currentzis and MusicAeterna have been assailed for their reliance on VTB Bank, a state-owned Russian institution that has been sanctioned by the United States and other countries but remains the ensemble’s main sponsor. Currentzis and the ensemble have been denounced for their silence on the war and criticized for working with associates of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, including some who sit on the board of MusicAeterna’s foundation.This scrutiny has complicated the career of Currentzis, one of the industry’s most in-demand stars. And it has rattled the 102-year-old Salzburg Festival, whose leaders have stood by MusicAeterna even as it has been shunned by other cultural groups.“It’s not that I’m a coward; it’s so sensitive,” Markus Hinterhäuser, the festival’s artistic director, said in an interview. “We are not for Putin. There is absolutely nothing to discuss about that.”Currentzis and his musicians are now at the center of a debate about how cultural groups should handle artists linked to Russian institutions. Many have cut ties with close associates of Putin, such as the conductor Valery Gergiev, a longtime friend and prominent supporter of the Russian president, who was once a fixture at the Salzburg Festival.Currentzis, center, with the MusicAeterna choir and the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra.Marco BorrelliiOther Western institutions, however, have been criticized for overreach after they canceled performances by Russian artists not associated with Putin, and even with some who had spoken out against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.The Bartok-Orff double bill features the MusicAeterna choir. And its appearance, with Currentzis in the pit, has already drawn protests from politicians, artists and activists, who say the festival should not provide a forum to MusicAeterna during wartime.“He belongs to the system of Putin,” Vasyl Khymynets, the Ukrainian ambassador to Austria, said in an interview. “He hasn’t criticized this brutal war, yet he has the chance to be presented on one of the most famous stages in Europe and probably in the world.”Our Coverage of the Russia-Ukraine WarGrain Blockade: A breakthrough deal aims to lift a Russian blockade on Ukrainian grain shipments, easing a global food crisis. But in the fields of Ukraine, farmers are skeptical.An Ambitious Counterattack: Ukraine has been laying the groundwork to retake Kherson from Russia. But the endeavor would require huge resources, and could come at a heavy toll.Economic Havoc: As food, energy and commodity prices continue to climb around the world, few countries are feeling the bite as much as Ukraine.Inside a Siege: For 80 days, at the Avtostal steelworks, a relentless Russian assault met unyielding Ukrainian resistance. This is how it was for those who were there.The esteemed pianist Evgeny Kissin, a frequent performer in Salzburg, said that while he would not object if Currentzis appeared with a Western orchestra, MusicAeterna’s ties to the Russian government were problematic.“In the current situation, groups funded by the Russian state should not be allowed to perform in the civilized world,” said Kissin, who was born in Moscow and is now based in Prague, citing Russia’s “criminal war in Ukraine.”Currentzis, through his representatives, declined to comment.Since founding MusicAeterna in Siberia in 2004, Currentzis has sought to defy labels. He is known as an uncompromising classical musician but has also earned a reputation as a punk, a goth and an anarchist. Born in Athens, he went to Russia in his 20s to study music and now carries a Russian passport. (Putin awarded him citizenship by presidential decree in 2014, the Russia news media reported.)Currentzis began his career as an outsider trying to build artistic centers away from the traditional bases of Moscow and St. Petersburg, including at the Novosibirsk State Opera in Siberia and in the industrial city of Perm. He stood up to the Russian authorities, including in 2017, when his friend and collaborator Kirill Serebrennikov, one of Russia’s most prominent theater directors, was detained in Moscow, a move seen as retribution for his critical portrayals of life under Putin.More recently, Currentzis has worked to win the support of the establishment, finding a partner in VTB Bank, which since 2016 has helped finance MusicAeterna’s concerts and recording projects. With that bank’s support, Currentzis opened a base for the ensemble in St. Petersburg in 2019.The invasion of Ukraine, on Feb. 24, coincided with his 50th birthday. That same day, he led a birthday concert with MusicAeterna in St. Petersburg, where he conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He performed the same piece again two days later in Moscow before an audience of more than 1,500 people, according to Russian news reports.Soon after, the ensemble began to face questions about its benefactors, and a performance at the Philharmonie de Paris was canceled while one at the Bavarian State Opera was postponed to 2024. In Vienna, a planned benefit concert in April in support of Ukraine was canceled after activists and officials — including Khymynets, the ambassador — objected to the idea of featuring Russian artists at an event for Ukraine.Some presenters were concerned about hosting an ensemble with ties to several prominent Russian officials, including Andrey Kostin, the chairman of VTB Bank; Alexander Beglov, the governor of St. Petersburg; and Elvira Nabiullina, the governor of Russia’s central bank. They all sit on the board of the MusicAeterna Cultural Initiatives Support Fund.Currentzis after a performance in Perm, Russia, in 2019. James Hill for The New York TimesOthers were sympathetic to Currentzis and his musicians, believing that if they expressed opinions on the war they could face punishment in Russia. As criticism of the group has intensified, they have faced pressure to speak out against the invasion, and to secure financing outside Russia.In March, SWR Symphony Orchestra in Germany, where Currentzis is the chief conductor, issued a statement calling for peace, though it did not criticize the Russian government or Putin. “Teodor Currentzis and the members of the SWR Symphony Orchestra unequivocally support the common appeal for peace and reconciliation,” the statement said.Louwrens Langevoort is the artistic and managing director of the Cologne Philharmonic. In an interview, he recalled that Currentzis, while smoking a cigarette in his dressing room after an appearance with the SWR Symphony there in late March, said he longed for an “ideal world” in which he could work in both Russia and the West.“He was really aware that something has to be done,” Langevoort said. “Pressure came from all sides and he — for reasons of safety for all parties living in Russia — would not make any declaration.”Even some of Currentzis’s staunchest supporters are pushing the ensemble to find new backers. Among them are Matthias Naske, the artistic director of the Vienna Konzerthaus, who said in an interview that his hall would not engage MusicAeterna until “completely independent financing of the orchestra is secured.” Currentzis will still be allowed to perform there, he added.“Teodor Currentzis is an exceptional artist who uses the power of music to stand up for humanistic values,” he said. “He feels responsible and sticks to his ensembles in Russia that he has built up there. It is wrong to punish him for not abandoning his musicians.”In Salzburg, leaders of the festival have sought to counter accusations that they are endorsing Russia’s cultural aims. The opening ceremony of the festival on Tuesday included a work by Valentin Silvestrov, Ukraine’s best known living composer. A keynote speech, by the Bulgarian-German writer Ilija Trojanow, was titled “The Tone of War, the Keys of Peace.”Hinterhäuser said he did not want to force MusicAeterna’s artists to speak out against the war.“They are not soldiers; they are not responsible for what’s happening,” he said. “It’s not a collective guilt.”The festival’s other ties to Russia have also come under scrutiny. One of the sponsors of the production of the double bill is GES-2 House of Culture, which is affiliated with the Russian oligarch Leonid Mikhelson. He was sanctioned by the United Kingdom and Canada — though, crucially for Salzburg, not in the European Union — after the invasion.Currentzis, who made his debut in Salzburg in 2017 with Mozart’s Requiem and “La Clemenza di Tito,” has tried to shift the focus back to his art. Last week at the festival, he led a performance of Shostakovich’s “Babi Yar” Symphony, featuring members of the MusicAeterna choir and the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra.Alexander Meraviglia-Crivelli, the artistic and executive director of that orchestra, said he had asked his players after the invasion whether they wanted to go forward with the concert. Nearly all wanted to play, he recalled, though a Ukrainian musician expressed concerns about appearing alongside Russian artists.“We strongly believe that in the arts and education, exclusion and cancellation are the wrong thing,” he said.Currentzis’s defenders have pointed to his performance of the Shostakovich symphony, which was written to remember the 1941 massacre of Jews near Kyiv by Nazis, as a statement of his views on the current war. But the performance was planned long before, and Currentzis made no remarks at the concert.At the end of the final movement, he held the hall in prolonged silence. Then he smiled as the audience erupted into a standing ovation that lasted for more than seven minutes.Joshua Barone contributed reporting from Salzburg, Austria, and Milana Mazaeva from New York. More

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      Joni Mitchell Performs Surprise Show at Newport Folk Festival

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      The 78-year-old artist performed a full set, her first in about two decades, at the renowned festival in Rhode Island on Sunday.Joni Mitchell, the revered Canadian singer-songwriter and one of the defining musicians of the 1960s and ’70s, surprised an audience in Rhode Island on Sunday when she appeared at the Newport Folk Festival to perform her first full set in about two decades, guitar in hand.Mitchell, never one for the limelight, has remained largely out of the public eye since having a brain aneurysm in 2015. As she recovered, she made a few brief appearances: In December, she gave a rare public speech as she accepted a Kennedy Center Honor, and in April, made a televised appearance at the Grammys and was honored at a gala for MusiCares, a Grammy-affiliated charity.But on Sunday, Mitchell, 78, wearing a beret and sunglasses, performed some of her most iconic songs, including “Carey,” “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Both Sides Now.”At one point, Mitchell, an electric guitar slung over her shoulder, performed a several-minutes-long solo during “Just Like This Train,” as fans whooped and cheered.“After all she’s been through, she returned to the Newport Folk Fest stage after 53 years and I will never forget sitting next to her while she stopped this old world for a while,” the singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile, who sang backup for Mitchell during her festival appearance, said in a Tweet.Having “looked at life from so many sides,” Mitchell has come “out of the storm singing like a prophet,” she added.Although Mitchell has limited her appearances in recent years, she has not avoided the headlines.In January, Mitchell joined Neil Young in boycotting the streaming service Spotify, over its role in giving a platform to Covid-19 vaccine misinformation.“Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives,” Mitchell wrote of the company at the time. She added, “I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue.”On Sunday, several musicians, including Carlile, flanked Mitchell onstage, and sang with her. “I will never be over this. I can’t even watch it without the tears coming back,” Carlile wrote later on Twitter. “Please forgive me.”As Mitchell and Carlile sang “A Case of You” from the influential “Blue” album, released more than 50 years ago, Mitchell sang:Oh, I could drink a case of you, darlingAnd I would still be on my feetOh, I would still be on my feet.The crowd roared. More

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      Lizzo Earns Her Second No. 1 Song: ‘About Damn Time’

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      The singer and rapper’s disco-tinged hit follows her 2019 smash “Truth Hurts” to the top of the Hot 100. Her album debuts at No. 2.If you have tuned in your local Top 40 radio station recently, or fired up TikTok, there’s a good chance you have come across Lizzo’s discofied hit “About Damn Time” (or at least, on your phone, found it in meme form).This week, after a three-month climb, “About Damn Time” becomes Lizzo’s second song to hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, after “Truth Hurts” — another inescapable hit-slash-meme — in 2019. “About Damn Time” displaces Harry Styles’s “As It Was,” which falls to No. 2 after a 10-week run at the top. Also on the singles chart, Kate Bush’s 37-year-old “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God),” still riding a new wave of popularity from its appearance in the Netflix show “Stranger Things,” has reached a high of No. 3.The popularity of “About Damn Time,” however, wasn’t enough to send Lizzo’s new LP, “Special,” to the top of the album chart. That position is still held by Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti,” which notches its fourth time in a row at No. 1, and sixth time overall since its release in May.In its 11th week out, “Un Verano” had the equivalent of 103,000 sales in the United States, with virtually all of its commercial activity attributable to 143 million clicks on streaming services, according to the tracking service Luminate. Week after week, “Un Verano” has proved a streaming blockbuster, even as none of its individual tracks has climbed higher than No. 4 on the Hot 100 chart (which is based on a combination of streaming, track sales and radio airplay).“Special,” Lizzo’s fourth album — and second for a major label — opens at No. 2 with the equivalent of 69,000 sales, including 37 million streams and 39,000 copies sold as a complete package. On TikTok, Lizzo posted videos of herself shopping for “Special” vinyl in Target and reacting as fans buy and drop the needle their copies. (Grape-colored, “standard black” or both?)No. 2 is Lizzo’s highest chart position on the album chart yet, surpassing that of her last album, “Cuz I Love You,” which went to No. 4. As Billboard notes, “Special” is the highest-charting album released by a woman this year.Also on the album chart this week, Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House” is No. 3, Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 4 and Drake’s “Honestly, Nevermind” is No. 5. More

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      U.K. Will Host Eurovision in 2023

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      Organizers had ruled out Ukraine from hosting because of safety concerns from Russia’s ongoing invasion.Britain, the runner-up of Eurovision 2022, will host the popular song contest in 2023 instead of war-torn Ukraine, which won the competition and the right to host next year’s event but was ruled out by organizers because of safety concerns.The announcement on Monday made official what had been widely predicted since Ukraine won the event in May. Tim Davie, the director general of the BBC, said in a statement that the process of choosing a city to host would begin soon.“Being asked to host the largest and most complex music competition in the world is a great privilege,” he said in the statement. “The BBC is committed to making the event a true reflection of Ukrainian culture alongside showcasing the diversity of British music and creativity.”Officials and artists in Ukraine protested last month when the competition’s organizers, the European Broadcasting Union, said that Russia’s ongoing invasion meant Ukraine could not provide “the security and operational guarantees” needed to host the event. Ukraine had offered three potential locations that it said were safe from the fighting: Lviv, in western Ukraine; the Zakarpattia region which borders Hungary and Slovakia; and the capital, Kyiv.Martin Österdahl, Eurovision’s executive supervisor, said in a statement on Monday that the 2023 contest “will showcase the creativity and skill of one of Europe’s most experienced public broadcasters whilst ensuring this year’s winners, Ukraine, are celebrated and represented throughout the event.”Representatives from UA:PBC, a Ukrainian broadcaster, will work with the BBC on the Ukrainian elements of the show, Eurovision said in a statement. Mykola Chernotytskyi, head of the broadcaster’s managing board, said in a statement that the event “will not be in Ukraine but in support of Ukraine,” adding that organizers would “add Ukrainian spirit to this event.”The competition invites artists from countries across Europe, plus some farther afield including Australia and Israel, to compete to be voted the best act. Over 160 million people watched in May as Kalush Orchestra, a Ukrainian rap act, was crowned the winner.Britain has hosted eight times before, most recently in 1998. At least 17 cities in Britain have said they intend to bid for becoming the host city, organizers said. More

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      Chaos and Creation: Inside the Making of Yeezy Gap

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      In 2020, two fashion brands announced an unusual alliance. Now that goods are finally hitting stores, is Yeezy Gap a corporate-creative cautionary tale, or a new model for fashion to come?It was almost 90 degrees in Times Square on Thursday morning when a scene began to play out on Broadway that was so unexpected it could have been a mirage: 100 people were wrapped around the block outside the Gap, waiting for its doors to open.Inside the store, which had been transformed into a kind of blackened cavern punctuated by digital screens, 24 industrial-size sacks were lined up in two long rows and stuffed with clothing from Yeezy Gap, the collaboration between the artist formerly known as Kanye West (now simply Ye) and the giant ur-American brand.For anyone following the partnership since its buzzy birth more than two years ago, this was a major development: the first time customers would be able to see and touch the clothes inside a store — albeit not hung from racks or folded on shelves, but piled into those huge bags.They would get to try on the unisex tees, double-layered hoodies and long-sleeve shirts in dark colors: tops with slightly skewed, look-again proportions, sometimes seamless or cropped, with dropped shoulders. When they swiveled in front of the fitting room mirrors, they would see images of doves in flight printed across their backs.

      .css-fg61ac{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;position:relative;}@media (min-width:600px){.css-fg61ac{margin-bottom:0;-webkit-flex-basis:calc(2 / 3 * 100%);-ms-flex-preferred-size:calc(2 / 3 * 100%);flex-basis:calc(2 / 3 * 100%);}}.css-1ga3qu9{-webkit-flex-basis:50%;-ms-flex-preferred-size:50%;flex-basis:50%;}.css-rrq38y{margin:1rem auto;max-width:945px;}.css-1wsofa1{margin-top:10px;color:var(–color-content-quaternary,#727272);font-family:nyt-imperial,georgia,’times new roman’,times,Songti TC,simsun,serif;font-weight:400;font-size:0.875rem;line-height:1.125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1wsofa1{font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;}}@media (max-width:600px){.css-1wsofa1{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}.css-1nnraid{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;margin:0 auto;gap:4px;}@media (min-width:600px){.css-1nnraid{-webkit-flex-direction:row;-ms-flex-direction:row;flex-direction:row;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;height:auto;gap:8px;}}.css-1yworrz{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:row-reverse;-ms-flex-direction:row-reverse;flex-direction:row-reverse;gap:4px;}@media (min-width:600px){.css-1yworrz{-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-flex-basis:calc((100% / 3) – 4px);-ms-flex-preferred-size:calc((100% / 3) – 4px);flex-basis:calc((100% / 3) – 4px);gap:8px;}}Outside the Gap in Times Square, where the store’s design was “re-engineered” to mark the first time Yeezy Gap products would be sold in a physical store.

      Ultimately they would get to judge for themselves how the boxy silhouettes and thick cotton differed from Gap’s typical offering — and decide whether that was enough to shift the fortunes of the brand: to make people across the country line up in anticipation, spend with alacrity and see Gap once again as a defining, disruptive staple of American fashion.As opposed to viewing it as a corporation — Gap Inc. is the parent company of Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy and Athleta — that is currently wrestling with the departure of its chief executive after only two years, along with diminishing profits (including a net $162 million loss in the first quarter of this year) and dwindling cultural relevance.It was that uncool factor that seemingly drove Gap to announce, in June 2020, a 10-year deal with the undeniably cool Ye and his fashion line Yeezy, with the option to renew at the five-year mark, at which point Gap hoped Yeezy Gap would be generating $1 billion in annual sales. Though mass-market brands have engaged in one-off collaborations with high-end designers and celebrities for years, Yeezy Gap was, in scope and ambition, unlike any the retail world had seen.Except that in its first 18 months, the partnership yielded just two products, both sold only online.It wasn’t until a third party, Balenciaga, the French luxury house, entered the collaboration that a full Yeezy Gap collection was finally released this year (though it was still relatively small, with 36 styles in total unveiled in May). This weekend, a portion of the collection is being rolled out in about 50 stores nationwide, in cities including Chicago, Dallas and San Francisco: a selection of eight styles, with more promised later in the year.It is a milestone in the much-watched collaboration, but one that raises the question: What took so long?The display inside the Times Square store: industrial-size sacks filled with Yeezy Gap clothing.via GapWhen Corporate Meets CreativeGoing into the Gap deal, Ye had a certain track record in the fashion-for-the-masses business; in 2020, the sneaker collaboration between Yeezy and Adidas brought in nearly $1.7 billion in revenue, according to Bloomberg.He had less success in building a ready-to-wear brand. An early attempt at a glitzy namesake luxury label in Paris had fizzled, and a comeback with the more minimal, conceptual athleisure Yeezy yielded unpredictable results (including one widely criticized show on Roosevelt Island at which models fainted in the heat). Still, there was no denying his cultural influence and compulsive watchability.Gap’s footing was less sure. In 2020, the brand’s net sales (about $3.4 billion) had been declining every year since 2013, largely in line with the demise of many traditional shopping malls (and not helped by the pandemic). That year, Gap Inc. said it would close 30 percent of its Gap and Banana Republic stores in North America, about 350 locations in total, by January 2024.Industry wisdom said the company needed something big to stop the downward spiral. Ye was about as big as they come.But he was not, as Mickey Drexler, who led Gap from 1983 to 2002, told Yahoo Finance in 2021, “a corporate person, and Gap is a big corporation,” with hierarchies, systems, calendars and fluency in SKUs. Mr. Drexler said he had advised Ye against the deal. “It doesn’t make any sense, in my opinion,” Mr. Drexler said at the time.Julie Gilhart, the president of Tomorrow Projects, agreed. “In my experience, Gap was all about risk management,” she said. “They didn’t want to disgruntle anyone. And if you go with Kanye, you have to know there is risk involved.”One week after the Yeezy Gap deal was announced, for example, he announced his run for president; a string of heated campaign remarks and tweets about his family compelled his wife at the time, Kim Kardashian West, to make a statement about his bipolar disorder.But the controversy did not deter either side. They had agreed to an arrangement in which Ye’s fortunes were tied to those of his products; he received stock warrants that would vest when certain sales goals — such as reaching $250 million in a fiscal year, — were met, as well as royalties. (Gap has not disclosed the line’s sales figures to date.)Ye — whose vision, according to Gap, was to create “modern, elevated basics for men, women and kids at accessible price points” — got to work, bringing on the Nigerian-British designer Mowalola Ogunlesi as design director and testing out pieces as early as the summer of 2020. (Ms. Ogunlesi left after a year, at the expiration of her contract.)According to two people who worked on the collaboration, the original goal was to have a collection ready by Singles Day, an annual Chinese shopping event, in November 2020. The garments were conceived to be relatively affordable, priced around $50.Images from that period shared with The New York Times showed brightly colored pants, shorts, shirts, hoodies and belts, all in line with the traditional casual clothing associated with Gap. (In a video shared on Twitter by Ye from a fitting in July 2020, at least one tie-dye-effect pink and purple bodysuit is visible.) At the time, there were numerous “style-ups” — a fashion term that means trying out samples of clothing on bodies to see how they look — photographed by Nick Knight, the SHOWStudio founder and longtime Yeezy collaborator, and paid for by Gap.But these designs were never put into production, despite what the two former employees described as long hours and mounting impatience from Gap over missed deadlines — and despite the fact that it is almost unheard-of in the industry to eliminate almost an entire collection once samples have been made.Taking the Yeezy Gap “round jacket” for a walk.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesAccording to Zac Posen, who has worked with Target, Brooks Brothers and David’s Bridal, as well as having his own fashion line, the “standard” ratio of sample garments that ultimately end up in stores was historically 2 to 1 (for every two samples, one was chosen and one discarded). Though Mr. Posen said he had “heard of 3 to 1 or even 4 to 1, that’s less common these days,” as brands, especially public brands like Gap, become more oriented to the bottom line.Ye, however, was widely known to be both a perfectionist and a nonconformist.“I don’t think his mentality is at all the mentality we see in more classic fashion houses,” said Mr. Knight, the photographer. “If he wants to spend a year looking into the color blue, we’ll spend a year looking into the color blue, which is extremely inspiring when so often schedules take priority over creativity. He doesn’t see himself in any way constrained by deadlines or seasons. I don’t think he would even use the word ‘collection’ for what he is doing.”Referring to the 2020 designs that weren’t put into production, a Gap spokeswoman said in an email that “a collection was not discarded; this was part of the creative process. The team was intentional about iterating until they were satisfied.” The broader goal was “product development, testing and learning.”One early product that survived the creative process was the “round jacket,” a puffy jacket with no closures made from recycled nylon and polyester fill.This was Yeezy Gap’s first piece, made available for purchase in June 2021, nearly one year after the partnership was announced. It was sold for $200 in three colors (first blue, then black and later red), and those who preordered received the jacket about five months later.Yeezy Gap’s second piece dropped online a few months later: a plain, heavy cotton hoodie in six colors for $90. Ye later claimed that after airing a commercial featuring the hoodie, Gap sold $14 million worth of the black version. (Gap would not confirm this figure, though previously said the hoodie broke its single-day online sales record.)Its name? The “perfect hoodie.”Avatars in a “virtual game experience” designed by Demna and released on Thursday.via Gapvia GapThe Balenciaga FactorBetween the puffer and the hoodie, Gap intervened, hiring Leonardo Lawson, the former chief executive of the British brand the Vampire’s Wife, to help drive strategy for Yeezy Gap — with Ye’s blessing, Mr. Lawson said. (Ye did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)Mr. Lawson’s directive has essentially been to build a conduit between Yeezy and Gap, acting as a translator of sorts. He helped opened a Los Angeles office for Yeezy Gap, whose operations had previously been spread out across several cities, depending on where Ye and his core team were at any given time. This “innovation studio” today houses about 20 employees, said Mr. Lawson, who was promoted to head of Yeezy Gap in March.“We’re constantly flexing, depending on the needs, and helping each side understand what the asks are, why things need to be done, what maybe we cannot do,” he said.Mr. Lawson was asked about the early structural difficulties of the partnership. “When I came here, to be honest, I saw it,” he said. “I think everyone knows and understands that Ye’s background and pedigree and fashion is really working with luxury houses and ateliers in Europe. Those systems and how those companies work and are set up are very different than how a company like Gap is set up. So it was really about bringing these two worlds together.”Meanwhile, Ye, who released his album “Donda” the same month Mr. Lawson was brought on board, had already asked Demna to get involved.The mononymous creative director of Balenciaga had worked with Ye on his first Yeezy collection, “Season 1,” in 2015, and the two men have maintained an ongoing creative conversation via WhatsApp and text — Ye’s preferred means of communication — ever since.“Ye called me in March 2021 telling me he was working on this project, and it was his dream for me to work together with him on it,” Demna said this month. “He said this is what he needs there: to bring this know-how to the brand, bring the structure; fittings, atelier, patternmaker. The way they were doing things was more trying them on and styling rather than constructing.”The Ye version of a checkout counter at the Gap in Times Square.via GapThough he was busy with several Balenciaga collections, Demna said he felt the need to “be there for him to help him create a solid foundation for Ye’s aesthetic on which they can now build. To accelerate the process.” Hence the name of the collaboration: “engineered by Balenciaga.” They were, Demna said, engineering the prototypes in the Balenciaga studios in Paris and Zurich after he and Ye talked (or texted) through the ideas.“Lots of talking, thousands of images shared,” he said of their exchanges. They talked about how Ye wanted a “fabric that is very light but also warm and makes no sound — kind of like nylon, but not nylon. Things that seemed to be impossible or very hard to make technically.“Ye’s not really interested in fashion at all,” Demna said. “He wants to know: ‘How can we make a new version of the hoodie? What’s next? What do we want to wear in 20 years?’”Then, Demna said, once “the shape was there, I would make a decision — OK, it’s ready, we launch it.” At that point, he would send the designs to Ye and the Gap teams in Los Angeles, after which they would “start the process on how to industrialize them.” (Ye also went to Paris, and Mr. Lawson said prototypes were also created by the Yeezy Gap team in Los Angeles, and characterized the work as a three-way partnership.)“Me being on board gave him reassurance,” Demna said, “so there could be a moment of letting go.”And the clothes, which included a catsuit ($300), cargo pants ($220) and thigh-high boots (coming later this year), could, with the help of the strengthened Los Angeles infrastructure, make it out of the experimental phase and into the public’s waiting hands.The first Yeezy Gap Engineered by Balenciaga (or YGEBB, as it’s called internally) designs were made available for purchase online in late February.A week later, Ye was in the news again, for a music video in which an animated version of himself buries Pete Davidson, Ms. Kardashian’s new boyfriend, alive.The “virtual game experience” playing on screens outside the Times Square store.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesWhat Happens Now?Gap’s preferred word to explain the unconventional production timeline of Yeezy Gap is “fluid.”The work with Balenciaga “really has been a fluid collaboration,” Mr. Lawson said. The entire experience of building Yeezy Gap “has been about being fluid,” and “creating new ways of doing things, and understanding how these ways of doing things will impact the bigger Gap brand and help everything be a little bit more fluid.”But is fluidity enough to help Gap make a profit? This spring, before the largest Yeezy Gap drop to date (the Balenciaga collection in late May), analysts who spoke to The Times were skeptical of Ye’s long-term effect on Gap as a company.“Anyone who was excited about the Yeezy partnership when it was announced is disappointed with the amount of product that is coming out,” said Simeon Siegel, a retail analyst at BMO Capital Markets.The discussion around Yeezy Gap has largely morphed from focusing on sales to focusing on buzz. And Gap is investing considerably in that buzz: in addition to fees Ye has already been or will be paid for the collection — and the costs of maintaining the innovation studio, as well as its sampling and production — Gap also provides support for music videos and concerts that feature Yeezy Gap products.“The Yeezy line was never going to be big enough to change Gap’s fortunes,” Mr. Siegel said. “It needed to be powerful enough to elevate the rest of Gap’s brand, and we clearly have not seen that.”With the advent of the in-store product, however, that could change. Already 70 percent of Yeezy Gap’s customers are first-time Gap customers, the company said during an earnings call last year.Mr. Lawson said that Gap interim leadership is fully committed to the Yeezy Gap vision. Ye himself posted a recent statement on Instagram after a call with Gap management calling the executive chairman Bob Martin “one of the most inspiring people I’ve heard speak in business.”“Bob I need to meet with you as soon as possible,” he wrote. (This may not be the way Mr. Martin usually sets up meetings, but according to a Gap spokeswoman, the appointment was already in motion.)According to Demna, Balenciaga’s work on the project is now over, and he’s not sure what will happen next. But Yeezy Gap has its sights on other future partnerships, in addition to growing its core business. There is a structure in place to adapt and iterate for the future: Yeezy Gap engineered by … fill in the bank.As Demna said, when it comes to Ye: “This was just step No. 1. He needed a starting point, and that was my challenge: to give him the starting point. But he is still miles and miles away from where he wants this to go.” More

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      Maggie Rogers’s Higher Calling

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      Musicians often talk about seeking the divine in their work. The 28-year-old singer-songwriter went to Harvard to study it as she made her second major-label album, “Surrender.”“I wanted to build a framework for myself, for how to keep art sacred,” Maggie Rogers said of her detour to Harvard Divinity School during the pandemic.OK McCausland for The New York TimesLike a lot of artists during the early days of the pandemic, Maggie Rogers was living a sequestered, solitary life. She had retreated to coastal Maine, trying to alleviate the burnout of touring for her 2019 major-label debut “Heard It In a Past Life,” with little plan to write. “I was hiding out,” she said. “At a complete loss for words.”But Rogers, who had earned a Grammy nomination for best new artist with that album, which merged her folky singer-songwriter roots with dance-tent momentum, didn’t stay cloistered for long. Remembering that “making beats is fun,” she joined a virtual song-a-day accountability group with the likes of Feist, Damien Rice and Mac DeMarco. “I would go for a walk and then listen to all my favorite artists make some [expletive] in our kitchens,” she said. “It was so sick.” The demos she produced in her own home studio sounded joyful, which surprised her.She thought the tumult and rage of the moment would lead her elsewhere. And then it did.“I talk so much about the artist’s job being to feel,” she said recently. “Feeling through the last couple of years — there’s been so much pain and so much suffering and so much injustice in the world. It brought up a lot of questions for me about what I believe, and how I want to structure my artistic practice or my business. Or my life.”So Rogers, while she was busy concocting sick beats in her kitchen, enrolled in Harvard Divinity School. “I wanted to build a framework for myself, for how to keep art sacred,” she said.Rogers was an undergraduate at New York University when her track “Alaska” drew a viral bit of adulation from Pharrell Williams, and she tried to recapture the city’s energy on her new album.OK McCausland for The New York TimesShe graduated in May with a master’s degree in religion and public life, a new program for mostly secular professionals “whose work is focused on having a positive social impact,” according to the university. In Rogers’s case, it included her struttingly confident performance at Coachella this past spring. “I feel super religious, if music is a religion,” she said. “When I’m in the crowd of fans or onstage, that’s when I felt the most connected to something greater than myself.”As she was studying, she was also completing “Surrender,” her second album for Capitol, a hypnotically danceable ode to ecstatic abandon, making leaps and navigating worry. Co-produced by Rogers and Kid Harpoon (Harry Styles, Florence + the Machine) and embracing distortion — a new sound for her — it’s due out Friday.“Right now, the joy on the record feels like the greatest form of rebellion,” Rogers, 28, said. It’s a hard-won hope, which — politically, culturally, environmentally — might be the vibe of the moment. “Surrender” was also part of her thesis, which examined cultural consciousness, the spirituality of public gathering and the ethics of pop power. The album, she told me, is “joy with teeth.”Terry Tempest Williams, an essayist, naturalist and writer in residence at Harvard Divinity School, taught Rogers in a class called “Finding Beauty in a Broken World.” Her fans may know her as “a rock star,” Williams wrote in an email. “But I know her as a writer. Her words are lean, staccato, unadorned, visceral. She writes through the full range of emotion that she inhabits. ”Williams added that Rogers “is mindful of the responsibility that comes especially as a musician with a large stage.”“The bridge between a public life and private life is stillness, having time to remember who you are and who you are not,” Williams wrote. “She dances between motion and stillness.”On a drizzly June weekday, Rogers and I met at an Upper East Side corner diner, to wait out the rain before making a pilgrimage to one of her sacred spots in the city, Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. She wore a chopped-off white undershirt, a cozy black thrifted sweater (all hail the Portland, Maine, Goodwill) and her once long, Laurel Canyon songwriter-esque hair shorn into a pixie — a development that was covered by Teen Vogue, though she’s sported that cut for most of her life. An angular Ferragamo mini-purse and square metal-capped boots were the only hints of major label star.Freckle-faced and warm, she was eloquent about her musical choices, with an undercurrent of goofball (like when she shoved a tampon up her nose to stanch a nosebleed while dancing at Coachella — and then used the video clip to advertise her set).Rogers had just moved out of her grad school apartment in Cambridge, Mass., a few weeks before — “my hot take on Boston: great food, bad lighting” — and was still determining where she would set up her new artistic life. “I feel like I’m in post-grad for the next year or something,” she said. “I’m doing field research.”She grew up in rural Easton, Md.; the Los Angeles apartment where she now stores her stuff has never quite felt like home. While she was an undergraduate at New York University studying music production and engineering, her track “Alaska” drew a viral bit of adulation from Pharrell Williams, and she felt a pull to the city as the place where she learned “what kind of artist I wanted to be.” “Surrender” seemed to her like a punky New York album; she missed what she called “the raw human energy, and community — that claustrophobic, someone sweating on you in the subway” connectedness.“There’s been so much pain and so much suffering and so much injustice in the world,” Rogers said. “It brought up a lot of questions for me about what I believe, and how I want to structure my artistic practice or my business. Or my life.”OK McCausland for The New York TimesThe video for the propulsive, synthy first single “That’s Where I Am,” with a bed of glitches and handclaps underneath Rogers’s clarion vocals about desire, pays tribute to that, as she catwalks through downtown Manhattan in a green boa, and piles into a cab with a New York crosscurrent — club kids and office workers. (The guitarist Hamilton Leithauser, the photographer Quil Lemons and David Byrne, who she cold-called to collaborate, show up too.)Her musical process starts with making a mood board. “In production, I always think of records as world building — if I understand that, what the world is, it’s way easier for me to understand what the bass should sound like,” she said.Kid Harpoon, the British producer, with whom she co-wrote her 2018 single “Light On,” remembered that the images for “Surrender” included black-and-white grittiness and ’70s New York — “Someone on their knees in a club with their top off, sweat all down them. Up-close teeth.” Rogers insisted on recording in the city too, a choice he didn’t necessarily understand until they set up shop last summer at Electric Lady, the storied West Village studio. “I’ve seen her just completely uncompromising on some of her ideas — quite brutally sometimes,” he said. “It’s a real strength. She knows what she wants.”They used the location to bring in other musicians, like Florence Welch, who was upstairs recording with Jack Antonoff and played tambourine on the jagged power anthem “Shatter,” and Jon Batiste, who was “just reacting” with so much delight, Kid Harpoon said, that they sometimes had to reset the take for his keyboards because the Grammy-winning bandleader was laughing.And Rogers, after years of performing — she had self-released two albums by the time she was 20 — found other shades in her own already protean vocals. “I learned how to use my lower register,” she said, “to just sing with my whole body.”“Right now, the joy on the record feels like the greatest form of rebellion,” Rogers said.OK McCausland for The New York Times“Heard It in a Past Life” was suffused with nature samples; “Surrender” uses distortion, which Rogers had hardly worked with previously. But she found an audio plug-in and flew with it. “The world was collapsing and my life in Maine was incredibly quiet,” she said. “Noise felt so therapeutic.”In a video introducing the album, she called it “chaos I could control.”When the skies cleared, Rogers and I meandered to Bethesda Fountain. Along with St. Mark’s Church in the East Village — where Patti Smith had her first poetry-and-electric-guitar gig — it’s a place she often detours to, for inspiration. She was drawn in by its history, too: “Angel of the Waters,” the 8-foot tall bronze sculpture at the center of the fountain, was designed by Emma Stebbins, the first woman to be commissioned for a major public artwork in New York, and unveiled in 1873.“This feels hopeful to me,” Rogers said, as tourists snapped pictures by the fountain and dozens of turtles dozed and lapped in the lake beyond. “The angel represents peace and temperance. She holds a lily. People still come here.”Once she even saw Joan Didion, a hero, being wheeled around by an attendant for an afternoon constitutional. Rogers was too awed to approach her, but did notice she was sockless. “I remember seeing her ankles,” she said, “and being like, whoa, that’s so intimate.” Rogers has a fine radar for the vulnerable points; Didion, the master modernist writer, died not long after. “I might cry talking about it,” she said.She is still working out how to apply what she learned in the last year to her creative life. But one way is just to pay close attention. “I always think about performance as a practice of presence,” she said. “It’s just this moment that is slipping through your fingers as it’s happening, and it can never be created again. And that’s what feels so sacred about it.”The rain started up again, but she went without an umbrella — she liked the patter of the summer drops. The album’s closing song is full of fret about “the state of the world,” and Rogers sought out education to respond to that feeling. Her music gets her there too; the song ends on a wishful note — with banger percussion — about togetherness. “I think part of creating anything is having hope that there is something else that’s possible,” she said. “I feel like I don’t have any other choice.”OK McCausland for The New York Times More

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      Review: ‘The Silent Woman,’ an Opera About Putting on an Opera

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      Bard SummerScape unveiled a rare staging of Richard Strauss’s opera, composed amid the Nazis’ rise to power.ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — “Ha! A silent woman?,” sings the basso buffo Morosus in Richard Strauss’s “Die Schweigsame Frau.” “You’ll only find her in a churchyard under a stone cross.”The casual misogyny of Strauss’s only opera buffa — a work that unfolds like a love letter to Mozart, Rossini and Donizetti — was hardly a point of controversy when it premiered in Dresden in 1935. But controversy there was: The opera’s libretto was written by Stefan Zweig, a Jew, who submitted it two weeks before Adolf Hitler became Germany’s chancellor in 1933.On Friday night, Bard SummerScape unveiled a rare staging of “The Silent Woman” at Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College that went some way toward reconciling the featherlight subject and its fraught historical context. The witty staging, engaging cast and efficiently evocative designs made a good opera feel like a great one.Much has been written about Strauss’s miscalculations with regards to the Nazi regime, his attempts to stay out of politics while currying favor and protecting his Jewish daughter-in-law and grandsons.He accepted the presidency of the Reich Chamber of Music, a post he later described as a “tiresome honorary office” in a letter that got him into hot water. In his notebooks, he called Nazi antisemitism “a disgrace to German honor.” Ultimately, he underestimated the National Socialist dictatorship as a political fashion, a nuisance affecting his work with Zweig, who was forced to flee the country.Strauss, who once thought his creativity wouldn’t survive the sudden death of his beloved librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, wrote to Zweig: “If you abandon me, too, I’ll have to lead from now on the life of an ailing, unemployed retiree.”According to a letter from Strauss, Joseph Goebbels and Hitler, presumably finding nothing subversive in “Frau,” approved it. After Strauss insisted that Zweig’s name appear on the program book, the propagandist and his boss skipped the premiere. It was only after Strauss expressed his dim view of Nazism in a letter intercepted by the Gestapo that the opera was banned.In 1942, Zweig, under pain of exile in Brazil, took his own life. Strauss, defeated by the bombing of Germany’s opera houses and the collapse of its culture, nonetheless had music left in him, including his Horn Concerto No. 2 and the “Four Last Songs.”From left, Matthew Anchel, Federico DeMichelis, Anya Matanovic, Edward Nelson, David Portillo, Chrystal E. Williams, and members of the Bard Festival Chorale.Stephanie BergerAgainst this backdrop we have “Die Schweigsame Frau,” an opera about the retired admiral Morosus, whose tinnitus makes him a world-class grouch who can’t bear the tolling of church bells or the idea of a nagging spouse. Zweig supplied an Italianate comedy without psychological underpinning, and Strauss was delighted.When Morosus’s nephew Henry shows up with his theater troupe, Morosus, appalled at Henry’s chosen career, disinherits him and insults his wife, Aminta. The troupe teaches him a lesson recognizable from Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale”: Aminta, disguised as a demure ingénue, marries Morosus in a sham ceremony and proceeds to throw tantrums and turn his life upside-down until he begs for mercy.For Bard’s delightful production, the director and set designer Christian Räth stages “Frau” as an opera about putting on an opera. Stagehands execute scene changes in full view of the audience, and Morosus’s single-word mantra, “Ruhe” (quiet), glows like an exit sign above the doors of his orderly home.The deception of Morosus becomes a show itself. The theater troupe riffles through clothing racks from other Strauss productions for their costumes. Morosus auditions his three potential brides-to-be on a mini-replica of the stage where “Frau” had its 1935 premiere, presenting the winner with a silver rose straight out of Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” (and “The Bachelor”).The troupe — and the cast — fully commits to its roles. Harold Wilson commands a sonorous bass as the proud, endearing Morosus. Jana McIntyre (Aminta) and David Portillo (Henry) sing with bright, earnest lyric voices that hint at stridency under Strauss’s demands. Edward Nelson, sounding handsome and polished, turns the Barber into an unusually compelling factotum. Matthew Anchel, a riot as the impresario Vanuzzi, shows an appealingly compact bass with depth of tone. Ariana Lucas (Housekeeper), Chrystal E. Williams (Carlotta) and Anya Matanovic (Isotta) delve zestfully into their characters.Mattie Ullrich’s funny, dazzling costumes transformed the cast, including a male corps de ballet that never missed a chance to shake their platter tutus.Strauss underscored spoken dialogue with arch instrumental commentary, but the orchestra, at times hamstrung by his sumptuous style and parlando vocal lines, shifts its weight like an elephant in ballet shoes. At Bard, the conductor Leon Botstein, deprioritizing tonal grandeur, showed the opera to be light on its feet. The overture’s quirky doodling emerged fast and clean, and the magical duet-turned-trio that ends Act II lilted, with Straussian wafts of pungent woodwinds.Räth, injecting resistance into a work that was politicized despite itself, turned the chaotic wedding scene into a nightmare sequence: Choristers and dancers swarmed the stage with large face masks of real-life personages (including Mozart, Bach, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Maria Cebotari, the first Aminta). Ominously, the masks of Hitler and Goebbels flanked a mask of Strauss and carted him off by the elbows.The opera closes with a reflection far removed from the prevailing mayhem, not unlike the glorious final monologue from Strauss’s last opera, “Capriccio.”As the strings swelled, Wilson’s Morosus stepped forward, offering a glimpse of peace, sung with touching restraint, from an ailing, unemployed retiree at the end of his life. In his hands he held the masks of Strauss and Zweig, forced apart by murderous bigotry, reunited at last.The Silent WomanThrough Sunday at Bard College; fishercenter.bard.edu. More

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      Michael Henderson, Funk Bassist Turned Crooner, Dies at 71

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      He was a sideman with Stevie Wonder and Miles Davis before embarking on a successful second career as a singer of soulful, romantic ballads.Michael Henderson, a self-taught bassist who performed and recorded in the 1960s and ’70s with Stevie Wonder and Miles Davis, then remade himself as a soulful balladeer and songwriter, died on Tuesday at his home in Dallas, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta. He was 71.His son, Michael Jr., said the cause was cancer.Mr. Henderson began his career early. He was about 14 and on tour with the Detroit Emeralds, an R&B group, when he met Mr. Wonder at a theater in Chicago.“There was a piano upstairs where the dressing rooms were,” Mr. Henderson said in the liner notes to “Take Me I’m Yours: The Buddah Years Anthology” (2018), a two-CD collection of his records from the 1970s and ’80s released by Soul Music Records. “Stevie was playing something I’d heard before, so I got my bass and sat down next to him. He started playing, and I started playing right along with him.”Mr. Wonder soon hired him. For the next five years, Mr. Henderson toured with Mr. Wonder while also working as a session musician for Motown Records. He said he had learned all he could from the influential Motown bassist James Jamerson, who would sometimes come to clubs or recording sessions where Mr. Henderson was playing.“I stayed close to James’s sound but began adding in my little stuff every now and then,” he said in the “Anthology” liner notes. “I’d go up the neck and find higher notes.”Mr. Henderson’s skills had advanced enough to pique Miles Davis’s interest when he heard him play with Mr. Wonder’s band in 1970 at the Copacabana in Manhattan. Davis had already begun using electric instruments and rock rhythms on “Bitches Brew” and other albums; now he wanted to take his music in more of a funk direction and decided to hire Mr. Henderson, who was not a jazz musician, to replace Dave Holland, who was best known as an upright bassist but had begun playing the electric bass with Davis.When the show was over, Mr. Henderson recalled in a 2017 interview for the website Lee Bailey’s Eurweb, which covers urban entertainment, sports and politics, Davis came backstage and told Mr. Wonder that he was “taking” his bass player.Over the next few years, Mr. Henderson recorded a string of albums with Davis, including “A Tribute to Jack Johnson,” “Live-Evil” and “On the Corner.” In a 1997 review of CD reissues of five Davis albums from 1969 to 1973, the New York Times critic Ben Ratliff cited “Live-Evil” and “In Concert: Live at Philharmonic Hall” as evidence of Mr. Henderson’s noticeable impact on Mr. Davis’s band.“Mr. Henderson made Davis’s band sound less searching, more hypnotic,” Mr. Ratliff wrote. “Instead of improvising and interacting with the band, he took a simple bass vamp and percolated it endlessly.”Mr. Henderson with Davis at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1973. One critic said that Mr. Henderson, who did not have a jazz background, had “made Davis’s band sound less searching, more hypnotic.”David Warner Ellis/Redferns, via Getty ImagesMichael Earl Henderson was born on July 7, 1951, in Yazoo City, Miss., and moved to Detroit with his mother, Rose Williams, who sang in church, and his stepfather, Earl Henderson, when he was young. During his childhood, he played cello and then switched to bass. Precociously talented, he was performing with local bands before his 12th birthday.“Mom was always cool with the noise I was making in the basement and backyard, and later as I began playing in the local bar scene,” he said in the liner notes. When he was 10 or 11, he saved enough money to take a bus to see a bill of Motown artists at the Fox Theater.“I told myself, ‘One day, I’m going to be onstage with all those artists,’” he said.Mr. Henderson was a sideman until 1976 — the year his time with Davis ended — when the jazz drummer and bandleader Norman Connors invited him to write and record a song for his album “Saturday Night Special.” He sang that song, “Valentine Love,” with Jean Carne. Mr. Henderson wrote and sang on the title song of Mr. Connors’s next album, “You Are My Starship,” and sang a duet with Phyllis Hyman on his song “We Both Need Each Other.”After making a deal with Buddah Records in 1976, Mr. Henderson’s transformation into a sexy crooner and songwriter continued. The cover of his 1981 album, “Slingshot,” showed him on a beach wearing a tiny aqua swimsuit.When Mr. Henderson appeared at the Roxy Theater in West Hollywood in 1979, Connie Johnson, a pop critic for The Los Angeles Times, wrote that he “isn’t a platinum sex symbol in the manner of Teddy Pendergrass — yet,” adding, “Currently, he’s in the same league as Peabo Bryson and Lenny Williams.”Mr. Henderson found success on the Billboard R&B chart with singles like “Take Me I’m Yours,” which hit No. 3 in 1978; “Wide Receiver,” which peaked at No. 4 in 1980, and “Can’t We Fall in Love Again,” another duet with Ms. Hyman that rose to No. 9 in 1981.After seven albums for Buddah, the last of them in 1983, he recorded “Bedtime Stories” for EMI America in 1986. That was his last solo album, although he continued to perform.In addition to his mother and a son, Mr. Henderson is survived by his daughters, Chelsea and Michelle Henderson, and his companion, DaMia Satterfield. He was separated from his wife, Adelia Thompson.In 2002, Mr. Henderson returned to Miles Davis’s music. He and several other Davis alumni, including the saxophonist Sonny Fortune and the drummer Ndugu Chancler, formed the group Children on the Corner; a year later, they released the album “Rebirth,” which reinterpreted and recreated Davis’s electric music from the 1970s.“This ain’t no smooth jazz,” Mr. Henderson told All About Jazz in 2003. “Don’t come to hear us and get ready to eat your steak and sit there and have a conversation with your old lady. It ain’t happenin’. Because when we hit the stage, we mean business. We’re going for the throat.” More