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      Mahmood and Blanco’s Eurovision Song Shows Italy’s L.G.B.T.Q. Progress

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      The love song, and its video showing the artist Mahmood embracing another man, has been well received in a nation with a spotty history on L.G.B.T.Q. rights.MILAN — In February, the artists Mahmood and Blanco turned to each other onstage at Italy’s national song competition and sang, “I’d like to love you, but I’m always wrong.” It was the refrain of “Brividi” (translated as “Chills”), a song about the vulnerability of love, as experienced by all people — regardless of gender, identity or sexuality.When the song won at that competition, the Sanremo contest, and became Italy’s entry for this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, the unexpected happened: There wasn’t much pushback.The two after winning the Sanremo music contest in Italy in February.Ettore Ferrari/EPA, via ShutterstockThere was some grumbling from a socially conservative politician about what he called L.G.B.T. “domination” at the contest, and disdain that Mahmood performed one evening wearing a garter, but Alessandro Mahmoud, known as Mahmood, had been expecting a bigger response, he said in a recent interview.When the musician — who was born in Italy to an Italian mother and an Egyptian father — won the national song contest in 2019, anti-immigration comments followed. But this year, even those polemics normally trumpeted by conservative politicians did not flare up. The 29-year-old artist saw the muted criticism for “Brividi” as a sign that “something has happened in Italian society.”Italy has long been influenced by the Roman Catholic Church, which for generations considered homosexuality as a taboo topic to be either ignored or shunned. In a 2005 text approved by Benedict XVI, who was pope at the time, homosexuality was described as “not a sin” but essentially “an intrinsic moral evil.”L.G.B.T.Q. rights in Italy have advanced after decades of campaigning, but some legal challenges remain. Same-sex civil unions were legalized in 2016, years after other European countries, but same-sex marriage is not legal, nor can someone in a same-sex civil union legally adopt his or her partner’s biological child.On Being Transgender in AmericaPhalloplasty: The surgery, used to construct a penis, has grown more popular among transgender men. But with a steep rate of complications, it remains a controversial procedure.Elite Sports: The case of the transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has stirred a debate about the nature of athleticism in women’s sports.Transgender Youth: A photographer documented the lives of transgender youth. She shared some thoughts on what she saw.Corporate World: What is it like to transition while working for Wall Street? A Goldman Sachs’ employee shares her experience.So when two men sang a love song, clearly engaging with each other, as part of a cherished national competition, it was a first. The track “normalizes what should have always been normal,” Mahmood said.The song’s video more explicitly shows Mahmood tenderly embracing a man, while Blanco sings to a woman. A video of the song on Mahmood’s official YouTube page has been viewed more than 55 million times.Italian society’s approach to sexuality is changing. “Sexual orientation no longer has any importance, nor is it important to label oneself anymore,” said Aldo Cazzullo, a columnist in the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera. In the 1950s and 1960s, many gay people in Italy were not open about their sexuality, Cazzullo said. This was followed by an era of coming out and empowerment, and “now there’s no longer the need to say anything,” he said. He pointed out that two of Italy’s southern regions had voted to elect gay men as regional presidents.Mahmood said that although his songs speak volumes about who he is, he doesn’t define his sexuality: “It makes no sense to make distinctions anymore.”Blanco, the stage name of Riccardo Fabbriconi, 19, said that his “generation is much more open” and that people his age no longer thought in terms of gender identity. In just two years, he has gone from posting videos “singing in my underwear in my bedroom,” he said, to a multicity Italian summer tour that sold out in 72 hours.And Blanco said he also saw Italy as being “more open in general — I hope.”A recent headline in the newspaper La Stampa in Turin captured this sentiment: “Blanco, son of the fluid century, his generation will save us.”“My generation is much more open,” said Blanco, 19, left. Mahmood, 29, says he doesn’t define his sexuality.Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York TimesOn Tuesday evening, the Italian hosts for the Eurovision Song Contest semifinal broadcast included Cristiano Malgioglio, a songwriter and popular television personality also known for his outlandish couture, who riffed on his love life. Speaking of the five countries that automatically get into the final — Italy, France, Germany, Spain and Britain — he quipped, “I have a boyfriend in every nation.” He was a host last year, too.Eurovision has always “had a large L.G.B.T.Q. element in its fandom,” said Catherine Baker, a historian at the University of Hull who has written about the competition. After significant rulings by the European Court of Human Rights in the late 1990s and the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam, which banned discrimination against people on the grounds of sexual orientation, “Europe became associated with the idea of L.G.B.T.Q. rights, and symbolically that had an impact on Eurovision, even if it wasn’t organized by the European Union,” Baker said.The competition has also long been a trailblazer when it comes to L.G.B.T.Q. representation onstage, featuring artists like Iceland’s Paul Oscar, Israel’s Dana International and Finland’s Saara Aalto over the years.L.G.B.T.Q. people face openly hostile environments in several European countries, including Poland, Hungary and Russia. Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, the powerful head of the Russian Orthodox Church, recently justified Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by claiming that it was part of a struggle against ideals imposed by liberal foreigners that included gay pride parades.Franco Grillini, a prominent Italian L.G.B.T.Q. rights activist, said a song like “Brividi” would once have been “unimaginable” at a festival that normally has Italians glued to their television screens.In the past, homosexuality could also hurt a musical career in Italy, he said, citing the case of Umberto Bindi, a talented, gay singer-songwriter who caused a scandal in Sanremo in 1961 by wearing a pinkie ring (then a presumed sign of homosexuality). He never got the recognition he deserved because “he was brutally discriminated” against, Grillini said.But democracies have a way of righting wrongs, according to Angelo Pezzana, another L.G.B.T.Q. rights activist. “It’s always been like this. Remember that not a century ago, women went to jail for the right to vote,” he said. In Italy, women only got the right to vote in 1945. The Mahmood-Blanco duet “was a sign that things had changed in a positive way,” he said.The track “normalizes what should have always been normal,” Mahmood said of the Eurovision song.Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York TimesThat said, Italy’s record on equal rights for L.G.B.T.Q. people remains spotty. Apart from not having fair representation when it comes to marriage and adoption, in October, the Senate rejected a bill meant to make violence against L.G.B.T.Q. people a hate crime, a label that would have meant harsher penalties. Critics blamed the lack of consensus both on political bickering as well as on Vatican interference, given that a few months earlier the Vatican had openly opposed the bill, saying it infringed upon guaranteed religious liberties.“Italy is still profoundly linked to the Vatican, which conditions Parliament,” said Grillini, who was a lawmaker for seven years.Even under Pope Francis, the message has been mixed. Shortly after his election in 2013, Francis said, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” and he has continued to encourage the church to be more welcoming toward the L.G.B.T.Q. faithful. But since then, the Vatican has rejected the notion that gender identity can be fluid, and it has reaffirmed its opposition to same-sex marriage.But at least at the Sanremo contest, old prejudices didn’t seem to apply.“All my songs speak of my way of experiencing love and sex,” Mahmood said. “The least an artist can do is give an example.” More

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      Martha Wainwright Tells a Few Stories She Might Regret

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      With a new memoir, the singer-songwriter from a famous musical family says she is happy to be “letting go of this story of being No. 4 on the totem pole.”When Martha Wainwright was 14 years old, she moved to New York from her home in Montreal to live with her father, the singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III. Her mother, the Canadian folk star Kate McGarrigle, was busy with a new album and a concert tour, and so it was decided that Loudon would watch over Martha for a year. The New York experiment turned out to be something of a failure, though, according to Ms. Wainwright; she did poorly in school and stayed out late, as if in competition with a father who was sometimes out even later. But the year definitely had its upsides: “I became more like my father, as if the DNA in me that came from him started to wake up,” she writes in a new memoir, “Stories I Might Regret Telling You.”A few years later, she went with him on a tour of Britain, serving as his warm-up act and joining him onstage for father-daughter duets. One night she heard him introducing “I’d Rather Be Lonely,” a song she had figured was about an old girlfriend. So she was surprised when he told the audience it was about the year he had spent living with his teenage daughter. As Ms. Wainwright listened to him sing the key lines — “You’re still living here with me / I’d rather be lonely” — she began to cry.“A part of me wanted to jump to my death from my tiny seat,” she writes in the memoir. “Or, better yet, take off into the night, leaving him standing there waiting for me. But the show must go on, so I dried my tears and went down the stairs and on to the stage.”The new book, cigarette and all.HachetteConfessional art always comes at a cost, for its creators and subjects alike, as people in the Wainwright-McGarrigle family know all too well. Loudon, who rose to sudden success with the novelty hit “Dead Skunk,” has included songs about his family on a majority of his more than 25 albums, many of them devastatingly personal. Ms. McGarrigle, who made 10 albums as part of a duo with her sister Anna before her death in 2010, also wrote a number of autobiographical songs that touched on her marriage to Loudon, which ended in divorce, and their children.When Martha and her older brother, the singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, came of age, they joined what was by then an established family tradition. The first song Ms. Wainwright wrote was about the birth of a new half sibling, a wry welcome to her singular family; and a song on her brother’s 1998 debut album delved into his relationship with his mother.As children, Martha and Rufus sang for paying audiences at folk festivals. Later, when he had a deal with the DreamWorks record label and started touring the world, she was often his backup singer, an arrangement that eventually came to an end. “He needed to cut the fat and I needed to get out of his shadow,” she writes.Rufus and Martha Wainwright sing their father’s hit “Dead Skunk” at a show in London, circa 1984.Martha Wainwright Collection In New York, Ms. Wainwright performed in dive bars while putting herself through a series of crushes on unavailable men. She was by turns ambitious and self-destructive. On nights when she knew a label scout or producer was in the crowd, she would go onstage drunk or high. “I created an impossible situation for myself,” she writes. “I was afraid to fail but I kept setting myself up to fail.”As her brother’s fame grew, she struggled with her status as the least famous member of her nuclear family. And while her parents provided inspiration, she says in the book that they could have been more helpful. “I don’t know if you’re wondering where my dad was during those New York years,” she writes, “but at the time, I was wondering, too.”For a while Rufus was running around as part of a “sons of” club, a group that included Sean Lennon, Chris Stills and Harper Simon. “They were all getting signed and written about and had publicists and photo shoots and beautiful girlfriends,” Ms. Wainwright says in the memoir. “Were their songs better than mine?” The chip on her shoulder led her to write a grand statement song, its title a vulgar epithet. Contrary to what she has told journalists in the past, the song isn’t about her father — or, rather, it isn’t exclusively about him.In addition to the attention-grabbing title, the song had perhaps the closest thing to a pop hook to be found in her oeuvre up till then. Whereas the typical Martha Wainwright melody meanders as it showcases her acrobatic whisper-to-scream vocal range, this one was different: a folky strum-and-shout with straightforward lines like “Oh, I wish, I wish, I wish I was born a man.”The Guardian called the song a “masterpiece” when it appeared in 2005 as the centerpiece of “Martha Wainwright,” her first album. Critics admired her debut but couldn’t resist comparing her with the rest of her family. A Pitchfork reviewer praised her voice and her songs, only to add the caveat that her ability to write about personal matters with such candor “would be more remarkable if it weren’t a genetic trait.”Her next album, “I Know You’re Married but I’ve Got Feelings Too,” was partly produced by Brad Albetta, a bass player who, by the time of its 2008 release, was also her husband. Their relationship had always been tumultuous, but she had pushed for marriage anyway, partly because she wanted to “grow up” before losing her mother, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.Martha Wainwright with her mother, Kate McGarrigle, in London, 2009.Martha Wainwright Collection Her memoir goes deep into her mother’s illness and death, which coincided with the premature birth of Ms. Wainwright’s first child. In less capable hands, such material could come across as maudlin, but Ms. Wainwright has a light touch and an eye for telling detail. She describes wanting to put her mother’s cancer-ridden body in the same kind of incubator that was keeping her son alive, as well as the moment when she and Ms. McGarrigle compared their damaged bodies — her own fresh C-section incision, the chevron scar from chemo that covered her mother’s torso.Ms. Wainwright’s marriage limped along after her mother’s death. She clung to Mr. Albetta as a source of stability (not to mention bass playing). “I really like the makeup sex / It’s the only kind I ever get,” she sang from the stage while on tour for the album “Come Home to Mama,” with her husband close behind onstage.An early draft of “Stories I Might Regret Telling You” that contained more details about those years was used as an exhibit in their divorce proceedings in 2018. That version — “the whole enchilada,” as Ms. Wainwright described it in an interview — was pared down considerably before publication.Rather than zeroing in on the father of her children (a second son was born in 2014), Ms. Wainwright, 46, concludes the memoir by focusing on her creative and personal renaissance of recent years. She describes the aftermath of a show she gave in Los Angeles, when she emerged rumpled from the house of “someone everyone in the world wants to sleep with” full of joie de vivre and “glad to know that rock ’n’ roll was still alive and I was still a part of it.”The extended musical family in New York, 2012, from left to right: Martha Wainwright, the singer-songwriter Suzzy Roche, Rufus Wainwright, Loudon Wainwright III, and the singer-songwriter Lucy Wainwright Roche.David Corio for The New York TimesOn a recent Zoom call, she looked and sounded exactly as she does onstage: beautifully unvarnished, full of open-mouthed laughter. In the past few weeks she has been preparing to go on tour with a show that combines readings from the memoir and performances of songs on her fourth album, “Love Will Be Reborn.” She said a documentary filmmaker has been following her around, adding that she sometimes wished she had a larger-than-life persona to hide behind, like Tom Waits’s or Laurie Anderson’s.Lately, she added, she has been in the mood to do some serious spring cleaning in her building in Montreal, which she inherited from her mother. “There’s a back room that’s filled with the Kate McGarrigle and Anna McGarrigle archive and crap,” she said, gesturing toward a door behind her desk. “I feel like I’m almost about to light the whole thing on fire. I’m not going to do it literally, but I’m like, ‘OK, let’s call a museum and have them take it away.’ And I think that I’m kind of excited about it. And maybe I’m excited about letting go of this story of being No. 4 on the totem pole.”She said that when she thinks about her earlier albums, filled with so many songs referring to her marriage, she wonders whether she had created the situation in order to mine it for material. Now she’s in a relationship that inspires lyrics like “I got naked right away when I saw you / And my love was like the rain when I saw you.”If her contentment threatens her creative output, she’s fine with that. “I’ll keep the love and forgo the material, if need be,” she said.But later in our conversation, she revised that assessment, after mentioning her plan to pick up her guitar later in the day and try to write some new songs: “I haven’t in a while, so I’ll see if I’m too happy and I made a terrible mistake.”Ms. Wainwright said she has been wondering if she’s too happy to write songs.Alexi Hobbs for The New York TimesEven her relationship with her father seems in a good place. “Stories I Might Regret Telling You” begins with the story of her own birth, or, rather, the story of how she almost wasn’t born. Her father, she writes, tried to persuade her mother to have an abortion when she was pregnant with her, which is something he confessed to Ms. Wainwright when she was a teenager. “It hurt my feelings,” she writes with an understatement that makes the story sort of hilarious. “I had always felt a little out of place in the world, and knowing that I’d only just barely made the cut didn’t help matters any.”Three days before our interview, her father called her to say he loved the book.“I mean, his voice was a little tight when he said it,” Ms. Wainwright said. “He told me he didn’t see things exactly the same way, and I asked him if he could accept my version, and he said that he could accept it. And so that was a really nice moment for us.” More

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      Kevin Morby Chases Ghosts, and a New Album, in Memphis

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      Since he was an anxious teen, Morby, a Kansas City singer-songwriter, has been fixated on death. By facing his fears in a mythical city, he found a way to reckon with it.MEMPHIS — Kevin Morby bounded into the lobby of the Peabody hotel on a Tuesday night in late April in a long red coat and twirled twice, stretching his arms toward the travertine columns of the century-old Southern institution. The songwriter, best known for solemn folk rock often fixated on death, beamed.An hour earlier and blocks away, he’d watched as the Memphis Grizzlies overcame a 13-point deficit to win a pivotal N.B.A. playoff game. The spoils of victory spilled into the hotel’s palatial entry — toasts, high-fives, the occasional whoop. A player piano dashed out a Scott Joplin rag, its pep perfectly scoring the electric scene. “That thing was so eerie when I was here writing,” Morby said, pointing as he passed, his grin briefly sagging. “I was so alone.”Just 18 months earlier, in October 2020, Morby escaped the impending pandemic winter in his hometown, Kansas City, Kan., by booking a three-week stay in Memphis. Since visiting the Peabody two years earlier with his girlfriend, Katie Crutchfield, the singer who performs as Waxahatchee, the city’s complicated history had become a muse.The sprawling hotel was so empty, the staff upgraded Morby to Room 409, a suite, where he focused on new songs with an intensity and patience that had always eluded him. He became a regular at some of the city’s morbid landmarks, too — the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated; the spot on the Mississippi River where Jeff Buckley drowned; the haunted stretch of Highway 61 that leads into the Delta.“When lockdown was happening, I wanted to go to the darkest place possible,” he said. Memphis was almost shattered by pandemic more than a century ago.During that stint, Morby wrote the bulk of “This Is a Photograph,” his seventh solo album, due Friday. It is a confident 45-minute sashay through vulnerable devotionals and existential reflections, tuneful folk and handclap soul. Using Memphis as a lens for understanding the frailty of bodies and the dreams they harbor, the album reckons with survival as much as death.“There was zero urgency for Kevin to make an album, and that is a beautiful place to be as a songwriter,” Crutchfield said, wryly laughing by phone. “He is always working so fast, but a year with nothing allowed him to dial in. The word here is density.”When Morby was only 17, his third (and last, until this year) therapist asked him why he was there. “I told him I was so afraid of dying,” Morby, now 34, remembered during an interview weeks before the basketball game. “There was this life-affirming moment where he was like, ‘Kevin, what’s so wrong with death?’ I guess nothing!”As his parents shuffled among various cities for work, Morby had morphed from a sports-loving kid into an especially anxious preteen. In Oklahoma City, he was terrified to learn friends had lost parents in the bombing there; later, in Kansas City, bullets on a playground convinced him his school was the next Columbine.“He might be sitting on the couch, and he would have these anxiety attacks,” his father, Jim, remembered. “He felt it coming, but it would happen anyway.”Dual odes to Jeff Buckley are at the center of “This Is a Photograph.” Whitten Sabbatini for The New York TimesThere were hospitals, therapists and an alternative school founded by a “Vietnam veteran and total hippie,” Morby said. Finally, after a particularly awful spell, his parents offered their son a compromise — he could drop out, granted he finish his G.E.D. and try a nearby junior college. “I felt like such a poor parent,” his mother, Sandy, said, “but I water up thinking about the relief on his face.”When Morby turned 18, he boarded an eastbound train with one goal: joining a band in New York. He started writing songs in seventh grade, lyrics-lined notebooks dotting the house. A Bob Dylan anthology led to the indie rock of the Mountain Goats and the Microphones, who placed less emphasis on production than poignancy. “You’re telling me I can just get a tape recorder and sing?” he said. “It felt like acceptance.” Morby joined the ascendant psych-folk band Woods and toured incessantly, then co-founded the scruffy pop-rock group the Babies. But double duty, plus jobs delivering food and babysitting, exhausted him. He bailed on both bands to take a chance alone. “There’s always something to lose,” he said, “but I thought maybe there was more to be gained.”Morby wrote and recorded at a feverish pace, releasing an album or EP every year since 2013 except one, even while moving from New York to Los Angeles and back to Kansas City. He recorded in a hurry, embracing mistakes and tossed-off lines while striving for productivity over perfection. “If I wasn’t not working,” he admitted, “I felt crazy.”This harried schedule stemmed in part from his fear it would all vanish. Soon after arriving in New York, Morby befriended Jamie Ewing, the dynamo leader of the punk band Bent Outta Shape — “this magical, hilarious guy, always ahead of the curve.” Morby loved Ewing and the artistic possibilities he represented. Ewing died in 2008 from a heroin overdose, which jump-started Morby’s drive.“I had this scarcity mentality,” Morby said, also referencing Jay Reatard, the Memphis garage-rocker who suggested that writing one’s best songs was really a race against death soon before he died. “I had to collect what I could while I could.”A medical scare in January 2020, though, prompted a change. Before a family dinner, Morby’s father accidentally doubled his dosage of heart medication and passed out at the table. He recovered, but Morby had worried he was watching his father die.That night, looking at old photos with his mother, he was struck by an image of his father — then 32, the same age Morby was about to be — posing shirtless in the Texas sun. He contemplated his family’s sudden frailty and began writing “This Is a Photograph,” a galloping track about death’s inevitability and the gratitude the fait accompli should inspire. “This is what I’ll miss about being alive,” Morby howls, putting himself inside his father’s former frame. What had his father lost? What would he lose?Morby took those questions to Memphis. As he drove his blue Ford pickup down Highway 61 to the infamous Crossroads or across Mississippi to sit on Elvis’s boyhood porch, he pondered how big dreams crumbled there. He obsessed especially over Buckley, who had applied for a job as a butterfly keeper at the Memphis Zoo while waiting for his band to arrive in 1997. Passers-by soon spotted his body floating at the foot of Beale Street.“The dead can help shape the living,” Morby said. “I want to be open to that kind of magic.”Whitten Sabbatini for The New York TimesMorby visited the little bungalow where Buckley lived and even recorded the sound of the current where he waded into the water. “You’re Jeff Buckley — you’ve achieved versions of the dream, but there’s still something you’re trying to accomplish,” Morby said. “I relate.”Dual odes to Buckley shape the centerpiece of “This Is a Photograph.” Graced by gospel harmonies, “Disappearing” offers caveat emptor for the kind of tortured artists who might try dipping into the Mississippi. (“I really want to swim in it,” he confessed from its banks, adding he knew it was a bad idea.) “A Coat of Butterflies” slowly unspools like an empathetic eulogy for a musician who spent a lifetime defining himself in light of his father’s fame. Morby realized he’d finally nailed the track as he left Memphis after the album’s third and final session, which he repeatedly called “the best four days of my life.” He’d faced his fear of death and walked away.The morning before the triumphant basketball game, Morby went for a run along a concrete path that skirts the Mississippi, a hobby he took up soon after turning 30. The trail dumped him beneath towering overpasses and a small clearing that led to the river, where Buckley is believed to have entered. Just as he turned around, two butterflies fluttered beside him for several seconds. It was a sign, he thought, that he was moving in the right direction.“It’s like you’re a photographer. You know what you want to take a picture of, but I knew I couldn’t take a photo I could develop until I got here,” he said, his voice rising above the Peabody’s din. “The dead can help shape the living. I want to be open to that kind of magic.” More

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      Why We Collect

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherIf you know a collector, you know about how collections are more than just agglomerations of items. They are stores of history, stores of emotion. They have a representational value that often far exceeds their literal financial value.They also take up space, physical and mental. They are often private ventures, not public displays. They scratch very personal itches in ways that are often invisible to anyone else.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the urge to collect, the stories embedded in certain objects and how some items can unearth stories from the person who covets them.Guest:Hua Hsu, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of the forthcoming memoir “Stay True”Connect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Susan Jacks, Who Sang ‘Which Way You Goin’ Billy?,’ Dies at 73

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      Released in 1969, the song, by her group the Poppy Family, was one of the biggest hits to come out of Canada to that point.Susan Jacks, a Canadian vocalist known for her 1969 hit with the Poppy Family, “Which Way You Goin’ Billy?,” one of the top-selling records Canada had produced to that point, died on April 25 in Surrey, British Columbia. She was 73.Her brother Rick Pesklevits said in a Facebook post on behalf of the family that the cause was kidney disease. He said she died at a hospital and had been on the waiting list for a kidney transplant, which would have been her second.As a teenager, Ms. Jacks was a regular on the Canadian show “Music Hop” when, in 1966, she needed an accompanist for a show at an Elks Club and turned to Terry Jacks, who had played guitar on the show. Soon they had married, formed the Poppy Family and cut “Which Way You Goin’ Billy?,” a song that Mr. Jacks, who wrote it, said was inspired by the spectacle of young men going off to fight in Vietnam.Ms. Jacks in 1969 with the other members of the Poppy family, from left: Satwant Singh, Terry Jacks and Craig McCaw.“Which way you goin’, Billy?,” Ms. Jacks sang. “Can I go too? Which way you goin’, Billy? Can I go with you?”The song hit No. 1 in Canada and, soon after, No. 2 in the United States.The Poppy Family and the Jackses’ marriage dissolved after a few years, and later there were dueling stories about “Billy.” The song was originally envisioned as “Which Way You Goin’, Buddy?,” but Ms. Jacks said she suggested that Mr. Jacks instead use the first name of one of her brothers. Mr. Jacks, though, said in interviews that he took “Billy” from a song by a group he admired, the Beau-Marks, called “Billy, Billy Went a Walking.”What is indisputable is that Ms. Jacks’s brother Billy played a unique role for her: He donated the organ for her first kidney transplant, in 2010, an operation that gave her a new lease on life.“I had rosy cheeks for the first time in many years,” she told The Vancouver Sun a year after the surgery, when she was giving a fund-raising concert in Coquitlam, British Columbia, for the Kidney Foundation of Canada. Raising awareness about kidney disease and donations had become a cause for her.“I knew nothing about kidney failure” until she was affected herself, she said. “I knew nothing about transplants. I was so uneducated about how important it is and how much it means to people.”Ms. Jacks around 1970 with her husband, Terry, who wrote the group’s biggest hit, “Which Way You Goin’ Billy?”Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesSusan Elizabeth Pesklevits was born on Aug. 19, 1948, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, to Janette and Dick Pesklevits. She began singing as a child, performing with school bands. She said her mother saw an audition notice for “Music Hop,” and by 1964 she was a regular on it. She toured with a stage version of the show as well.“Sue, as she is fondly called by members of the group, can swing with a hip tune as well as croon with sentimental ballads such as ‘Summertime,’” The Nanaimo Daily News of British Columbia wrote of a performance by the “Music Hop” road troupe in 1966.The Poppy Family had a few other minor hits before breaking up. Ms. Jacks released a few solo albums, including “Ghosts” (1980). In 1983 she moved to Nashville with her second husband, Ted Dushinski, working as a songwriter and running a pirogi restaurant for a time. She moved back to Vancouver in 2004.Mr. Dushinski died of cancer in 2005, about the same time that Ms. Jacks learned her kidneys were failing.She is survived by a son from her second marriage, Thad Dushinski, and six siblings, Rick, Gerry, Wayne, Bill, Cathy and Jim. More

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      At 85, the Jazz Bassist Ron Carter Still Seeks ‘A Better Order of Notes’

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      The famously curious musician and bandleader will celebrate his milestone birthday with a career-spanning Carnegie Hall concert.On a recent morning on the Upper West Side, the bassist and bandleader Ron Carter sat on the far end of a plush, rust-colored sofa in his spacious 10th floor apartment, an oak-hued space with ornate sculptures and panoramic views of the bustling neighborhood blocks below. In the background wafted a gentle melody from Antônio Carlos Jobim, the Brazilian multi-instrumentalist and a former collaborator. The place exuded a grandeur that describes the man, too. It’s no surprise that Carter — Mr. Carter, Maestro, a jazz legend — lives here.With over 60 albums as bandleader and countless others as a sideman, and more than 2,220 recording sessions to his credit, Carter has long let his music do the talking. During our conversation, he seemed guarded, resting his head in a balled-up right fist and looking away when answering questions. But on this April day, he had something specific to discuss: a career-spanning show at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday with his own trio, quartet and octet to celebrate his 85th birthday.“He’s as straight as an arrow,” said Herbie Hancock, the hallowed pianist who met Carter at Miles Davis’s house in 1963, in a phone interview. They were playing tunes in what would become the trumpeter’s Second Great Quintet. “Miles played a little bit, then he threw his horn down on the couch and went upstairs,” he added. “But before he did, he told Ron to take over. He targeted Ron to do that because he knew that Ron could. Ron is a no nonsense guy.”Carter grew up as something of a prodigy in the Midwest, in a family that played instruments, yet wasn’t musical, per se. “Most Black people in the ’40s and ’50s, the families had some kind of common bond in the house before TV and all the stuff took over,” he said. “It was always someone who played piano, you had this choir singing at the house, normal African American communal in-house music.”Carter turned to the bass in high school as a way to stand out in the orchestra.Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York TimesHe took up the cello at 11 when a teacher starting an orchestra laid out the instruments on the table and it “seemed to strike my fancy,” he said, and played it until he got to high school. But he noticed he didn’t get the same opportunities as white students, despite being told how talented he was. High school orchestra members were sometimes asked to play background music for dinners and P.T.A. meetings — everyone except the Black students. In 1954, Carter saw that the orchestra’s only bassist was graduating. He turned to the instrument as a way to stand out.Discrimination followed him to Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., where Carter played bass in the orchestra: The guest conductor Leopold Stokowski, then leading the Houston Symphony, said he liked Carter as a player and person, but Texas wasn’t progressive enough to have a Black musician in the orchestra. So Carter started playing at a local jazz club called the Ridge Crest Inn, working as the de facto bassist for touring musicians passing through town.“They said I played really good, and they thought that if I got to New York City, I could find work there,” Carter said. He moved to the city after graduating in 1959 and landed a spot playing in a band led by the drummer Chico Hamilton while also pursuing a master’s at the Manhattan School of Music. In 1961, he earned the advanced degree and released his debut album, “Where?,” which featured two other stalwarts — the alto saxophonist Eric Dolphy and the pianist Mal Waldron.“I wanted to paint a picture of what I could do,” Carter said of his first LP. Aside from Charles Mingus and Oscar Pettiford, bassists weren’t seen as bandleaders; being able to carry out his own vision was a rebellious act. “By and large, bass players were not getting the attention for those details that everyone else was getting,” he said. “I thought, ‘This is my chance to do what I think is my point of view.’ I took advantage of that.” Concurrently, his star rose in the New York scene; by 1963, he was perhaps the hottest young talent in the city. The coolest jazz purveyor in the area, and likely the world, soon came calling.Carter was working as a freelance musician with folk and blues singers, and was playing a club gig with the trumpeter Art Farmer, when Miles Davis asked him to play bass in the new quartet he was forming. Davis’s band was headed to California for a six-week tour, which meant Carter would have to quit Farmer’s group. Other musicians would have been likely to leave to play with the star trumpeter, but Carter — out of respect for Farmer — didn’t budge so easily.The saxophonist Pee Wee Ellis and Carter onstage in Rochester, N.Y.Paul Hoeffler/Redferns“I said, ‘Mr. Davis, I have a job already for the next two weeks with Mr. Farmer,’” Carter recalled. “If you will ask him to let me out of my gig, yes. If not, I’ll see you when it’s over.” Farmer let the young bassist tour with Davis. “Because I gave him the respect that he was due,” he continued. “I think it showed Miles that I was a man of my word, that I was an honorable person.”In Davis’s home and on the road, Hancock was taken by Carter’s tone and intuition. “He had the mind of someone that continued to explore and try new things,” he said. “His playing was clean and clear and definitive, and he was always right in the pocket at just the right place. He knew which way to go, to make it not just an exciting listening and playing experience but one that opened doors to new possibilities.”The group lasted five years, disbanding in 1968 when Davis sought an electric sound that merged rock, funk and ambient on albums like “In a Silent Way,” “Bitches Brew” and “On the Corner.” But you don’t get those records without the Second Great Quintet, and artists like Carter, Hancock, the tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter and the drummer Tony Williams pushing Davis’s music to uncomfortable places. “Every night was a chance to play some wonderful music with some lovely people,” Carter said. “I still look back in awe at what we were doing, not understanding what it was, but it worked for us night in and night out.”Carter kept evolving, even as the popularity of jazz gave way to funk as the dominant genre in Black music. He taught jazz at the City College of New York, worked as a sideman at the record labels Blue Note and CTI, and has credits with everyone from Roberta Flack and Gil Scott-Heron to Lena Horne and Archie Shepp. Carter also embraced hip-hop later in his career, and played on A Tribe Called Quest’s sophomore album “The Low End Theory.” (He hadn’t heard of the group, but one of his sons advised him to do the session.) The “surprise of the music” has kept him going, he said.The bassist Stanley Clarke met Carter as a teenager in 1970 and was enamored with Carter’s consistency on the instrument. “He’s kind of like the center of a concentric circle,” Clarke said in a phone interview. “He pretty much controls every band he’s in. On every record I’ve ever heard him play, the first thing you go to is the bass.”By 1963, Carter was one of the hottest young talents in New York City. Soon, Miles Davis came calling.Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York TimesCarter, he said, is the culmination of the great bassists before him — Mingus, Pettiford and Paul Chambers — who all pulled magnificent tones from the instrument, paving the way for someone like Carter to synthesize it into something more melodic and wistful. “It’s all directed and converged in this person,” Clarke said. “There isn’t a bass player that’s out here today that has any sense that is aware of the bass, that’s not influenced by Ron Carter.”While he’s willing to discuss the past, Carter can’t help but focus on the future: his upcoming concerts and making sure he’s always improving.“Can I find a better order of notes that I didn’t find last week?” he asked.His dedication to his bandmates is always top of mind. “Can I be responsible for the standard I’m setting for them?” he continued. “Can I make them see how responsible I am to the music that I’m presenting to them?”“I’m going to make sure that I let them know that I appreciate their love, their care,” he added reflectively, looking toward a window. “I’m still getting better at doing what I do right now.”“For the Love of Ron,” an 85th birthday celebration with Ron Carter and Friends, is at 8 p.m. on Tuesday at the Perelman Stage of Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium; carnegiehall.org. 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      The Pulitzer Prize Winner That Emerged Out of a Time of Quietness

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      Raven Chacon’s “Voiceless Mass,” a work for ensemble and pipe organ that “evokes the weight of history in a church setting,” won the prize for music.At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, when the world around him turned quiet and still, the composer Raven Chacon went to work.Inspired by the silence of days spent in lockdown, he began writing “Voiceless Mass,” a 16-minute work for ensemble and pipe organ. Chacon, 44, a member of the Navajo Nation who lives in Albuquerque, set out to use the sounds of the organ, accompanied by winds, strings and percussion, to explore themes of power and oppression.“During the pandemic, we were able to focus on some of the cries of people who were feeling injustices around them,” he said in an interview. “Lockdown was this time of quietness where there was an opportunity for those sounds and cries to emerge.”On Monday, “Voiceless Mass” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music. It was an unexpected honor for an artist who has worked across genres — music, video, printmaking — to shine light on the struggles facing Indigenous people.Chacon said he did not realize he had won the prize until shortly after the announcement on Monday, when friends started texting him.“Apparently they don’t call you,” he said.“Voiceless Mass” had its premiere on Nov. 21, 2021, at the annual Thanksgiving concert of Present Music, an ensemble dedicated to contemporary music. It was commissioned by the ensemble and by the Wisconsin Conference of the United Church of Christ and Plymouth Church in the United Church of Christ.Chacon has described the work as an exploration of the “spaces in which we gather, the history of access of these spaces, and the land upon which these buildings sit.” He wrote “Voiceless Mass” specifically for the Nichols & Simpson organ at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in Milwaukee.“In exploiting the architecture of the cathedral, ‘Voiceless Mass’ considers the futility of giving voice to the voiceless, when ceding space is never an option for those in power,” Chacon has said.The Pulitzer committee praised the piece as a “mesmerizing, original work for organ and ensemble that evokes the weight of history in a church setting, a concentrated and powerful musical expression with a haunting visceral impact.”It is the latest in a series of works by Chacon exploring the injustices suffered by Indigenous people. He has produced graphic scores dedicated to Indigenous female composers; recordings of silent standoffs between Indigenous women and the police during protests near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, in 2016; and a video installation, filmed on Navajo, Cherokee and Seminole lands, featuring women singing the stories of sites where massacres or removals have taken place.He also wrote the music, along with Du Yun, for the opera “Sweet Land,” a meditation on colonialism that premiered in 2020.Chacon said he hoped the prize would help give “Voiceless Mass” a broader audience.“I hope it gets performed more,” he said. “It’s always been a challenge to make this kind of work accessible to people who can’t enter these spaces, either because of monetary barriers, or just because they feel they aren’t the audience for classical music.” More

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      Madonna and Beeple Collaborate on NFT Project

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      The pop singer spent the last year working with the digital artist on a video series about motherhood. Proceeds will benefit three nonprofits.Has Madonna embraced the blockchain?The pop superstar’s interest in NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, caught some fans off guard in March, when she paid 180 ether, a digital currency worth $560,000 at the time, for an NFT of a tattooed ape from the Bored Ape Yacht Club, a collection of digital art.On Monday, the singer released her own NFT series, titled “Mother of Creation” — three digitally rendered videos that recast her as a nude woman giving birth to flora, fauna and technology. The artworks are the result of a yearlong collaboration with Mike Winkelmann, the digital artist known as Beeple.“This is such an absolute, insane honor,” said Winkelmann, who is known for selling an NFT in 2021 for $69 million at Christie’s. “I don’t do many collaborations. This is probably the only one I will do for a very long time.”From Wednesday through Friday, Madonna and Beeple’s NFTs will be auctioned for charity through the online marketplace SuperRare.“It’s counterintuitive to who I am,” Madonna said in a phone interview, explaining that her initial struggle with the concept of digital assets made her want to explore what she saw as the elements of faith and community that drive the NFT market.From there, Beeple and Madonna developed three videos in which audiences have a full-frontal view of Madonna’s avatar giving birth to different organisms from a hospital bed, a rusted vehicle, and a forest floor. The singer has paired each video with poetry — some her own and some by the mystic poet Rumi.“I never want to be provocative just for the sake of provocation,” said Madonna, insisting that the butterflies and centipedes she gives birth to in the video mean something. “They stand for hope. They stand for technology.”Proceeds from the NFTs will benefit three nonprofits supporting women and children: the Voices of Children Foundation, which cares for those affected by the war in Ukraine; the City of Joy Foundation, which helps survivors of violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo; and Black Mama’s Bail Out, which provides bail for incarcerated caregivers.The charity auction comes at a time when the NFT market’s future remains uncertain.John Crain, a founder and chief executive of SuperRare, said that his company did $10 million in sales last month compared to a $35 million high set in October. He sees the discrepancy not as a sign of the NFT market’s demise but of its maturation.“It’s been a frothy year, but marketplaces are inherently volatile,” Crain said. “There are fluctuations, but I wouldn’t call it a bear market.” More