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      Bonnie Raitt Faces Mortality With Compassion and Hope

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      On her latest album, “Just Like That…,” the singer-songwriter brings new depth to songs of love and loss.Who would expect a Bonnie Raitt song to start like this? “Had the flu in the prison infirmary,” she sings in “Down the Hall,” from her new album, “Just Like That…,” which arrives more than half a century after her debut.“Down the Hall” is a folky, fingerpicked ballad, written by Raitt, with the plain-spoken diction of a John Prine song. Based on a New York Times story, it is narrated by a convict, a murderer, who finds a kind of atonement in becoming a prison hospice worker: “The thought of those guys goin’ out alone/It hit me somewhere deep,” she sings, as Glenn Patscha’s organ chords swell behind her like glimmers of redemption.“Down the Hall” is the somber finale to “Just Like That…,” Raitt’s first album since 2016. The music’s style is familiar; Raitt, 72, reconvened her longtime band members, who are old hands at blues, soul, ballads and reggae, and she produced the tracks with the feel of musicians performing together in real time, savoring grooves and finding warmth in human imperfections.But the album was recorded in 2021, well into the pandemic, and it shows. Along with her usual insights into grown-up love, desire, heartbreak and regret, Raitt’s latest collection of songs directly faces mortality.“Livin’ for the Ones,” with words by Raitt and music by the band’s guitarist George Marinelli, is a Rolling Stones-flavored rocker, with strummed and sliding guitars tumbling across the backbeat. It draws a life force from mourning, countering petty impulses toward lethargy or self-pity with the blunt recognition of so many lives lost: “If you ever start to bitch and moan,” Raitt sings, “Just remember the ones who won’t/Ever feel the sun on their faces again.”Another kind of solace after death arrives in the quietly poignant title track of “Just Like That…,” also written by Raitt. Its story unfolds at a measured pace. A stranger shows up on the doorstep of a woman who has never stopped blaming herself for the death of her son. The man has sought her out because he’s the one who got her son’s heart as a transplant: “I lay my head upon his chest/And I was with my boy again,” Raitt sings, with sorrow and relief in the grain of her voice.The rest of the album features Raitt’s more typical fare: songs about love lost and found, about getting together or drifting apart. “Made Up Mind,” from the Canadian band Bros. Landreth, opens the album with a stolid portrait of a slow-motion separation, feeling “the quiet behind a slamming door.” Its counterbalance is “Something’s Got a Hold of My Heart,” an Al Anderson song about a late-arriving, unexpected romance.Yet mortality haunts even the love songs. The album includes Raitt’s remake of “Love So Strong” by the reggae pioneer Toots Hibbert, who led Toots and the Maytals and died in 2020 after being hospitalized for Covid-like symptoms. “Blame It on Me,” by John Capek and Andrew Matheson, is a bluesy, torchy, slow-dance breakup ballad that couches accusations in apologies, warning that “Truth is love’s first casualty”; near the end, Raitt turns the tables with an exquisite, sustained, breaking high note. The song also assigns some of the blame to time, which has, “Poured like sand through your hands and mine.”Understanding that life is finite, the stakes are higher for every relationship, every moment. On “Just Like That…,” Raitt calls for compassion, consolation and perseverance to get through with grace.Bonnie Raitt“Just Like That …”(Redwing) More

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      Joyce DiDonato Wants Music to ‘Build a Paradise for Today’

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      The star mezzo-soprano’s album and concert program “Eden” addresses climate change by planting seeds both real and metaphorical.What are the duties of an artist toward society? As Russia invades Ukraine, as racism persists in the United States, this age-old question remains very much of the moment. And the list of issues to take a political stand on, whether by choice or suggestion, grows ever longer.The one taken up by the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato in her latest project, an album and concert program called “Eden,” is climate change.Employing a broader repertoire than DiDonato’s typical focus on the Baroque — Wagner, Mahler and a new commission from Rachel Portman in counterpoint with Cavalli, Gluck and Handel — the program reflects on what this star singer sees as humanity’s disconnect from nature. If the result is more mystical than activist, DiDonato’s aim remains, as her liner notes say, a prompt for her listeners “to build a paradise for today.”Touring since early March and arriving at Carnegie Hall on Saturday with the period-instrument ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro under the conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, the concerts are staged by Marie Lambert-Le Bihan. At performances, plant seeds are handed out to audience members, and, as part of an educational initiative, local children’s choirs — some ongoing, others formed for the occasion — sing “Seeds of Hope,” a song collated by the teacher Mike Roberts from lyrics and melodies written last year by 11- to 13-year-old students at a school near London.In an interview, DiDonato spoke about her project and the issues it raises, picking a favorite page from Portman’s “The First Morning of the World,” which features text by Gene Scheer. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.What were the origins of this project?It emerged about five years ago from the last big project I did with Il Pomo d’Oro, “In War and Peace.” I struggled for about two years to try to reconcile how to put climate change onto the stage in a way that made people want to come and experience it. I’m essentially an optimistic person, and I think my biggest strength is to prompt people to relief and hope, which is hard to do when you’re looking at a pretty dire situation.In a naïve way, it falls under that category of a disconnect, from me to you and me to the world that I’m living in: When I look at music and the natural world; I see harmony; I see balance; I see all kinds of forces working together to create an ecosystem, to create a symphony, to create an environment where everything has the chance to thrive. So, I’ve married those two, and I’m putting it out under the invitation to say, in a really simplistic way: What seeds are you planting with your words, with your actions, with your tweets, on your balcony?You start the program by singing the trumpet part to Ives’s “The Unanswered Question.” How did you select the repertoire?We knew that it had to start in a mystical and magical way. The Ives is infinite, but you have this insistent question that keeps coming back, and you have a progressively complicated and chaotic non-answer. I just don’t know of anything that summarizes the 21st century more accurately than that.That piece was on Gene’s mind in writing the poetry for “The First Morning of the World.” His line “there is a language without question marks” is a bridge from the Ives. We’re hoping to demonstrate what it is to be fully connected to nature, which happens in Mahler’s “Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft,” certainly in Handel’s “Ombra mai fu,” but also to demonstrate that ripping apart, that complete disconnect from nature that the Myslivecek warns about. We feel deeply in the “Piante ombrose” of Cavalli a sense of desolation and despair. The answer finally comes in the Mahler and the Wagner — and the Handel.What do you admire in the music of Rachel Portman, which has predominantly been for film?She wasn’t necessarily on my radar as a composer, but her name came up from several different sources. I listened to her “Leaves and Trees,” and it was clear that she had a very personal connection to the natural world.What she gave us I wouldn’t classify as cinematic at all, but it feels perfect for trying to create the nurturing and tranquil side of nature. There’s an unease because the singer hasn’t yet learned to speak this language of nature that is in the text, but the language is present from the beginning in the flute.Rachel Portman’s ‘The First Morning of the World’EratoThere’s something comforting about that first bird sound that you hear in the morning. You’ve gone to bed reading all the headlines, and right before you pick up your phone to see the horror of the day, you hear the bird. There’s something primal in us that goes, “Well, here comes another day.”The Portman song ends with “Teach me to sing notes that bloom like a canopy of leaves,/Meant to do nothing but feel the sun.” That would seem to imply that music can’t do much in the world, but you write that the album is a “call to action.” What can your audience really do in the face of climate change?I think they can do extraordinary things, personally, but the extraordinary things are at a local level. I get completely overwhelmed if I’m trying to solve world peace or climate change. But when I do little things, and again I know this sounds so naïve, I’ve come to believe that it’s really the only way forward.Literally, the call to action in this is planting seeds. We are giving seeds to every concertgoer who comes, and if everybody takes a pot of dirt, puts them in, gives them a little bit of water, we will have planted thousands and thousands of plants across the course of this tour.The other huge part of this project is planting seeds of music in kids. I don’t know of very many more effective ways to grab kids and to empower them than choral music. That is one practical way in which this project is calling people to action.So what do you think the role of an artist should be in politics?I think some artists embrace more humanitarian aspects, and some are just called to get through the day and do the best they can — and I think all of it is OK. You can’t put one stamp on an artist and say, “Because you call yourself an artist, you’re required to do X, Y and Z now.” But you also can’t pretend that art and politics are not intertwined.I don’t think we can make a blanket statement about what artists should and shouldn’t do, but if they want to talk about politics, and they want to use their music as it has been done for centuries, then they are allowed to do that.You want to get your message out to as many people as possible, understandably, but you are touring this program on five continents. Has this project led you to question the priorities of your own industry?For sure, what has been heavy on my mind is that I want people to take care of the environment and I’m getting on a plane to travel around the world. But I don’t think it’s enough to just do a 90-minute drive-by concert for people who can afford the tickets and move on to the next. That’s why we are leaving behind a green souvenir in the hands of everybody who comes to the concert. I think even more profoundly of the effect that it’s going to have on these kids, to join a world-class artist on the stage.Of course, we’re finding more ways to travel on the ground if we can, and finding ways to do carbon offsetting. I know it’s not a perfect solution. The biggest thing is, the impact that we leave behind has to be lasting. More

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      How Arcade Fire Found a Way Back

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      There are a few indicators that Win Butler, the singer and guitarist who fronts the rock band Arcade Fire, might be a professional somebody: the flat-brimmed, cream-billed bolero hat atop his head or the shock of slicked-back, bleached blond hair that materializes when he takes it off. He’s also exceptionally tall, a trait that helped him to win MVP at the 2016 NBA All-Star Celebrity Game over Jason Sudeikis and Nick Cannon.On a warm day in March, Butler and his wife, the singer and multi-instrumentalist Régine Chassagne, were walking through Times Square when Butler was conscripted into a tourist-trap performance where someone would vault over a group of men. It was safe to say that Butler was the only participant who’d once accepted a Grammy for album of the year.In the end, the performers chose to leap over someone else. “Discrimination against tall people is real,” he noted with humor returning to Chassagne, who’d pressed a wad of bills into a collection hat.This trip represented a musical homecoming, of sorts. The night before, Butler, Chassagne and Arcade Fire, a band that has headlined to more than 100,000 at Glastonbury, performed at Manhattan’s 600-capacity Bowery Ballroom for the first time since 2004. David Bowie and David Byrne attended that performance 18 years ago, and the joint patronage of two art-rock legends helped anoint the band as The Next Big Thing.“Right out of the gate, it was like, ‘I think our lives might be a bit different,’” Butler recalled.From left: Parry, Butler, Gara, Chassagne and Paul Beaubrun onstage at Bowery Ballroom in March. The band returned to the New York club for the first time since 2004.OK McCausland for The New York TimesWhat followed was one of the sharpest ascents in recent rock history. Arcade Fire’s debut, “Funeral,” became the fastest-selling record in the history of its indie label, Merge. Its 2010 LP, “The Suburbs,” debuted at No. 1 and was the surprise album of the year winner, beating out Katy Perry, Lady Gaga and Eminem.The group’s music has combined delicate interiority with expansive Springsteen-esque rock ’n’ roll, and pulled from classical, disco, chamber music and Haitian rara. Onstage, where the large ensemble’s ecstatic performances could resemble a tent revival, it has sounded like a shuffling street band, a tight rhythm machine and a superstar rock unit capable of filling out a football stadium.But when “Everything Now” arrived in 2017, an LP that hybridized the band’s dance and rock sounds, something shifted. The record was accompanied by a trollish press campaign where the band created several websites that intentionally spread false information about its activity, as a sort of commentary on the nascent “fake news” era. This did not go over well. For whatever reason — the darker political climate, the quality of the record itself — “Everything Now” was a commercial and critical misfire.“We,” the group’s sixth album, due May 6, is a reset. The lead single “The Lightning I & II” returns to soaring, big-sky rock, and the existential concerns threaded through the band’s career. (“I heard the thunder and I thought it was the answer,” Butler sings. “But I find I got the question wrong.”) “Age of Anxiety I” and “Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole)” start as solemn, piano-driven ballads before slowly building toward explosive, rhythmic release. Other songs veer into stripped-down, singer-songwriter territory: “End of Empire I-IV” is a multipart epic about life during American decline, while “Unconditional I (Lookout Kid)” wouldn’t sound out of place at a campfire singalong.“I look at Paul Simon, and look at the breadth between ‘Graceland’ and what he was doing with Simon & Garfunkel — to think that’s the same person who made that music, that’s extremely inspiring,” Butler said. “I was always more interested in seeing if there’s a way to do whatever you want, musically, and still have it feel like the band.”As the group performed some of those tracks at the Bowery — and led elated fans on a mini-march into a nearby subway station — the new songs bled seamlessly together with older favorites like “Rebellion (Lies)” and “Ready to Start.” But the band that made “We” has undergone significant changes.“It’s a less physically unified life than it was once upon a time, which you can look at however you want to,” Richard Reed Parry, one of the band’s multi-instrumentalists, said in a video interview, with a knowing chuckle. “Very, very different life these days.”“Our process is just our life,” Butler said, of songwriting with Chassagne.OK McCausland for The New York TimesSITTING AT THE Midtown restaurant Patsy’s, where Butler’s grandfather Alvino Rey used to perform with his jazz band, Butler was chattier than Chassagne, but they regularly finished each other’s thoughts, and shared knowing glances across the table.“I’ve come to believe that music is literally a spirit,” Butler said. “Not figuratively. There’s something that gets inside you, and it can get passed on to different people.”For more than 20 years, Arcade Fire has thought deeply about the forces, spiritual and otherwise, that connect people. On some level, its music wagers, all of us feel that society is stupefying, and modernity is terrifying. Only by acknowledging this can we be liberated from the paralysis that accompanies adulthood, and recapture our uncontaminated appreciation of the world.“The music is good, but I think it’s also about what they represent,” David Byrne said in a video interview. “They don’t seem too slick; they take the slightly chaotic aspect of their shows as a virtue. I think people appreciate that they’re not getting a super-duper polished pop product — it feels like this is something they really believe in.”Butler in the crowd at Bowery Ballroom.OK McCausland for The New York TimesIn the band’s early years, the band gained and shed members, settling into a lineup that included the multi-instrumentalist Parry, the bassist Tim Kingsbury, and Butler’s brother, Will, on various keys, strings and football helmets; the drummer Jeremy Gara began as a tour manager, and joined full-time in 2004. They remained remarkably self-contained, and resistant to the external pressures of rapid success.“When things blow up, the sharks come around,” Chassagne said with a laugh. “We know what we want to do, and so you don’t get impressed by checks and promises.” (Butler noted they “probably met about 20 people” who claimed to have signed Nirvana after “Funeral” blew up.)After the 2013 album “Reflektor,” Butler and Chassagne relocated to New Orleans, where they’d fallen in love with the local culture (as well as its relative proximity to Haiti, where Chassagne’s family originates), while the rest of the band remained in Montreal. The backlash to its follow-up, “Everything Now,” didn’t prompt “massive internal change,” Parry said, but noted, “It was the first time we’d been outside of an arm’s length from each other, and that had much more of an impact on the band.”Kingsbury agreed. “It coincided with the time in everyone’s life when we were in our mid-30s, and children were appearing,” he said in a video interview. (Butler, now 42, and Chassagne, 45, have a 9-year-old son.) As a result, he said, on the band’s most recent albums “there’s certain aspects that are less all of us and a little more of them.”At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, border restrictions prevented the group from meeting in person, and working over Zoom proved fruitless. Butler said he and Chassagne challenged themselves to envision every song on “We” without production or drums, in case they were forced to make the album without the rest of the band. (Early on, Josh Tillman, who performs as Father John Misty, flew in from Los Angeles to act as a sounding board.) The band was subsequently able to convene in El Paso, Texas, in the fall of 2020, and again the following summer in Maine.Butler and Chassagne are constantly working on new music. “Our process is just our life,” he said, noting that Chassagne doesn’t receive enough credit for the band’s output. “Régine has this magical ability to remember almost anything we’ve ever done. It’s always coexisting at the same time; some songs take 20 years to write, some songs take 20 minutes.” During our conversation, Butler spoke often about time, musing about what it takes for a restaurant to stay open for 100 years (“There’s something to be said for just executing something”), and lamenting the strict standards that new artists are judged by (“I hope there’s still a space in the world for a band to make a bunch of crappy records, and have their fifth record be genius”).The first of four Bowery Ballroom shows ended with the band leading the crowd onto the street, and into a subway station.OK McCausland for The New York TimesMembers of Brother High, a Haitian rara band, joined Arcade Fire on the street outside the Bowery Ballroom.OK McCausland for The New York TimesButler and members of Brother High make their way to a subway station.OK McCausland for The New York TimesOK McCausland for The New York Times“The common path of almost every artist that I respect is very circuitous — it’s not a straight line, and there’s a lot of ups and downs,” he said in a separate video interview. “It takes 20 years to know if anything’s good or bad, anyway.”Butler also resisted the idea that the reaction to “Everything Now” provoked any extended contemplation about the band’s identity. Still, “We” feels like a subtle recalibration that both revisits the past, and pushes forward. The band is “always mixing the old with the new,” Parry said. “Things kind of surface and resurface.” Parts of “The Lightning I and II” date back to the “Funeral” era. Chassagne said one movement of “End of Empire I-IV” was written when she and Butler first met in college; it’s immediately followed by something they wrote the week of recording. Parry said a lot of music was left on the cutting-room floor. “There were other records we were working on at the same time as this one that I would like to exist,” he noted.For “We,” Arcade Fire brought in the British producer Nigel Godrich, who’s known most for his work with Radiohead. The title harkens back to Butler’s childhood memory of his grandmother reading him a book with “We” stamped on the cover. That book was Charles Lindbergh’s autobiography, but the name is more directly drawn from the Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel of the same name, which takes place in a future society that exists entirely under mass surveillance.Butler said he made a physical mood board of inspirational material, and was drawn to both “dystopic images of a boot stepping on someone’s face, everyone in masks, really kind of anxiety, fever dream stuff” and “images of our son, family, old pictures of the band, and the piece of concrete outside of our old apartment in Montreal where we wrote our names in 2003.” (It’s still there, he proudly noted.)“It took a while to understand why they were related to each other,” he said. “But we started to realize that it was more like the light and the shadow. It’s tempting to separate them, but they’re actually sort of the same thing.”The first half of the record is shot through with dread about the modern age, with Butler lamenting the palliatives — television, medication, algorithmic-generated content — that don’t seem to make us any happier. But it gives way to a more tender perspective, with Butler and Chassagne singing directly about their son, Eddie (who’s credited with providing “whispers” on “End of Empire”), and the way that love forges meaningful kinship. Peter Gabriel sings on “Unconditional II (Race and Religion),” and they said it was gratifying to talk shop with another artist with the same dogged approach to pursuing music.“It was so special to hear that because I was like …” Chassagne said, trailing off.“ … we feel crazy sometimes,” Butler said, finishing the thought. “It’s nice to meet other people that know what we’re talking about.”“We” signals a new era for Arcade Fire in some more formal ways. The day after the first of what turned into four Bowery shows, Will Butler announced he was leaving the band. “There was no acute reason beyond that I’ve changed — and the band has changed — over the last almost 20 years,” he said in a statement.Kingsbury said, “He was just ready to take a break.” Parry added he was “devastated” by the move: “I think there’s just a lot of things that he has to do, while he’s still in the prime of his life, that are not being in a rock band on tour.” (Will Butler declined to comment.)Arcade Fire’s membership has always expanded in a live setting, and with a tour tentatively scheduled for the fall, it has brought in Wolf Parade’s Dan Boeckner and the Haitian multi-instrumentalist Paul Beaubrun. “Even though they’re one of the biggest bands in the world, it always feels like we’re the underdog,” Beaubrun said. “We have to give it our all, all of the time. I’ve never felt that from anyone.”The group’s ambitions still stretch beyond putting out more records. Chassagne cited her philanthropic work in Haiti as a major focal point of the next few years. Butler said he and Beaubrun are working on launching a digital label focused on importing Haitian artists. He brought up his grandfather Alvino, who continued playing music into his 90s. “The scope of his career, and those relationships, is so long. Even with my brother — if he hadn’t been in the band, we just have so many shared experiences that I’m really proud of.”He wanted to stay present, he said, no matter what the future held. “This whole process of people judging a record, and is this good or is this bad — I don’t give a [expletive] about any of that,” he said. “I play music to stay alive.” More

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      The Multifaceted Mingus

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      On the bassist and bandleader’s centennial, 10 jazz musicians discuss his achievements and complexities and pick out a pivotal track from his repertoire.Charles Mingus was everything all at once: jazz, folk, dance, theater, label owner, brave Black man. In an era where the wrong opinions could get him killed or, at the very least, exiled from the music business, he expressed himself boldly, and exorcised strong emotions through the strings of his upright bass. His playing style was fierce, almost violent, as if the trauma of American racism was coming through it.Born 100 years ago on Friday along the United States-Mexico border, in a body that confounded easy racial categorization (one of his most memorable ballads is “Self-Portrait in Three Colors”), Mingus lived, wrote and played bass in a state of agitated brilliance. He stretched the instrument’s powers of melody and found new ways of making it into leadership material. As a composer, he brought the blues erudition of Duke Ellington into every group he led, whether sextets or full orchestras. And he kept his ensembles as loose as a group of friends joking around the card table.In one of his most quoted interviews, with the producer Nesuhi Ertegun, Mingus explained that the smoldering, sizzling force of his music was a reflection of everything happening inside. “What I’m trying to play is very difficult, because I’m trying to play the truth of what I am,” Mingus said. “The reason why it’s difficult — it’s not difficult to play the mechanics of it — it’s because I’m changing all the time.”By the time he released his most widely remembered album, “Mingus Ah Um,” in 1959, he was both a leading man and an elder statesman on the New York scene. But his defining years were still ahead: Mingus’s music would ultimately become hard to disassociate from the 1960s, probably because it so powerfully conveys a feeling of convulsive change. He made reinvention and regrowth feel like a ritual and a party, all the way until his death of a heart attack in 1979, at 56.Highly sensitive, he had a short temper onstage and sometimes with his band; he was called the “Angry Man of Jazz” in a time when the genre was hopped up on cool. (His infamous memoir, “Beneath the Underdog,” showcased this sometimes volatile passion.) Mingus’s legacy is best represented by the unruly beauty of his recordings, including “The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady,” a courageous 1963 album filled with the roots of Baptist gospel and the blues, the language of Blackness and the sound of togetherness. He wanted to stray from the labels that siphoned Black music into prescribed boxes and sanitized it for the mainstream marketplace. This was him — the rage, the swing, the beauty and the confusion.Still, no single album sums up the live-wire brilliance of Mingus. What follow are edited excerpts from conversations with a wide range of jazz musicians who are active today, including one who played with Mingus and many who carry his torch. Each picked a pivotal track from his career and explained its powers.Charles McPhersonSaxophonist, 82; played in Mingus’s ensembles from 1960 to 1972Mingus to me was a complicated person, and he had a lot of moving parts, which can translate into musical dimension. I would use the term “Renaissance man.” I think of him as a world thinker. He had feelings, thoughts and opinions about the world, and he expressed all of that in his compositions.When we would play his music, if we were too clean, he would say: “I do not want it to sound processed. It’s too pristine.” And if we weren’t as organized, then he would say, “Well, that’s too raggedy.” He would say, “I like organized chaos.”He called his group the Jazz Workshop. So when you come to see Mingus, you’re not only coming to see a performance, but you’re also coming to see a process. He would sometimes just stop a tune right there, in front of 200 people, and give advice to the musicians. And then he would turn to the audience and say, “Jazz Workshop process. You’re witnessing creation in progress in real time.”“Peggy’s Blue Skylight” (live at Town Hall, 1962)There was a recording date at Town Hall where we were reading music that was being copied while we were on the bandstand — and we were performing this music and some of the parts were still not quite written. That’s a great example.Georgia Anne MuldrowSinger, songwriter, rapper and producer, 38I think the most meaningful aspect is his naturalness, because we can look at it two different ways, right? His naturalness as far as the transparency of his emotions coming through his arrangements, and just him. However he felt it, he was going to write it. And I think the other thing is in the way he arranged his music, and the way he taught it to people. Like, “I’ll hand you the music, but you should probably play it how I’m singing it to you.” That’s one of my favorite things about Mingus, because it’s something that transcends the paper.He was pressing up his own stuff — and I love that, too. I think that’s one of my favorite things, his independent business sense. He walks his talk, basically. He’s like, “Yo, I’m going to do this differently. I’m going to own my own thing.”“Myself When I Am Real” (recorded 1963)I love Mingus on piano, so “Myself When I Am Real” is one of my favorites. He’s just such a West Coast dude, and it’s a beautiful song.Jason MoranPianist, 47; studied for years with Mingus’s longtime pianist, Jaki ByardFirst, Mingus wholeheartedly acknowledges the folk aspect of all great music. That means acknowledging your ancestry and how it shows up — and that you can never put a tuxedo on it. That’s what makes it vital, because a folk tradition just is. That’s one aspect that makes Mingus’s music vital today, for the artistry’s part.But the political part, I think, is that, because of his generation, he was able to say things with maybe a more pointed tongue than, say, Ellington. Then he and Max Roach and Ellington teamed up, and that’s a really beautiful generational meet-up. Whether everybody was on the same page or not, it’s necessary. So I think he also represents that every generation will have a way that they view the politics and react to it, and the artists will find a way to sew it in so that it hits people differently.“Meditations on Integration,” (a.k.a. “Praying With Eric,” recorded live at Town Hall, 1964)On “Meditations,” there’s something that happens in it, especially when they would play it live, where it feels like it just rips apart. It sounds like the band is literally screaming through the instruments.Esperanza SpaldingBassist, vocalist and producer, 37I like the way that you hear the personality of everybody in his band, even when it’s a big band. Even as you’re hearing the arrangement that clearly was written by his hand on a piece of paper. And the total sound of the arrangement is this tapestry of every individual’s sound and way of playing.I think his transparency is really meaningful. His transparency of who he is and what he thought, what he felt and what he was dissatisfied with. And what he was striving for and what he was talking about in the music. From the way he plays and the way he writes and the titles of his songs, and the words in the songs, you can feel exactly what he means. I feel like that was his point, to let you know exactly what the hell he meant, and exactly who he was. And I think that’s really radical for anybody.“So Long Eric” (live in Stockholm, 1964)There is this song for the saxophonist Eric Dolphy called “So Long Eric.” It was his last gig with the band. I remember hearing it when I was pretty young, thinking, “This is a grown man onstage in front of people he doesn’t know, offering a song of longing and grieving and farewell to another person that he loves. That’s so generous and radical.” What a profound gesture of love.Michael FormanekBassist, 63; played in Mingus Dynasty and Mingus Big Band in the 1990sWhen people talk about Mingus’s music, more often than not they talk about these pieces of music that are incredible tunes by themselves. But in some ways, I think of him as so much more than that: as a composer who was able to combine different moods and feelings and colors in ways that are just so human.He was also about setting things in motion and then cutting them off. And pulling the rug out from under you, and then sending you back in another direction. And then just when things are getting to a certain point of tension, he would throw in this beautiful ballad idea — but it would only last for a short time. His compositions often had many moods right up against each other, yet changing very quickly. I think human beings can relate to that in a different sort of way, maybe even unconsciously. The internal sort of push-and-pull of life. It’s very real, it’s very exposed. And very beautiful.“Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Blue Silk,” (recorded 1964) and “Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Silk Blue,” (recorded 1974)“Orange Was the Color of Her Dress” is a really important one for me, partially because the recorded versions are so different. The sextet played it in Europe in ’64, with Jaki and Dolphy and Clifford Jordan. To go from that to “Changes Two” in 1975, to hear what they did with it, and how portable the material was. To have music like that, with all that character and all that complexity, but that can really happen in really different ways with different groups — to me, that’s amazing.Miles MosleyBassist, singer and composer, 42One of my favorite ideas of Mingus’s is that rhythm is felt in a circle. Each of us feels time in a slightly different place. When I refer to “time” in music, it’s the rhythm, the beat, the tempo. And Mingus would put his band together depending on who felt the rhythm where, in this concept of a circle: ahead of it, on top of it, behind it. And he would make it so that the entire band equaled a group of musicians that created a full circle of time.What Mingus embraced in his music, what you’re hearing, is someone embracing the idea that you want to cultivate a collection of humans because they are different from one another, not because they are the same. You’re not hearing a bunch of people in unity. You are hearing a bunch of people sharing a concept and expressing it uniquely to themselves, all at once. That is one of the most unique approaches to music, to jazz, that I’ve been able to bring into my own thought process. And I think it’s a wonderful idea: The small things that separate us on a common goal is what makes us more powerful.“Haitian Fight Song” (recorded 1957)There’s so much I like about this piece of music. One is the constant tension of that bass line and the constant lurking sound that it has: Something is coming for you. He was so able to capture the spirit of the Haitian revolution throughout the arc of that song. It sounds like it’s starting at night. It sounds like people are making their way toward some purpose. The ability of that song to set visuals in your head is something that I aspire to at all times — not just tell a story but to evoke imagination in the listener.I also like that the band and Mingus don’t stay quiet inside of their instruments. They’re expressing themselves vocally. They’re expressing themselves with yells and shouts, not just for effect, but in actual praise of the musicians around them and the performances they’re hearing.Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah (formerly Christian Scott)Trumpeter and composer, 39If I had to choose one thing to take away from what he contributed, it would be courageousness, the things that he levied against a world that refused to see all people’s humanity, in a time where those types of accurate appraisals of our environment could have been met with death.And, as much as his musicianship and genius, the things that he was able to conceptualize and actualize, I think his ability to be upright in the moment and say the things that he said through his chest and mean it, is one of the greatest examples that we have in the 20th century of a human being speaking to the ills of this world and trying to do something to contribute light to it.“Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” (recorded 1959)Obviously, we understand that it’s written for the great Lester Young. It was my grandfather’s favorite song, and when I was a very small boy, and before I started to cut my teeth into music, he would play the song all the time. It’s just one of the most beautiful examples of that kind of send-off, the power in the melody, the space and the timing of it, texturally what’s going on.Endea OwensBassist and bandleader, 30I was introduced to Mingus at Michigan State University. I was told to play “Haitian Fight Song,” the first tune of his I ever played. I listened to a lot more Mingus after that, partially because that record is so iconic and begins with an open bass solo. It’s something that every bass player knows.When I listen to Mingus, I can hear all of the influences that relate to me, even in 2022. Mingus’s music was a very social-activist music. You take “Fables of Faubus,” that was written in the late ’50s. People were still getting lynched for speaking their minds back then. To create music that really impacted such a social change and pressed against the society’s norms at the time, that was incredible. He always kept the integrity.“Better Git It in Your Soul” (recorded 1959)“Better Git It in Your Soul,” that’s just a feel-good song. I grew up in church, so automatically I’m just vibing to it. I could hear people doing the two-claps, and then just all the jazz language that he uses in it. From his work with Ellington, he found a way to mash everything together and make it relatable and timeless.William ParkerBassist and composer, 70Musically, he had a great imagination, and lots of the content in his music came from the church. His music grew from contrasts, fast against slow; from the idea of politics; from color and bursts of sound; and using the instrument as a human voice.If you look at the way the books try to clean up Mingus’s music, I feel that his music was much less cleaned up than they represent. If you’re changing it every time you play it, it can’t be boxed in. There’s one thing missing when you say, “Let’s play the music of Charles Mingus.” And that’s Charles Mingus. You need Mingus.“Money Jungle” (recorded 1962)Mingus was a street musician, to me. People say, “Well, he’s academic, he’s trying to do a kind of classical or symphonic music.” But, to me, the way he played was non-calculated; he used his ear a lot. If you listen to “Money Jungle,” with Duke Ellington and Max Roach, I believe they just came together and pulled that record together in the studio.Nick DunstonBassist and composer, 25In the music, I feel like there’s a very audible sense of his search for identity, and constructing an identity in real time. And him being multiracial — that’s been a significant part of my identity development over the years, and he also went through that.There was such a strong foundation of the blues in particular, and also Ellington’s music. And you can tell that even as he branches out with experimentation, and exploring other kinds of music in his work, he is always playing with this idea of tension and release. There’s this balance of checking out relatively unexplored areas, and then connecting it back to the blues roots. It also, I think, challenges this idea that musical evolution is a linear concept. He really turns that inside out. It’s more like a circle.“Duet Solo Dancers” (recorded 1963)“Duet Solo Dancers” is the second track on “The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady,” and I think is pretty much a perfect composition. What starts out as the most beautiful ballad I’ve ever heard goes into a section where the band starts in this sort of downtempo funeral march, and then just keeps on constantly accelerating. Then they drop back down. He’s kind of messing with you a little bit, which I really dig. And then, toward the end of the track, he brings back stuff from the track prior, in really creative ways. As the album progresses, all this material kind of returns; it gets folded back and creates this really beautiful chaos that he’s controlling. More

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      With ‘Waiting for the Sibyl,’ Kentridge Looks Into the Future

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      The South African artist developed a piece about how difficult it is to see around the next corner. Ironically, the work anticipated the uncertainties of pandemic life.LONDON — Billions of us have spent the past two or so years trying to divine the future. Will I get Covid-19? How bad will it be? When will the coronavirus pandemic end? Will it ever end? Reliable answers have been scant; even if we’ve been cushioned from the worst effects, many people have been camping in a sort of existential waiting room, living in near-permanent uncertainty.Appropriate timing, then, that the Barbican arts center in London is about to stage a chamber opera, by the South African artist William Kentridge, about how difficult it is to see around the next corner. Titled “Waiting for the Sibyl,” it retells the myth of a Greek prophetess whom mortals once pestered with exactly these sort of exasperating questions.A scene from “Waiting for the Sibyl,” which premiered at the Teatro Dell’Opera di Roma, in Italy, in 2019.Stella OlivierThat prophetess, the Cumaean Sibyl, was said to have spit out her written answers on oak leaves, but there was a catch: If the wind scattered the leaves, she would not help put them in the correct order, leaving her clients none the wiser. The opera is a reminder that humans have been trying to get a jump on what’s coming next for perhaps as long as we’ve existed — and that maybe we’d be better served by living in the present instead.In a recent interview in London, Kentridge said that, ironically, he hadn’t seen the piece’s relevance coming: He had begun work on “Waiting for the Sibyl” more than two years before the pandemic.“Those questions of mortality, fate, who are we in this world, have been the bread and butter of artists for millennia,” he said. “But that’s been brought right to the forefront now.”Commissioned by the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma in Italy and debuted there in September 2019, the roughly 40-minute piece consists of short, fragmentary scenes without dialogue. At first, it seems as cryptic as anything produced by a Greek oracle. A cast of nine singers and dancers enact moments from the legend. In one, a performer writhes in stuttering flashes of light in front of a screen displaying messages like, “I have brought NEWS” and “THE MOMENT HAS GONE.” Later, the cast dances while surrounded by scraps of prophecies on leaves of paper.The prophecies themselves are wry: “Resist the THIRD MARTINI,” “DISCARD LAST YEAR’S SOCKS.” But the parallels with our pandemic experience are often eerie. “FRESH GRAVES are everywhere,” reads one. Another is even more plangent: “My turn is when?”Making the opera had been an intricate process, Kentridge explained. The work was compiled from odd phrases he’d seen in books of English, Russian and Hebrew poetry and from a 1916 book of proverbs compiled by the South African writer Solomon Plaatje, which he made into a libretto of sorts.“A libretto is a straitjacket: You put it on willingly, but nonetheless it is a restriction,” Kentridge said. This opera “is a totally different experience.”Alex Ingram for The New York TimesThese scraps of text were then workshopped with the singers alongside the composers Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Kyle Shepherd. Together, they translated the phrases into African languages including Zulu, Setswana and Sesotho and Xhosa, and developed an improvised musical score.Sometimes, the music refers to traditions such as call-and-response isicathamiya choral singing; elsewhere it is deliberately jumbled. To draw all of this together, Kentridge created art work — drawings, ink washes, sculptures, palimpsests of old letters and reference books — which he turned into animated projections and stage designs.Like so many of his works, the result is a “collage,” Kentridge said. While he has designed and directed operas before — notably a madcap spin on Shostakovich’s “The Nose” (2010) and a brutally monochrome version of Berg’s “Wozzeck” (2017) — being able to create his own universe was liberating, he added.“A libretto is a straitjacket: You put it on willingly, but nonetheless it is a restriction,” he said. “This is a totally different experience.”Mahlangu said that, for himself and the singers, the Greek source material seemed remote at first. Yet as they developed the piece, it began to resonate with African mythologies and storytelling traditions. “Many people in South Africa believe that when people die, they don’t actually die,” he said. “They continue to look after the living. There is a sibyl in each and every one.”He added that this story of prediction and counter-prediction also resonated with the volatile politics of contemporary South Africa, which became even more turbulent amid the pandemic, as the country’s unemployment rate climbed to a dizzying 35 percent. “Here we are constantly in the state of wonder and worry,” Mahlangu said: “‘What is the next step? Where will we be?’”Now 66, Kentridge is unusual — almost unique — among contemporary artists in having achieved as much acceptance in theaters and opera houses as in museums and contemporary art spaces. He began his career in the mid-1970s as a Johannesburg-based illustrator and printmaker, but his practice has expanded to include whimsical short films, elaborate installations and majestic pieces of public art.A still from “City Deep,” an animated film by Kentridge about South Africa.William KentridgeOften his subjects reference classical literature or art history; almost always they reflect on South Africa’s bitter legacy, as in his new animated film “City Deep” (2020), a response to Johannesburg’s contentious history. A documentary on the making of the movie will be screened at the Barbican alongside “Waiting for the Sibyl.”In an era of conceptual and digital art, Kentridge has remained defiantly figurative and analog: His hulking charcoal drawings, loose sketches in Indian ink and flickering projections are immediately recognizable. Even when working on collaborative projects, the bulk of his time is spent laboring alone with ink, or charcoal, and paper, the artist said. “The physicality is essential. It’s the medium through which the thinking happens.”Much as he enjoys making gallery-based shows, he loves the challenge of theatrical commissions, he added. “The opera house says, ‘We’ll give you a canvas, 17 meters wide, 11 meters high. And we’ll give you another 18 meters of depth,’” he said. “And I get to make an hour-and-a-half drawing in the space.”With opera houses and concert halls closed, he hunkered down in Johannesburg and made a series of nine films about his studio practice, which are now being edited. He has also been preparing a career retrospective at the Royal Academy in London (set to open in September after pandemic-related delays), and making an animated film response to Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, which will be performed live at the Lucerne festival, in Switzerland, in June.“There are always a few too many projects,” he said with a laugh. “But I can’t blame anyone but myself.”In an era of conceptual and digital art, Kentridge has remained defiantly figurative and analog: His hulking charcoal drawings, loose sketches in Indian ink and flickering projections are immediately recognizable.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesRe-encountering “Waiting for the Sibyl” in light of the coronavirus had been salutary, he added: Though the opera was partly about the limits of human knowledge, partly about mortality itself, it also contained seeds of hope.“In the long run, none of us are going to get out of this alive, but while we are here, we can acknowledge that,” he said. “We can still work wisely and optimistically. Comfort must be taken where it can be found.” More

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      Kae Tempest’s Music Defies Boundaries. A New LP Demolishes Even More.

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      The prolific British poet and musician’s fourth album, “The Line Is a Curve,” is personal in new ways.LONDON — “I’m just going to go into it, and I’ll see you on the other side,” Kae Tempest told the crowd at an intimate concert earlier this month.Over the following 30 minutes, Tempest — who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns — performed their new album, “The Line Is a Curve,” a cappella. Standing alone onstage at Rough Trade East, Tempest closed their eyes and swayed, trance-like, to the rhythm of the words, occasionally wiping sweat into their cropped hair. The 300 audience members were silent and still, as though sharing the same reverie.When Tempest performs, “I want to conduct this power that’s in the room,” they said in a recent interview at a cafe near their home in Catford, southeast London. “I want us to plug into each other and see if we can connect.”That impulse has guided Tempest since they started rapping under the name Excentral the Tempest as a teen. Now 36, Tempest has been influential in London’s poetry and spoken-word scenes, creating a formidable body of work including poetry, plays, fiction and nonfiction books, and albums that feature spoken lyrics over a variety of atmospheric backdrops, two of which were nominated for the Mercury Prize.“The Line Is a Curve,” released earlier this month, is Tempest’s fourth album, and perhaps their most personal call for connection yet. Tempest’s previous records and poems offered portraits of the inner lives of contemporary south London characters and ancient Greek gods. “The Line Is a Curve” is firmly in the first person: “I love you when I see you” Tempest chants over moody synths on “Salt Coast”; another track features a voice note Tempest recorded for a friend, intoning, “There can’t be healing until it’s all broken, break me.” The first track’s refrain is “to be known and loved.”“The Line Is a Curve” might be Tempest’s most personal call for connection yet.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesThe album’s cover is the first in eight years to feature a picture of Tempest. Dan Carey, who worked as a producer on “The Line Is a Curve” and all Tempest’s solo albums, said that compared to their previous records, the new album “feels a bit more kind of tender, with a bit more acceptance. I think that Kae’s had some realizations about themselves that make it closer.”Recently, the artist has started to share more of themselves. In August 2020, Tempest came out as nonbinary and changed their first name. Sitting in the south London cafe, Tempest’s eyes glistened as they spoke about this new process of self-acceptance. “I feel relief,” they said. “Trans people are beautiful, so why was I afraid of that person in me? We’re blessed people.” Since coming out, “Maybe I’m able to connect more fully with myself,” they added. “But I’ve been on a journey toward connection my whole life.”Ian Rickson, who directed one of Tempest’s plays, an adaptation of Sophocles’ “Philoctetes” called “Paradise” at London’s National Theater last year, described this as a “shamanic” element of Tempest’s work. When Tempest won the prestigious Ted Hughes Award for poetry at 26, for a piece of live performance poetry called “Brand New Ancients,” there was still a rift “between what was perceived to be ‘literary’ and what was spoken-word/performance and perceived as somehow ‘not literary,’” said Maura Dooley, one of the judges for that year, in an email. Bridget Minamore, a poet and Tempest’s friend, said Tempest was instrumental in bridging that divide.In the years since, Tempest has had many imitators in the spoken-word scene. “There is almost a mythology around them,” Minamore said, attributing it to Tempest’s combination of high energy and raw vulnerability onstage. “You watch Kae sometimes and you’re like, you’re going to rip yourself in two,” she said.Capturing this live energy in a recording was central to Tempest and Carey’s goals on “The Line Is a Curve.” Tempest likes to record an entire album in one take, “so I’m going through it while you’re going through it.”“I’ve been on a journey toward connection my whole life,” Tempest said.Wolfgang TillmansBut for this album, they did something even more raw and bold, and recorded each vocal track three times, live in a theater, to different audiences. The first contained three teenagers; the second, Minamore, who was 30; and the last included one person, who was 78.In live performance like this, “Your physiology responds to somebody else, there’s things that the voice will do in real communication,” Tempest said. “It takes it out of the realm of like, here’s some lyrics I’ve written, the words become a bridge.”During the performance Minamore saw, “I smiled a lot listening to it,” she said, noting the record’s lightness and feeling of “letting go.” In the end, the takes recorded before Minamore were the ones Tempest used for almost the entire album. The LP features additional vocals from Lianne La Havas and Fontaines D.C.’s Grian Chatten, and was executive produced by Rick Rubin.The beauty and mundanity of human interaction have always provided inspiration for Tempest, especially in southeast London, where they have lived more or less their entire life. In the cafe, their gaze drifted out of the window, tracking the movements of passers-by. “Most of what really comes to me in the process of creativity is observations, people,” Tempest said, pointing out at the street. “Even now it just feels so good to me, watching how people do it.”Carey remembered waiting in line for a cab at an airport with Tempest. Ahead of them, some men were causing a delay by trying to maneuver a large appliance into a taxi. Carey was annoyed, but “Kae just turned to me and said, ‘I love people, just watching these people trying to do this thing,’” he said, laughing. “It’s moments like that, where Kae is able to come away with something beautiful from a situation where most people wouldn’t see it.”As Tempest performed, the audience seemed to share the artist’s reverie.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesThe crowd at Rough Trade East.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesThe everyday isn’t the only thing that fuels Tempest’s art. In their 2020 nonfiction book “On Connection,” they wrote about the Jungian notions of spirit of the times, the zeitgeist and the place in the soul where creativity emerges. Talking about these ideas in the cafe, Tempest’s blue eyes were large and earnest behind the thick lenses of their glasses. “I feel like I exist too much in the depths,” Tempest said. “Sometimes I’ve got to really pull it back.”They do this by talking about “random rappers on the U.K. chart and reality TV,” Minamore said; Tempest is a huge “MasterChef” fan. “Sometimes my mind is firing on all cylinders, thinking about a million things, trying to write characters, plot, narrative, rhyme,” they said, “but other times I just want to sit in the pub and not talk about anything interesting and just have a laugh.”Tempest will embark on a European tour next month, and described the feeling of a good gig as being like “going to space.” “It’s really physical, it feels like being bound to this moment and to each other,” they said, “when it’s all happening, it’s like we’re all breathing the same rhythm.”At Rough Trade East, Tempest achieved liftoff. “It just felt so personal, like they were speaking to everyone individually,” said Rob Lee, a 28-year-old fan, after the show. “I was in tears for most of it.” More

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      Chika Has Never Lost Sight of Her Dream

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      5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 Samuel R. Delany Jonathan Bailey Piet Oudolf […] More

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      She Taught New York to Sing

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      “Throw the note over your shoulder!” Debbie Harry, Kathleen Hanna, Justin Vivian Bond and other singers recall Barbara Gustern, a beloved vocal coach who was killed last month at age 87.Barbara Maier Gustern, a 4-foot-11 woman from the tiny town of Boonville, Ind., exerted an improbable and little-known influence over New York’s overlapping music scenes, guiding cabaret performers, stage actors and rock stars to get the most out of their voices.Ms. Gustern, who died last month, had a gift for unusual metaphors that made her teachings stick. In the bedroom of her 17th-floor apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, where she gave lessons almost every day deep into her 80s, she would ask her students to build theaters inside their heads. Your tongue, Ms. Gustern said, is the stage. Your soft palette is the fly space. You must sing from the very back of stage, projecting your voice into the fly space, through a blowhole at the top of your head.“Your blowhole — these weird little tips that you’re like, ‘That just changed my life,’” said Kathleen Hanna, the frontwoman of the bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, who credited Ms. Gustern with restoring her singing voice after medical issues so severe that she thought she might never sing again.The cabaret singer Justin Vivian Bond prepared for a performance at Carnegie Hall with Ms. Gustern’s help. “I filled that room effortlessly, because the inside of my head was basically an extension of the room,” Mx. Bond said.Another one of her students, Tammy Lang, who performs under the stage name Tammy Faye Starlite, said, “Everyone I knew in the downtown scene worked with her. She was the mother to us all.”Her friends and students recalled her as the grandmother who wore dominatrix gear to perform as a go-go dancer at a playwright’s birthday party; who left her friends in the dust as she ran to catch a subway; who danced on top of a table at the cabaret theater Joe’s Pub.Ms. Gustern with one of her star pupils, the performance artist and singer Taylor Mac.Jackie RudinShe had come to the city in the late 1950s with dreams of making it on Broadway. After realizing she wasn’t going to be a star of the stage, she stopped auditioning for parts and dedicated herself to the work that would bring her an unexpected kind of glory.In a recent Facebook post, she wrote that she wanted to die at age 127 by running across the street and accidentally colliding with a Dewar’s Scotch truck. The end came in what appeared to be a senseless act of violence, when someone shoved her to the sidewalk near her home on March 10. The suspect, Lauren Pazienza, who turned herself in almost two weeks after the incident, has been charged with manslaughter.At the time of her death, Ms. Gustern was three days away from recapturing the fantasy of her youth, and returning to the stage.‘Sing It to the Back 40!’Barbara Joan Maier’s family ran a hardware store in Boonville. Bobbi Jo, as she was known, sang at the Methodist church and, as a teenager, taught Sunday school. Later, as a student at nearby DePauw University, she joined the Young Republicans club.Her pursuit of a stage career took her away from all that. She auditioned for parts in New York and joined regional theater troupes along with summer stock companies in the Poconos, landing parts in “The Sound of Music” and “Threepenny Opera.” She traveled the world, a cruise-ship mezzo-soprano.While singing in choirs at a synagogue in the Bronx and a church in Brooklyn, she got to know the man who would become her husband, Josef Gustern, a singer and actor with a bass voice. They married in 1963 and had a daughter, Katherine.While they scrounged to make a living in music, the names of Ms. Gustern’s peers were appearing more and more frequently in Playbill and on Broadway marquees. At around age 40, she faced the fact that she was too old to be cast in lead roles, much less as an ingénue, and she began her next act by taking a job as a teacher at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in Manhattan. Her husband continued to hustle for stage work, and finally in the early 1990s he scored a long-running part in the Broadway production of “The Phantom of the Opera.”As she settled into the city, Ms. Gustern gained an appreciation for New York’s rough-and-tumble glamour. For some years, prostitutes hung out on the street where she lived, and on morning walks she would try to tell the future by counting the condoms on the sidewalks, as she wrote on her Facebook page, which she treated like a diary. Fewer than three meant trouble; more than three portended good luck; a colored condom indicated that a million-dollar check was on the way; a black one signaled imminent nuclear attack.She began to establish a reputation among insiders of New York’s singing scene in the 1980s, when the avant-garde singer Diamanda Galás took a lesson from her while visiting New York. Ms. Galás ended up moving to the city full-time, in part to keep studying with Ms. Gustern.“Diamanda opened the gate,” said Ms. Lang, the cabaret singer. “And then everybody saw that, ‘Oh, this is somebody who’s open to something that is different.’”Debbie Harry, the lead singer of Blondie, sat in for one of Ms. Galás’s lessons around 1998. Then she began studying with Ms. Gustern. “I had never really tried to learn how to sing properly,” said Ms. Harry, the rare performer who has sung at CBGB and the Café Carlyle. “She taught me more about the voice and your body as an instrument.”Debbie Harry, left, and Ms. Gustern at the Broadway opening of the musical “Passing Strange” at the Belasco Theater in 2008. Ms. Harry credited Ms. Gustern with teaching her “how to sing properly.”Nick Hunt/Patrick McMullan, via Getty ImagesAnother of Mr. Gustern’s students was Murray Hill, an actor, comedian and singer, who spoke at a gathering for her at Joe’s Pub on March 27, after a memorial service at the Church of the Holy Apostles in Midtown. “She was the first, and only, person to say I wasn’t tone-deaf,” Mr. Hill wrote in an email.Tragedy seemed to reinforce Ms. Gustern’s devotion to teaching. In 2003, her daughter died of a drug overdose. Her husband died in 2017. After whole days of lessons, she often spent her nights at students’ performances.Perhaps the biggest job of her career came recently, when she served as the vocal coach for the 2019 Broadway revival of “Oklahoma!” She stayed with the production, which won the Tony Award for best musical revival, until it closed in 2020.“Her career was actually at a high point at 85 years old,” said James Davis, who played Will Parker in the show.During a typical lesson, Ms. Gustern would sit in an antique wooden chair on one side of the bed, a portable keyboard on the blanket before her. The student would stand facing her, on the other side of the bed.“Throw the note over your shoulder!” was one of her catchphrases. Ms. Gustern used bits of Indiana argot to make a point. Rather than telling students to project their voices, she would say, “Sing it to the back 40!” City metaphors crept in, too: “Your mouth is a taxi cab,” she would say, “and your molars are the back doors of the taxi cab. And they’re opening, both of them.”When leading scale exercises, she told her students to use the phrase “he is a really bad bad bad bad man” or the schoolyard taunt “nyah-nyah nyah-nyah-nyah.” She recorded herself going through warm-up exercises and gave the recordings to her students, so that they could practice along with her when they were apart.Ms. Hanna, whose punk style compels her to sing abrasively, said she started meeting with Ms. Gustern more than 10 years ago, after she had undergone surgery on her vocal cords to remove polyps. For a time, her work with Ms. Gustern was her only artistic activity. She learned she had been holding her breath when she should have been letting it go. Under Ms. Gustern’s guidance, she began to exhale before hitting certain notes and to pronounce an ‘h’ before glottal strikes.Ms. Hanna’s voice is back. This month she is starting a tour with her band Bikini Kill. “Without her, I would have been done,” Ms. Hanna said of Ms. Gustern. “How do you thank someone for your career?”Back to the StageBeginning in 2016, Ms. Gustern directed a series of cabaret evenings featuring Austin Pendleton, an actor noted for his character roles in films, and Barbara Bleier, who made her Carnegie Hall debut at age 4. “Make your mouth a little narrower at the top,” Ms. Gustern would comment at rehearsals, and the right rendition of a song would pop out, Ms. Bleier recalled.Now and then Ms. Gustern would perform as part of their show, including a memorable “Santa Baby,” which she sang while making eyes at Ms. Bleier’s husband. But she preferred to remain in the background.That had begun to change in recent months, when she was leading rehearsals for “Barbara Bleier and Austin Pendleton Sing Steve and Oscar,” an evening dedicated to the songs of Oscar Hammerstein and Stephen Sondheim. As they headed toward opening night at Don’t Tell Mama, a Midtown piano club, the group decided that Ms. Gustern would sing three songs herself. For one of them, the “Oklahoma!” showstopper “I Cain’t Say No,” Ms. Gustern planned to pantomime sitting on the lap of a cowboy.“The thought of doing a show was like sentencing me to be tortured,” she wrote on Facebook on March 10. “But as of today all that is reversed.” Now, she continued, “I feel like a singer again for the first time in forever.”A few hours after posting those words, Ms. Gustern was shoved. She died from head injuries brought on by the fall. Ms. Pazienza, a 26-year-old former events coordinator from Queens, has been released on bail from Rikers Island and is due to appear in court on May 10.In the weeks before her death, Ms. Gustern was leading rehearsals of a cabaret show featuring Barbara Bleier, center, and Austin Pendleton, right. After a postponement, they took the stage at Don’t Tell Mama in Midtown Manhattan on March 27, with Paul Greenwood on piano.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesThe “Steve and Oscar” show went on without Ms. Gustern, postponed to March 27. Before an audience of cabaret regulars seated in the banquettes of Don’t Tell Mama, Ms. Bleier and Mr. Pendleton turned the show into a tribute to their friend and director. “All these lyrics mean so many new things,” Mr. Pendleton said from the stage. He soon appeared befuddled, asking the pianist, “What am I going to sing here?”Others who relied on Ms. Gustern find themselves a little lost. The performer and writer Penny Arcade had drafted Ms. Gustern to be the musical director of a show scheduled to start around July. She said she was so shaken by Ms. Gustern’s death that she is now considering a start date in late fall. Eric Schmalenberger, a cabaret producer and performer, said he will lose what was, for a long time, the closest thing he had to an annual family tradition: trimming the Christmas tree at Ms. Gustern’s apartment with others in the music community who had nowhere else to go.But Ms. Gustern’s students have not lost her completely. She will live on for them in the form of the warm-up tapes she gave them. Many performers who studied with her said they listen to the tapes of her before every show; a few said they listen before rehearsals, too.Ms. Gustern on the carousel at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn at a party after “Only An Octave Apart,” a 2021 show featuring Justin Vivian Bond and Anthony Ross Costanza.Joy EpisallaAmelia Zirin-Brown, a cabaret singer under the name Rizo, said that she has listened to hers more than 2,000 times. Ms. Harry and Mx. Bond estimated “thousands”; Ms. Hanna, between 500 and 1,000.They have become attached to one particular warm-up session, made specially for them. They have transferred the recordings from cassettes to CDs to computers to phones. They have backups, and backups of backups. No matter how many times they are told how to hit certain notes, or how to position their faces, they treasure the reminders.The tapes preserve the past. Mx. Bond’s includes Ms. Gustern discussing a lover from decades ago. Ms. Zirin-Brown’s assistants know the tape so well that they can predict the exact moment when, out of nowhere, Ms. Gustern’s cat jumps onto the keyboard.Ms. Gustern might have thought of herself as a helpmeet or second banana, but her students didn’t see her that way.“She meant so much more to me than I did to her, and that was totally OK,” Ms. Hanna said. “I would see her and she wouldn’t understand — I’ve been around the world with you. You’ve been here and you’ve been doing all your stuff, and, meanwhile, I’ve been in France, and you were with me. I’ve been around the world with Barbara a few times. I’m still going to be going around the world with Barbara.” More