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      Selena’s Family Announces New Album, 27 Years After Her Death

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      A record featuring the singer’s digitally altered voice is expected to be released by next month, her father said.Nearly three decades after the singer Selena was killed, a new album featuring recordings by the Grammy Award-winning Tejano music star is expected to be released, her family has announced.In a video interview with Latin Groove News last week, Abraham Quintanilla Jr., the singer’s father, described the forthcoming album, expected to be available by next month, as a family effort. It will feature 13 songs, with new arrangements by her brother A.B., and artwork by her sister, Suzette, Mr. Quintanilla said.Three songs are new versions of previously released tracks, and at least one song will feature Selena’s upbeat soprano voice, recorded when she was 13 years old and digitally modified, Mr. Quintanilla said.“What’s unique about it is, not only is the music completely new arrangements, my son worked on Selena’s voice with computers and if you listen to it she sounds on this recording like she did right before she passed away,” Mr. Quintanilla said. “It sounds incredible.”In an interview last year with Tino Cochino Radio, A.B. said he remixed all of Selena’s vinyls and “detuned her voice,” rendering it deeper and closer to how she sounded in her 20s.Further details about the album are unavailable, including how much of it features Selena’s voice. A spokesman for Warner Music Group, which Mr. Quintanilla said is releasing the album, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.Joe Bennett, a forensic musicologist and professor at Berklee College of Music, said that digitally aging a voice was a simple process that could potentially require just an isolated recording of the singer and the appropriate digital software.Born Selena Quintanilla-Pérez in Lake Jackson, Texas, on April 16, 1971, the Mexican-American singer became a leading star of Tejano music — a blend of corrido, mariachi and polka music — with hits including “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom,” “Como La Flor” and “Amor Prohibido.” During her abbreviated career, she dominated the Billboard Latin music rankings.Before she was fatally shot on March 31, 1995, at age 23 by the president of her fan club, Selena was aiming for more mainstream success by recording a crossover album.Since her death, Selena’s popularity has grown. Fans continue to celebrate her music and emulate her signature style of red lipstick and wispy, curled bangs. Jennifer Lopez portrayed her in a 1997 movie, and a Netflix show about Selena’s rise to fame, titled “Selena: The Series,” was released last year.Her family has cultivated the public’s fascination with the singer, from collaborating on the Netflix show, to releasing an unfinished song of hers in 2015. Mr. Quintanilla told Latin Groove News said that soon after his daughter’s death, he committed to keeping her memory alive with her music.“I think that we have done that,” he said. “The public still remembers Selena. They haven’t let her go, and so they are waiting for a project like this to come out and I know that it will be well received by the public.” More

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      Michael Bublé Always Finds a Way

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      Hustle, charm and a remarkable ability to slot himself into songs have made the musician a star — even though his style has never aligned with pop trends.Michael Bublé had a lot to share in the first five minutes of a recent video chat. He hates having to use the bathroom at a movie theater, because the idea of missing a crucial plot point is stressful. The creamy vegetable soup he apologized for eating on camera — not great. He also did not care for “The Matrix Resurrections,” the 2021 installment of the sci-fi franchise; that said, he loves Keanu Reeves, who lives on his street in Los Angeles. Though they’ve never met, every time Bublé and his family pass the actor’s house, they say, out loud, “Hi, Keanu.”“He’s a Canadian, too,” the singer pointed out. “So there’s this giant urge to go, ‘Hey, we’re connected.’”Bublé, who turned 46 last fall, has built his career off such immediate accessibility. Perhaps you’ve seen him on one of his televised Christmas specials, where he sings holiday songs alongside stars like Barbra Streisand, Jimmy Fallon and Kermit the Frog. Maybe you’ve watched his many appearances on “The View,” “The X Factor,” “30 Rock” or “Sesame Street,” or just about any talk show you can think of. The traditional showbiz entertainer is a disappearing breed, but Bublé, an exceptionally congenial singer who can seamlessly slot himself into any song, room or situation, is built in this classical mode.Bublé is most famous for reinterpreting other people’s songs. His tastes draw from a deep pool of eras and genres: Dean Martin, Louis Prima, the Bee Gees, Nat King Cole, Justin Timberlake, the Drifters and many, many more. (He has, improbably, tackled the theme from the “Spider-Man” cartoon.) On “Higher,” his new album out March 25, he belts “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” which was popularized by Vera Lynn in 1940, and directly follows it with “Make You Feel My Love,” a 1997 Bob Dylan song also notably covered by Adele in 2008.The through line for these seemingly disparate selections is his buoyant and mellifluous voice, capable of roping any and all material into the realm of genuine romance. Bublé’s earnest commitment to rendering songs written for many generations of lovers has won him cross-demographic popularity. He has released four albums that have gone to No. 1 on the Billboard charts, and has sold north of 70 million records around the world, despite having never aligned with contemporary pop trends at any point in his career.“I can never just expect that they’re going to stick me on the radio,” Bublé said.Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times“It’s hard to categorize what I do; people would like to, and I’ve fought it my whole life,” he said very matter-of-factly. “I categorize myself as a soul singer who loves the great American songbook, but loves writing pop songs. It’s a very strange place to live.”Bublé’s passion for the classics was fomented during his childhood in Burnaby, British Columbia. His grandfather, a plumber, would play songs from the ’40s and ’50s and explain their history to Bublé, who “fell in love with the depth of what it meant to that generation.” At the time, he was a self-described “nerdy kid” with “no girlfriends” and said his growing interest in this music was a means of feeling unique.“I wasn’t one of those guys who wanted to dress in retro clothing,” he said. “The music just moved me, and so I knew, even at that age, that was all I wanted.”His intent on pursuing a singing career through an off-market style of jazzy big band music led him down some winding paths. The nightclub gigs were “the good ones,” he said; more humbling were the cruise ships and shopping mall performances, and worst of all were the singing telegrams, where for $20 he might sing for a lucky birthday girl at the Canadian restaurant chain White Spot.In 2000, Bublé was hired to perform at the wedding for a daughter of Brian Mulroney, the former prime minister of Canada, and met the producer David Foster there. Eventually, he convinced Foster to sign him to his Warner subsidiary label, with the caveat that Bublé had to personally raise the budget to make a new album. The result was the 2003 LP “Michael Bublé,” which placed multiple singles on the Billboard Adult Contemporary charts and ultimately went platinum.When he broke through, Bublé was approaching 30 — young for the world, but not the music industry. While some record executives paled at his age, one bonus was that he was ready to meet his moment with proper humility, when it finally came. “I was so late to this party, that I was already who I was,” he said. The years of grinding had also inculcated a relentless work ethic that, in retrospect, came with trade-offs. “I was blinded to anything that wasn’t the ascension of a career — becoming the greatest musician, the greatest songwriter, the greatest entertainer,” he said. “Everything I did was going toward that goal, and I never stopped to smell the roses.”He missed friends’ birthdays and weddings; he said he rarely explored the cities where he’d perform. Greater success followed, both professionally and personally: In 2011, he married the Argentine actress Luisana Lopilato and released “Christmas,” a record of holiday songs that remains the best-selling of his career. But when his commercial momentum momentarily flagged with “Nobody but Me” in 2013, “It was the first time that I probably had ever felt a sense of panic,” he said, pausing to let the thought sink in. “I felt like my false self had started to get the best of me — I started to doubt myself and who I was and what I wanted to do.”In 2016, he learned his eldest son, Noah, then 3 years old, had a rare form of liver cancer. “I just remember thinking that for the first time, I could see everything completely clearly,” Bublé said. “That’s when I started to have a much healthier relationship with this thing that I do — this person you become when you go on tour.” (After months of chemotherapy, Noah went into remission.) Bublé started paying closer attention to his fitness so that he could better maintain the stamina required for long performances; he also allowed himself to open up the creative process, after what he called a “micromanaging” approach to his earlier work.“I was so late to this party, that I was already who I was,” Bublé said of finding success a little later than many pop personalities.Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesOn “Higher,” that partly manifested out of necessity. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, it wasn’t always possible to hash out an idea in person; instead, he would trade ideas and demos over email with other musicians, and excitedly await their response. Bublé isn’t a trained musician, but he can play piano well enough to feel his way through a song. He described one solo session in between Zoom calls where he stumbled upon an arrangement for Sam Cooke’s “Bring It on Home to Me,” which he likened to gospel by way of Donny Hathaway and Elvis Presley, leading him to immediately call the producer Bob Rock (Metallica, Aerosmith) with his idea. He pronounced the result the best thing he’s ever recorded.“People still think of him as a singer who’s been handed material to sing,” said Greg Wells, a first-time collaborator with a vast résumé who executive produced the album. “But he’s a real record maker — he had this incredible Hubble telescope overview of what he wanted to accomplish.” He pointed out that many of Bublé’s highest-charting songs, like the jaunty 2009 track “Haven’t Met You Yet,” are ones he co-wrote himself, contrary to his reputation as an interpreter.“Higher” also benefited from a series of lucky happenstances that are just very Michael Bublé. A duet with Willie Nelson on his standard “Crazy” developed through Bublé’s friendship with Nelson’s son Lukas. And after Bublé recorded a demo of Paul McCartney’s late-career ballad “My Valentine,” McCartney agreed to produce the version that appears on the record. Bublé’s interpretation sidesteps McCartney’s guitar-driven arrangement and applies what he called a “cinematic flair” — stirring strings and swelling builds, guided by his tender vocals. (He and McCartney hit it off, and occasionally text; after waffling over whether to refer to him aloud as “Sir Paul” or “Mr. McCartney,” he displayed his phone, which lists the former Beatle as “Sir P.”)Though Bublé described the “sense of anxiety and dread” that comes with every album cycle, there were bigger things to think about. He pointed out, his voice turning soft, that the week of our interview also marked five years of clean cancer scans for Noah. He emphasized his appreciation for all he’s been able to do, and acknowledged this sounded like a cliché. But he said he was still motivated to find his audience, regardless of how trends change or the methods we use to listen to music evolve.“You just have to find a way to satisfy that hunger,” he said. “I can never just expect that they’re going to stick me on the radio.”After expounding further on how he had openly bawled watching “Marriage Story” (a recommendation from the director of his wife’s new comedy, he noted with bewilderment), our conversation came to an end. The singer had been chatting from a hotel room in Los Angeles, to avoid potential interruptions from a noisy gardener near his home. As usual, Michael Bublé was finding a solution. More

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      How Kneecap Is Pioneering Irish-Language Rap

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      The trio Kneecap is pioneering Irish-language rap, a genre that barely existed a decade ago.BELFAST, Northern Ireland — On a recent evening in a small, rowdy, West Belfast bar, Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap, two members of the rap group Kneecap, were posing for photographs with fans. One of the bar’s patrons, tapping out a text message nearby, called out to the rappers, “How do you spell ‘ceart go leor’?” an Irish phrase meaning something like “OK.”It might seem like a weird question for hip-hop artists, but Kneecap’s members should know. They have found fame here in a genre they are pioneering: Irish-language rap.Since 2017, when Kneecap released “CEARTA” (the Irish word for “rights”), the band’s popularity has been growing on both sides of Ireland’s internal border and among the diaspora across the Irish Sea. The band’s signature blend of ramshackle rave and rudimentary hip-hop beats, mixed with republican politics — in the Irish sense of seeking unity for the island’s north and south — has brought Kneecap sold-out gigs in Belfast and Dublin, and a growing fan base in England and Scotland.Even a decade ago, the notion of Irish-language rap seemed fantastical. But something is happening in Ireland — north and south — which lately finds itself in the midst of a so-called Celtic revival, with questions of identity, place and culture being interrogated across the arts, politics, fashion and even spirituality.The Irish language is central to this resurgence. The dominance of English in Ireland is a legacy of British colonization, stretching to the 12th century. English became the language of opportunity, progress and employment, and Irish came to be seen as incompatible with modern life. But people carried on speaking Irish in some pockets of the island, and a boom in Irish-language schools from the 1970s raised new generations that viewed the language with pride and enthusiasm rather than shame and resistance.D.J. Próvaí showing a photo of his father’s arrest during the Bloody Sunday uprising of 1972.Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York TimesRepublican murals in the Falls Road district of Belfast.Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York TimesKneecap’s signature style blends ramshackle rave and rudimentary hip-hop beats with republican politics.Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York TimesKneecap was born out of an Irish-speaking west Belfast squat, whose all-night parties featured both techno and traditional Irish music on the sound system. “We felt there was something bubbling, and we wanted to represent that,” Móglaí Bap said.“Irish language and culture doesn’t necessarily have to be an image of rural traditional music,” Mo Chara said. “It can involve youth culture.”Kneecap’s lyrics feature republican slang and slogans — often used in a tongue-in-cheek manner — that have stirred controversy in Northern Ireland. D.J. Próvaí, the third band member, said he left a job as an Irish teacher in 2020 after his school objected to a Kneecap video in which an anti-British slogan — “Brits out” — appears drawn on his buttocks.“Republicanism is so vast, and on a spectrum,” Móglaí Bap said in an interview. “We like to toy with it. We like to take the irony on, and also not be dictated about what kind of republicanism we’re going to believe in.”Frequent references to taking drugs in the band’s lyrics have placed Kneecap at odds with republican dissidents, many of whom have a zero-tolerance policy toward drug use. (The band’s name comes from a form of torture that republican paramilitary groups would inflict on those they accused of drug dealing.) “We’re screaming about the ‘Ra,” Móglaí Bap said, using a familiar name for the Irish Republican Army, “even though the ‘Ra would probably shoot us for doing all of these sort of things.”Not all artists embracing the Irish language are motivated by politics, however: Often, it is as much about rediscovering the past as reckoning with the present. In summer 2020, Manchán Magan, a writer and broadcaster, published “32 Words for Field,” a catalog of lost words to describe the Irish landscape. The book recalled ancient Irish terms like “scim,” which can mean a thin coating of particles, like dust on a shelf, “but it can also mean a fairy film that covers the land, or a magical vision, or succumbing to the supernatural world through sleep,” Magan writes.“32 Words for Field” was an instant cult hit, and it became a mainstream one. Its initial print run sold out in pre-orders before it reached bookstores.Magan said the recent boom in Irish-language creativity was part of a continuing search for an Irish identity, unshackled from colonialism and Catholicism. “What we’re trying to do is rooting ourselves back to — not nationalism, but those things that came before the nation,” he said in an interview. “Connection with the spirit, or some sort of universal mythology, all of those things that bring us together, that make us realize we’re united.”Catherine Clinch, left, and Carrie Crowley in a scene from “The Quiet Girl,” an Irish-language movie that won two honors at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival. InscéalIn Irish-language cinema, barely a genre a few years ago, the latest hit is “The Quiet Girl” (“An Cailín Ciúin”), which last month won two honors at the Berlin International Film Festival, and this month beat the Academy Award-nominated “Belfast” to win best film at the Irish Film and Television Academy Awards. Adapted from a 2010 short story in The New Yorker by Claire Keegan, “The Quiet Girl” was partly funded by an initiative called Cine4, run by the Irish-language television station, TG4.The film’s writer-director, Colm Bairéad, said he looked forward to the film being screened around Europe, when audiences would hear “the Irish language bouncing around these auditoriums where the language just hasn’t been heard throughout the history of the medium.”Cleona Ní Chrualaoí, the producer of “The Quiet Girl,” said the current resurgence of Irish-language creativity was, in part, because of people who went through the Irish-language school system. “That has really helped our positive relationship with the language,” she said. “We have generations of children, who have become adults who really respect the language.”Móglaí Bap said Kneecap’s members came from “probably the first generation coming out of the Irish-language education system that developed their own sense of identity within the language.” For the band, rapping in Irish wasn’t just about lyricism, or even identity, Mo Chara said. It offered, he added, “a completely different understanding of the culture, and even of reality around you.”“We found this wee niche,” Móglaí Bap said. “The language is a way for us to bring people with us.”Kneecap has played sold-out gigs in Belfast and Dublin, and has a growing fan base in England and Scotland.Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times More

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      Heather Christian’s Choral Work Is a Study of Time. Patience, Too.

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      The composer’s “Oratorio for Living Things,” forced to shut down because of the pandemic, returns to the Ars Nova stage in Manhattan.On a strangely comforting morning in early March, the composer Heather Christian made her way to Ars Nova’s space in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, for the first time in two years. The bright sun, radiating the warmth of a spring day, was enough to momentarily make her forget she was freezing. Once inside, she re-encountered the set for her delicately epic choral piece “Oratorio for Living Things,” which had two preview performances before the pandemic hit, and is back, running through April 17.“I felt the weight of time,” she said during a recent conversation over Zoom, reflecting on her return to the theater. “It was the weight of expectation or even the grief of the last time I was in that space.”It was only fitting that time felt like Christian’s companion, since “Oratorio for Living Things,” in the words of its creator, is a study of time “in three different scales: the quantum scale, the human scale and the cosmic scale.”To achieve this, she said she tried to find parallels between the ways in which particles move, for example, and the way in which a fugue is structured, or by examining cosmic violence (the Big Bang) and linking it to human trauma.Gerianne Pérez, center, in “Oratorio for Living Things” at Greenwich House Theater in March 2020, shortly before the premiere run shut down.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThen, to explain these concepts on an emotional level, she collected hundreds of voice mail messages that she had solicited from strangers, inviting them to share a memory anonymously. (“I left business cards everywhere!” she said with a laugh.) These delicious recollections — of transporting bags of groceries on a sleigh in Moscow, or knowing that someone’s mother “will bring my baby brother with her” when she leaves the hospital — make up the second act.As for the musical composition, performed by an orchestra of six, “Oratorio” layers myriad genres — gospel, jazz, Baroque and a range of pop styles — to create harmony where cacophony might otherwise exist.“The more we sing these songs and say these words,” said Onyie Nwachukwu, one of the 12 singers who bring the piece to life, “the more I’m acutely aware of the almost fantastic nature of humans and everything that’s around us.”The show’s director, Lee Sunday Evans, envisioned the production as if set in a Quaker meeting house “where there’s no pulpit or proscenium and so the music wants to be amongst us.” Performers move throughout the space gently interacting with audience members, almost inviting them to sing along.“I knew I wanted to do a piece about time,” Christian, 40, explained. “Music itself is a study of time, a dissertation on how time moves in a specific way.” She tried dissecting Carl Orff’s cantata “Carmina Burana,” a celebration of earthly passions that she describes as “spaghetti exploding out of the bowl.” It has been a favorite of hers since high school because of its mysteriousness — it asks big questions without offering an answer.A self-described cultural omnivore who finds as much wisdom in “The Golden Girls” as Bach’s compositions, Christian revisited Orff while reading Carlo Rovelli’s “The Order of Time,” about time in physics, and rewatched old episodes of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos.” Her fascination with how they all explained complex subjects in digestible ways eventually resulted in an eureka moment: She would do the same with a musical piece. And that’s when she started working on “Oratorio.” (The libretto is dedicated to the three Carls.)Christian composes by ear. “Things come to me all at once,” she said. But lacking a consistent practice for transcribing her work, she found a priceless collaborator in the music director Ben Moss, who also performs in “Oratorio.” Moss came in during an early workshop of the piece in 2018 and offered to help with the transcription. At the time, Christian had the skeleton of the work, Moss added the minutiae. He said it felt as if he were “crawling inside of her mind and her musical and poetic imagination.”Using voice notes and memos, Christian conveys her intentions to her collaborators, making them an essential part of the process. “I wish we recorded some of the sessions of her explaining things and her whys and hows because it in and of itself is artistry,” said Nwachukwu, who also appeared in a 2019 workshop of Christian’s “Annie Salem: An American Tale” at Vassar’s Powerhouse Theater. She said she found herself approaching theater from a new perspective: “less restrictive and structured” than what she was accustomed to in opera and more traditional musicals. “What Heather asked of me was to go to a place that was somewhat uncomfortable,” she recalled, “where the first thing I had to do was throw away convention.”From left, Amber Gray, Christian at the piano and Libby King and Brian Hastert embracing in “Mission Drift” at the Connelly Theater in Manhattan.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesRachel Chavkin, the Tony-winning director of “Hadestown” who oversaw the workshop of “Salem,” described Christian’s music as “somewhere between a creature howling at the moon and the sound of the moon itself.” Her music, she continued, “isn’t about furthering story, each song is a bit more like a spiritual or emotional happening than a story beat.”Chavkin began collaborating with Christian in 2008 when they created a musical called “Mission Drift,” a show about the recession and America’s rapacious brand of capitalism. Every time they work together, Chavkin said, “I can see my own experience with the possibilities of these forms.” She added: “Heather is inventing the wheel for herself.”FOUR DAYS BEFORE theaters in New York shut down, I attended the last dress rehearsal for “Oratorio.” I distinctly remember leaving the theater feeling as if I had witnessed a work that successfully established a dialogue between the sacred and the mundane, between the invisible and what we grasp with our senses. In many ways, it left me open to viewing the pandemic as an opportunity to find wonder and solace in the things we often take for granted.During that forced break in 2020, Christian herself found and made music out of things she’d never tried before. “I was swimming in a sea of first drafts,” she said, laughing, “but I also got chickens and decided to learn how to garden in a serious way.” Spending time with her husband at home in Beacon, N.Y., she also took to self-reflection. “I tried to investigate my relationship to ambition and slow down, especially because all my shows are about exactly those things,” she added.Born in New Orleans, Christian was raised in what she called “avant-garde Catholicism.” At 11, she became a cantor in Natchez, Miss., where her family had moved when she was 3. But soon “the functional magic of religion lost its mysticism,” she explained. She recalled being behind the scenes and a time when she saw “a priest pick a wedgie in the middle of the consecration of the host.” Suddenly, it was all theater, a new kind of sacred space.“I honestly think it’s going to take a little bit of work for me, and for people, to reimagine the performance space as a womb and a safe space,” Christian said.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesShe sought formal education in musical theater at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where her acting teacher observed she was quite complex and wisely encouraged her to join the experimental theater wing.Christian describes herself as someone who “would go insane if you took away my pens and microphones.” During lockdown, she found new channels for her creativity in projects like “I Am Sending You the Sacred Face,” a one-person musical about Mother Teresa in collaboration with Joshua William Gelb, and even became a foley artist in order to adapt her show “Animal Wisdom,” an autobiographical cabaret, for film, which she hopes will be picked up by distributors. “I’m incredibly prolific, and I don’t say that as a brag,” she confessed, “it’s just how I function.”She explained that she needs to find functionality in her art, returning to work in “Oratorio” presents a new set of challenges. “Initially I made a Rorschach test for whatever people brought into it,” she said, but now she wants to “provide people with some optimism.”“I honestly think it’s going to take a little bit of work for me, and for people, to reimagine the performance space as a womb and a safe space,” Christian said. “The lucky thing is that with theater all it takes is lighting and sound and bodies to completely transform a space.”She added: “I forgot how much I love people, how much I thrive around people.” More

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      The Artists Turning Nina Simone’s Childhood Home Into a Creative Destination

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      Rashid Johnson, Julie Mehretu, Adam Pendleton and Ellen Gallagher are working both to preserve and transform the North Carolina house where she was born.IN 1997, WHEN he was 20 years old, the New York-based artist Rashid Johnson traveled with a friend from their hometown, Chicago, to Ghana, on a pilgrimage to the final resting place of the most prominent Black intellectual of the 20th century, W.E.B. Du Bois. Arriving in Accra, Johnson enacted a ritual familiar to Black Americans across generations: that of searching for home in a lost ancestral past. More than 30 years earlier, in 1961, Du Bois, disillusioned after a life spent fighting Jim Crow racism, had left the United States for Ghana at the invitation of the Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah. Two years later, he became a Ghanaian citizen, and on Aug. 27, 1963, the eve of the March on Washington, he died. “I remember just being in this house and feeling his presence,” Johnson, now 45, recalls.T’s Spring Design Issue: A Place to Make ArtWhere creativity lives, from Los Angeles to the German countryside.- Located on the grounds of a former agricultural collective an hour north of Berlin, the artist Danh Vo’s farmhouse brings together all kinds of creative talents.- Inspired by Nina Simone’s invaluable legacy, the artists Rashid Johnson, Julie Mehretu, Adam Pendleton and Ellen Gallagher decided to purchase and preserve her childhood home.- It was a hands-on renovation of one couple’s Greenwich Village apartment that prompted them to start designing home goods.- The focal points of this Edwardian townhouse in northwest London? The eccentric bathrooms.Five years ago, Johnson partnered with three other prominent Black American artists — the conceptualist Adam Pendleton, the abstract painter Julie Mehretu and the collagist and filmmaker Ellen Gallagher — to help bring another towering ancestor into focus: the genre-defying musical performer and civil rights activist Nina Simone. Simone’s childhood home, located in Tryon, N.C., a small town of 1,600 nestled at the base of the southern escarpment of the Blue Ridge Mountains, was at risk of succumbing to age and neglect. Once the artists were made aware of this, they bought the house, for $95,000, in 2017. The following year, the National Trust for Historic Preservation designated it a national treasure.The French historian Pierre Nora invented the concept of les lieux de mémoire, “sites of memory” — be they places or personas, objects or concepts — that contribute to the symbolic coherence of a nation’s identity. In 2022, much as in the 1960s when Simone answered the call to activism, the United States is openly contesting its collective identity. Some seek a return to an imagined America whose greatness depends on selective erasure of its diverse and complex history. “We live in a moment when half the country would be perfectly content to forget somebody like Nina Simone,” Pendleton says. “What a precarious state; what a precarious place to be culturally, historically.”The artists have an important partner in Brent Leggs, the executive director of the National Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. Launched in 2017, the action fund aims to identify and preserve what Leggs calls “nationally significant projects that express the Black experience.” Leggs, 49, saw in the modest clapboard home the very qualities that make many historical Black American sites so necessary — and so vulnerable to loss. “I was inspired by the simplicity of this unadorned vernacular structure that at first glance might appear to be missing history and meaning,” he says. “I believe deeply that places like the Nina Simone childhood home deserve the same stewardship and admiration as Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello or George Vanderbilt’s Biltmore estate.”Eunice Kathleen Waymon, a.k.a. Nina Simone, at age 8, photographed at the Tryon Cemetery in Tryon, N.C.© The Nina Simone Charitable Trust, courtesy of Dr. Crys Armbrust, Nina Simone Project Archive Simone performing at the 1968 Newport Jazz Festival.David Redfern/Redferns, via Getty ImagesNINA SIMONE WAS born Eunice Kathleen Waymon on Feb. 21, 1933, in the 660-square-foot house at 30 East Livingston Street. Simone’s mother was an ordained minister and domestic worker; her father ran his own dry-cleaning business and worked as a handyman. Modest though the home might seem today, back then it embodied the promise of prosperity. The Waymons’ plot of land afforded them room for a vegetable garden. They enjoyed other small luxuries, as well, as described in Nadine Cohodas’s 2010 biography, “Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone”: a stove in two of the three rooms to keep the house warm during cold months and to heat water for bathing; a small pump organ where Eunice picked out her first notes; a swing in the yard; even a tennis court just across the street. The exercise of segregation was more nuanced in Tryon than it was in large metropolitan areas like Charlotte and Atlanta, but it nonetheless exerted itself as a palpable lack. Simone, her parents and her siblings (she was the sixth of eight children) lived in the home until early 1937, when her father suffered an intestinal illness that left him incapacitated for a time. The next several years were itinerant, the family moving to close to half a dozen now-forgotten homes in and around Tryon.Those early years on Livingston Street established Simone’s foundation as an artist. “Everything that happened to me as a child involved music,” Simone wrote in her 1992 autobiography, “I Put a Spell on You.” “It was part of everyday life, as automatic as breathing.” Her mother, Mary Kate, sang church songs to her daughter; her father, John, introduced her to jazz and the blues. By the time Eunice was 4, she was accompanying her mother on piano as she preached Sunday sermons at St. Luke C.M.E. Church.The years that followed were quite literally the stuff of storybooks (two children’s books about Simone’s life have come out in the last five years): Recognized as a prodigy, Eunice studied under a white woman, whom she called Miss Mazzy, who schooled her in Beethoven and Bach; the town rallied around Eunice and raised money to support her education, including time in New York City, at Juilliard; soon thereafter, she faced wrenching rejection from Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute, where she had hoped to continue her studies in classical music; instead, she made a surprising star turn as a lounge singer at an Atlantic City, N.J., nightclub, leading to a recording contract; a string of hits followed for Eunice (now called Nina); then, galvanized by the social and political upheavals of the 1960s, she achieved artistic complexity and individualism through what she would later call “civil rights music.”The artists on the grounds of the property.Nydia BlasLike Du Bois, Simone was an expat: When she died in 2003, after a protracted illness, she was living in Carry-le-Rouet, a small seaside town in the south of France, some 4,500 miles away from the house on East Livingston Street where she had been born 70 years earlier. Even though she lived nearly half her life outside of the United States — from Liberia to the Netherlands and beyond before settling in France — she remained forever enlisted in the cause of racial justice in America. Simone’s enduring power emanates from her art and from her activism, as well as from her activist art. Her biggest hits — “I Loves You, Porgy,” “Trouble in Mind,” “I Put a Spell on You” — are ingenious reinventions of other people’s songs grappling with love, loss and longing. But her most cherished recordings — “Four Women,” “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” “Mississippi Goddam” — are original compositions that give voice to an insurgent Black pride and defiance. It is these qualities, this complexity of vision, to which the four artists respond.“I think the most interesting question is ‘why, why, why?’” Pendleton says. Why Nina? Why now? For him, the answers are clear. “I’m interested in the questions that Nina Simone’s legacy raises. And these are not just questions about music; [they’re] questions about the avant-garde, about abstraction, about how artists speak to each other across generations and across time.” Pendleton, 38, whose work often incorporates language layered like a palimpsest, finds his artistic connection to Simone in a shared commitment to the complexity, at times the indeterminacy, of voice. (Simone once said of her vocal instrument, “Sometimes I sound like gravel and sometimes I sound like coffee and cream.”) Listening to recordings like “Sinnerman” or “Feeling Good” or “Why? (The King of Love Is Dead),” which she performed in the days after Martin Luther King Jr.’s April 1968 assassination, “demands a kind of deep listening, a kind of geometry of attention,” Pendleton explains.It is fitting, if unexpected, that a group of visual artists — not musicians — came together to rescue Simone’s childhood home. They share common goals: that the home be preserved as a place of artistic creation and invention; that it support aspiring artists, particularly those pursuing the path from which Simone was excluded, in classical performance and composition. In the fashion of Simone’s classical compositional approach, the artists offer variations on these shared themes. Pendleton wonders if the home might function like a StoryCorps site, providing a space for oral history and reflection. Mehretu, 51, thinks it could “offer a refuge and a space of development” for creative people. Johnson, perhaps inspired by his travels to Ghana, imagines it as a site of pilgrimage — in both the physical and the virtual worlds. Leggs understands all of these visions and more coming together as part of the enduring legacy of the home, and ensuring that Tryon, as Leggs puts it, “has a Black future.”The language of historical preservation — easements, adaptive reuse, stewardship planning — might not inspire much passion. But in the mouths of Leggs and the four artists, these words become incantations. Collectively, they understand that while Simone’s childhood home is a potent symbol, it is also a century-old structure in need of maintenance and basic upkeep. It’s a contrast worthy of Simone herself, a singer both of show tunes and knife-sharp indictments of racist duplicity, a loving freedom fighter and truculent aggressor, a figure who tests our capacity to contain the challenging but essential facets of our national history. Nearly two decades after her death, she is still bearing witness, living her life after life through the artists she inspires in the house where she was born. More

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      The Sounds of Ukrainian Pop

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherThe Russian invasion of Ukraine is entering its fourth week, upending life, damaging cities and towns and spawning a refugee crisis. Culture, needless to say, has largely come to a standstill.Pop music in Ukraine has long been a window to understanding the country. The scene is wide and varied — there is, among many other styles, the theatrical pop of Max Barskih, the indie pop of Luna, the quick-tongued rapping of Alyona Alyona and the dance-soul of Ivan Dorn. The music is bold and modern, in dialogue with the styles popular in the rest of Eastern Europe, and beyond.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about some of the country’s pop stars, the musical traditions they borrow from and work within, and how they have grappled with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, both in music and on the internet.Guest:Liana Satenstein, senior fashion writer at VogueConnect 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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      Timmy Thomas, Singer Whose Biggest Hit Was an Antiwar Anthem, Dies at 77

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      His “Why Can’t We Live Together” rose to the top of the Billboard charts in 1973. He could never match its success.In the summer of 1972, the singer and keyboardist Timmy Thomas was watching the “CBS Evening News” and heard Walter Cronkite tick off the day’s death count of American and Vietcong soldiers.“I said, ‘what?!’ You mean that many mothers’ children died today?” Mr. Thomas told Spin magazine in 2015. “In a war that we can’t come to the table and sit down and talk about this, without so many families losing their loved ones?’ I said, ‘Why can’t we live together?’”His question became the title of his best-known song: a soulful, plaintive statement against the Vietnam War which he sang to his own accompaniment on the electric organ and drum machine. With a sentiment similar to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” from a year earlier, Mr. Thomas sang on “Why Can’t We Live Together”:No more wars, no more wars, no more warUmm, just a little peace in this worldNo more wars, no more warAll we want is some peace in this worldEverybody wants to live togetherWhy can’t we live together?The song, released on the Glades label, a subsidiary of the Miami-based TK Records, reached No. 1 on Billboard’s R&B chart and No. 3 on its Hot 100 chart in early 1973 and sold upward of a million copies.Mr. Thomas never again had a hit anywhere as big as “Why Can’t We Live Together,” but the song had a lasting impact. Forty-two years later, Drake sampled it on “Hotline Bling,” his hit about late-night cellphone calls from a former lover, which rose to No. 1 on the Billboard rap chart and No. 2 on the Hot 100.“He had an opportunity to use Snoop Dogg beats, Dre beats, all these new beats,” Mr. Thomas told Miami New Times in 2018. “He went all the way back … and used my original.”“Why Can’t We Live Together” has also been covered by artists including Sade, Joan Osborne, Santana, Steve Winwood and Iggy Pop, who recorded it with the jazz organist Lonnie Smith for Mr. Smith’s 2021 album, “Breathe.”Mr. Thomas died on Friday at a hospital in Miami. He was 77.His wife, Lillie (Brown) Thomas, said the cause was cancer.Timothy Earle Thomas was born on Nov. 13, 1944, in Evansville, Ind. His father, Richard, was a minister, and his mother, Gwendolyn (Maddox) Thomas, was a homemaker. By the time he was 10, he told Blues & Soul magazine, he was playing organ at his father’s church. “I always had a good ear for music,” he said. “I was one of 12 kids and most of them were into music, but I guess I pushed a little harder.”After graduating from high school in 1962, he spent a week studying at a Stan Kenton summer music clinic at Indiana University, Bloomington, where his teachers included the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley and the trumpeter Donald Byrd.While attending Lane College in Jackson, Tenn., from which he would graduate in 1966 with a bachelor’s degree in music, Mr. Thomas recorded a few songs in Memphis for the Goldwax label and was a session musician at Sun and Stax Records.Even as he pursued a career in music, he worked as a financial aid director at Lane and a vice president of development at Jarvis Christian College, in Hawkins, Texas, and Florida Memorial University, in Miami Gardens.He later shifted his focus to teaching. In 1993 he became the choir master at Miami Norland High School, and from 1996 to 2005 he taught music at Shadowlawn Elementary School in Miami. He earned a master’s degree in mental health counseling from Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale in 1997.Mr. Thomas in 2017. His 1973 hit has been covered by Sade, Steve Winwood and others.Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for BMIIn addition to his wife, Mr. Thomas is survived by his daughters, Tamara Wagner-Marion and Li’Tina Thomas; his sons, Tremayne and Travis; 12 grandchildren; four great-grandchildren; his sisters, Diane Winton, Mary Davis and the Rev. Velma Thomas; and his brothers, Ray, Kenneth, Roland, Jerome and the Rev. Jeffery Thomas.More than a dozen of Mr. Thomas’s songs landed on the Hot R&B chart between 1973 and 1984, but the outsize success of “Why Can’t We Live Together” cast him as a one-hit wonder. And he understood that it was difficult to replicate the success of his megahit.He recalled that he once asked Henry Stone, the co-founder of TK Records, what he thought the problem was.“He said, ‘Timmy, your major problem was what you said was so profound that you could never back it up,’” Mr. Thomas said, recalling the conversation to Spin magazine. He added, “I thought about it, I said, ‘You know, that’s tough. … ’ I had some nice regional records after that, but nothing that worldwide.” More

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      Metropolitan Opera’s Concert Honors Ukraine

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      A concert to benefit relief efforts featured a young Ukrainian singer, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” and the Met’s prima donna of the moment.Vladyslav Buialskyi stood center stage at the Metropolitan Opera, his hand on his heart, and sang the national anthem of his country, Ukraine.That was on Feb. 28, when the house reopened after a month off from performing and the Russian invasion of Ukraine was just a few days old. The company’s chorus and orchestra joined Buialskyi, a member of the Met’s young artists program, in a message of solidarity with him and his suffering people.Exactly two weeks later, on Monday, Buialskyi, a 24-year-old bass-baritone from the besieged port city of Berdyansk, stood center stage once more, his hand again on his heart, and sang the anthem with the orchestra and chorus.This time it wasn’t a prelude to Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” but the start of “A Concert for Ukraine,” an event hastily organized by the Met to benefit relief efforts in that country and broadcast there and around the world.Banners forming the Ukrainian flag stretched across the travertine exterior of the theater, bathed in blue and yellow floodlights. Another flag hung above the stage; a few in the audience brought their own to unfurl from the balconies. Seated in the guest of honor position in the center of the parterre, Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations, responded to an ovation at the start by raising his arms and making resolute V-for-victory signs.The Ukrainian bass-baritone Vladyslav Buialskyi, a member of the Met’s young artists program, was featured in a performance of Ukraine’s national anthem.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesThe Ukrainian flag hung above the Met’s chorus and its orchestra, led by the company’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin.Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesIt has been a trying time for the Met, which broke with Anna Netrebko, its reigning diva, over her unwillingness to speak against the war and distance herself from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.But the conflict has also given the company — still bruised by labor battles despite remarkable success staying open during the Omicron wave — a sense of unity and moral purpose. Who would have predicted a few months ago that the Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, broadly reviled within the ranks for imposing a long unpaid furlough on many employees during the pandemic, would get applause from some in the orchestra as he declared from the stage that they were “soldiers of music”?His remarks had a martial tinge, saying that the Met’s work could be “weaponized against oppression.” But much of the concert, led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music director, was consoling, with favorites like Barber’s Adagio for Strings, here fevered and unsentimental, and “Va, pensiero” from Verdi’s “Nabucco,” with its chorus of exiles longing for their homeland, “so beautiful and lost.” Most powerful was Valentin Silvestrov’s delicate, modest a cappella “Prayer for the Ukraine,” written in 2014 amid the Maidan protests against Russian influence.The soprano Lise Davidsen, the company’s prima donna of the moment, sang Strauss’s “Four Last Songs.”Caitlin Ochs for The New York TimesRichard Strauss’s “Four Last Songs” wasn’t quite on message, with its autumnal vision of accepting death’s imminence. But it provided a vehicle for the Met’s prima donna of the moment: the young soprano Lise Davidsen, currently starring in Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos.”At opening night of “Ariadne” two weeks ago, Davidsen kept inundating the theater, seeming intent on proving just how much vibrating sound can flow out of her. It was thrilling, and a little much. At the performance of the opera on Saturday afternoon, she seemed consciously trying to restrain herself — even a bit tentative, fumbling a phrase in her opening aria and only gradually building to a true compromise of power and nuance.On Monday, Davidsen again seemed to be finding her way. Her high notes in the first of the “Four Last Songs,” “Frühling,” had a steely edge rather than soaring freedom; in “September,” she sounded muted in lower registers; and in “Beim Schlafengehen,” her phrasing was stiff. But she began “Im Abendrot” with a soft cloud of tone and proceeded with unforced radiance to an ending that felt light and hopeful.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 7Olga Smirnova. More