Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      Cardi B Awarded $1.25 Million in Libel Lawsuit Against Celebrity Gossip Blogger

      by

      The rapper sued the YouTuber Tasha K in 2019 after she posted a series of videos claiming that Cardi B was a prostitute.A federal jury on Monday awarded the rapper Cardi B $1.25 million in damages in a libel lawsuit against a celebrity gossip blogger who had posted videos in 2018 claiming that she was a prostitute who had contracted sexually transmitted infections and used cocaine.Cardi B, whose real name is Belcalis Almanzar, had sued the celebrity gossiper, known as Tasha K, in 2019 for posting more than 20 videos that spread “malicious rumors” about the rapper, according to the lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, where Tasha K lives.The jury found Tasha K, whose real name is Latasha Kebe, liable on two counts of slander and one count each of libel and invasion of privacy, according to a verdict filed on Monday.Ms. Kebe had also posted in 2018 that Ms. Almanzar had herpes outbreaks in her mouth and that she would give birth to a child with intellectual disabilities.Ms. Almanzar, 29, testified in court this month that she “felt extremely suicidal” after Ms. Kebe posted the videos, adding that “only an evil person could do that,” Lisa Moore, a lawyer for Ms. Almanzar, said on Monday.In the lawsuit, the rapper’s lawyers said that the content would damage her reputation with her fans and affect her business prospects. Cardi B, a Grammy-winning rapper from the Bronx, found fame in 2017 with her song “Bodak Yellow,” which immortalized her propensity for making “money moves.”Ms. Kebe’s claims have helped her amass millions of views on Twitter, Instagram and her YouTube channel, unWinewithTashaK. Most of the content can still be viewed online, even though the rapper sent Ms. Kebe a cease-and-desist letter a few months after Ms. Kebe first posted about her in 2018, according to the lawsuit.Ms. Almanzar’s lawyers said Ms. Kebe was “obsessed with slandering” the rapper, and that she posted the content because it got more views than her other posts, according to the lawsuit. Ms. Almanzar’s lawyers said that the rapper was not a prostitute, had never had herpes and had never used cocaine.Ms. Kebe’s lawyers did not immediately respond to emails or phone calls on Monday.On Monday afternoon, Ms. Kebe said on Twitter that “My Husband, Attorney’s, & I fought really hard,” adding, “it’s only up from here.”Ms. Almanzar had filed the lawsuit against both Ms. Kebe and Starmarie Ebony Jones, a guest on Ms. Kebe’s YouTube channel who had claimed to be a former friend of the rapper.Ms. Jones was not included in the verdict on Monday because she moved to New York after Ms. Almanzar sued her, the rapper’s lawyers said. The lawyers filed another lawsuit against her in New York, where she was found liable last year on counts of libel, slander and invasion of privacy. A lawyer for Ms. Jones could not immediately be reached for comment on Monday night.This case was not the first time the rapper found herself in court. She was indicted in Queens in 2019 in connection with a fight in a strip club the year before. The case is still ongoing. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      James Maraniss, Librettist of Long-Silent Opera, Dies at 76

      by

      A Spanish scholar who taught for more than four decades at Amherst College, he waited, along with the composer, 32 years for “Life Is a Dream” to be staged.James Maraniss, a Spanish scholar who wrote the libretto for an opera that was finished in 1978, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 but was not fully staged for another decade, died on Jan. 9 at his home in Chesterfield, Mass. He was 76.The cause was a heart attack, his brother, David, said.Mr. Maraniss, a professor of Spanish and European studies at Amherst College, had never written a libretto when the composer Lewis Spratlan, a faculty colleague, approached him in 1975 to collaborate on an opera based on Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s early 17th-century drama “La Vida es sueño” (“Life Is a Dream”). The piece had been commissioned by the New Haven Opera Theater in Connecticut.Excited at how Calderon’s vivid writing quickly conjured musical images in his mind, Mr. Spratlan told Mr. Maraniss the news about the commission — not knowing that Mr. Maraniss was an expert on Calderon’s work.“It was a wonderful happenstance that this was the case,” Mr. Spratlan, now retired from Amherst’s music department, recalled in a phone interview. The two men, friends and neighbors in adjoining apartments in a campus house, soon started working together and completed the three-act opera in 1978. That year, Mr. Maraniss also published “On Calderon,” a study of the writer’s plays, including “La Vida es sueño,” which is about a prince in conflict with his father, the king.Mr. Maraniss’s familiarity with Calderon’s rhythms and language animated the libretto.“Jim managed to take extremely elaborate 17th-century Spanish, the equivalent of Elizabethan English, with very exalted levels of diction, and rendered it into modern English that preserved all the grandeur of Golden Age Spanish,” Mr. Spratlan said.By the time they were finished, though, the New Haven Opera Theater had gone out of business, and no other opera company would produce it. Frustrated for many years, Mr. Spratlan finally raised money for concert performances of the second act in early 2000, first at Amherst, then at Harvard. Mr. Spratlan nominated himself for the Pulitzer for music and won.Still, “Life Is A Dream” did not receive a full production until 2010, at the Santa Fe Opera.In his review in The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini described the libretto as “elegantly poetic,” and said that Mr. Maraniss and Mr. Spratlan “honor Calderón by adhering closely to the philosophically ambiguous play, considered the ‘Hamlet’ of Spanish drama. Sometimes too closely.”A scene from the Santa Fe Opera’s production of “Life Is a Dream,” by the composer Lewis Spratlan and Mr. Marannis, colleagues at Amherst.Ken HowardDavid Maraniss said that his brother didn’t complain about the long wait for a full production.“But that libretto meant as much to Jim as anything he had done in his life,” Mr. Maraniss, a journalist and biographer who won a Pulitzer in 1993 for his coverage of Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign for The Washington Post, said in a phone interview. “I can’t say the waiting was as torturous for Jim as it was for Lew, but it was a great feeling of relief when it was finally produced.”James Maraniss and Mr. Spratlan won the 2016 Charles Ives Opera Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.James Elliott Maraniss was born on March 22, 1945, in Ann Arbor, Mich. He moved several times with his family before settling in 1957 in Madison, Wis., where his father, Elliott, a journalist who had been fired from his job as rewrite man at The Detroit Times after an informant identified him as a Communist, found work at The Capital Times. His mother, Mary (Cummins) Maraniss, was an editor at the University of Wisconsin Press.After graduating from Harvard in 1966 with a bachelor’s degree in Spanish literature, Mr. Maraniss earned a master’s there in the same subject. He then began work on his Ph.D in Romance languages and literature at Princeton University. It was granted in 1975.Following several months working for Wisconsin Gov. Patrick Lucey on Native American and migrant worker issues, Mr. Maraniss was hired at Amherst in early 1972 where he remained until he retired in 2015. He taught Spanish culture and literature in Spanish.Until recently, he had been working on a translation of “Don Quixote.”In addition to his brother, Mr. Maraniss is survived by his wife, Gigi Kaeser; his daughter, Lucia Maraniss; his sons, Ben and Elliott; his stepson, Michael Kelly; and his sister Jean Alexander. Another sister, Wendy, died in 1997.Mr. Maraniss in 2015, the year he retired from Amherst College after teaching there since 1972. Amherst CollegeAfter his work on “Life Is a Dream,” Mr. Maraniss wrote the Portuguese lyrics to James Taylor’s 1985 song “Only a Dream in Rio” and translated fiction and essays in the 1990s by Antonio Benitez-Rojo, a Cuban émigré and a major voice in Caribbean literature who was a professor of Spanish at Amherst.“I was bored with being an academic until I began a new life as his translator,” Mr. Maraniss said in an obituary of Mr. Benitez-Rojo, “and in a sense his presenter to the English-speaking world, to share that degree of his power, which was that of a great art.” More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Stephen Sondheim Leaves Rights to His Works to a Trust

      by

      Stephen Sondheim left the rights to all of his work — including his contribution to musicals such as “Sweeney Todd” and “Into the Woods,” as well as any unfinished shows — to a trust that will manage his estate.The trust will now determine what happens to the acclaimed composer and lyricist’s intellectual property, as well as all other property that he left behind when he died last fall.The plan for handling Sondheim’s assets is described in a probate petition signed last month and filed with Sondheim’s will in New York Surrogate’s Court. The filings were previously reported by The New York Post.The probate petition says that the estimated value of Sondheim’s personal property at the time of his death was between $500,000 and $75 million, but three estate lawyers advised caution in interpreting those numbers, which they said are often rough estimates, and which would not reflect the value of any property Sondheim had placed in a trust during his lifetime.“$75 million is the estimated ceiling of the value of the assets that were in his name, which pass under the will to the Stephen J. Sondheim Revocable Trust,” T. Randolph Harris, a partner in the law firm McLaughlin & Stern, said when asked to help interpret the filings. “Although it is possible that his estate contains other assets not passing under the will, it appears likely that the $75 million in the probate document filed with the court constitutes the bulk of his estate.”Sondheim, who had spent much of the pandemic at his country house in Roxbury, Conn., died in Connecticut on Nov. 26. The cause of death, according to a death certificate, was cardiovascular disease.The court filings include two documents — a will, written in 2017 with the estate lawyer Loretta A. Ippolito, that leaves all of his property to the revocable trust, and a probate petition, put together by Sondheim’s longtime friend and lawyer F. Richard Pappas, that lists beneficiaries of that trust.Alison Besunder, an estate lawyer at Arden Besunder, said reliance on a revocable trust was a common estate planning technique. “Among other benefits, a revocable trust affords privacy to public figures and celebrities in the administration of their affairs,” she said.The beneficiaries of the trust include a number of prominent organizations: the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Irish Repertory Theater and the Dramatists Guild Fund; the Museum of the City of New York is listed as a “contingent beneficiary,” but the filing does not specify what the contingency is. The trust will also benefit a Stephen Sondheim Foundation, once that is created.A dozen individuals are also listed as beneficiaries, including friends, neighbors and former assistants. Among them: Sondheim’s husband, Jeff Romley, and one of Sondheim’s best-known collaborators, James Lapine. (Sondheim and Lapine shared a Pulitzer for writing “Sunday in the Park With George”; their other collaborations included the musicals “Into the Woods” and “Passion.”) Also listed as beneficiaries: Peter Jones, a playwright who was once romantically involved with Sondheim; Steven Clar, who was Sondheim’s assistant; Peter Wooster, a designer who lived in a small house on Sondheim’s Connecticut property; and Rob Girard, who is Wooster’s gardener.“The probate papers tell you who the beneficiaries are, but not who gets what, and that’s the point here,” said Andrew S. Auchincloss, an estate lawyer with Schlesinger Lazetera & Auchincloss. “It’s being kept private.” Benjamin Weiser contributed reporting. More

    • 50 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      A Day of Divas

      by

      Two star sopranos, Renée Fleming and Sonya Yoncheva, held court in two of New York’s grandest venues on Sunday.A little imperiousness? A lot of extravagance? A touch of the supernatural?You could try to come up with the recipe for a diva, but you just know one when you see it. Or hear it: In an appraisal of André Leon Talley this weekend, the New York Times fashion critic Vanessa Friedman described his words as those “of a diva, uttered at a time when divas were going out of style.”Out of style, perhaps, but not out of existence. In fact, I read that appraisal on Sunday as I was getting ready for a day of rare diva alignment, with two star sopranos holding court in two of New York’s grandest venues: Renée Fleming at Carnegie Hall in the afternoon, and Sonya Yoncheva at the Metropolitan Opera in the evening.If you were looking for evidence of the demise of the diva — at least of the stereotypical variety — it’s true, neither of these seemingly genial, generous women came across as imperious. And clutch your pearls: Fleming didn’t even change gowns at intermission.But divadom still shows signs of life. It’s in tiny things, like this sentence in the program at Carnegie: “Ms. Fleming’s jewelry is by Ann Ziff for Tamsen Z.” And at the Met, when Yoncheva sang the phrase “ta première larme” (“your first tear”) in a Chausson song, she slowly raised her hand to her face, as if she really believed she was wiping that larme away. Sometimes, even in opera, it’s the gesture that makes the diva.In a gesture of becoming modesty, Fleming shared a reasonably crowded stage for the most prominent part of her concert: the New York premiere of “Penelope,” an account of the wife who waits very, very patiently for Homer’s Odysseus to return from the Trojan War.The soprano Renée Fleming, center, was joined on Sunday at Carnegie Hall for the New York premiere of André Previn and Tom Stoppard’s “Penelope” by (from left) the pianist Simone Dinnerstein, the Emerson String Quartet and the actress Uma Thurman.Chris LeeLeft unfinished at the death of its composer, André Previn, in 2019, the piece was stitched together from manuscript sketches and drafts of Tom Stoppard’s text. The 40-minute result is as talky as a Stoppard play but far less sparkling or affecting. Its tone mostly pseudo-archaic, this is pretty much just an “Odyssey” in extreme digest, lightly backed by the Emerson String Quartet and the pianist Simone Dinnerstein.There are so many words that many of them were assigned to be spoken, to shorten the running time. Thus the title role was split between a singer and an actress (at the premiere three years ago and here, the movie star Uma Thurman).Thurman is a natural at intoning amid the wispy thatches of underscoring, and she sometimes tries to inject some attitude into the dry libretto. But it’s never quite clear why the role has been divided. Couldn’t a single performer just shift between speaking and singing? The bifurcation works only to dilute interest in both parties.Fleming is game, even if she doesn’t get to take lyrical flight: The soprano part is almost entirely recitative — sung narration — and never blossoms into aria or gives us any real sense of Penelope’s character or emotions. There are reminders of Previn’s stylish facility, as when a quietly swirling little quartet interlude slips into a minor-key whisper of “Here Comes the Bride” before modulating, almost quicker than you can hear it, into gentle satisfaction. But mostly the music seems scant and exhausted trying to keep up with Stoppard.It followed intermission; earlier, the Emerson played Barber’s 1936 Quartet, dedicating it from the stage to Roger Tapping, the superb Juilliard Quartet violist, who died last week. Dinnerstein rolled out the deliberate arpeggios and rushing surges of Philip Glass’s “Mad Rush,” and accompanied Fleming in a set of five songs altogether more memorable than “Penelope.” The first, Grieg’s lively “Lauf der Welt,” didn’t play to this singer’s mellow strengths, but his “Zur Rosenzeit” very much did.Fleming is 62, but there is still considerable richness in the middle of her voice, and her dips into low notes were done cleanly, without the syrupy scooping for which she was once often criticized. In the wistful quiet of “Zur Rosenzeit” she was moving, almost vaporizing the second syllable in “meinem Garten” (“my garden”) for the touching effect of the past vanishing as she remembered it. Fauré’s “Les Berceaux” had discreet, dusky power.And she was earnestly impassioned in “Evening,” Kevin Puts’s new setting of a Dorianne Laux poem, most charming in a middle section with a Joni Mitchell vibe: a deliberate, repetitive piano riff anchoring a free and easy vocal line. (Fleming takes the Meryl Streep role in Puts’s coming operatic adaptation of “The Hours.”)Yoncheva’s solo recital on the Met stage was a sign that she had swiftly risen to become one of the company’s core artists.Ken Howard/Met OperaAt the Met, Yoncheva was given one of the dearest gifts the company can bestow on a valued artist: a solo recital on its stage. And at 40, she has become valued with dizzying swiftness. Though she jumped into a few memorable revivals starting in 2013, it was only when she opened the 2015-16 season, in Verdi’s “Otello,” that she cemented her place in this house; at the end of February, she will star in a new production of “Don Carlos.”On Sunday she displayed the ease with which she can fill even the vast Met with an encompassing mood: darkly nostalgic and death-haunted, as you’d expect from her melancholy repertory. Even her sensuality brooded, compellingly joyless; Malcolm Martineau’s relative effervescence at the piano placed her gifts in high relief.Her voice is supple but lean. It feels like an instrument, in the most literal sense: a vehicle of expression rather than a remarkable sound in its own right. It has a low center of gravity and a quality of intimacy; Yoncheva gives the sense of singing to herself even when she’s not being soft.As she began with a set of French songs by Duparc, Viardot, Chausson, Donizetti and Delibes, her high notes were thin and stiff. Indeed, throughout the evening those notes above the staff were a problem, mostly when she had to rise to them through a long musical line. Stabbed out of the air, loud ones had startling fullness and clarity.But from the first number — Duparc’s “L’Invitation au voyage” — her interpretive intentions were intriguing, as she stretched the poem’s vision of “luxury, calm and delight” into a clear, forbidding premonition of the afterlife. With Yoncheva, details are everything: In Duparc’s “Au pays où se fait la guerre,” the repetitions of “son retour” (“his return”) at the end of each verse had a different gauzy texture, subtly increasing the complexity and tension of the illusion that a lover will come back.A silvery sheen to “printemps” in Chausson’s “Le temps des lilas” gave a brief impression of dewy spring; there was grandeur in Donizetti’s “Depuis qu’une autre a su te plaire” without overkill. The Spanish-style ornaments in Delibes’s “Les filles de Cadix” weren’t dashed off for smiles, but were sung with intensity, turning what could be a throwaway number into an unlikely burning drama.In a second half of Italian songs, Yoncheva was dreamy in Puccini, though her voice wanted greater size and juiciness to fill out her epic conception of “Canto d’anime.” In works by Martucci, Tosti and Verdi, her phrasing had confidence and style, a carefully constructed but persuasive evocation of naturalness; though she had a music stand in front of her throughout the evening, she sang with focus and commitment.Tosti’s “Ideale” was particularly striking, its finale building from faintness to climax. Warmly received, she moved to classic arias for encores: a refreshingly unsappy “Donde lieta uscì” from “La Bohème”; a genuinely sexy, insinuating “Carmen” Habanera; and “Adieu, notre petite table” from “Manon,” tenderly mused.Oh, and she spent the first half in a black gown, billowing above the bodice, and the second in white — shiny satin throughout, a dream of a diva. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      ‘Encanto’ Soundtrack Returns to No. 1, Beating Gunna and the Weeknd

      by

      When the soundtrack to “Encanto,” Disney’s latest animated film, came out two months ago, it was by no means a hit, entering the Billboard 200 chart at No. 197.But the film’s catchy and eclectic songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda — drawing on salsa, bachata, hip-hop and classic Broadway — became sleeper hits once the film began streaming on Disney+, a month ago. For weeks, the song “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” has been unavoidable on TikTok, with fans making dance and singalong videos, helping make “Bruno” one of the top tracks on Spotify and Apple Music.This week, the “Encanto” soundtrack returns to No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart, beating out competition from the Weeknd, Gunna and a new release by the Americana band the Lumineers. It is the second time “Encanto” has topped the chart, after going to No. 1 two weeks ago and then dipping to No. 3.“Encanto” had the equivalent of 104,000 sales in the United States, including 125 million streams and 17,000 copies sold of the album as a complete package, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. “Encanto” is the first Disney soundtrack to have multiple turns at No. 1 since “Frozen,” which notched a total of 13 weeks at the top in the first half of 2014. “Bruno” is No. 2 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart, behind Adele’s “Easy on Me,” which is at the top for a 10th week.Last week’s top seller on the album chart, “DS4Ever” by the Atlanta rapper Gunna, falls one spot to No. 2 in its second week out, losing 36 percent of its equivalent sales, while the Weeknd’s “Dawn FM” lost 59 percent, sliding one to No. 3.Adele’s “30” is No. 4, Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 5, and the Lumineers’ “Brightside,” its first LP in two and a half years, starts at No. 6. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Dan Einstein, Champion of Singer-Songwriters, Is Dead at 61

      by

      He operated independent record labels for John Prine and Steve Goodman that took a critically praised (and award-winning) artist-driven approach.NASHVILLE — Dan Einstein, a Grammy-winning independent record producer who championed the careers of John Prine and Steve Goodman, died here on Jan. 15. He was 61.His death, in a hospice facility, was confirmed by his wife of 27 years, Ellen Krause Einstein, who did not cite a cause.Most people in Nashville knew Mr. Einstein as the proprietor, with his wife, of Sweet 16th, the award-winning bakery they opened in 2004. But he had previously made his mark, in the 1980s and ’90s, as an independent record label operator who forsook corporate wisdom about economies of scale in favor of a smaller, more artist-driven approach to making records that proved feasible as well as garnering critical acclaim.Having dropped out of U.C.L.A. in the early ’80s after his studies were eclipsed by his work with the campus concerts committee, Mr. Einstein became a partner with the Los Angeles-based company Al Bunetta Management, where he helped launch and run two successful musician-owned record labels.The first of them, Oh Boy Records, was the brainchild of the singer-songwriter John Prine, who, after parting ways with Asylum Records in 1980, had grown disenchanted with the commodification and excesses of major-label culture. The other imprint, Red Pajamas Records, was started by the singer-songwriter Steve Goodman, who died of leukemia in 1984. (Mr. Prine died of Covid-19 in 2020, Mr. Bunetta of cancer in 2015.)The two labels promptly won Grammy Awards. Red Pajamas won in 1987 for “A Tribute to Steve Goodman,” a multi-artist anthology co-produced by Mr. Einstein, and in 1988 for “Unfinished Business,” a posthumously released collection of Mr. Goodman’s music, also produced by Mr. Einstein. In 1992 Mr. Prine won the first of his four Grammys with Oh Boy for “The Missing Years.” (He also won a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2020.) All three were honored in the best contemporary folk album category.Oh Boy and Red Pajamas were of course not the only successful independent labels at the time. What was different was the resolutely antediluvian way Mr. Einstein, who by 1993 was based in Nashville, approached things before the advent of the modern internet.Employing a boutique model without the benefit of major-label distribution, he and Mr. Bunetta relied on mail-order sales, grass-roots marketing and innovative consumer engagement. They included comment cards with the orders they filled, inviting buyers to rate albums and offer feedback on packaging and artwork.They also worked with artists who had left major labels for small independents, disregarding the usual trajectory in which performers are incubated at niche labels before graduating to big conglomerates and the money and prestige they promise (but only sometimes deliver).“In the middle ’80s, the idea of running a label for an artist with actual traction seemed crazy,” the music journalist Holly Gleason, who worked as a publicist for Mr. Prine in the ’90s, wrote in a eulogy for Mr. Einstein.“John Prine — or Steve Goodman — were nationally known,” she continued. “Major accounts weren’t going to deal with a handful of titles here, a new release with maybe 100 copies there. And yet, with the customer cards and mail-order business, Oh Boy and Red Pajamas were making it work.”In the process, the two labels became precursors of the human-scale, do-it-yourself entrepreneurship embraced by the Americana and alternative country movements of the late 1980s and beyond.Mr. Einstein in 2021. Most people in Nashville knew him as the proprietor, with his wife, of an award-winning bakery, but he first made his mark in the record business.Ellen EinsteinDaniel LeVine Einstein was born on Dec. 11, 1960, in New Haven, Conn., and grew up in New London, some 50 miles to the east. His father, Lloyd Theodore Einstein, known as Ted, was a physicist who helped invent the Sonar systems for nuclear submarines for the Navy. His mother, Nedra LeVine Einstein, was a schoolteacher.The family moved to Los Angeles in 1978, two years after Mr. Einstein’s mother’s death from cancer.While at U.C.L.A., Mr. Einstein became immersed in Los Angeles’s vibrant punk-rock scene. He frequented clubs like Madame Wong’s and the Masque and soon began promoting shows, which opened doors to his partnerships with Mr. Bunetta, Mr. Goodman and Mr. Prine.Besides his wife, Mr. Einstein is survived by his stepmother, Beverly Kaplan Einstein, and two sisters, Susan Richman and Loryn van den Berg.When Mr. Einstein left Oh Boy to open Sweet 16th, his entrepreneurship and affability translated seamlessly to his new venture.Referring to themselves, tongue in cheek, as “your East Nashville sugar dealer,” the Einsteins earned accolades for their baked goods from the likes of Southern Living and Glamour. And in 2021 they were named East Nashvillians of the Year by the magazine The East Nashvillian for their community-mindedness and generosity: Their hospitality extended both to hungry neighbors unable to afford the price of their award-winning breakfast sandwich and to those who had lost homes when tornadoes ravaged Nashville in 2020. More

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Badal Roy, Who Fused Indian Rhythms With Jazz, Is Dead at 82

      by

      He collaborated across cultures, playing tabla with Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, John McLaughlin and others in the jazz world and beyond, including Yoko Ono.Badal Roy, an Indian tabla player whose drumming propelled East-West fusions for some of the most prominent musicians in and out of jazz, died on Tuesday in Wilmington, Del. He was 82.His son, Amitav Roy Chowdhury, said the cause was Covid-19.Mr. Roy was largely self-taught. He was not trained in the Indian classical apprentice tradition of gurus and disciples. Where classical tabla players use a pair of differently tuned drums, Mr. Roy sometimes used three or four. His improvisational flexibility and his skill at sharing a groove made him a prized collaborator for jazz, funk, rock and global musicians.He first became widely known for his work in the early 1970s with the English guitarist John McLaughlin and Miles Davis, appearing on Davis’s pivotal jazz-funk album “On the Corner” and its successors. He went on to many other collaborations,— recording with Pharoah Sanders, Herbie Mann, Yoko Ono, Bill Laswell and Richie Havens — and spent more than a decade as a member of Ornette Coleman’s electric band, Prime Time.Amarendra Roy Chowdhury was born on Oct. 16, 1939, in the Comilla District of what was then British India. (The area was later part of East Pakistan and is now in Bangladesh.) His father, Satyenda Nath Roy Chowdhury, was a government official in Pakistan; his mother, Sova Rani Roy Chowdhury, was a homemaker. “Badal,” which means “rain” in Bengali, was a childhood nickname.An uncle introduced him to the tabla and taught him its rudiments: the vocal syllables that denote specific drum sounds. Later, in New York, he took some lessons from Alla Rakha, Ravi Shankar’s longtime tabla player. While growing up, he was also a fan of Elvis Presley and Pat Boone. His introduction to jazz was hearing Duke Ellington perform in Pakistan in 1963.Mr. Roy wasn’t planning a career in music when he came to New York in 1968. He intended to earn a Ph.D. in statistics.To support himself, he worked as a waiter at the Pak India Curry House and found a weekend gig playing tabla with a sitarist at A Taste of India, a restaurant in Greenwich Village. Mr. McLaughlin was a regular there, and he sometimes sat in with the duo. After a few months of jamming, he asked Mr. Roy to join a recording session. The resulting album, “My Goals Beyond,” released in 1971, was an early landmark in Indian-influenced jazz.Mr. McLaughlin was also working with Miles Davis at the time, and he brought Mr. Roy to Davis’s attention; when Davis was appearing at the Village Gate in 1971, Mr. Roy’s duo auditioned for him during a break between sets at A Taste of India, carrying their instruments a few blocks down Bleecker Street. Davis called on Mr. Roy for a 1972 session that also included Mr. McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock on keyboards and Jack DeJohnette on drums.In an interview with an Indian newspaper, The Telegraph, Mr. Roy recalled: “All of a sudden, Miles tells me: ‘You start’ — no music, no nothing, just like that. Realizing I have to set the groove, I just start playing a ta-ka-na-ta-n-ka-tin rhythm. Herbie nods his head to the beat and, with a ‘Yeah!,’ starts playing. For a while, it’s just the two of us, and then John and Jack join in. Then all the others start and, to me at least, it’s pure chaos. I’m completely drowned out by the sound. I continue playing, but for the next half-hour, I can’t hear a single beat I play.”Those sessions yielded Davis’s “On the Corner.” Mr. Roy joined Davis for other 1972 sessions that contributed material for Davis’s “Big Fun” and “Get Up With It,” both released in 1974, and performed with him at Philharmonic Hall (now David Geffen Hall) at Lincoln Center for what became Davis’s 1973 album “In Concert.”Mr. Roy received a copy of “On the Corner” when it was released in 1972. But after his frustration at the sessions, he didn’t listen to it until the 1990s, when his son, then a graduate student, told him, “All the hip-hop guys are sampling it.”In 1974, Mr. Roy married Geeta Vashi. She survives him, along with their son and Mr. Roy’s sisters, Kalpana Chakraborty and Shibani Ray Chaudhury, and his brother, Samarendra Roy Chowdhury. He lived in Wilmington.Mr. Roy backed the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders on the albums “Wisdom Through Music” (1972), “Village of the Pharoahs” (1973) and “Love in Us All” (1974), and in later years performed with Mr. Sanders onstage. With the saxophonist Dave Liebman, who had been in Davis’s group, Mr. Roy appeared on “Lookout Farm” (1974), “Drum Ode” (1975) and “Sweet Hands” (1975). (“Sweet hands” is the translation of a Bengali term praising a virtuoso tabla player.)He released two albums as a leader in the mid-1970s, both featuring Mr. Liebman: “Ashirbad” (1975) and “Passing Dreams” (1976), which also included the Indian classical musician Sultan Khan on sarangi, a bowed string instrument.Mr. Roy performed and recorded widely, often as part of cross-cultural fusions. He had a longtime duo with the bansuri (wooden flute) player Steve Gorn, which appeared regularly at the Manhattan restaurant Raga. He shared the 1978 album “Kundalini” with the American jazz clarinetist Perry Robinson and the Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos. In the early 1980s, he was a member of the flutist Herbie Mann’s group and appeared on the 1981 Mann album “All Blues/Forest Rain.” He also recorded with the composer and trumpeter Jon Hassell; with the trombonist and conch-shell player Steve Turre; with Yoko Ono on her 1982 album, “It’s Alright (I See Rainbows)”; and with the Brazilian guitar duo Duofel, the Japanese bassist Stomu Takeishi, the bassist and producer Bill Laswell and the Swiss harpist Andreas Vollenweider.In 1988, he joined Ornette Coleman’s band Prime Time, and though the group rarely released studio albums, he appeared on its final one, “Tone Dialing,” in 1995. In the early 2000s he was a member of Impure Thoughts, a group led by the keyboardist Michael Wolff. Mr. Roy also recorded often as a leader, collaborating across idioms and styles.In an interview for All About Jazz, Mr. Roy emphasized that his solos were about “telling a story.” “I go with the groove,” he said, “and then go free.” More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      How Meat Loaf Made a Cult Favorite: ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light’

      by

      The eight-and-a-half minute tale of sexual awakening features drums by the E Street Band’s Max Weinberg and vocals from Ellen Foley, who help recount how the unlikely song came together.The singer Meat Loaf, who died on Thursday, was a rock ’n’ roll anomaly: a portly force of nature whose theatrical musicality made him an unlikely but undeniable radio staple, and a standout presence in films like “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Fight Club.”Of his vital contributions to the American karaoke canon, the most potent may be “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” the eight-and-a-half minute opus to nascent sexuality that appeared on his multiplatinum 1977 debut, “Bat Out of Hell.” The story of a teenage couple about to consummate their relationship in a car, the song is built around a boisterous call-and-response duet between Meat Loaf and the singer Ellen Foley. The sexual act itself is narrated by the famous New York Yankees shortstop and play-by-play announcer Phil Rizzuto, over a rollicking barroom groove. (Sample dialogue: “Here’s the play at the plate — Holy cow, I think he’s gonna make it!”)“Meat got to act in that song, and he loved acting,” the bassist Kasim Sulton, who performed on “Bat Out of Hell,” said in a phone interview. “He did that with every song, but especially in ‘Paradise’ because it was indelibly linked to his whole life. He loved performing that song more than I could possibly tell you.”Like many of Meat Loaf’s best-known songs, “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” was written by the composer Jim Steinman. Lifelong collaborators, the two met in New York City when Meat Loaf auditioned for Steinman’s 1973 musical “More Than You Deserve.” Not long after, Meat Loaf was cast as John Belushi’s understudy in a “National Lampoon” road show, and he found Steinman a job as a piano player on the tour.It was on that tour that “Paradise,” and many of the songs that would turn up on “Bat Out of Hell,” first took shape. “We were driving around the country in a little blue van, and wherever we would play the ‘National Lampoon’ show, Jim would find a piano,” Ellen Foley said in a phone interview. “I don’t want to be a shrink, but I think it was probably him working out his own teenage desires that he hadn’t done in real life, but was able to experience in this hyper-emotional material. He just wanted to create something that nobody had ever heard before.”In a 2021 interview with Rolling Stone, Meat Loaf discussed his uncredited contributions to Steinman’s writing process. “My input was more arrangement, methods, a word or two here and there,” he said. “My job was to make the songs focused, the same way you’d get a character focused. Every song was a character. I’d get Jim to add a word, change the melody.”Back in New York, the three were joined by the singer Rory Dodd, who met Meat Loaf in 1975 while working on the Broadway musical “Rockabye Hamlet.” “We would rehearse every day, singing the same songs and working out the arrangements,” Dodd said in an interview. As a quartet, they performed these songs at clubs across the city as Meat Loaf and Steinman went looking for a record deal.That was slow coming, as most record executives didn’t quite understand what they were hearing. But they picked up some admirers along the way. Max Weinberg, the drummer for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, recounted being told about Meat Loaf and Steinman by a mutual friend, and watching them perform in a rehearsal studio on 57th Street. “Right there, in this little 8-by-10 room, Meat Loaf and Ellen Foley delivered ‘Paradise’ full-bore,” he said. “I had a lot of experience with Broadway-type presentation, so the idea of going into a studio and listening to a show being put together — immediately, I got the theatricality of it.”One of those admirers was the artist Todd Rundgren, who, under the mistaken impression that Meat Loaf and Steinman had a record deal, agreed to produce “Bat Out of Hell.” (When the truth came out, he also agreed to fund the recording himself.) In the fall of 1975, the musicians convened at Bearsville Studio in Woodstock, N.Y., where they were joined by members of Rundgren’s band Utopia, as well as Weinberg and Roy Bittan, the piano player for the E Street Band.Sulton said the group “all had a hand” in how the songs were arranged. “My first time hearing ‘Paradise,’ I remember thinking ‘it’s obvious what the song is,’” he said. “It’s kind of a boogie-woogie shuffle, and then there’s the Phil Spector part, and then there’s a bit of ‘Thunder Road.’ The song laid itself out for us in its entirety with just Jim playing the piano, and Meat Loaf singing it live.”After rehearsals, the band recorded “Paradise” in sections, without vocals. Weinberg said Steinman pushed him to play “like an out-of-control teenager.” “Teenage drumming is overplaying and very histrionic; it’s like a spice, because it’s not something you want to do all the time,” he said. “But he would tell me to hit those things so hard they fall over, and you can hear it in ‘Paradise.’ By the end of it, I’m just slamming away at the cymbals.”Foley’s singing parts were recorded in one take. “I did my part individually, but I had Meat come into the room so that I could act, and sing at him,” she said. “We were both in character; he was that poor, frightened, horny guy.” Dodd, who was one of the few people in the room when Meat Loaf recorded his own vocals, said Meat Loaf also performed in character as he sang. The initial recording was originally longer, clocking in at around 11 minutes; Dodd said about three minutes of background vocals at the song’s outro were cut out.Even with a completed album, Meat Loaf and Steinman had difficulty finding a record deal. Dodd recalled the record executive Clive Davis telling Steinman “that he had to learn how to write rock ’n’ roll.” But the album was eventually accepted and released by the executive Steve Popovich’s Cleveland International Records, and it slowly gained traction upon its 1977 release. Its popularity was boosted by a promotional video clip for “Paradise,” in which Meat Loaf and the singer Karla DeVito — lip syncing over Foley’s vocals — performed onstage.In the 2011 book “I Want My MTV,” Meat Loaf said he secured the video placements before midnight showings of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” “That is still the number one selling album in the history of Holland, and I never played there,” he said. “It’s all because of the ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light’ video.”DeVito, who replaced Foley for the initial “Bat Out of Hell” tour, said audiences “went nuts” when the band got to “Paradise.” For these shows, she was given free rein to create the character of what she called “the girl in white” — the innocent counterpart to Meat Loaf’s lascivious singer. “He just wanted to put on the best show possible every night,” she said. Over the years, performances of the song would sprawl to the 20-minute mark because “Meat would milk it for all it was worth,” Sulton said.Even as his health waned, Meat Loaf was intent on performing live. DeVito said that less than a month before his death, he called her about staging a tour. “I’m thinking, ‘How are we going to do this?’” she recalled. “He said, ‘I really don’t like the way I’m walking, anyway. So we’ll come out in a car, and then we’ll roll out, and when it gets to the kissing part in “Paradise,” everything will go black, and they’ll play the video.’ He really did not stop thinking, and this is the thing that kills me about losing him — he was always inspired to do more.”Weinberg said Meat Loaf, ultimately, was a truly devoted performer. “Whatever he did, he committed to it,” he said. “And in committing to it, he made it real for you.” More