Music

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherThroughout the coronavirus pandemic, jazz’s flexibility has become an asset. It informed how 2021 played out in the jazz world — the return of Pharoah Sanders with a new, unlikely collaborator, the electronic musician Floating Points; interesting intersections with hip-hop that call back to earlier jazz fusion; duet recordings that emphasize call and response, two artists communicating across the empty transom.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about how the pandemic is continuing to shape the world of jazz recordings, how the genre revives its heroes and also some promising new artists.Guests:Giovanni Russonello, who covers jazz for The New York TimesMarcus J. Moore, who writes about music for The New York Times and othersConnect 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 [email protected]. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

The musical “Hadestown” and the opera “Eurydice” aim to offer new twists on a Greek myth. But when it comes to their heroine, they only go so far.When Orpheus turned around to look at Eurydice during the closing performance of Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice” at the Metropolitan Opera, the audience’s collective gasp seemed to shake the grand theater. I recalled another time I heard such a gasp: from the character of Eurydice near the end of “Doubt Comes In,” a song in the Broadway musical “Hadestown.” Then, too, the audience gasped along with her.A lifelong classics nerd, I was surprised both times by the reaction: Does the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice really require a spoiler alert?The myth has been kicking around for over two millenniums, after all. Orpheus, the greatest musician of all, marries Eurydice, who dies when she’s bitten by a snake on their wedding day. He descends to the underworld, where the god of the dead offers him another chance at love: He can leave with Eurydice, but only if he walks ahead and never turns around. Here’s that spoiler: Orpheus looks, and Eurydice is damned to Hades forever.For such an old — and short — story, the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is still frequently told and adapted, much like that of another famous ill-fated couple, Romeo and Juliet. Operatic renditions by Monteverdi and others date back to the early 1600s. Renowned filmmakers like Jean Cocteau created their own narratives in the 20th century.In 1922, Rainer Maria Rilke used the tragic story as a launchpad for his deeply ruminative 55-poem cycle “Sonnets to Orpheus.” Countless other poets have followed suit, many revising the myth to give its sad dead wife a voice — perhaps in a contemporary vernacular, as in Carol Ann Duffy’s “Eurydice,” or in the measured verse and elevated diction of A.E. Stallings’ “Eurydice’s Footnote.”And of course there’s Ruhl herself, who created a revisionist mythology in her 2003 play “Eurydice,” which she adopted into the opera’s libretto.Modern-day adaptations like “Hadestown” and “Eurydice” reveal more than just the imaginations of their creators; they reflect a gender politics that gets to the core of how men and women are mythologized, who has agency and whose stories are most valued.Morley, as Eurydice, surrounded by the dead.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLet’s face it: Orpheus has always been the star of the myth. Eurydice is simply the young bride. She has no background and no future; she only serves as the vehicle of tragedy for Orpheus.Both “Hadestown” and “Eurydice” interrogate that starring role. In both, Orpheus remains a genius musician who, though in love with Eurydice, is preoccupied with his art above all. Her death is a touch of bad luck — you never know when a venomous snake will slither underfoot on your wedding day. But both adaptations draw a line of causality from Orpheus’s behavior to Eurydice’s death.Perhaps, the productions suggest, Orpheus was the original slacker musician boyfriend, so concerned with his next big hit that he neglected the love who inspired his best work. But Eurydice doesn’t merely get dragged down into the underworld; in both versions she’s tempted by the offer of something she wants.In Aucoin and Ruhl’s “Eurydice,” the new bride wanders off from her own wedding party. She’s bored and missing her dead father, who has been secretly trying to write to his beloved daughter from the underworld. In comes Hades, the ruler of that realm, as sleazy as a back-alley hustler, to manipulate her grief; he baits her with one of her father’s letters.In Anais Mitchell’s “Hadestown,” the seduction is twofold: financial and sexual. Orpheus and Eurydice are trapped in some otherworldly version of the Depression era. In the lurid “Hey, Little Songbird,” Hades draws in Eurydice with promises of security and comfort, while undermining Orpheus, mocking him as a starving artist: “He’s some kind of poet and he’s penniless?/Give him your hand, he’ll give you his hand-to-mouth./He’ll write you a poem when the power’s out.”But the pressure goes further; in Patrick Page’s beguiling performance, Hades is explicitly predatory, exploiting Eurydice’s feelings of displacement and neglect in her relationship.That each of the two Eurydices actively makes a choice, as opposed to being passively buffeted by fate, is telling. But the result in both cases is still tragic.Whether it’s via a gradual transformation, as in “Hadestown,” or an abrupt change, as in “Eurydice,” our heroine loses her sense of self. In the underworld of “Hadestown,” Eurydice joins Hades’s army of souls, forgetting her identity like the deceased around her. Her counterpart in “Eurydice” also forgets Orpheus, her own name and even how to read; she meets her dead father but is unable to recognize him at first.Reeve Carney, foreground center, and Eva Noblezada, far right, as Orpheus and Eurydice in the Broadway musical “Hadestown.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesI’ve already told you the spoiler, that the myth ends in death. Opera has an easier time going there; it’s difficult for a musical to pull off a somber ending — the upbeat finale that practically demands a standing ovation feels so much more typical for the form.And yet “Hadestown” bravely, if self-consciously, resolves that way, announcing that the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is an “old song” and “a sad song, but we sing it anyway.”“Eurydice” commits more explosively to woe in its stellar third act, after two acts of tedious exposition. Orpheus, Eurydice and Eurydice’s father all end up in the underworld together, but they find no peace. Eurydice’s father, having lost all hope of reuniting with his daughter after her husband arrives to save her, takes another dip into the Styx, causing him to die a final death. Eurydice, having lost both her husband and father twice, follows her father into oblivion.So the grand tragedy of the piece isn’t contingent on Orpheus’s inconvenient rubbernecking and the implications about trust (though that’s in there too); it’s the ways death has riven these relationships. In trying to outmaneuver their mortality and reconnect with one another, Orpheus, Eurydice and Eurydice’s father each arrive at an oblivion more desolate and lonely than what they’d known before.For all I appreciate about the way both productions offer Eurydice more agency, I do think they give her short shrift.“Hadestown” sticks to the plot of the classic, with some twists and embellishments. But in performance, the musical positions her as the more interesting half of the couple. As played by Eva Noblezada, she is a plucky, streetwise heroine — “no stranger to the world,” as one lyric goes. She may love a juvenile dreamer lost in his own head (Reeve Carney, with a beardless falsetto). But she’s practical; she’ll do what it takes to survive in a world of gross inequality, where Hades is an industrial fat cat and artists and workers are largely servile. If her death becomes the focal point over her character, that may be more the myth’s fault than the musical’s.“Eurydice” allows its heroine the power to decide: head back with her husband, or remain in the underworld with her father. She chooses to call to Orpheus — in effect separating from him and reuniting with her father.But even with this often intriguing revision, the opera still defines Eurydice solely by her relationship to men. Take the scene of their marriage proposal: Orpheus slyly ties a red string around Eurydice’s ring finger, and suggests using her to create his art — quite literally, making an instrument from the strands of her hair. She laments her father’s absence at the wedding itself, because, she claims, she was married to her father first. She doesn’t seem to exist outside of these men.When Eurydice dies the second time, vanishing without a trace, it’s as though she’s a figment of Orpheus’s imagination, more an archetype than anything else — the ill-fated lover, the tragic dead wife, another muse.Still gone at the turn of a head. More

One suspect was captured by federal marshals in Indiana after failing to surrender as he had promised on social media, the authorities said.Two people have been arrested in the killing of the rapper Young Dolph, who was shot by two people while buying cookies at a bakery in Memphis in November, according to the authorities.The U.S. Marshals Service announced on Tuesday that one of the suspects, Justin Johnson, 23, had been captured that day in Indiana. Last week, the police in Memphis obtained a first-degree murder warrant for Mr. Johnson and law enforcement agencies offered a reward of $15,000 for information leading to his arrest.Also on Tuesday, the other suspect in the killing, Cornelius Smith, was indicted by a grand jury in Tennessee on charges including first-degree murder and property theft in connection with the killing, the Shelby County district attorney general, Amy Weirich, said in a news release. Mr. Smith, 32, was also charged with the attempted murder of Young Dolph’s brother, who was also at the bakery during the shooting.Mr. Smith was arrested on Dec. 9 in Southaven, Tenn., on a warrant charging him with auto theft in connection with the getaway car used in the killing, Ms. Weirich said.Young Dolph, 36, a promising hip-hop artist who had emerged in recent years and whose real name was Adolph Thornton Jr., was shot on Nov. 17 inside Makeda’s, a bakery in downtown Memphis. The gunmen fled, and he was pronounced dead at the scene, the Memphis Police Department said.It was unclear on Tuesday whether Mr. Johnson and Mr. Smith had lawyers.The U.S. Marshals Service, the Memphis Police Department, and Shelby County District Attorney’s Office are to hold a joint news conference on Wednesday to discuss the case.Mr. Johnson, 23, had posted on social media over the weekend, maintaining his innocence and saying that he intended to turn himself in on Monday, Action News 5 in Memphis reported. Monday passed with no arrest, and two U.S. Marshals fugitive task forces captured Mr. Johnson on Tuesday afternoon.Mr. Johnson, a rapper known as Straight Drop, also has an outstanding warrant for a violation of supervised federal release on a prior weapons conviction, the U.S. Marshals Service said.A memorial for Young Dolph in Memphis on Nov. 18, the day after the rapper was shot to death.Justin Ford/Getty ImagesYoung Dolph’s last solo album, “Rich Slave,” debuted at the No. 4 spot on the Billboard Chart in 2020. He had previously survived at least two shootings in 2017.The Memphis Police Department and Mayor Jim Strickland have pointed to Young Dolph’s killing as yet another example of a steady rise in gun violence in the city. In a letter to constituents last week, Mr. Strickland called for reform to state gun laws to increase penalties for crimes like aggravated assaults.Mr. Johnson had not been adequately punished, Mr. Strickland wrote, referring to the six months he served in prison four years ago after he fired a gun at a bowling alley and injured several people.“One of our top legislative priorities has been and continues to be finding a workable solution to these laws so that, if a person commits a violent crime, they are not back out in a few weeks or months doing the same things again,” he wrote. More

Among his best-known songs were “River,” “The Roseville Fair” and a cross-generational classic, “A Place in the Choir.”The folk singer Bill Staines used to tell a story about the oddest line in his best-known song, “A Place in the Choir,” whose lyrics celebrate the diversity of the animal kingdom and, by implication, the human one.Thanks to numerous cover versions and a best-selling picture book, countless children and adults could sing you the chorus:All God’s critters got a place in the choir,Some sing low, some sing higher,Some sing out loud on a telephone wire,Some just clap their hands, or paws, or anything they’ve got.But what about the line that ends one of the verses? “The otter hasn’t got much to say, and the porcupine talks to himself.” What’s up with that porcupine?The line, as Mr. Staines often related, came from a camping trip he and his wife, Karen Elrod Staines, took to the Tobacco Root Mountains in southwest Montana. Lying awake in their tent at 4 a.m., he heard an odd chattering outside.“And I figured, Well, they’ve landed,” he told the story to an audience in 2009. But when he peered out the tent flap, it wasn’t extraterrestrials; it was a porcupine talking to itself.Mr. Staines died on Dec. 5 at his home in Rollinsford, N.H. He was 74.His wife said the cause was prostate cancer.Ms. Staines, who works in special education, said the song, which first appeared on Mr. Staines’s 1979 album, “The Whistle of the Jay,” didn’t leap out at either of them as a career highlight.“When Bill wrote ‘P.I.C.’ and played it for me when I got home from school, we both shook our heads and said, ‘I don’t know if this is a keeper or not,’” she said by email. “Obviously and luckily, we were wrong.”The song has been covered by Peter, Paul and Mary; Red Grammer; Tommy Makem and Liam Clancy; and many others. A rousing live performance by the Irish group Celtic Thunder on YouTube has been viewed over seven million times.“Songs are like children you care about,” Mr. Staines, who recorded almost 30 albums, told The Register of Yarmouth, Mass., in 2013. “You write a song and it’s born and you have to nurture it awhile and it grows up healthy and strong and then it develops relationships with people who don’t have anything to do with you. ‘A Place in the Choir’ has a life of its own. It’s like a child that’s grown up and gone away.”William Russell Staines was born on Feb. 6, 1947, in Medford, Mass., to William Henry and Dorothy (Trask) Staines. He grew up in Lexington, Mass., and two boyhood friends, Dick and John Curtis, were the catalysts for his performing career.“When I was around 11, Dick got a guitar, so of course I had to get one,” Mr. Staines told The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, Mass., in 2018. “It was a Sears Silvertone three-quarter-size guitar with a cowboy painted on it. I sanded the cowboy off the front, and Dick and John and I started a little rock ’n’ roll band, with contact pickups on our acoustic guitars.”Before long, he had gone solo and begun writing his own songs, upgrading to a full-size guitar, which he played in an unusual way: upside-down.“When I got my first guitar, I picked it up and held it the correct way, the right-handed way,” he told the Quincy newspaper. “But I’m left-handed and it just didn’t feel right. So I flipped it over and figured this must be the left-handed way of playing. You know, a D chord is still a D chord, so I just had to get to it differently.”That approach gave his picking a somewhat different sound, since he was hitting the high strings with his thumb. At least one fellow guitarist was impressed.“About four years ago I met this fellow in California who was a wonderful guitar player, who said, ‘I really like the way your style sounds,’” Mr. Staines told The Wenatchee World of Washington State in 2009. “And I saw him a year ago, and he’d went out and bought a left-handed guitar and was playing it right-handed. So that’s even one step to the weirder.”Mr. Staines wrote countless songs. Many evoked the natural world, like “River,” one of his best known, with its wistful refrain:You rolling old river, you changing old river,Let’s you and me, river, run down to the sea.Others were character sketches — “pensive, probing narratives made especially memorable by their ability to translate the common details of common lives into songs of uncommon eloquence and beauty,” as L.E. McCullough put it in The Austin American-Statesman in 1986. There was, for instance, “The Roseville Fair,” about a couple’s first meeting and their enduring love. Among those who covered the tune was Nanci Griffith, who called Mr. Staines “the Woody Guthrie of my generation of songwriters.” Ms. Griffith, who died in August, credited Mr. Staines with encouraging her in her own career.Mr. Staines, an old-school troubadour who traveled tens of thousands of miles every year to perform, started out in coffee shops and other small venues. Early in his career, he was M.C. of the Sunday hootenanny at the famed Club 47 in Cambridge, Mass.He was still a road warrior half a century later. His most recent album, in 2018, was called “The Third Million Miles.”In addition to Ms. Staines, whom he married in 1976, Mr. Staines is survived by a son, Bowen Keith Staines, and a brother, Stephen.Mr. Staines had another talent: yodeling. He sometimes gave workshops on the skill. In 1975, he won a yodeling contest at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas — “defeating some crestfallen Swiss yodelers,” The Christian Science Monitor reported. More

In a wide-ranging career, he went from playing percussion with Miles Davis to writing and producing sleek R&B to a long stint on political talk radio.James Mtume, the musician, songwriter, producer, bandleader and talk-radio host whose 1983 hit “Juicy Fruit” has been sampled in more than 100 songs, died on Sunday at his home in South Orange, N.J. He was 76.His cause was cancer, his family said.Mr. Mtume started his career as a jazz percussionist. He was in Miles Davis’s band for the first half of the 1970s, appearing on Davis’s landmark 1972 jazz-funk album “On the Corner” and its successors.But in the late ’70s he pivoted to R&B: He co-wrote hits for Roberta Flack and Stephanie Mills, produced albums and formed a group, Mtume, which had major hits with his songs “Juicy Fruit” and “You, Me and He.” His sparse, sputtering electronic beat for “Juicy Fruit” gained an extensive second life in hip-hop when it was sampled on the debut single by the Notorious B.I.G., “Juicy,” a No. 1 rap hit in 1994.Mr. Mtume was born James Forman on Jan. 3, 1946, in Philadelphia. His father was the jazz saxophonist Jimmy Heath, but he was raised by his stepfather, James Forman, a jazz pianist also known as Hen Gates who had played with Charlie Parker, and his mother, Bertha Forman, a homemaker.Jazz musicians including Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Dinah Washington and John Coltrane were frequent family visitors, and the young James Forman grew up playing piano and percussion; his biological uncle, the jazz drummer Albert (Tootie) Heath, gave him his first conga drum.He was a champion swimmer in high school, winning the Middle Atlantic title for backstroke, and attended Pasadena City College on an athletic scholarship.In California, he joined the US Organization, a Black nationalist cultural group that introduced the holiday Kwanzaa, and he took an African last name: Mtume, Swahili for messenger. He also turned seriously to music.In 1969, Albert Heath recorded four modal, Afrocentric jazz compositions by Mr. Mtume on his album “Kawaida,” featuring Mr. Mtume on congas alongside Herbie Hancock on piano, Don Cherry on trumpet and Jimmy Heath on saxophones. Mr. Mtume also worked with Art Farmer, McCoy Tyner, Freddie Hubbard and Gato Barbieri.He joined Miles Davis’s band in 1971 as it was making the transition to the jagged, open-ended, rhythm-dominated funk of “On the Corner.” In an extensive Red Bull Music Academy interview in 2014, Mr. Mtume said that Davis had taught him the value of space and concision — “the appreciation for abbreviation.” He worked with Davis until 1975, touring and appearing on the albums “Big Fun,” “Dark Magus,” “Agharta,” “Pangaea” and “Get Up With It,” which included a Davis composition titled “Mtume.”Working with Davis, Mr. Mtume expanded his sound with electronic effects. “You don’t fight technology, you embrace it,” he said in 2014. “It’s like fire. It’ll burn you, or you learn how to cook with it.”In 1972, Mr. Mtume made his recording debut as a leader with “Alkebu-Lan: Land of the Blacks” on the Strata-East label, credited to the Mtume Umoja Ensemble. It opened with a spoken manifesto that praised “the role of Black music as a functional organ in the struggle for national liberation.” He released a second jazz album, “Rebirth Cycle,” in 1977.Mr. Mtume with Miles Davis in 1973. In a 2014 interview, he said Davis had taught him the value of space and concision — “the appreciation for abbreviation.” R. Brigden/Express, via Getty ImagesWhen Davis stopped performing in 1975, Mr. Mtume and the guitarist Reggie Lucas, another member of the Davis group, joined Roberta Flack’s band. Their composition “The Closer I Get to You,” which she recorded as a duet with Donny Hathaway, reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1978 and was later remade by Beyoncé and Luther Vandross.They formed Mtume-Lucas Productions to write and produce songs. Among the artists they worked with were Phyllis Hyman, Teddy Pendergrass, the Spinners and Stephanie Mills, for whom they wrote the 1980 hit “Never Knew Love Like This Before,” a Grammy Award winner for best R&B song. On Instagram this week, Ms. Mills praised Mr. Mtume, writing, “He was so brilliant and an amazing music mind.”Between production jobs, Mr. Mtume and Mr. Lucas recorded with their core musicians as the group Mtume, which featured the singer Tawatha Agee. Mr. Mtume described the group’s first albums as “sophistifunk,” using plush harmonies and elaborate orchestrations.But one day, Mr. Mtume recalled, he realized that “I was playing something that sounded just like something else I had done. I got up and I walked away, and I disbanded the band, and I decided not to do any more productions.”He put together a second lineup of Mtume, without Mr. Lucas, and turned to a style he described as “neo-minimalism,” using just a handful of instruments and fewer effects. The new Mtume lineup recorded “Juicy Fruit.” At first, Mtume’s record label, Epic, dismissed the song as too slow for daytime radio, but it became a No. 1 R&B hit.The title song of Mtume’s 1984 album, “You, Me and He” — a confession of polyamory — reached No. 2 on Billboard’s R&B chart. On the group’s final album, “Theater of the Mind,” released in 1986, Mtume turned to sociopolitical commentary in songs like “Deep Freeze (Rap-a-Song) (Part 1).” That same year, Mr. Mtume wrote the score for the film “Native Son” and produced a solo album for Ms. Agee.In a radio interview in 1988, during a freewheeling era of hip-hop when samples were widely used without payment or credit, Mr. Mtume denounced hip-hop’s reliance on sampling, calling it “Memorex music” and complaining that the originators were ignored. The hip-hop group Stetsasonic responded with “Talkin’ All That Jazz,” which argued, “Rap brings back old R&B/And if we would not, people could’ve forgot.”Eventually, sampling — by then licensed and credited — would keep Mr. Mtume’s music on the radio. “Juicy Fruit” has been sampled by Alicia Keys, Warren G, Jennifer Lopez, Keyshia Cole, Faith Evans and dozens of others, and many of Mr. Mtume’s other songs and productions have made their way onto new tracks.In 1994, Mr. Mtume scored the TV series “New York Undercover.” At his urging, the show’s story lines featured a nightclub, Natalie’s, where an older generation of musicians, including B.B. King and Gladys Knight, got new TV exposure and younger performers revived old songs. During the 1990s he also produced songs for Mary J. Blige, D’Angelo, and K-Ci & Jojo.Yet by the mid-1990s, Mr. Mtume had grown dissatisfied with the music business. He moved into talk radio, and was a co-host from 1995 to 2013 on the weekly show “Open Line,” heard first on WRKS-FM (Kiss-FM) in New York and then on WBLS-FM when the stations merged, discussing politics, activism, news and culture alongside Bob Slade and Bob Pickett. Over the years, he also traveled to Cuba, Libya, Sudan and South Africa. He recorded a TED Talk in 2018, “Our Common Ground in Music,” in which he discussed “the cross-pollination of culture, politics and art.”He is survived by his wife, Kamili Mtume; his brother, Jeffrey Forman; two sons, Faulu Mtume and Richard Johnson; four daughters, Benin Mtume, Eshe King, Ife Mtume and Sanda Lee; and six grandchildren.“Pressing the boundaries. To me that’s always what it was about,” Mr. Mtume said in 2014. “Never give yourself a chance to look back, because that’s always easier. Looking forward is always harder.” More

He and his partners hoped their weekend of “peace and music” would draw 50,000 attendees. It ended up drawing more than 400,000 — and making history.Michael Lang, one of the creators of the Woodstock festival, which drew more than 400,000 people to an upstate New York farm in 1969 for a weekend of “peace and music” — plus plenty of drugs, skinny-dipping, mud-soaked revelry and highway traffic jams — resulting in one of the great tableaus of 20th-century pop culture, died on Saturday in a hospital in Manhattan. He was 77.Michael Pagnotta, a spokesman for Mr. Lang’s family, said the cause was non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.In August 1969, Mr. Lang was a baby-faced 24-year-old with limited experience as a concert promoter when he and three partners, Artie Kornfeld, John P. Roberts and Joel Rosenman, put on the Woodstock Music and Art Fair on land leased from a dairy farmer, Max Yasgur, in bucolic Bethel, N.Y., about 100 miles northwest of New York City.Since Monterey Pop in California two years before, rock festivals had been sprouting around the country, and the Woodstock partners, all in their 20s, were ambitious enough to hope for 50,000 attendees. Mr. Lang and Mr. Kornfeld, a record executive, booked a solid lineup, with, among others, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and a new group called Crosby, Stills & Nash (they would be joined at the festival by Neil Young). The show was set for Aug. 15-17.They sold 186,000 tickets in advance, at $8 a day. On the opening day, traffic snarled much of the New York State Thruway, and many ticket holders did not make it. Others simply entered the field without paying.In an interview, Mr. Rosenman said that days before the show, workmen had said that they could build a stage or ticket booths but not both; the partners chose a stage.The event became a defining moment for the baby boomer generation, as a celebration of rock as a communal force and a manifestation of hippie ideals. Despite the presence of nearly half a million people, and the breakdown of most health and crowd-control measures, no violence was reported.Mr. Lang — described in The New York Times Magazine in 1969 as a “groovy kid from Brooklyn” — became the public face of the powers behind the festival. He was seen in Michael Wadleigh’s hit documentary “Woodstock” (1970) roaming the grounds in cherubic curls and a vest. Despite the festival’s inception as a moneymaking endeavor, Mr. Lang always insisted that its aims were to bring out the best in humanity.“From the beginning, I believed that if we did our job right and from the heart, prepared the ground and set the right tone, people would reveal their higher selves and create something amazing,” Mr. Lang said in his memoir, “The Road to Woodstock” (2009), written with the music journalist Holly George-Warren.Mr. Lang with an associate, Lee Blumer, at the site of the Woodstock festival in August 1989, its 20th anniversary. Mr. Lang would later be involved in anniversary versions of Woodstock in 1994 and 1999 and an unsuccessful attempt to stage a 50th-anniversary concert in 2019.Suzanne DeChillo/The New York TimesMichael Scott Lang was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 11, 1944, and grew up in middle-class surroundings in Bensonhurst. His father, Harry, ran a business that installed heating systems, and his mother, Sylvia, kept the books.Michael attended New York University and the University of Tampa, and in 1966 he opened a head shop in the Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami. He soon became involved in the music scene there, and in May 1968 he was one of the promoters of the Miami Pop Festival, with Hendrix, Steppenwolf, Blue Cheer and Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention.Later that year Mr. Lang moved to Woodstock, N.Y. — then known as a prime bohemian outpost thanks to the residency of Bob Dylan — and he soon met Mr. Kornfeld. Around the same time, Mr. Roberts and Mr. Rosenman, two young businessmen who were roommates on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, placed a classified ad in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal introducing themselves, half in jest, as “young men with unlimited capital” in search of investment ideas.Mr. Lang and Mr. Kornfeld always maintained that they never saw that ad. But the four men met through one of Mr. Roberts and Mr. Rosenman’s investments, a recording studio in New York, and Mr. Lang and Mr. Kornfeld suggested a studio in Woodstock, which they said was swarming with talent. The four set up a partnership, Woodstock Ventures, and agreed to work together.In his memoir, Mr. Lang said that Mr. Roberts, who had a large inheritance, had agreed to finance both the studio and the festival. Mr. Rosenman, in an interview, said the plan had been for profits from the festival to pay for the studio.When the Woodstock festival took place, it was initially portrayed in the news media as a catastrophe. The Daily News’s front page declared, “Traffic Uptight at Hippie Fest,” and a Times editorial bore the headline “Nightmare in the Catskills.”But images of endless fields of longhaired fans idling peacefully, and of stars like Hendrix, the Who and Santana commanding thousands of fans, ricocheted around the world and established a new template for the rock festival — even though many local governments around the country quickly took action to keep other such hippie fests out of their backyards.Mr. Lang and Mr. Kornfeld quit the partnership. To settle more than $1 million in debts from Woodstock, Mr. Roberts and Mr. Rosenman sold film and soundtrack rights to Warner Bros.; according to Mr. Rosenman, it took about a decade for Woodstock Ventures to break even. Mr. Roberts died in 2001, and in 2006 a performing arts center and museum, the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, was opened on the site of the 1969 festival.Mr. Lang in 2018, when the ill-fated 2019 Woodstock concert was in the planning stages.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesIn 1971, Mr. Lang formed a record label, Just Sunshine, which signed artists including the folk singer Karen Dalton and the funk singer Betty Davis. He also managed Joe Cocker, whose memorable performance at Woodstock helped build his fame. Mr. Lang was also involved in anniversary versions of Woodstock in 1994 and 1999 — the latter marred by fires, rioting and allegations of sexual assault — and he eventually rejoined Woodstock Ventures as a minority partner.That company holds the trademark and other intellectual property rights for the Woodstock festival, including the image of a dove on a guitar that was part of its first poster. Among its many licensing deals was one for Woodstock Cannabis.Mr. Lang is survived by his wife, Tamara Pajic Lang; two sons, Harry and Laszlo; his daughters Molly Lang, LariAnn Lang and Shala Lang Moll; a grandson; and his sister, Iris Brest.In 2019, Mr. Lang attempted to revive Woodstock for a 50th-anniversary concert in Watkins Glen, N.Y., that would feature Jay-Z, Miley Cyrus, the Killers, Chance the Rapper, Santana and Imagine Dragons. But the event collapsed amid a legal battle with its financial backer, an arm of the Japanese advertising conglomerate Dentsu.To make the 50th-anniversary show stand out in a market that had become crowded with large-scale festivals like Coachella, Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo, Mr. Lang envisioned the new event as one that would make social and environmental activism central to its experience, and hark back to its roots.“It just seems like it’s a perfect time,” he said in an interview with The Times, “for a Woodstock kind of reminder.” More

The country star’s list of must-haves mixes heartstring-yanking shows, sports video games and powerhouse musicians known for shaking up the culture.The country singer Kane Brown will not lie: He has not developed any new skills during the pandemic. He’s spent a lot of time with his wife and daughter. He’s spent a lot of time in the gym. He oversaw construction on his house, and almost looked into whether he could try building his own home in the future. (That did not pan out.)But for the most part, he’s been waiting to get back on the road. Calling from Indianapolis, on the first day of the second leg of his Blessed & Free tour, he said it was “crazy” to be performing again, and observed that the feeling stretches to the audience. “The fans don’t know what to think; they don’t know what to do,” he said. “I don’t really have answers for them, or explanations. But we get to play the show.”Tour life in the time of Covid-19 is different than it used to be. One constant is video games: Brown plays just about all the available sports games, with some “Call of Duty” thrown in for good measure. He doesn’t take much care to hide his identity, which makes for some fun interactions. “I got a big microphone above my head, so a lot of people think I’m a rapper,” he said. “One time, we had these kids convinced I was Lil Baby. But if you click on my profile, it says my name, so then I’ll get a lot of messages like, ‘Man, I’m a big fan.’”Brown is on tour for the next two months, so those fans will have plenty of time to catch him in the digital sphere. Before the Indianapolis show, we spoke about 10 of his beloved cultural necessities. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. The Madden N.F.L. series One of my favorite memories was Madden 2004, when Michael Vick was on the cover. I got my first PlayStation 2, and I remember sitting down in the basement, just beating my stepdad. The game is really mechanical, but I kind of learned how to play football like I play Madden — just run and get a touchdown. You know, don’t play by the rules; don’t get hit; just run. That’s what I did in real life football, and I guess that’s why I’m sitting on my tour bus today.2. Elvis Presley Elvis was just his own thing, man. My nana was a huge Elvis fan; I remember she used to have this crazy bedazzled Elvis purse she would take everywhere, that was just his face blown up on a purse. As I got older, I started listening to his music, and if you really listen, he’s not scared to do anything. I find myself trying to sound like him all the time, on “Blue Christmas” or “Hound Dog.” However long this world goes on, he’ll still be talked about.3. “Ted Lasso” Jason Sudeikis is one of my favorite actors; I just love his dry sense of humor. I see a lot of myself in Ted. I wish I could be more like him, but I love how he’s so optimistic. No matter how much bad news is given to him, he always tries to turn it positive. The team is looking at him as a weird dude that doesn’t know anything about soccer, and he just goes in there and shows everybody his heart. It’s just amazing to me.4. Steph Curry I remember Curry coming to UTC, a college in my hometown of Chattanooga, and he hit a half-court buzzer beater. I remember everybody saying he was small and overrated, and he was just killing us. To see him go to the league, just destroying the competition, is insane. I did a podcast with him, and I think my favorite part was he brought his daughters in. I asked what they would listen to every day going to school, and they said my song “What Ifs.” It just hit a spot in my heart.5. H.E.R. I didn’t really know much about her until I met my wife, who was a huge fan. Our first dance at our wedding was “Best Part,” her song with Daniel Caesar. She’s just an amazingly talented vocal artist, and she can play that incredible guitar. She’s one of my favorite collaborators that I’ve got to work with; I feel like she’s another artist that’s going to be around for a while.6. “Click” I’m a huge Adam Sandler fan, and I actually showed this movie to my security guard last night. The angel of death gives him a universal remote that controls everything, but also controls his life. Every time he uses it, it just keeps fast forwarding. He ends up going past 20 years of his life — he loses his wife, his kids are grown, he ends up getting cancer. He fast forwarded past all the boring parts of his life, and now his life is gone. It literally brings me to tears every time I watch it. If you’re sitting on the couch like, “Oh, I’m bored,” that’s precious time you could be spending with your family. After I watched it last night, I called my wife; my security guard even called his wife. We just said, “We love you.”7. “Sesame Street”When I was a kid, Elmo and Cookie Monster were the main two characters for me. I didn’t expect to ever meet or film with them, but I got to do it last year. It was cool to see how they did it; they really make you feel like the characters are alive. I got to watch it with my little girl Kingsley, and you know, she just looks up to me and she loves Elmo. So for her to see her daddy with Elmo, it was one for the books.8. “Yellowstone”I fell in love with the TV show “Yellowstone” so much that my wife told me I need to go outside and do something. So I bought full cowboy gear and went to Lowe’s to buy some wood to build a treehouse. [Laughs] The story’s amazing; the music’s amazing. My nana always took me to rodeos, growing up. I used to mutton bust, and I used to chase the cows and try to get the ribbons off their tails. She also took me to a lot of pow wows, so to see the Native American culture that’s also in there — it’s just another part of my life that I really like watching.9. His first home in Mount Juliet, Tenn. I never really grew up in a steady home; I was always moving around, moving in with friends or different apartments with my mom. I was always grateful to have a roof over my head, but we never knew if we were going to stay there long, or what was going to happen. Before this house was built, we kept going there, and being like, “This is our new home.” Thinking about what we were going to put in there, I really felt like an adult. It was a huge, life-changing moment for me. Fast forward, we have a new home that we’re expanding on because I just had another kid. It’s amazing to give them things I never had growing up.10. Madison Square Garden The first time I went there, I watched the Knicks play Boston. The next night I was playing the Hulu Theater, so I didn’t actually get to play Madison Square Garden, but my dream was always to go to the big arena across the street. We actually get to do it this year; I think we’re even shooting a documentary. When you think about all the names that have gone through there, it’s just like: “I’m a nobody artist from Fort Oglethorpe, Ga., and I’m actually going to be headlining the arena that they’re all talking about.” It’s mind blowing. I can’t even think about the jitters; I just know it’s going to be a good show. More

The awards will support projects including Cherokee language translation, a digital map of jazz and hip-hop in Queens, and a study of the secret language of French butchers.A “living history museum” based on the life of Dred Scott, digitization of books and manuscripts dispersed from the Philippines in the 18th century, a Cherokee translation effort, and an exhibit on the history of jazz and hip-hop in Queens, N.Y., are among 208 projects across the country that are receiving new grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.The grants, which total $24.7 million, support individual scholarly projects and collaborative efforts, including initiatives and exhibitions at cultural institutions ranging from local history sites to behemoths like the Metropolitan Museum of Art.The awards are part of the agency’s regular cycle of grants. Last year, the agency also distributed more than $140 million of additional grants supported by funding from the American Rescue Plan Act.Some of the new awards are dedicated to infrastructure. One grant, of $500,000, is going to the Esperanza Peace and Justice Institute in San Antonio to support the refurbishment of seven historic buildings to be used as a cultural center focused on the immigrant communities of the city’s Westside neighborhood. A grant of $20,000 will support digital upgrades at the Chapman Center for Rural Studies at Kansas State University, which aims to highlight the history of Great Plains communities at risk of being forgotten.There are also a number of grants to historically Black colleges and universities, including roughly $130,000 to Oakwood University in Huntsville, Ala., to create the living museum dedicated to Dred Scott, the enslaved man whose lawsuit seeking freedom resulted in the infamous 1857 Supreme Court decision stating that African Americans could never be citizens.Other awards include nearly $45,000 to the University of Virginia, toward the creation of a database of 18th- and 19th-century North American weather records, including the detailed daily reports made by Thomas Jefferson between July 1776 and the week before his death in July 1826. There is also a $100,000 grant to Northeastern University in Boston, to support the translation of its Digital Archive of American Indian Languages Preservation and Perseverance, which gathers handwritten materials in the Cherokee syllabary, a writing system created in the early 19th century.In New York City, the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens will receive $30,000 to support a digital mapping project exploring the history of jazz and hip-hop in the borough. The Metropolitan Museum of Art will receive $350,000, to support biochemical analysis of the chia oil found in Mexican lacquerware and paintings by New Spanish artists in Mexico from the 16th to 19th centuries, to help with conservation and provenance research for works held in museums around the world. (The museum will collaborate with Grupo Artesanal Tecomaque, an Indigenous collective in Mexico that teaches sustainable lacquerware practices.)While most grants are directed toward institutions, there are also several dozen grants to individual scholars, some supporting “who knew?” topics like the history of Louchébem, described by the endowment as “a secret, highly endangered language spoken by Parisian butchers since the 13th century,” which was also used by some members of the French Resistance during World War II.The agency has an annual budget of roughly $167 million. In October, President Biden nominated Shelly C. Lowe, a scholar of higher education and longtime administrator, as its next director. If confirmed by the Senate, Lowe, an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, will be the first Native American to lead the agency. More