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      Tupac Shakur Touring Exhibition Opens in January

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      The show, spearheaded by Shakur’s estate, will start out in Los Angeles. It’s “a story about race in America using Tupac as a proxy,” one of its producers said.A major touring exhibition centered on Tupac Shakur and spearheaded by his estate will arrive in Los Angeles in January.The exhibition, “Tupac Shakur. Wake Me When I’m Free,” opens on Jan. 21, in a newly built, temporary 20,000-square-foot space in the entertainment complex L.A. Live in downtown Los Angeles.Shakur, a hip-hop artist, poet, actor and activist who released his first album in 1991 and went on to become one of the top-selling rappers in the 1990s, was killed in Las Vegas in 1996, at age 25. The case was never solved. He also acted in films including John Singleton’s “Poetic Justice,” in which he starred opposite Janet Jackson. In the decades since his death, he has inspired dozens of albums, books, movies, theater productions and even a hologram. In 2017, he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.The exhibition, named after a Shakur poem included on the album “The Rose That Grew From Concrete, Volume 1” in 2000, features artifacts, contemporary art, music and multisensory elements in telling the story of Shakur’s life.“It became evident very quickly that this was way bigger than his music,” Arron Saxe, one of the exhibition’s co-producers, said in a phone interview on Monday. “You can’t talk about Tupac without talking about Afeni, his mother, and you can’t talk about Afeni without talking about her involvement in the Panther Party, and you’re then talking about the connections with the Civil Rights movement.”It’s “a story about race in America using Tupac as a proxy,” he added.Shakur’s estate worked for more than six years and has a number of partners, among them Nwaka Onwusa, the chief curator at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and Jeremy Hodges, the show’s creative director and founder of Project Art Collective. Shakur’s activism and his music will be highlighted, Saxe said. Part of the exhibition’s aim, he said, will be to demystify the legend.“There will be notebooks, song lyrics, poetry and also everyday stuff like shopping lists, and phone numbers on pieces of paper,” Saxe said. Humanizing him is a focus “because he and a lot of these other figures are mythical, larger than life.”After about six months, the exhibition will travel to other cities in the United States and internationally. More

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      She Was an Organist for the Ages

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      Jeanne Demessieux, born 100 years ago, was an astonishing player and a virtuosic composer.Few musicians have faced a debut more intense than did the organist Jeanne Demessieux. For years before her first concert — one of six she gave at the Salle Pleyel in Paris early in 1946 — her teacher Marcel Dupré had stoked rumors of her outlandish talent.“Jeanne Demessieux is the greatest organist of all generations,” Dupré, then practically the god of the French organ world, had declared in 1944. She would be, he predicted, “one of the greatest glories of France.”There was tremendous pressure, then, on this shy, workaholic, perfectionist prodigy, who had lived under what Dupré said was his “artistic protection” since 1936 — winning first prize in his class at the Paris Conservatory in 1941 and remaining his student and assistant after that.Pressure, too, from the imposing program of the first of her “six historic recitals,” as the publicity announced them: the Bach C Minor Passacaglia; a Franck chorale; a Dupré prelude and fugue; the premiere of her own, impossibly challenging Six Études; and a symphony in four movements — one she improvised.Yet Demessieux, who was born in Montpellier, France, in 1921 and whose centenary is being celebrated with performances of her complete organ works at St. Thomas Church in Manhattan Nov. 6, 13 and 20, exceeded expectations. Dupré waxed “of a phenomenon equal to the youth of Bach or Mozart.” Maurice Duruflé, then finishing his Requiem, declared that “next to Jeanne Demessieux, the rest of us play the pedals like elephants.” Le Figaro wrote that she was a fairy tale that could be believed in, for she had been “irresistible absolute perfection.”“She certainly earned her place,” Stephen Tharp, the organist for the St. Thomas concerts, who released a recording of Demessieux’s complete organ compositions in 2008, said in an interview. “You like her interpretations, you don’t like her interpretations — but the amount of skill, focus, intelligence it took to play programs of that stature at the Salle Pleyel, in her 20s, and to compose, to improvise, in the way and at the level that she could, was really without equal.”Demessieux became the first female organist to sign a record deal, setting down a fleet run through Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor for Decca in 1947, and paving the way for women such as Marie-Claire Alain and Gillian Weir. Tours began, taking her around Europe and on to the United States, where the critic Virgil Thomson, praising her “taste, intelligence and technical skill of the highest order” in 1953, would think of “masters” like Charles-Marie Widor, Louis Vierne and Olivier Messiaen as the only possible equals of this “extraordinary musician and virtuoso.”Demessieux seemed destined to take a top liturgical position, at Dupré’s St.-Sulpice or even at Notre-Dame. But shortly after her debut, Dupré, who appears to have been fed unfounded rumors that Demessieux had been disloyal, cut off contact with his pupil and resolved to sabotage her career.Instead, Demessieux stayed with her family’s parish church, where she had been organist since she was 12, until she succeeded Camille Saint-Saëns and Gabriel Fauré as titulaire, or chief organist, at the church of the Madeleine in 1962. She prospered at a Cavaillé-Coll instrument with which she had a rare bond, having recorded a transcendent Franck cycle on it in 1959, the high point of an invaluable eight-disc set from Eloquence that came out earlier this year, amply documented with notes by the organist D’Arcy Trinkwon.Although Demessieux was a star in the 1940s and ’50s, when she kept up a punishing concert schedule alongside her liturgical work and her teaching in Liège, Belgium, her status faltered after her death from cancer in 1968, at just 47. The Eloquence set gives her Decca tapes their first release on a major label in the CD era.Part of the reason for Demessieux’s ebbing fortunes can be traced to the rise of neoclassical and period performance practices, which made her impulsive, lyrical, heartfelt style — one that brought a singular lightness of touch to a grand symphonic tradition — seem outdated, especially in the Bach and Handel with which she often opened her concerts.Part of the reason, too, was the difficulty of her compositions, some of which were unpublished until recently and were promoted mostly by students like Pierre Labric. Although her whirling “Te Deum” from 1958, inspired by the Aeolian-Skinner organ at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, has had sustained success, works like her études, her “Triptyque” and her late Prelude and Fugue pushed the frontiers of the possible, and they remain “ferociously hard” even now, Tharp said — “things she really wrote for herself.”While Demessieux sometimes wrote with moving simplicity, as in chorale preludes like “Rorate coeli” and “Hosanna filio David” that speak to the devotional quality of her Catholic faith, many of her pieces have an angst to them, a gnarled bleakness, though they stop far short of atonality.“She uses a voice that I don’t think women were often allowed to use in other ways, and she puts it all into her music,” the organist Joy-Leilani Garbutt said in an interview.Predictably, Demessieux faced sexist stereotypes throughout her career. There were critics who wrote ill of the high heels that were an intrinsic part of her pedal technique, or that she was “too young and attractive to be an organist of the first rank,” as The Boston Globe put it in 1953. Some churches still barred women from their organ lofts, not least Westminster Abbey, which had to give her special dispensation to perform in 1947. Perhaps most scurrilous was the slur that she was merely the creation of Dupré, not an artist in her own right.But Garbutt, a scholar and a founder of the Boulanger Initiative, which advocates women composers, has found in her research that prejudices came with a twist in this case. Demessieux emerged from a tradition in which women organists could and did shine, though she might well have dazzled brightest of all.“She wasn’t the only woman international virtuoso, she wasn’t the only woman composer for the organ, and she wasn’t the only woman professor of organ, or the only woman to hold a major church position,” Garbutt said, mentioning Joséphine Boulay, the earliest woman to win first prize in organ at the Paris Conservatory, in 1888; Renée Nazin, a student of Vierne’s who did three world tours in the 1930s; and Rolande Falcinelli, who succeeded Dupré as professor at the Conservatory in 1955.“But I think Demessieux may have been the only woman to do all of those things in her lifetime,” Garbutt said.This was an era when women had greater opportunities to succeed, Garbutt argues, suggesting that they found grudging acceptance when jobs needed filling after so many men had died in the world wars. The spatial configurations of French churches played a role, too, with organists seated high in the gallery, unseen during Mass. While there were Parisian priests who tolerated or even supported women, others banned them, a rule that some artists used their invisibility while performing to flout. Henriette Puig-Roget, for instance, simply submitted her name as Monsieur Roget, cross-dressed, and substituted for Charles Tournemire at Ste.-Clotilde.Even so, the opportunities were fleeting. “The invisibility was a privilege or a tool that could be used to create their music,” Garbutt said, “but on the flip side it made their work disappear almost as soon as it had been created.” Women have since occupied major organ posts — Sophie-Véronique Cauchefer-Choplin, for instance, has shared Dupré’s old position at St.-Sulpice with Daniel Roth since 1985 — but equal representation remains a distant ideal.In achieving that ideal, though, it may well be helpful to have historical material like the new Demessieux set. It is a revelation, from the incandescence of her Toccata from Widor’s Fifth Symphony to the jazzy angularity of Jean Berveiller’s “Mouvement”; the reverence of her Bach chorale preludes to the fury of her Liszt. The playing invites superlatives, even as it defies the complexity and artificiality of the organ to such an extent that it allows a rare focus on the music itself.“Who is the greatest organist of the 20th century?” Tharp said. “I really think it’s fair to say she’s a contender.” More

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      Ronnie Tutt, 83, Dies; Powerful Drummer Backed Rock and Pop Stars

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      He was a force in Elvis Presley’s TCB band and accompanied other big names like Jerry Garcia, Billy Joel and Elvis Costello.NASHVILLE — Ronnie Tutt, the prolific and versatile drummer who accompanied both Elvises, Presley and Costello, as well as other major figures in rock and pop like Jerry Garcia and Neil Diamond, died on Oct. 16 at his home in Franklin, Tenn. He was 83.His death was confirmed by his wife, Donna, who said he had lived with chronic heart problems.Mr. Tutt was singing jingles and drumming in local bands in Dallas when, in his early 30s, he was hired to play drums in Presley’s TCB (Taking Care of Business) band for a series of historic engagements at the International Hotel outside Las Vegas in 1969.Presley’s four-week residency there marked his triumphant return to the stage after an eight-year hiatus, reviving a career hampered by uninspired movie roles and an image that had lost relevance in the face of the ’60s counterculture.The comeback — a transformation that also invigorated Las Vegas’s nightclub scene — was due in no small part to the strength of Presley’s rhythm section, a dozen of whose performances were documented on the live portion of the 1969 album “From Memphis to Vegas/From Vegas to Memphis.” Foremost among them was a racing take, nearly eight minutes long, of “Suspicious Minds” featuring Mr. Tutt’s hyperkinetic, barely controlled drumming.Mr. Tutt’s powerful yet nuanced style enlivened many of Presley’s studio recordings from this period as well, including “Burning Love,” a Top 10 pop hit in 1972 that lives up to its incendiary title. Admired for his use of cymbals, Mr. Tutt was known for his ability to anticipate Presley’s moves onstage and accentuate them on the drums.“Elvis always bragged how you intuitively could keep up with his stage moves, even when he tried to trick you,” Presley’s ex-wife, Priscilla Presley, wrote in a tribute addressed to Mr. Tutt on Instagram.Mr. Tutt did studio work for other artists while in Presley’s employ. He provided empathetic support to Billy Joel’s 1974 Top 40 hit “Piano Man.” He contributed propulsive cymbal and snare rhythms to Gram Parsons’s “Ooh Las Vegas,” a 1974 recording that featured Emmylou Harris on vocals. In the 1970s, Mr. Tutt played in both Ms. Harris’s Hot Band and the Jerry Garcia Band.Working concurrently with Presley and Garcia, the Grateful Dead founder and lead guitarist, proved a study in contrasts, Mr. Tutt said: His work with Presley was meticulously rehearsed, his sessions with Garcia more impromptu and improvisational, akin to jazz.“Elvis’s music was a lot more in your face; you could never play enough,” he recalled in a 2017 interview with Rolling Stone. “With Jerry we never talked about it, but I just knew that my role with that band, no matter what configuration it was, was to help keep it together. We weren’t there to do flashy solos.”Ronald Ellis Tutt was born on March 12, 1938, in Dallas, the only child of Frank and Gladys Tutt. His father owned a dry-cleaning business; his mother was a homemaker.Young Ronnie took dance lessons at an early age. His first instrument was ukulele, followed by guitar, violin and trumpet. He did not begin playing the drums until his senior year in high school.“When I was 3, I started dancing, so the rhythm of everything was more important to me than the melodic,” Mr. Tutt said, discussing his affinity for the drums in a 2016 interview with the website Elvis Australia. “I was frustrated with playing trumpet and guitar because I wanted to express myself rhythmically. It was a very easy transition.”He worked as a drummer with Presley until Presley’s death in 1977. He then played on recordings by the Carpenters, Mink DeVille and others before joining Mr. Diamond’s band, as a drummer and background singer, in 1981. Onstage, Mr. Tutt routinely drew ovations for his drum crescendos during performances of Mr. Diamond’s 1969 pop hit “Holly Holy.”He remained with Mr. Diamond until 2018, while continuing to do studio work on projects like Mr. Costello’s “King of America” (1986) and Los Lobos’ “By the Light of the Moon” (1987). From 1997 to the mid-2010s he also appeared in “Elvis: The Concert,” a touring extravaganza that featured video footage of Presley performing, with new live backing by members of the TCB band and other musicians.In addition to his wife, Mr. Tutt is survived by seven daughters, Cindy Rutter, Tina Dempsey, Christine Edson, Terie Tutt, Rhonda Henderson, Elisia Notermann and Rachael Dodson; two sons, Ron Jr. and Jared; 16 grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren. Another son, Nathan, died 10 years ago.Though he was not known as a producer, Mr. Tutt served in that role, albeit uncredited, on “Burning Love” while Felton Jarvis, Presley’s regular producer, was recovering from a kidney transplant.“He was lying on his back in the control room at RCA,” Mr. Tutt said of Mr. Jarvis in his interview with Elvis Australia. “Emery Gordy came up with the bass line, and I produced the record for Felton — you know, the whole session.”“It more described the kind of music that we were trying to get Elvis to do at the time,” he said of “Burning Love” and the aspirations that he and other members of Presley’s Nashville rhythm section had for the session. “So I take a little pride in that.” More

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      Review: ‘Porgy and Bess’ Returns to a New Opera Landscape

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      The Metropolitan Opera’s revival boasts strong performances but raises difficult questions about race and American music.George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” is both easy and impossible to love.Its contradictions may have been captured best in Truman Capote’s “The Muses Are Heard,” his 1956 dispatch from a touring company’s historic stop in the Soviet Union. “Porgy,” he wrote, was like an allergen to Russian officials — its characters erotic, God-fearing and superstitious.But its reflection of America was a different story. “An exploited race at the mercy of Southern whites, poverty-pinched and segregated in the ghetto of Catfish Row,” Capote said, “could not be more agreeably imagined if the Ministry of Culture had assigned one of their own writers to the job.”“Porgy” — which returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Sunday after two years, its performances still exhilarating but its staging still blandly naturalistic — keeps raising questions over its three hours. And after a long pandemic closure, during which the Met, like the rest of the country, took a fresh look at racial inequities, those questions are increasingly difficult to sit with.Just a couple: Does “Porgy,” a leading contender for the Great American Opera, fulfill Antonin Dvorak’s prophecy that this country’s homegrown music would be founded on Black melodies? If so, did the work’s all-white creative team achieve that by exploiting stereotypes?Opera is rife with troubled histories and receptions. Of two works now playing at the Met, Puccini’s “Turandot” is set in a fairy-tale China out of late Romantic Orientalism; Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” ends with a startling paean to German nationalism. Classics like those tend to be defended with a logic that some have applied to “Porgy”: This is an art form that deals in broad strokes and the mythic. Who, then, are Porgy and Bess if not just another pair of star-crossed lovers?The soprano Angel Blue, left, as Bess and the bass-baritone Alfred Walker as a mighty and menacing Crown.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut that argument is on shakier ground with “Porgy” than “Turandot”; Gershwin’s work inevitably carries the baggage of American history. And its characters, mythic or not, can feel like cartoons of Black pain, violence and poverty. Black artists have had vastly divergent responses to the piece, but what James Baldwin called “a white man’s vision of Negro life” has remained ensconced in the repertory, held up by the same institutions that have long overlooked the work of Black composers.There’s no clear resolution to any of the problems that have dogged “Porgy” since its premiere, in 1935. But it is here to stay — a discomfort to be experienced, pondered and managed, not removed. It’s no coincidence that the Met accompanied this production’s debut two years ago with face-saving initiatives like talks, an album celebrating Black artists of its past and an exhibition to match, and the announcement that it would present its first opera by a Black composer. (That work, Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” opened the season in September.)If “Porgy” is the Great American Opera, it is more for its score — an innovative and seamless blend of grand opera, Broadway, and invented spirituals and folk melodies — than for its subject matter. (For that, we have the melting pot milieu of Kurt Weill’s “Street Scene,” the original sin of American greed in Marc Blitzstein’s “Regina” or stateside verismo in William Grant Still’s “Highway 1, U.S.A.,” to name just a few.)And at the Met, James Robinson’s production — a mostly timid, literal presentation of the libretto, by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward and Ira Gershwin — undercuts the defense of “Porgy” as timelessly mythic with its realistic direction and designs (by Michael Yeargan and Catherine Zuber). Even the preshow curtain, a towering photograph of Catfish Row, suggests something documentary. At odds with all this is the stylized and thoroughly modern choreography of Camille A. Brown.Much of the 2019 cast remains intact, including, from left: Latonia Moore as Serena, Eric Owens as Porgy and Denyce Graves as Maria.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut in the pit, the conductor David Robertson made an argument for the triumphs of Gershwin’s score, with stylistic shifts fluid and distinctly articulated. “Porgy” is also one of the great operatic portraits of a community; as such, its true stars are the chorus singers, matching the instrumentalists with vigor and richly textured delivery.As Porgy, the bass-baritone Eric Owens sang with limited power, but imbued each line with dramatic consideration. The soprano Angel Blue’s Bess was one of tragic juxtapositions: luminous in “Oh, the train is at the station” and shattering in the conflicted Act III reprise of “Summertime.” (That standard was first heard, lush and stylishly ornamented, at the start of the opera, sung by Janai Brugger as Clara).Much of the cast remains intact from 2019: Denyce Graves’s caring and comical Maria; Ryan Speedo Green’s mighty Jake; Alfred Walker’s similarly mighty but menacing Crown; Frederick Ballentine’s flamboyant Sportin’ Life; and Latonia Moore’s Serena, this production’s finest pairing of artist and aria in the showstopping “My man’s gone now,” and a commanding comfort in the later “Oh, Doctor Jesus.”Moore, Green and Blue — all Met regulars — come to this revival fresh from “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” As recently as last year, the idea of two operas with exclusively Black ensembles running at the company in the same month would have been fantastical. Thankfully, that’s no longer the case.Porgy and BessThrough Dec. 12 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      Drake Earns a Fifth Week at No. 1 Ahead of Music’s Major Fall Releases

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      With new albums by Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift and Adele looming, the rapper’s “Certified Lover Boy” remains atop the Billboard chart.Before Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift and Adele make themselves known on the Billboard album chart, there is still Drake.In the absence of much competition, the rapper’s latest album, “Certified Lover Boy,” logged its fifth nonconsecutive week at No. 1 with the equivalent of 74,000 sales in the United States, including 100 million streams and fewer than 1,000 copies sold as a complete package in its eighth week out, according to MRC Data.But major releases loom this fall as formidable challengers: Sheeran’s new album, “=,” pronounced “equals,” was released on Friday and will make its chart debut next week, while Swift’s rerecorded version of “Red,” from 2012 — now called “Red (Taylor’s Version)” — is due out Nov. 12.Yet even those top-selling singer-songwriters should enjoy their likely spots at No. 1 while they last, as the new album from Adele, “30,” is scheduled for release on Nov. 19, and is shaping up to be another blockbuster.Drake’s five weeks at the top of the Billboard 200 so far this year with “Certified Lover Boy” match the stay of his previous album, “Scorpion,” in 2018, according to Billboard. And it ties his second-longest reign for a release, trailing the 13 weeks at No. 1 for his 2016 album, “Views.”“Certified Lover Boy” is followed on this week’s chart by some of the year’s most consistently popular releases, including “Dangerous: The Double Album” by Morgan Wallen at No. 2; “Planet Her” by Doja Cat at No. 3; “Sincerely, Kentrell” by YoungBoy Never Broke Again at No. 4; and “Sour” by Olivia Rodrigo at No. 5.New albums by Lana Del Rey (“Blue Banisters,” No. 8) and Elton John (the collaborative “The Lockdown Sessions,” No. 10) were the top debuts of the week. More

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      La Grenouille NYC: Classic Cuisine and the Owner’s Lusty Crooning

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      Around 9:15 on a recent Wednesday evening, the mood in the full but otherwise serene dining room of La Grenouille suddenly shifted.The lights brightened. A small band began to play loudly. Out of the kitchen emerged a man in sunglasses, sporting a Cheshire cat grin and hips that swayed like a palm tree in a storm. He burst into a rendition of “Fly Me to the Moon,” in a voice that combined the boom of a sportscaster with the swagger of an Elvis impersonator. For almost half an hour, he strutted around this French restaurant known for its towering floral displays and airy soufflés, perching on diners’ tables and even growling like a cat.Who was this brassy balladeer? None other than the restaurant’s majority owner, Philippe Masson.Some guests cheered. Others took photos. As Mr. Masson, 60, told how he once romanced Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, a woman could be heard saying, “This is the last dying gasp of the patriarchy.”Mr. Masson and his house band perform the Gershwin tune “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesLa Grenouille, just off Fifth Avenue on East 52nd Street, is among the last old-school French restaurants left in New York City, a contemporary of lost gustatory temples like Lutèce, La Caravelle and La Côte Basque. Much of its reputation has rested on how little it changed during nearly 60 years in business.So the restaurant’s transformation into a raucous late-night jazz lounge has been jarring to some diners, thrilling to many others and surprising to almost everybody. (The performances, which take place on all four nights the restaurant is open each week, aren’t mentioned when you make a reservation online, though they are noted on the La Grenouille website.)“It was definitely like a caricature of Frank Sinatra,” said Caroline Askew, 37, a creative director of a Manhattan design studio, who ate at La Grenouille in July. “But it was fun. I don’t know, I think we needed that sense of humor.”It was one of the first times she’d dined indoors since the pandemic began. “It felt like, OK, this is why I live here,” she said. “I love the old New York-y characters.”To Mr. Masson, who has no formal musical training and who broke into song four times during a half-hour interview for this article, the musical gig feels like a fulfillment of a lifelong destiny. “I seem to move people — I can’t explain it,” he said.Some have been moved in less desirable ways.“It ruined the entire ambience and tenor of the evening,” said Carrie Cort, 77, who lives in Washington, D.C., and has been going to La Grenouille for 28 years. She and her husband recently celebrated his 80th birthday there, and felt the performance was more a disturbance than a delight. “If he wants to open up a nightclub, good, but that’s not what La Grenouille is.”Many guests are excited about the live music, the first in the restaurant’s nearly 60-year history. Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesLa Grenouille has been a Midtown oasis of tradition and tranquillity since Gisèle Masson and her husband, Charles Masson Sr., opened it in 1962. But the restaurant has also kicked up some public drama. In 2014, their son Charles Masson Jr. stepped down from his longtime role as general manager amid a bitter, longstanding dispute with Philippe, his younger brother, who then took over. (Asked for comment about the new musical act, Charles Masson Jr. said, “As much as I may have an opinion, I’d rather keep it to myself.”)Philippe Masson started performing casually for outdoor diners at La Grenouille in July 2020, as a tribute to the restaurant’s captain Bertrand Marteville, who had died of Covid-19. When indoor dining resumed two months later, Mr. Masson removed some tables and replaced them with a stage. He hired four jazz musicians and named them the Buster Frog Quartet, a nod to the restaurant’s name, which means “the frog.”Mr. Masson learned songs like “La Vie En Rose” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” The goal, he said, was to “bring back life to the city.”He soon realized that he had unlocked a passion. “People are saying, ‘Never mind the food or flowers — we are coming here to hear you sing, Philippe.’”Between sets of about 30 minutes, Mr. Masson still runs the kitchen, oversees the dining room and creates the restaurant’s signature flower arrangements. “Music is energizing,” he said. “It picks me up.”Mr. Masson started performing to honor an employee who died from Covid-19, and found a new passion in the process.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesHe knows that not everyone appreciates his act. “One out of 100 say, ‘Oh, Philippe, this is not La Grenouille,’” he said. “I say, it is fitting for me and it is fitting for most.”It’s good for business, too, he said. “In the past we didn’t have a third seating. I could give food away and it wouldn’t happen. Now we have something to create more income for that elusive late-night seating.” (A French singer, Naïma Pöhler, also performs three nights a week, and the singers Lucy Wijnands and Ashley Pezzotti take the stage on Saturdays.)The music has attracted a younger clientele. Liana Khatri, 30, worried that the restaurant would be too stuffy when she visited in August — until Mr. Masson came onstage. “You didn’t care if the guy’s voice was good,” she said. “That was not the point. It was more the experience.”“There are so many trendy restaurants in New York City,” she added. “There is something to be said for a place that is not trying to be cool.”Eventually, Mr. Masson wants to turn the private dining room upstairs into a jazz lounge, where he will keep performing.And what of the employees who hear his crooning night after night? One busboy simply shrugged and said, “You get used to it.”Follow NYT Food on Twitter and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. More

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      Jay-Z, Foo Fighters and Carole King Join the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

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      Barack Obama (via video), Paul McCartney and Taylor Swift spoke on behalf of the inductees at a ceremony that also honored Tina Turner, the Go-Go’s and Todd Rundgren.CLEVELAND — Like many awards shows during the pandemic, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame hosted a virtual induction ceremony in 2020. On Saturday night at the Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse in Cleveland, where the organization’s museum is based, the event returned with a powerful lineup to laud its 36th annual class: a former United States president, Taylor Swift and a Beatle.A video introduction for Jay-Z that flaunted the New York City rapper’s wide reach opened with a tribute from Barack Obama. “I’ve turned to Jay-Z’s words at different points in my life, whether I was brushing dirt off my shoulder on the campaign trail, or sampling his lyrics on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the 50th anniversary of the Selma march to Montgomery,” said Obama, who spoke in the package alongside Beyoncé, Chris Rock and LeBron James.The comedian Dave Chappelle, who delivered Jay-Z’s formal induction in the arena, opened with, “I would like to apologize …” — an apparent reference to the controversy surrounding his recent Netflix special, “The Closer” — before sticking to the subject at hand: Jay-Z’s eternal sense of calm and how he has stayed true to his community through the decades.“When he said this is Jay everyday. When he told us he’d never change. You heard this and you probably said as a white person, ‘Well, maybe this guy should focus on his development,’” Chappelle said. “But what we heard is that he’ll never forget us. He will always remember us. And we are his point of reference. That he is going to show us how far we can go if we just get hold of the opportunity.”A tuxedo-clad Jay-Z, who did not perform, followed with a charming, sometimes meandering 10-minute speech in which he referred to the mentors and peers who guided him: LL Cool J (who received a musical excellence award on Saturday after he wasn’t voted in on his sixth nomination), KRS-One, Rakim and Chuck D, among others. “Growing up, we didn’t think we could be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame,” Jay-Z said. “We were told that hip-hop was a fad. Much like punk rock, it gave us this anti-culture, this subgenre, and there were heroes in it.” Hopefully, he added at the end of his remarks, he is showing the “next generation that anything is possible.”The actress Angela Bassett inducted the singer Tina Turner, who did not attend the event.Michael Loccisano/Getty ImagesThe actress Drew Barrymore, center, with the Go-Go’s. David Richard/Associated PressJay-Z joined one of the more diverse recent Rock Hall classes: Carole King, the singer and songwriter who was honored by the organization in 1990 with her songwriting partner and former husband Gerry Goffin; the arena rockers Foo Fighters, whose frontman, Dave Grohl, traced the band’s longevity to the familial bond developed between the musicians; the indefatigable powerhouse singer Tina Turner, finally inducted as a solo performer after gaining entry as part of Ike and Tina Turner in 1991; the 1980s power-pop band the Go-Go’s, hailed as the sound of “pure possibility” in a big-hearted introduction by Drew Barrymore; and the classic rock auteur Todd Rundgren, who recently told TMZ that he “never cared much about the Hall of Fame” and stayed true to his word, skipping the event to perform a solo set in Cincinnati. HBO will present highlights from the ceremony on Nov. 20.Jay-Z’s speech, filled with asides and memories, well demonstrated how despite the multitude of big personalities packed into one of Cleveland’s biggest venues, the event often centered on more intimate moments.Swift helped set the more personal tone, recalling in her induction speech for King how at age 7 she used to dance throughout her house in socked feet while listening to the musician’s records. “I cannot remember a time when I didn’t know Carole King’s music,” said Swift, who went on to describe the seemingly magical way that King’s songs could be introduced by an outsider — a parent, a sibling, a lover — only to become an integral part of a person’s own internal world.“I cannot remember a time when I didn’t know Carole King’s music,” said the singer Taylor Swift, left, with King.Gaelen Morse/ReutersSwift embodied this idea in her show-opening performance, gliding through “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” which Swift reinvented as a gently pulsating synth-pop ballad that wouldn’t feel out of place in her own discography. King, who could be seen onscreen in the venue wiping away tears as Swift finished the song, thanked the pop star for “carrying the torch forward” in her own speech.“I keep hearing it, so I guess I’m going to have to try to own it, that today’s female singers and songwriters stand on my shoulders,” said King, who was quick to extend the spotlight to her own forebears. “Let it not be forgotten that they also stand on the shoulders of the first woman to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. May she rest in power, Miss Aretha Franklin!”In his speech for the Foo Fighters, Paul McCartney joking pointed out how Dave Grohl followed in his own footsteps. Both were swept up by music at a young age, McCartney said, landing in popular groups that came to an untimely end. Both rebounded by making albums and playing all the musical parts (Grohl with Foo Fighters’ self-titled 1995 debut; McCartney with his 1970 solo album). “Do you think this guy’s stalking me?” the Beatle cracked.Onstage, Grohl, born roughly 60 miles east of the Rock Hall in Warren, Ohio, praised the influence of the Beatles and in particular McCartney, describing him as “my music teacher.” After the Foo Fighters muscled through a trio of battle-tested rock singalongs — “The Best of You,” “My Hero” and “Everlong” — McCartney repaid the favor, joining the band for a galloping cover of the Beatles’ “Get Back.”The singer Paul McCartney, right, inducted the Foo Fighters. He joined the band for a galloping cover of the Beatles’ “Get Back.”Michael Loccisano/Getty Images H.E.R. and Keith Urban paid tribute to Turner.Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty ImagesIn other performances, H.E.R., Christina Aguilera, Mickey Guyton and Keith Urban combined to pay tribute to Tina Turner, who did not attend the event. During the in memoriam segment, Brandi Carlile joined her bandmates Phil and Tim Hanseroth for an understated take on the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream” to honor Don Everly, who died in August.The Go-Go’s captured all of the sunny, sneering urgency of their 1981 debut “Beauty and the Beat,” the first and only album from an all-woman band to score the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s chart, opening with “Vacation,” pogo-ing into “Our Lips Are Sealed” and closing with a bounding, bass-heavy “We Got the Beat.”In Janet Jackson’s 2019 induction speech, she spoke of the Rock Hall’s well-documented gender imbalance, asking voters to “please induct more women.” The Go-Go’s bassist Kathy Valentine echoed these comments during the band’s own time onstage.While Valentine credited the Rock Hall for making progress, she also prodded the organization to do more. “By honoring our historical contribution, the doors to this establishment have opened wider,” she said. “Because here is the thing, there would not be less of us if more of us were visible.” More

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      5,000 Shows Later, the Grand Ole Opry Is Still the Sound of Nashville

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      A two-hour celebration for the milestone broadcast captured the shifts and strides in country music that played out over the past century on the Opry stage.NASHVILLE — The survival of the Grand Ole Opry was anything but guaranteed when Bill Anderson started performing in it six decades ago. Rock ’n’ roll was luring away fans. Radio stations were abandoning barn dance-style programs. There were nights, he said, when musicians could look out from the Opry stage and see empty seats.But on Saturday night, as the curtain went up and he started singing “Wabash Cannonball,” the house was packed, his music beaming out live on WSM, the Nashville station that has carried the Opry since the fledgling days of radio, and streaming online to viewers around the world.The show on Saturday was the 5,000th broadcast of the Grand Ole Opry, a constant accompanying American life through generations of turmoil and transformation, through the Depression and recessions, wars, cultural upheaval and, most recently, a pandemic.The milestone — adding up to roughly 96 years worth of weekly shows, an unparalleled achievement in broadcasting — was a testament to the durability of the Opry as a radio program but also as a Nashville institution that has inducted well over 200 performers as members.“The Opry is bigger than any one artist,” Anderson, one of the longest-serving members of the Opry cast, said in an interview. “As times change and things evolve, somehow, the Opry has been able to remain the star of the show.”The Nashville crowd heard staples like Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”Kyle Dean Reinford for The New York TimesDustin Lynch, one of the Opry’s younger stars, prepared to go onstage Saturday night.Kyle Dean Reinford for The New York TimesThe singer-songwriter Connie Smith performing at the Opry’s 5,000th broadcast.Kyle Dean Reinford for The New York TimesIt was an evolution that was reflected in the two-hour show on Saturday, with an array of performances capturing the shifts and strides in country music that all played out over the past century on the Opry stage.Throughout the night, there were plenty of nods to the past. But there were just as many contemporary songs, a recognition that nostalgia alone was not enough to sustain the Opry.The show included staples like Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Hank Williams’s “Jambalaya,” and “Can the Circle Be Unbroken,” a song first released in 1935. Anderson joined Jeannie Seely, an Opry member since 1967, in a duet of “When Two Worlds Collide.”Then, Seely introduced Chris Janson, the singer-songwriter who was inducted in 2018, describing him as the “one we call the family wild child” as he bounded onstage to perform one of his hits, “Buy Me a Boat.”“It is the show,” said the singer-songwriter Darius Rucker, who performed on Saturday — along with Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood and Vince Gill, among others — and was inducted into the Opry in 2012. “I hope it keeps getting more diverse and that people keep coming to see it and that it remains the show in country music.”As the Opry gained traction, covering a lot of ground with WSM’s 50,000-watt signal and then NBC Radio picking it up nationally in 1939, it emerged as a defining force in country music. The show minted stars and established Nashville as the heart of the industry. (The signs welcoming motorists into Nashville remind them it is the “Home of the Grand Ole Opry.”)The singers Jeannie Seely and Bill Anderson. “As times change and things evolve, somehow, the Opry has been able to remain the star of the show,” Anderson said.Kyle Dean Reinford for The New York Times“It appeals to mostly rural hearts,” said Les Leverett, the longtime behind-the-scenes photographer of the Opry.He recalled his childhood in Perdido, Ala., where his family was “as poor as Job’s turkey,” yet his father scrounged together the money for a radio. Every Saturday night, they would huddle around it, listening to the Opry for as long as the device’s puny battery would allow.“People all over the country were doing that,” Leverett added. “It just has an attraction. You can’t wait to see who the next entertainer is going to be. It just freezes itself in your mind.”The Opry has endured as a vital element in the country music ecosystem by being nimble, according to performers, producers and country music historians. The show has balanced an embrace of tradition with striving to appeal to the taste of younger listeners.“One lyric in one of my favorite songs asks the question: Are you more amazed at how things change or how they stay the same? My answer is both,” said Dan Rogers, the Opry’s executive producer.“Those black-and-white images of a man sitting down and playing a fiddle,” he added, “have evolved into this show that is about so much more than a man sitting down and playing a fiddle. But if someone came out and played ‘Tennessee Wagoner’ — the song that started the Grand Ole Opry — it will still feel right at home on our stage.”The Opry had been in danger of becoming encased in amber, a museum piece that was treasured but no longer relevant. For a long spell, particularly in the 1960s and ’70s, it had become “a little hidebound, a little bit stuck in its ways,” said Robert K. Oermann, the country music historian and a longtime contributor to Music Row magazine.“You listened to the Opry to hear your old favorites,” he added. “To hear the old-timers do their thing.”Anderson backstage at the Opry anniversary show.Kyle Dean Reinford for The New York TimesIn 1925, the Grand Ole Opry was born as George D. Hay’s “WSM Barn Dance.”Kyle Dean Reinford for The New York TimesThe singer John Conlee performs with the Isaacs, who were inducted into the Opry last month.Kyle Dean Reinford for The New York TimesBut over time, the Opry was reinvigorated, fueled by country music’s resurgent popularity, welcoming new performers and using technology to expand its reach. In 2019, the Opry began broadcasting on Circle, a digital television outlet named for the slice of wooden floor at the center of the Opry House stage, brought over with the move from the Ryman Auditorium, the Opry’s home until 1974.“We are really trying to put the Grand Ole Opry left, right and center before consumers all across this planet,” said Colin V. Reed, the chairman and chief executive of Ryman Hospitality Properties, which owns the Opry.The 5,000 tally started with a broadcast on Dec. 26, 1925, when George D. Hay’s “WSM Barn Dance” earned a regular spot on the station’s schedule, just about two months after WSM went on the air.The show was broadcast every week with few exceptions, like the day of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death in 1945 and in 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., when the authorities imposed a curfew in Nashville. In 2010, the stage was submerged in a flood that swept through Nashville, but the show was staged elsewhere while the Opry House was renovated. (In the green room, a waist-high marker indicated how high the water reached.)Just as the Opry became a reliable presence in the lives of listeners, it offered the same to performers, where they found community in a tough business. “You have this home base,” Anderson said, noting that for itinerant artists always on the road, it was the place where they could hear about good places to eat in Omaha or be warned about a promoter in Ohio writing bad checks.Janson was introduced as the “one we call the family wild child” before he performed one of his hits, “Buy Me a Boat.”Kyle Dean Reinford for The New York TimesOn Saturday night, the performers were doing two back-to-back shows. Backstage is a maze of dressing rooms, each one with a theme (“Stars and Stripes,” “Honky Tonk Angels”) or named for a longtime Opry performer (Roy Acuff, Little Jimmy Dickens).Seely stepped out of the dressing room dedicated to Minnie Pearl, the character the comedian Sarah Ophelia Colley Cannon portrayed on the Opry for more than 50 years, and pointed to the long hallway of rooms, calling it “testosterone alley.” Seely preferred the nook where the walls were lined with photographs of women who had been fixtures of the Opry. “I just think it shows the sisterhood as well as it can be shown,” she said.Later, the Isaacs piled into “Welcome to the Family,” a dressing room set aside for newly inducted members. In recent years, the Opry has added to its ranks, bringing in younger stars like Carly Pearce and Dustin Lynch.The Isaacs, a family bluegrass gospel group, were certainly not newcomers, having made their debut Opry performance nearly 30 years ago. But they were inducted as members just last month.“We were engaged, and we got married,” said Becky Isaacs Bowman, joking about the long wait to be inducted.“We’ve been dating a long, long time,” her sister, Sonya Isaacs Yeary, added.“This place feels like home,” said Lily Isaacs, the vocalist and matriarch of the group.Recently, the hallways had been quieter than usual, as coronavirus precautions have led producers to limit who was allowed backstage. But on Saturday, it was more like it used to be.As Brooks and Yearwood electrified the audience with a medley of their hits, the Isaacs crowded into Vince Gill’s dressing room with their instruments — Sonya had her mandolin, Becky had her guitar and Ben Isaacs had his bass. They played and sang, jamming for their own entertainment until they had to go back onstage for the second show. More