Music

Listening to the album. Singing along at the show. And wearing a loincloth to play the title role. All fresh in our readers’ minds in the 50 years since.Fifty year ago, “Jesus Christ Superstar” landed on Broadway at the Mark Hellinger Theater, and the careers of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Tim Rice and Ben Vereen would never be the same. Responding to a recent article celebrating the anniversary, nearly 400 readers shared their own memories of hearing, seeing or acting in the show, then and since. Here is an edited selection.Setting: A dinner party at our house in Toledo, Ohio. Time: Fall 1970. Dramatis Personae: My parents (Mom, probably in a Halston Ultrasuede dress, Dad with au courant sideburns) and 10 of their groovy friends. Music: The “Jesus Christ Superstar” cast album is on the stereo. What is that incredible music? Everyone thought it was the most modern, creative and innovative thing they’d ever heard. I was 8 years old. I went on to memorize the whole album and can still, to this day, pretty much sing any song. LISA W. ALPERT, New YorkI played Jesus in my Connecticut boarding school production in November 1982. Me, a Pakistani Zoroastrian with a decent baritone — yes, “Gethsemane” was near impossible. Women played Simon and Judas; a mix of the school’s nerd and jock squads Caiaphas and his cabal; and the son of a French expat aristocrat sang Pilate. As I dragged the cross to Calvary, from stage through audience to exit, my loincloth snagged on I still don’t know what, and unbeknown to me unraveled slowly as I performed trudging up that imaginary hill. I’m certain Christ flashing a healthy mop bordered on blasphemy. FRAMJI MINWALLA, Karachi, PakistanI was asked to play Herod in the 2003 tour with Carl Anderson, Sebastian Bach and Natalie Toro. Carl blew me away every night as Judas. At 58 years old — still singing, wrapping each note with deep, rich, emotional life. He was a marvel! He is missed! Natalie Toro brought an exotic beauty to her performance and should be remembered as one of the best Marys ever. And then we come to Sebastian Bach of the ’80s rock band Skid Row [as Jesus.] It was an interpretation like no other. That’s the best way to remember it! PETER KEVOIAN, Dingmans Ferry, Pa.I appeared as Pilate in a dance recital production where my first wife went to see her sister perform and saw me as well. A week later she seduced me and then her ex-husband insisted we marry. He didn’t want his kids exposed to a “sinful” relationship. So I owe that part of my life and the rest as well to “Jesus Christ Superstar”! PAUL JANES-BROWN, Pukalani, Hawaii“Jesus Christ Superstar” was my first Broadway show. I had been listening to the double album for months when the time finally came for us to go: Me, my best friend, Stacy, and her magical Aunt Joanne. Stacy’s aunt took us — two 10-year-old kids — from Long Island to Times Square. I was breathless watching the cast sing all the songs I knew by heart, and had to keep myself from singing with them. And when King Herod appeared in heels higher than any platform shoes I’d yet seen in the early 1970s, I laughed with the best of them and felt oddly at home. RUSSELL KALTSCHMIDTMy husband Stephen Altman was the assistant electrician at the Mark Hellinger. Toward the beginning of the run, he remembers that one of the Apostles was supposed to put a safety clip on Judas’s harness, when they “hang” him at the end of the show. He missed the clip, and Nicky Knox, one of the flymen, grabbed Ben Vereen and saved him! Fortunately, Ben’s neck was very strong! Stephen is a proud 53-year retired member of IATSE Local #1. DOREEN ALTMAN, Morrisville, N.C.Age 21, and I took the girl of my dreams, who to this day remains one of my favorite people, to the final preview. When Yvonne Elliman sang “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” and reached the extremely high note, I felt, for the first time in my life, an actual physical electrical stimulation going up and down my spine. JOSEPH R. REM Jr., Hackensack, N.J.I played King Herod in a production in Auckland, New Zealand, in the late ’80s. Of course every director was trying to find a new “take” on Herod’s song. I just happened to be cast by someone who thought it would be a brilliant idea to have me pop out of a giant Easter egg which then became an ornate bath, covered in pink balloons (and only balloons), with a pink shower cap and brandishing a golden loofah. My dancing troupe were dressed like Playboy Bunnies. Well, it was the ’80s, I suppose. CHRIS BALDOCK, Canberra, Australia More

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherYou ask, we answer. Or prevaricate. It depends!On this week’s Popcast, part of our semiregular mailbag series, the team takes questions on a range of topics:the year in Taylor Swiftthe quality of Halsey’s new musicthe state of the music videothe ways TikTok can be a lifeline for a legacy actthe direction Drake’s career should head inthe increasingly idiosyncratic vocal styles of young female pop starswhether we still buy physical mediaAnd much more.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterCaryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editorConnect 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 country was once largely known for cars and smartphones, but a global audience has become mesmerized by its entertainment, and creators say success didn’t happen overnight.PAJU, South Korea — In a new Korean drama being filmed inside a cavernous studio building outside of Seoul, a detective chases down a man cursed to live for 600 years. Pistol shots crack. A hush follows. Then, a woman pierces the silence, screaming: “I told you not to shoot him in ​the heart!”The scene was filmed several times for more than an hour as part of “Bulgasal: Immortal Souls,” a new show scheduled to be released on Netflix in December. Jang Young-woo, the director, hopes it will be the latest South Korean phenomenon to captivate an international audience.South Korea has long chafed at its lack of groundbreaking cultural exports. For decades the country’s reputation was defined by its cars and cellphones from companies like Hyundai and LG, while its movies, TV shows and music were mostly consumed by a regional audience. Now K-pop stars like Blackpink, the dystopian drama “Squid Game” and award-winning films such as “Parasite” appear as ubiquitous as any Samsung smartphone.Jang Young-woo, the director of “Bulgasal: Immortal Souls.” He hopes it will be the latest South Korean phenomenon to captivate an international audience.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesIn the same way South Korea borrowed from Japan and the United States to develop its manufacturing prowess, the country’s directors and producers say they have been studying Hollywood and other entertainment hubs for years, adopting and refining formulas by adding distinctly Korean touches. Once streaming services like Netflix tore down geographical barriers, the creators say, the country transformed from a consumer of Western culture into an entertainment juggernaut and major cultural exporter in its own right.In the last few years alone, South Korea shocked the world with “Parasite,” the first foreign language film to win best picture at the Academy Awards. It has one of the biggest, if not the biggest, band in the world with BTS. Netflix has introduced 80 Korean movies and TV shows in the last few years, far more than it had imagined when it started its service in South Korea in 2016, according to the company. Three of the 10 most popular TV shows on Netflix as of Monday were South Korean.“When we made ‘Mr. Sunshine,’ ‘Crash Landing on You’ and ‘Sweet Home,’ we didn’t have a global reaction in mind,” said Mr. Jang, who worked as co-producer or co-director on all three hit Korean Netflix shows. “We just tried to make them as interesting and meaningful as possible. It’s the world that has started understanding and identifying with the emotional experiences we have been creating all along.”The South Korean dystopian drama “Squid Game” became the most watched show on Netflix.NetflixThe growing demand for Korean entertainment has inspired independent creators like Seo Jea-won, who wrote the script for “Bulgasal” with his wife. Mr. Seo said his generation devoured American TV hits like “The Six Million Dollar Man” and “Miami Vice,” learning “the basics” and experimenting with the form by adding Korean colors. “When over-the-top streaming services like Netflix arrived with a revolution in distributing TV shows, we were ready to compete,” he said.South Korea’s cultural output is still tiny compared with key exports like semiconductors, but it has given the country the sort of influence that can be hard to measure. In September, the Oxford English Dictionary added 26 new words of Korean origin, including “hallyu,” or Korean wave. North Korea has called the K-pop invasion a “vicious cancer.” China has suspended dozens of K-pop fan accounts on social media for their “unhealthy” behavior.The country’s ability to punch above its weight as a cultural powerhouse contrasts with Beijing’s ineffective state-led campaigns to achieve the same kind of sway. South Korean officials who have attempted to censor the country’s artists have not been very successful. Instead, politicians have begun promoting South Korean pop culture, enacting a law to allow some male pop artists to postpone conscription. This month, officials allowed Netflix to install a giant “Squid Game” statue in Seoul’s Olympic Park.Seo Jea-won, the writer behind “Bulgasal.” The show’s supernatural plot recalls American TV favorites like “X-Files” and “Stranger Things.”Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesThe explosive success didn’t happen overnight. Long before “Squid Game” became the most watched TV show on Netflix or BTS performed at the United Nations, Korean TV shows like “Winter Sonata” and bands like Bigbang and Girls’ Generation had conquered markets in Asia and beyond. But they were unable to achieve the global reach associated with the current wave. Psy’s “Gangnam Style” was a one-hit wonder.“We love to tell stories and have good stories to tell,” said Kim Young-kyu, CEO of Studio Dragon, South Korea’s largest studio, which makes dozens of TV shows a year. “But our domestic market is too small, too crowded. We needed to go global.”It wasn’t until last year when “Parasite,” a film highlighting the yawning gap between rich and poor, won the Oscar that international audiences truly began to pay attention, even though South Korea had been producing similar work for years.“The world just didn’t know about them until streaming platforms like Netflix and YouTube helped it discover them at a time when people watch more entertainment online,” said Kang Yu-jung, a professor at Kangnam University, in Seoul.A scene from “Parasite,” the first foreign language film to win best picture at the Academy Awards.EPA, via ShutterstockBefore Netflix, a select number of national broadcasters controlled South Korea’s television industry. Those broadcasters have since been eclipsed by streaming platforms and independent studios like Studio Dragon, which provide the financing and artistic freedom needed to target international markets.South Korean censors screen media for content deemed violent or sexually explicit, but Netflix shows are subject to less stringent restrictions than those broadcast on local TV networks. Creators also say that domestic censorship laws have forced ​them to dig deeper into their imagination, crafting characters and plots that are much more compelling than most..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Scenes often overflow with emotionally rich interactions, or “sinpa.” Heroes are usually deeply flawed, ordinary people trapped in impossible situations, clinging to shared values such as love, family and caring for others. Directors and producers say they deliberately want all of their characters to “smell like humans.”Kim Young-kyu, CEO of Studio Dragon, which makes dozens of South Korean TV shows a year. Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesAs South Korea emerged from the vortex of war, dictatorship, democratization and rapid economic growth, its creators developed a keen nose for what people wanted to watch and hear, and it often had to do with social change. Most national blockbusters have story lines based on issues that speak to common people, such as income inequality and the despair and class conflict it has spawned.“Squid Game” director Hwang Dong-hyuk first made a name for himself with “Dogani,” a 2011 movie based on a real-life sexual abuse scandal in a school for the hearing-impaired. The widespread anger the film incited forced the government to ferret out teachers who had records of sexual abuse​ from schools for disabled minors​.Although K-pop artists rarely speak about politics, their music has loomed large in South Korea’s lively protest culture. When students in Ewha Womans University in Seoul started campus rallies that led to a nationwide anti-government uprising in 2016, they sang Girls’ Generation’s “Into the New World.” The boy band g.o.d.’s “One Candle” became an unofficial anthem for the “Candlelight Revolution” that toppled President Park Geun-hye.The K-Pop band Blackpink, which has conquered markets in Asia and beyond.Netflix, via Associated Press“One dominating feature of Korean content is its combativeness,” said Lim Myeong-mook, author of a book about Korean youth culture. “It channels the people’s frustrated desire for upward mobility, their anger and their motivation for mass activism.” And with many people now stuck at home trying to manage the enormous angst caused by the pandemic, global audiences may be more receptive to those themes than ever before.“Korean creators are adept at quickly copying what’s interesting from abroad and making it their own by making it more interesting and better,” said Lee Hark-joon, a professor of Kyungil University who co-authored “K-pop Idols.”On the set of “Bulgasal,” dozens of staffers scurried around to get every detail of the scene just right — the smog filling the air, the water drops falling on the damp floor and the “sad and pitiable​”​ look of the gunned-down man. The show’s supernatural plot recalls American TV favorites like “X-Files” and “Stranger Things,” yet Mr. Jang has created a uniquely Korean tragedy centered on “eopbo,” a belief among Koreans that both good and bad deeds affect a person in the afterlife.Based on the recent success of Korean shows abroad, Mr. Jang said he hopes viewers will flock to the new series. “The takeaway is: what sells in South Korea sells globally.”Construction of new studios at the complex where “Bulgasal” was filmed. “Our domestic market is too small, too crowded. We needed to go global,” Mr. Kim said.Chang W. Lee/The New York Times More

He was one of the genre’s most acclaimed players when brain surgery left him with no memory. But he recovered and made music for another three decades.Pat Martino, whose trailblazing career as a jazz guitarist seemed to end prematurely in 1980 when brain surgery left him with no memory, but who then painstakingly relearned the instrument, and his own past, and went on to three more decades of innovative musicianship, died on Monday at his home in South Philadelphia. He was 77.Joseph Donofrio, his longtime manager, said the cause was chronic respiratory disorder, which had forced Mr. Martino to stop performing after a tour of Italy in November 2018.Mr. Martino’s playing began drawing attention when he was still a teenager. Having been expelled from a Roman Catholic high school in 10th grade (“Something took place between me and one of the priests there,” he wrote years later. “If I remember correctly, it had something to do with bubble gum.”), he became a professional musician, joining the singer Lloyd Price’s big band and then, in 1962, the saxophonist Willis Jackson’s combo.In 1967, when he was in his early 20s, he released his first album, “El Hombre,” on the Prestige label, and a series of well-regarded records followed. At the start of his career he often drew comparisons to earlier jazz guitarists like Wes Montgomery, but by the 1970s he was forging his own sound. “Pat Martino: Breaking Barriers Between Rock & Jazz,” a 1975 headline in The San Francisco Examiner read.On a tour supporting his first albums for Warner Bros., “Starbright” (1976) and “Joyous Lake” (1977), Mr. Martino began experiencing frequent headaches and seizures, something he had dealt with occasionally since childhood. One seizure came while he was onstage in France in 1976.“I stopped playing and stood there for about 30 seconds,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Here and Now!” (2011, with Bill Milkowski). “During these moments of seizure, it feels like you’re falling through a black hole; it’s like everything just escapes at the moment.”Mr. Martino at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater in 2006, accompanied by Albert Heath on drums.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesIn the book, he described going through a series of misdiagnoses and ill-advised treatment, including electroshock. He retired from performing and turned to teaching at the Guitar Institute of Technology in Hollywood, but his problems worsened; at one point, he wrote, a doctor told him he had two hours to live.A condition called arteriovenous malformation, a tangling of arteries and veins, was diagnosed. An aneurysm resulted in emergency surgery to remove a large tumor; when he awoke, he had no memory.“When you don’t remember something, you have no idea of its existence,” he wrote. “And upon awakening after the surgery, I remembered nothing.“But it wasn’t a disorienting feeling,” he continued. “If I had known I was a guitarist, if I had known those two people standing by my bedside in the hospital were in fact my parents, I then would’ve felt the feelings that went along with the events. What they went through and why they were standing there looking at me then would’ve been very painful for me. But it wasn’t painful because to me they were just strangers.”His parents helped him relearn his past, showing him family photographs and playing him his own albums. Picking up the guitar again was another form of memory recovery.“I had to start from Square 1,” he told The Edmonton Journal of Alberta, Canada, in 2004. “But once I made the decision to try, it activated inner intuitive familiarities, like a child who hasn’t ridden their bicycle for many years and tries to do so again to reach a destination. There are moments of imbalance, but it’s subliminal, and it emerges after some mistakes, and then it strengthens.”By the mid-1980s he was performing again. Jon Pareles, reviewing one performance, at Fat Tuesday’s in Manhattan in 1986, found Mr. Martino as virtuosic and unpredictable as ever.“He can play chorus after chorus of bebop lines, zigzagging through the chromatic harmonies of his own tunes,” Mr. Pareles wrote. “But more often than not, he turns bebop conventions sideways. He starts a line on an unexpected beat, breaks his runs up to insist on a single note or riff, inserts odd-length leaps into standard licks and shifts accents around the beat. His playing is articulately wayward, approaching tunes from odd angles and taking rewarding tangents; he makes song forms seem slippery and mysterious.”In 1987, Mr. Martino released a new album. It was called “The Return.”Mr. Martino at a nightclub in Asbury Park, N.J., in 1967, the year he released his first album, “El Hombre.”Pat Martino CollectionPatrick Azzara (he took Martino, which his father had also used, as a stage name) was born on Aug. 25, 1944, in Philadelphia to Carmen and Jean (Orlando) Azzara. His father, known as Mickey, was a tailor who also worked as a guitarist and singer. He would hide his guitar from young Pat, though in the autobiography Mr. Martino suggests that this “was a bit of reverse psychology on his part” — once the boy took up the instrument, his father encouraged his career and introduced him to various musicians.Mr. Martino was in bands as a boy, including one with the future pop star Bobby Rydell, who lived nearby. One of the guitar greats Mr. Martino’s father took him to meet, backstage after a concert in Atlantic City, was Les Paul, who asked young Pat to play a little something.“What came out of that guitar was unbelievable,” Mr. Paul wrote in the liner notes to Mr. Martino’s 1970 album, “Desperado.” “His dexterity and his picking style were absolutely unique. He held his pick as one would hold a demitasse … pinkie extended, very polite. The politeness disappeared when pick met string.”As Mr. Martino grew more experienced, his view of jazz evolved, largely shaped by Eastern philosophies; he did not, he told The Examiner in 1975, consider himself a jazz musician.“Jazz is a way of life,” he said. “It’s not an idiom of music. Jazz is spontaneous improvisation. If you ever leave your house with nowhere to go, and just walk for pleasure, observing and looking around, you’ll find that you improvise.”And he did not consider himself a “guitar player,” he said, though he once did.“I no longer view myself that way because I don’t want to be depersonalized by my instrument,” he said. “I’m an observer of my environment, including the guitar; I see the guitar in everything.”In his autobiography, he described the process of recovering the ability to play.“As I continued to work out things on the instrument,” he wrote, “flashes of memory and muscle memory would gradually come flooding back to me — shapes on the fingerboard, different stairways to different rooms in the house. There are secret doorways that only you know about in the house, and you go there because it’s pleasurable to do so.”The records he made after his surgery included “All Sides Now” (1997), on the Blue Note label, an album on which he shared tracks with other famed guitarists, including Mr. Paul. Two of his albums, also on Blue Note, were nominated for Grammy Awards, “Live at Yoshi’s” (2001) and “Think Tank” (2003).His surgery and the recovery period, Mr. Martino said, changed what he was after in his music.“It used to be to do everything I possibly could to become more successful in my craft and my career,” he told the Edmonton paper. “Today, my intention is to completely enjoy the moment and everything it contains.”Mr. Martino is survived by his wife of 26 years, Ayako Asahi.Mr. Martino had other health issues over the years, but Mr. Donofrio, his longtime manager, said his resilience was remarkable.“Every time I thought he was going to be down and out,” he said, “he came back stronger than before.”Jeff Roth contributed research. More

Four years ago, Haley Dahl dreamed of taking her band and an orchestra into a cave to record an album. The result, “Madison,” is out Friday.LEWISBURG, W. Va. — On a Friday afternoon in October 2019, Haley Dahl, the leader of the bicoastal punk rock orchestra Sloppy Jane, sat at a small upright piano in the belly of Lost World Caverns here, recording tracks for the band’s second full-length album, “Madison,” out Friday.Her head bent forward in concentration, Dahl struck the keys, loosing a mesmerizing cascade of notes. The piano tuner, Maria Caputo, sat on a rock nearby to tweak the instrument when needed, which was often because of the cold and damp. After a round of takes, Jack Wetmore, a producer and musician on the album, reached into the piano’s innards to mute the strings.“It’s like playing Whack-a-Mole,” he said.“I don’t think the idea was for this to be easy,” Caputo said. “The idea was for this to be awesome.”This awesome thing started the way most do — in the wake of heartbreak. In 2017, Dahl attempted to distract herself from unrequited love by spelunking the internet. Her searches led her to discover Leland Sprinkle, who built the Great Stalacpipe Organ in Virginia’s Luray Caverns in the 1950s. She wanted to play it, but when the powers that be said no, she chose the next best thing: dragging her own piano, along with her band and a backing orchestra, into another cave and making an album there.From left, Dahl, Bailey Wollowitz and Al Nardo at Lost World Caverns in West Virginia during a recording session.Walter Wlodarczyk“The decision early on that no matter what, this is a project that is happening fueled everything else,” Dahl said a few months after recording “Madison.” She was at one of her favorite spots in Brooklyn, Kellogg’s Diner in Williamsburg, and surrounded by a handful of people who contributed to this moonshot of hers: a few of Sloppy Jane’s core collaborators — the filmmaker Mika Lungulov-Klotz and the multi-instrumentalists Al Nardo, Bailey Wollowitz and Lily Rothman — and the album’s engineer, Ryan Howe.Besides involving a cave and a piano, the project needed to be “giant” and “beautiful,” Lungulov-Klotz said. “Everything else was becoming a bigger person and learning how to compromise or learning how to record in a place that is super humid and doesn’t want you to touch it at all.”Subterraneous settings can lend music a beautiful, ethereal resonance. But recordings are rare, for good reason. At Lost World, the cave dripped, echoed and randomly hummed. Because of the humidity, the recording equipment was relocated to a car parked at a nearby grate aboveground. Five band members needed a day to get the piano into position and another one to get it out. Each workday started at around 3 p.m. and ended anywhere from 6 or 8 a.m. Over two weeks, Dahl, 21 musicians and a film crew endured a constant temperature of 53 degrees Fahrenheit and numerous round trips through a long, sloped tunnel.Having done her homework on caves, which included trips to more than 30 scattered across the country over a year and a half, Dahl was aware that the conditions would be grueling. Additionally, the project was funded not by a record label, but by credit cards, a GoFundMe campaign and the kindness of others, including the owner of Lost World, Steve Silverberg, who allowed the band to use the cave free as long as they recorded outside of business hours.Accordingly, Dahl tapped the group’s cellist, Sean Brennan, to recruit additional orchestra members, most of whom were students from his alma mater, the Berklee College of Music. But utmost, Dahl knew she would need to enlist people who would fully commit. “Everybody needed to be really, really gung-ho, and that was going to be the only thing that was going to carry it,” she said.Realizing big ambitions and singular visions in a D.I.Y. fashion seems to be a criterion for Dahl, 26, who started Sloppy Jane 11 years ago as a high school student in Los Angeles. A boyfriend back then gave her a Roy Orbison CD that was so well loved it became scratched to the point where a peak in “Only the Lonely” fell into distortion. It was anguishing yet inspiring: “I was like, ‘That’s what I want to make musically,’ something that has the highest high and the lowest low, that goes in and out of lucidity, where it’s like this beautiful thing that just unravels,” she said a few weeks ago during another interview in Williamsburg, this time at Bar Blondeau.Rather than seeking formal training, Dahl opted for self-direction. “Ideas are the things that are important,” she said. “You just need to walk around and trust yourself.” So she did her time on the Los Angeles punk scene, and in 2015 released Sloppy Jane’s first EP, “Sure-Tuff,” six songs of rock ’n’ roll high jinks that feature Phoebe Bridgers, the Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter who has been Dahl’s friend since high school, on bass.Following the EP’s release, Dahl started work on the band’s first full-length album, “Willow.” She wanted to not only base it around a narrative theme but also expand beyond the bass-drum-guitar sound when performing the songs live. Dahl recalled that Bridgers told her, “Go get your orchestra.” So after recording “Willow” in Los Angeles with Sara Cath, Dahl headed to New York in 2017 and found Nardo, Wollowitz, Rothman, Brennan and others. Once she had the band she desired in place, she released “Willow” in March 2018.The opening musical passage of “Madison” references the final piano outro of “Willow,” beginning where the other ends, but the two albums differ. Musically, where “Willow” is more of an alt-rock opera, “Madison” is a wall of sound with poppier leanings that key in a spectrum of emotions — the uplift of “Party Anthem,” the delightful weirdness of the wordless “Bianca Castafiore,” the wistfulness of “Wilt.” And thematically, where “Willow” is about “numbness” and “touching but not being able to feel,” “Madison” is about “loneliness” and wanting someone who is just out of reach, Dahl said. “It’s like you figured out how to have these feelings, but you have nowhere to put them.”The desire to make “Madison” happen was intense enough that nothing could stop it. Not even a mugging a month before the cave sessions, during which Dahl was slashed in the face, hand and back. After the incident, the band talked of delaying the recording to spring 2020 but decided to push ahead. Even after it was done, Dahl was concerned she had irrevocably harmed herself mentally. “But then the pandemic happened,” she said. “And I was like, ‘No, good call, because now I have a lot of time to recover.’”At the start of last year’s lockdown, Dahl left the closetlike space she had called home in Bushwick, Brooklyn, first spending a few months in Wisconsin and then returning to Los Angeles. She spent the pandemic working on other people’s projects, both visual and musical; doing more cave recordings; putting the final touches on “Madison”; and finding it a label, Bridgers’s Saddest Factory Records.Dahl hopes someday to do a third album that picks up where “Madison” leaves off and uses the piano she played in the cave, then she wants to perform all three as one piece in concert. For now, more traditional shows are on the horizon, including an appearance at Pitchfork’s festival in Paris this month. But perhaps the cherry on the cake is that she is verging on the sound she has wanted to achieve since she was a teenager.“I think that I got close with this record,” she said. “I think that it sounds like a scratched Roy Orbison CD.” More

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

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

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