Music

Spike Lee scores, daring jazz: Here are highlights from the varied career of the composer of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” at the Metropolitan Opera.Like Wayne Shorter — to whom his newest album, “Absence,” is dedicated — Terence Blanchard is the rare jazz star whose renown as a composer almost overshadows his reputation as a daring and stylish improviser. Almost.Blanchard, whose opera “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” opens the Metropolitan Opera’s season on Monday, rose as a jazz phenom in the early 1980s, taking over the trumpet chair in Art Blakey’s fabled Jazz Messengers after Wynton Marsalis left. Barely 20, he was a double threat even then: writing compositions of coiled energy and smartly woven rhythmic interplay, and improvising fiercely, cutting sharp turns and slipping into sly glissandos.He soon became Spike Lee’s musical other half, a relationship that helped to make film scoring into a primary vocation. And in the 21st century, he’s established himself as one of jazz’s most respected educators and spokesmen. Here are a few highlights from his discography.‘Ninth Ward Strut’ (1988)Throughout much of the 1980s, Blanchard led a band along with the alto saxophonist Donald Harrison — a fellow 20-something New Orleans native and Jazz Messenger — that became one of the standard-bearing groups of jazz’s Young Lions movement. In “Ninth Ward Strut,” Blanchard pays tribute to his hometown’s signature sound with a swinging second-line rhythmic underpinning, while pushing his own identity as a composer. The track is rhythmically suspenseful and harmonically jagged in a way that would become characteristic.‘The Nation’ (1992)Spike Lee tapped Blanchard to record the trumpet parts for Denzel Washington’s character in “Mo’ Better Blues” (1990), including on the film’s title tune, which became a kind of Young Lions-era classic. Lee soon began asking Blanchard to write scores — and he hasn’t stopped. “Malcolm X” (1992) was one of the first films Blanchard did, exploring an expanded palette of choral harmonies, strings and brass. He rearranged the music for jazz sextet soon after, and recorded it as “The Malcolm X Jazz Suite,” a restless and ambitious album for Columbia Records.‘A Child With the Blues’ (1997)Blanchard recorded this track with the neo-soul doyenne Erykah Badu for the soundtrack to “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” librettist Kasi Lemmons’s 1997 film “Eve’s Bayou.” Bantering with Badu, he pulls sassy glissandos from the horn and pushes her into pitter-patter rhythmic exchanges. (It later reappeared on a deluxe edition of the album “Baduizm.”)‘Dear Mom’ (2007)After scoring “When the Levees Broke,” Lee’s 2006 documentary about Hurricane Katrina, Blanchard adapted his compositions into a suite, as he had with the “Malcolm X” music. He released the results as “A Tale of God’s Will” the following year.Katrina was deeply personal for Blanchard, whose mother lost her home in the storm. Adoration and enervation course together on “Dear Mom,” as Blanchard plays a pas de deux with a large string section. The album won Blanchard the second of his five Grammys, for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album.‘Can Anyone Hear Me’ (2018)For years, Blanchard has put a premium on working with younger musicians, and in his current quintet, the E-Collective, he’s assembled a wrecking crew of cutting-edge improvisers who regularly reimagine how jazz-rock fusion might work. On “Can Anyone Hear Me,” from a recent live album, Blanchard’s horn is encased in an electric bodysuit of distortion and effects, but the precision and counter-intuition of his soloing shines through. More

After winning a vocal competition in 1975, she starred in “Treemonisha,” which ended up on Broadway. She also sang for a senator.The soprano Carmen Balthrop made her Metropolitan Opera debut on April 6, 1977. Thirteen days later she made an entirely different sort of debut, in a hearing room of the United States Senate.That day Ms. Balthrop, still early in a career that would take her to opera and concert stages all over the world, was one of a number of people testifying at a meeting of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee in support of funding for the arts.It was a dreary and underattended meeting, with Senator Mark O. Hatfield, Republican of Oregon and the subcommittee chairman, the only member of the panel present. Dreary, that is, until Senator Hatfield, skeptical of the funding request, challenged Ms. Balthrop’s assertion that opera singers were a disciplined and hard-working lot.“He said, ‘Come on, are you really that disciplined?’” she told Knight-Ridder afterward. “And he said he’d like to hear some of the results. I said, ‘Why, certainly.’”She stood up and sang “Signore, ascolta” from Puccini’s “Turandot.”“He was delighted and declared a recess,” she said, “and later on, we got the money.”Ms. Balthrop, a noted Black star when opera was still early in its efforts to become more diverse, died on Sept. 5 at her home in Mitchellville, Md. She was 73.Her husband, Patrick A. Delaney, said the cause was cancer.Two years before that impromptu Senate performance, Ms. Balthrop’s career took off after she wowed audiences at the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in April 1975, winning that competition. During the finals, she had sung that same “Turandot” excerpt, as well as “Che sento? O Dio!” from Handel’s “Julius Caesar,” performances that had been broadcast live on National Public Radio.“The announcement of Miss Balthrop’s victory brought cheers from the audience, which had clearly approved of her singing,” The New York Times reported.Later that year she landed perhaps her most prominent role, the title character in “Treemonisha,” Scott Joplin’s folk opera about an 18-year-old Black girl who is trying to lead her people to a better life. The opera, written before World War I, was not produced in Joplin’s lifetime, but in 1972 a version of it was staged in Atlanta, and three years later the Houston Grand Opera mounted a production with Ms. Balthrop in the lead.The opera was performed in Houston seven times as part of a free opera series, with thousands attending. At the final performance, the opera’s finale, “A Real Slow Drag,” was reprised three times for the enthusiastic crowd.That production moved to Broadway. At the time, Elizabeth McCann was managing director of Nederlander Productions, which brought the show to New York. (Ms. McCann died this month.) She told The Times that the ability of Ms. Balthrop, who was then 27, to portray a teenager was a large part of the reason.“Carmen Balthrop, who plays the title role, is just tremendous,” she said. “The part needs an enchanting and innocent girl with strength. How often do you get a combination like that?”Ms. Balthrop as Pamina in Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte.” She made her Metropolitan Opera debut in the role in 1977.James Heffernan/Metropolitan Opera ArchivesCarmen Arlene Balthrop was born on May 14, 1948, in Washington. Her father, John, worked in the printing office of the Department of Justice, and her mother, Clementine (Jordan) Balthrop, was a homemaker.As Ms. Balthrop often told the story, she set her career goal early — when she was 8. Her father had a hobby: In the basement of the family home, he would tinker with radios and televisions. She had an assigned Saturday chore: to clean the house while her mother went to the market.“One Saturday I was running the vacuum cleaner, and I turned it off because I heard something very unusual coming from the basement,” where her father was testing a radio and speakers, she told “The Opera Diva Series,” a web interview program, in 2011.“I went to the top of the steps and I called out,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Daddy, what’s that?’ He said, ‘That’s opera.’”Specifically, it was the voice of Leontyne Price, the groundbreaking Black soprano.“Something was awakened in me,” Ms. Balthrop said, “and I began from that moment on to try to re-create that sound myself.”She graduated from Theodore Roosevelt High School in Washington in 1967 and earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Maryland in 1971. The next year she received a master’s degree in music at the Catholic University of America.Her Met debut in 1977 was in “Die Zauberflöte,” in which she sang the role of Pamina. She performed with numerous other opera companies and symphonies, including Washington Opera, Deutsche Oper of Berlin and Opera Columbus in Ohio, where in 1999 she performed the title role in the world premiere of “Vanqui,” an opera about the travels of the souls of two slaves composed by Leslie Burrs and with a libretto by John A. Williams.Ms. Balthrop began a career as a teacher at the University of Maryland in 1985. She also filled administrative roles there, including coordinator of the voice and opera division.A marriage to Dorceal Duckens ended in divorce. In addition to Mr. Delaney, whom she married in 1985, Ms. Balthrop is survived by a daughter from her first marriage, Nicole Mosley; her daughter with Mr. Delaney, Camille Delaney-McNeil; and three grandchildren.In a blog entry on the University of Maryland website, Ms. Balthrop once wrote of being surprised by Ms. Price, who turned up unexpectedly at a rehearsal when Ms. Balthrop was preparing to perform in San Francisco.“There was no one in the hall,” she wrote of their encounter. “I was standing there with the voice that inspired me to sing. Every time I think about it, I just well up, because I don’t think people get to meet their idols very often.” More

The singer’s lawyer requested the installation of a temporary conservator, citing her need to negotiate a prenuptial agreement and ongoing “anguish and harm.”Britney Spears supports the prompt and complete termination this fall of the conservatorship that has overseen her finances and personal life since 2008, a lawyer for the singer said in a court filing on Wednesday, but she wants her father removed from the legal arrangement first.In a supplemental petition filed a week before the next scheduled hearing in the case, Mathew S. Rosengart, a lawyer for Ms. Spears, reiterated his previous calls for the immediate resignation or suspension of James P. Spears as the conservator of her estate, even as Ms. Spears pursues the dissolution of the guardianship and an investigation into her father’s conduct while in charge.“While the entire conservatorship is promptly wound down and formally terminated, it is clear that Mr. Spears cannot be permitted to hold a position of control over his daughter for another day,” Mr. Rosengart, a former federal prosecutor who took over as Ms. Spears’s representative in July, wrote. “Every day Mr. Spears clings to his post is another day of anguish and harm to his daughter.”The filing follows a surprise turnaround by Mr. Spears earlier this month, when he asked the Los Angeles probate court to “seriously consider whether this conservatorship is no longer required” after more than a decade of asserting that the unique arrangement was in his daughter’s best interest. Previously, in August, lawyers for Mr. Spears said he planned to step down as conservator “when the time is right,” arguing that there were “no urgent circumstances justifying Mr. Spears’ immediate suspension.”In June, in her first detailed public comments on the conservatorship, Ms. Spears, 39, called it abusive and said she wanted to end the arrangement without having to undergo additional psychiatric evaluations.But Mr. Rosengart said on Wednesday that while Ms. Spears “fully consents” to terminating the conservatorship, the singer “rejects her father’s recounting of history and maintains that the Termination Petition was motivated by Mr. Spears’s apparent self-interest” — namely, rehabilitating his reputation, avoiding suspension and impeding Ms. Spears’s ability “to further investigate and examine his conduct since 2008.”Mr. Rosengart called for “a temporary, short-term conservator to replace Mr. Spears’s until the conservatorship is completely and inevitably terminated this fall.”Mr. Rosengart had previously requested that a certified public accountant in California, Jason Rubin, be named conservator of Ms. Spears’s estate. But on Wednesday, the lawyer withdrew that nomination and suggested another individual, John Zabel, take over from Mr. Spears on a temporary basis instead.He said Ms. Spears’s current personal conservator, Jodi Montgomery, backed both the eventual termination of the conservatorship — “subject to proper transition and asset protection” — and “the immediate and necessary suspension of Mr. Spears, by no later than September 29,” the date of the next status hearing.The lawyer also cited the singer’s recent engagement to be married, noting that Mr. Spears’s current role as conservator of the estate “would impede the ability to negotiate and consummate” a prenuptial agreement.Lawyers for Mr. Spears did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Additionally, Mr. Rosengart called for a future hearing on outstanding accounting and financial issues regarding the conservatorship, arguing that mismanagement of Ms. Spears’s estate by her father was “evident and ongoing.” The lawyer said that Mr. Spears had been served a request for discovery and a sworn deposition in August, before he filed to end the conservatorship.Mr. Rosengart cited Mr. Spears’s potential “unwarranted commissions from his daughter’s work, totaling millions of dollars”; a salary larger than Ms. Spears’s, “including for apparently-unused ‘office’ space”; his failure to negotiate or to obtain a contract with the singer’s previous business manager; and “potential self-dealing” in connection with the estate’s assets.Liz Day contributed reporting. More

They were teenage sweethearts, but their marriage turned tragic, and when she married the protégé singer Bobby Womack, the publicity was intense and the boos were loud.Their story started out as if lifted from one of his love songs. Sam Cooke was 18 and Barbara Campbell was only 13 when they met on the South Side of Chicago.Fifteen years later, Mr. Cooke, by then a pop superstar, was dead, murdered in a motel tryst gone awry. And only three months after his death, Barbara Campbell Cooke, his widow, would marry her husband’s protégé Bobby Womack, the gravelly-voiced soul singer and guitarist. Widely publicized, their union made them pariahs in their families, to much of the music community and to Mr. Cooke’s adoring fans.In her later years Ms. Cooke lived in relative obscurity, and when she died in April at 85, no public announcement was made, at her and her family’s wish. The death was recently confirmed by David Washington, a Detroit radio host who is close to the Cooke and Womack families. No cause was given.The Cookes’ life together and its aftermath were the stuff of Greek tragedy. Mr. Cooke, once a teenage gospel singer, was music royalty, a movie-star-handsome crooner of hits like “You Send Me” and “Wonderful World,” as well as the wrenching “A Change Is Gonna Come,” which would become a civil rights anthem.The son of a preacher, he took a firm stand in playing the American South, refusing to perform for segregated audiences. He was a canny businessman who retained the rights to his work and built a publishing and recording company to promote the work of others. He was a voracious reader, of everything from James Baldwin to William L. Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.” (Aretha Franklin, who as a young singer was often on tour with him, remembered buying the book just because he had it.)He was also a voracious womanizer. Mr. Cooke was 33 when he was shot by the manager of a $3-a-night motel in Los Angeles in December 1964 while chasing a prostitute who had stolen his clothes and money. Conspiracy theories still surround the death.Barbara was his teenage sweetheart but only one of many girlfriends. She had their daughter, Linda, when she was 17; three other women would also have daughters by Mr. Cooke.Barbara and Sam had married and divorced other people before marrying each other in Chicago in 1959, with Mr. Cooke’s disapproving father, the Rev. Charles Cook, performing the ceremony. The couple settled down in Los Angeles in a vine-covered Cape in the Hollywood area. (Mr. Cooke had added an “e” to his name at the start of his career.)The marriage was a hard bargain. Mr. Cooke, steely in his ambition and chronically unfaithful, went about his life while Ms. Cooke fended for herself. In his exhaustive biography “Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke” (2005), Peter Guralnick noted how Ms. Cooke, whom he had interviewed at length, had tried to keep her end up, attempting to read James Baldwin at her husband’s prompting and joining a group of philanthropic African American women known as the Regalettes. And she had her own affairs, as she explained to Mr. Guralnick.In 1963, their third child, Vincent, drowned in their pool when he was 18 months old. A year later, Mr. Cooke was dead.When Mr. Cooke died, Ms. Cooke was still numb from grief over her son’s death and humiliated by the tawdry circumstances of her husband’s murder, she told Mr. Guralnick. She said she had welcomed the 19-year-old Mr. Womack into the house as a kind of protector. She was 29 at the time. At her urging, they married in early 1965.In his own memoir, “Bobby Womack: My Story” (2006), Mr. Womack likened Ms. Cooke’s proposal to a scene out of the “The Graduate,” the 1967 film in which a dazed and disillusioned young man is seduced by a friend of his parents. “If you promise to give me five years,” Ms. Cooke told Mr. Womack, by his account, “I will give you a lifetime. You know, whatever you need to do. I just need you to walk with me here.”Mr. Womack wrote of his new wife: “She could, and did, take a lot. She could endure.” He added: “She and Sam were a pair. They lived each other. They really did.”The marriage of Ms. Cooke and the soul-singer and guitarist Bobby Womack, a protégé of Sam Cooke’s, attracted wide publicity in 1965. Mr. Cooke had been murdered three months earlier. EBONY MediaBut it upset many people to see Mr. Womack, sometimes in Mr. Cooke’s clothes, squiring Mr. Cooke’s widow about. The couple received hate mail, including a package containing a baby doll in a coffin. At a Nancy Wilson concert, when Ms. Wilson introduced the couple sitting in the audience, the crowd booed. In his telling, Mr. Womack, goaded by his new wife, took to cocaine. He also began a sexual relationship with the Cookes’ daughter, Linda, by then a teenager. When Barbara found them in bed, she shot Mr. Womack, the bullet grazing his temple. (Ms. Cooke was not charged, according to Mr. Womack’s book.) They divorced in 1970.Years later, Linda Cooke married Mr. Womack’s brother Cecil, and the couple became a recording duo, Womack & Womack. Linda now goes by the name Zeriiya Zekkariyas, a nod to her African heritage.Ms. Cooke and Bobby Womack had a son, whom they named Vincent, after the Cookes’ drowned baby. Vincent Womack struggled with drugs and alcohol, his father wrote, and committed suicide in 1986 when he was 21.Bobby Womack experienced fame early on when the Rolling Stones covered his 1964 song “It’s All Over Now,” their first No. 1 hit. He died in 2014 at 70, but not before suffering other tragedies. Another son of his, Truth, died when he was a baby, and Mr. Womack’s brother Harry was murdered by a girlfriend.“I don’t speak to Barbara no more,” Mr. Womack wrote in his memoir. “Linda doesn’t speak to her. Haven’t spoken to Cecil for years. No one speaks to no one.”Barbara Campbell and her twin sister, Beverly, were born on Aug. 10, 1935, in Chicago. She attended Doolittle Elementary School. Mr. Cooke had graduated from high school when they met, but Barbara, a teenage mother, worked two jobs to support herself and her child.In 1986, when Mr. Cooke was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Ms. Cooke stood by Mr. Cooke’s father to accept the award on the singer’s behalf.“I think if Sam were able to be here tonight, he would be thrilled just to see me on this stage,” Mr. Cooke’s father declared. (The elder Mr. Cook had not initially been thrilled with his son’s transition from gospel to secular music.)Ms. Cooke is survived by Ms. Zekkariyas and another daughter, Tracey Cooke; her twin sister, Beverley Lopez; and a granddaughter.Family members and Mr. Guralnick declined to speak about Ms. Cooke’s life and death, citing her wish for privacy.But Ms. Cooke had the last words in Mr. Guralnick’s nearly 750-page biography. The author quoted her reminiscing about falling in love with Mr. Cooke, and he with her, and about their wandering through Chicago’s Ellis Park in the snow when they were teenagers.“We’d walk around the park and fantasize,” she told Mr. Guralnick. “We didn’t have a dime between us, but you’d have thought I was the princess and he was the prince. Every time a Cadillac went by, I’d say, ‘That’s our chauffeur. He’s coming to take us to our mansion.’”She added: “Everybody wants a happy ending. That’s the way I see it.” More

She brought her church-rooted soprano and high harmonies to the rock and funk powerhouse best known for the No. 1 hit “Lady Marmalade.”Sarah Dash, a founding member of the groundbreaking, million-selling vocal trio Labelle, died on Monday. She was 76.Her death was announced on social media by Patti LaBelle and Nona Hendryx, the other members of Labelle. They did not say where she died or what the cause was.Ms. Dash brought her church-rooted soprano and high harmonies to Labelle, which began as a 1960s girl group before reinventing itself as a socially aware, Afro-futuristic rock and funk powerhouse, costumed in glittery sci-fi outfits and singing about revolution as well as earthy romance. In 1974, Labelle had a No. 1 hit, “Lady Marmalade,” and performed the first concert by a pop group — and a Black group — at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.In Ms. LaBelle’s 1996 autobiography, “Don’t Block the Blessings,” she wrote, “It was perfect harmony, the way we sounded together, the way we fit together, the way we moved together.”Ms. Hendryx, speaking by phone on Monday, described Ms. Dash as “a little ball of energy.” She added that Ms. Dash had played a crucial role in Labelle’s vocal interplay.“Sarah was very meticulous about vocal parts,” Ms. Hendryx said. “Patti and I would just want to do whatever we wanted to do, and Sarah had really great ears and was really great with harmony. That was her strength. She was the glue.”Labelle reached its commercial peak with the 1974 album “Nightbirds,” produced by Allen Toussaint with a New Orleans backup band and featuring the hit single “Lady Marmalade.”Sarah Dash was born in Trenton, N.J., on Aug. 18, 1945, the seventh of 13 children of Abraham and Mary Elizabeth Dash. Her father was a pastor, her mother a nurse. She grew up singing in the Trenton Church of Christ choir and turned to secular music as a teenager. She met Ms. Hendryx when the two girls’ church choirs shared a bill, and invited her to join her in the Del-Capris, a local doo-wop quintet.In 1961, Ms. Dash and Ms. Hendryx joined Patricia Holte and Cynthia Birdsong, members of a Philadelphia group, the Ordettes, to form a quartet, which they named the Blue Belles. Because there was already another group called the Bluebells, Ms. Holte adopted the name Patti LaBelle and the group became Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles (sometimes spelled Blue Belles or Bluebells).Their first hit was not actually by them; “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman” was recorded by a Chicago girl group, the Starlets. But because of contractual complications, the single was credited to the Bluebelles, who performed it on tour and on television.The Bluebelles had minor hits of their own with gospel-charged versions of standard songs including “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and “Danny Boy,” and the group worked through the 1960s on the R&B circuit, recording on the Newtown, Cameo-Parkway and Atlantic labels. For years, they played three shows a night, up to 300 nights a year, at clubs and theaters; in New York City, they became known as the Sweethearts of the Apollo.Labelle performing on Cher’s television variety show in 1976. From left: Nona Hendryx, Ms. Dash and Patti LaBelle.CBS via Getty ImagesMs. Birdsong left the group to join the Supremes in 1967, but the trio persevered. In 1966, the group had performed on the BBC pop program “Ready, Steady, Go!,” and the members had stayed in contact with a producer from the show, Vicki Wickham. Ms. Wickham became their manager, along with the Who’s management team, Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert.The Bluebelles metamorphosed into Labelle in 1970. Abandoning the formal gowns and wigs of a girl group for jeans, tie-dye and Afros, the group moved from the R&B circuit to rock clubs like the Bitter End in Manhattan.In 1971, Labelle released its self-titled debut album and collaborated with Laura Nyro on her album “Gonna Take a Miracle”; the group also opened for the Who on an arena tour. The trio’s 1972 album, “Moon Shadow,” started with the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”; its 1973 album, “Pressure Cookin’,” featured a medley of the Thunderclap Newman song “Something in the Air” and Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”Along with its sociopolitical messages, Labelle adopted a new look designed by Larry LeGaspi: “campy space costumes of channel-quilted metallic leather, disclike cowls and boots with stratospherically high stacked heels,” as Guy Trebay wrote in The New York Times. Labelle was at the forefront of glam-rock and Afro-Futurism.While Ms. LaBelle’s acrobatic voice often dominated Labelle’s arrangements, Ms. Dash was prominent in songs like “(Can I Speak to You Before You Go to) Hollywood.”Labelle reached its commercial peak with the 1974 album “Nightbirds,” produced by Allen Toussaint with a New Orleans backup band. Although most of its songs were written by Ms. Hendryx, its hit was by Bob Crewe and Kenny Nolan: “Lady Marmalade,” a tale of a memorable New Orleans prostitute, with the refrain “Voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir?”Labelle made two more albums, “Phoenix” and “Chameleon,” before breaking up in 1977, with its members pulling in different musical directions: disco for Ms. Dash and Ms. LaBelle, rock for Ms. Hendryx. They moved into solo careers, and Ms. Dash started hers with a hit in 1978: “Sinner Man,” from her solo album simply titled “Sarah Dash,” the first of four she made in the 1970s and ’80s. “Oo-La-La, Too Soon,” from her 1980 album “Oo-La-La, Sarah Dash,” was turned into a commercial jingle for Sasson jeans.Ms. Dash in performance at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 2012. After Labelle broke up in 1977, she began her solo career in 1978 with a hit single, “Sinner Man.” Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesShe also recorded widely as a session singer — with Nile Rodgers, the Marshall Tucker Band, the O’Jays, Keith Richards and the Rolling Stones. She looked back on her career in the 1990s with one-woman shows and an autobiography, “A Dash of Diva.”Information on survivors was not immediately available.Ms. Dash stayed in touch with the members of Labelle and appeared on solo albums by Ms. LaBelle and Ms. Hendryx. The trio had a club hit together in 1995 with “Turn It Out,” heard on the soundtrack of the movie “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.” In 2008, Labelle reunited for a full album, “Back to Now,” followed by a tour.Ms. Dash gave her final performance on Saturday night, two days before her death, when she joined Ms. LaBelle during a performance in Atlantic City.“Sarah Dash was an awesomely talented, beautiful and loving soul who blessed my life and the lives of so many others in more ways than I can say,” Ms. LaBelle posted on social media. “And I could always count on her to have my back!” More

Our intrepid reporter and photographer biked through Queens with David Byrne and some of his castmates ahead of their return to Broadway. Then the skies opened up.On a dock in Queens, David Byrne’s musical bike gang was gearing up to go.“Are we ready?” Byrne called.It was a Saturday in late August, and the gang — three percussionists, a guitarist, a bassist and me, along with a daredevil photographer and lighting assistant — were sitting astride bicycles as Byrne, our fearless two-wheeled leader, outlined the plan.He wore a brimmed, pith-style helmet and a tour guide’s relaxed confidence: He’d done this route before, from Astoria to Flushing. The destination was the Queens Night Market, a paradise of global food stalls at the site of the 1964 World’s Fair. He’d already been talking up a ceviche stand and the all-women samba drumline he’d seen the last time he’d pedaled through.The market, in its diversity, “is really extraordinary,” he said — the kind of endeavor that seems like an antidote to our current social divisiveness. “In that context, you really go, ‘OK, this is not impossible, we can do this.’” It’s a message of community-as-uplift that Byrne, the former Talking Heads frontman, has been big on recently, with his hit theatrical concert “American Utopia,” a mostly joyous pilgrimage through his music. Even the act of extreme weather that ultimately derailed our ride didn’t curb his ability to find revelation locally.From left, the percussionists Tim Keiper, Jacquelene Acevedo and Daniel Freedman. “We would go on these adventures,” Acevedo said of the rides with Byrne. “It’s great. You come back six hours later, exhausted, like, ‘Where did I go?’”Byrne is, of course, a devoted cyclist: He’s written a book about it, and even designed bike racks; last week, he took an e-bike to the Met Gala (so he wouldn’t get sweaty!) and checked his helmet at the door. In the Before Times, I could sometimes clock the velocity and verve of my nightlife by how frequently I intersected with him speeding to some event along the Williamsburg waterfront bike path. He was easy to spot, often dressed in somehow still-pristine white — as he was on this evening, stepping off the East River ferry in white pants, a blue guayabera shirt and brown fisherman sandals. His whole crew, castmates from “American Utopia,” had been onboard, too.On the dock, he gave a few general instructions — hang a left at the big brick building, “go down for, like, a couple miles; should I say when our next turn is? Sixty-first, we make a right” — and then we peeled off. In interchanging pairs or spread out, our expedition took up half a city block. “Riding in New York is — hoo-hoo!” trilled Angie Swan, the guitarist, who had moved here from Milwaukee to work with Byrne and was now dodging through a crowded bike lane.From left, the guitarist Angie Swan, Byrne, Freedman, Keiper and the bassist Bobby Wooten III. The band members got matching folding bikes during their tour.It was the weekend before rehearsals began for the Broadway return of “American Utopia.” But the cast had already been convening throughout the pandemic for these miles-long, leisurely (or not) bike rides around town, led by Byrne, who is 69 and has the stamina of an athlete and the curiosity of a cultural omnivore. Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island: He traversed the city a couple of times a week at least, trailing bandmates alongside him.“That kind of pioneering spirit that he has in music is the same as he has in his bike rides,” Jacquelene Acevedo, a percussionist and Toronto transplant who lives in Manhattan, said as we pedaled along, passing beneath the rumbling train and only-in-Queens intersections like the corner of 31st Avenue and 31st Street. She said she got to know the city on these socially distanced rides. “We would go on these adventures,” she said. “It’s great. You come back six hours later, exhausted, like, ‘Where did I go?’”From left, Freedman, Byrne and Swan. They landed in Flushing Meadows Corona Park with the rest of the group as the sun was setting.That Saturday, we pulsed through Jackson Heights toward Corona — two neighborhoods, Byrne observed later, that had been hit hard, early on, by the coronavirus — and saw the city’s rhythms change. We spun through families barbecuing on pedestrian blocks and dinged our bells along to the streetside cumbia and reggaeton. It was, in a word, glorious.We might’ve blown a few stoplights, too, and caused some double-takes as Cole Wilson, the photographer, and his assistant, Bryan Banducci, cycled ahead of the group but peered backward to get their shot. Byrne was always in the lead; as soon as traffic disappeared, he removed his helmet, revealing his signature silver coif.By the time we landed in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, the sun was setting. Byrne led us to his ceviche spot. Moments later, the skies opened up: Tropical Storm Henri, arriving far earlier than the forecast predicted. We were quickly drenched. So, so drenched.A night that was meant to be a dreamy celebration of this multicultural city and its serendipitous connections, experienced from atop a bike seat, wound up in a (very) soggy group subway ride home. But even that became a moment for Byrnian wonder, thanks to a subway preacher and her acolytes, and an unexpected bit of ecstatic dance — the civic and the divine aboard the 7 train. Byrne clocked it all, surrounded by his bikemates.This group of musicians had toured with “American Utopia” when it was a more traditional rock concert a few years ago, and their matching bikes — a folding model made by Tern — came along then, too. The bikes had their own compartment on the tour bus: “Even when we went overseas, the bikes would come,” said Tim Keiper, a drummer. They would sometimes ride 25 miles before soundcheck, added Daniel Freedman, another drummer. (There are more than four dozen percussion instruments in the show.) “David would find the cool thing,” Freedman said, “and be like, there’s a restaurant or a museum or something bizarre, funny — ‘Cumming, Iowa! We’ve got to go!’”For Byrne, the rides kept him “sane on the road,” he told me later, “and inspired and stimulated.”It also gave his cast and crew a connection that was rare among performers. The original run of “American Utopia” ended in February 2020, just before the coronavirus shut down the city’s live performance spaces. During lockdown, Annie-B Parson, the show’s choreographer, saw the “American Utopia” crew a lot more than anybody else, she said. The cast’s emotional closeness onstage? “It’s not acted.”“Bike riding is a nice metaphor,” she added, “because there’s a kinship. There’s a group moving together, but everybody’s in their own space. But there is a unison. It’s a dance, for sure.”Tropical Storm Henri arrived earlier than forecasted. But the group did manage to finally try the ceviche and some of the other fare at the market.Days after drying out from the Queens ride, the group gathered for rehearsals. “American Utopia” is now playing at the St. James Theater, a bigger Broadway venue than its previous home, the Hudson. Parson, a downtown choreographer known for her attention to form and multimedia detail, was thrilled to learn that the stage is a rectangle, as she’d originally envisioned for the piece. “To me, a square shape is a warm shape that faces in, because there’s symmetry on the sides,” she explained. “A rectangular shape implies infinity, because it reaches out on the sides. They’re both beautiful. This show, and David, to me, I associate with a rectangle.”So Parson polished the choreography, much of which is done by the musicians while they’re playing. (Chris Giarmo and Tendayi Kuumba, standouts onstage and in Spike Lee’s filmed version of the show, are the main dancers.) In one rehearsal, Parson directed Byrne to amplify a moment by turning to face his castmates, giving an extra beat of connection there — the pandemic had underscored a theme of the show, “that we’re not atomized entities,” Byrne said. “Being together with other people is such a big part of what we are as individuals.”As a collaborator, Byrne leads with praise. Watching his percussion circle, he danced along with his very core. “I love the first half where you change up the groove, but it still keeps all the momentum,” he told them.In Byrne’s recent eclectic career, “American Utopia,” which will receive a special Tony Award at this Sunday’s ceremony, has taken up a bigger chunk than other projects. It may be because it makes him happier. “It’s a very moving show to do,” he said, “and a lot of fun” — not least because audiences shimmy with abandon a few songs in.And it pulls from the panoply of Byrne’s interests. There’s neuroscience, civic history, and Brazilian, African and Latin instrumentation. The visual and movement references span the world: the Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer; ’70s Japanese movies; a Thai king’s coronation; and, after our Queens odyssey, a scene from the 7 train, when a woman pulled out a mic and an amp, plugged in and began proselytizing.Byrne, unrecognized beneath his mask, stood near her, holding his bike. Across the way, her companion suddenly began doing impassioned hand motions that were reminiscent of some “American Utopia” moves, waving and snapping her wrists around her face. “Annie-B should see this!” Byrne said, almost to himself. Someone taped a snippet, and he sent it off to her to check out.“There are no words to describe how adventurous David is,” Parson said. “He always finds the most profound way to interact with a place with his bicycle, and he always invites others, graciously, to join in.” More

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherKacey Musgraves’s new album, “Star-Crossed,” documents the collapse of the marriage she celebrated on her last album, the Grammy-winning “Golden Hour.” It’s an LP that calls back to her earliest, more modest-scaled work — the embodiment of post-exuberance.Throughout her career, Musgraves has been embraced as a country music radical, but that’s not exactly true. She’s someone well versed in tradition who also understands that over the decades, plenty of alleged outsiders made crucial contributions to the genre. As a result, she’s far less preoccupied with the terminology than anyone trying to apply it to her.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Musgraves’s career, her easy way with songwriting, and what might come next after you’ve documented your life’s highs and lows in song.Guests:Amanda Hess, a critic at large at The New York TimesLaura Snapes, deputy music editor at The GuardianConnect 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

Paul Appleby and Conor Hanick presented a song program focused on cycles by Beethoven and Berg.The past few weeks have brought heartening signs that classical music is coming back to New York after the devastating pandemic closures of the past year and a half. The Metropolitan Opera reopened the doors for an inspiring performance of Verdi’s Requiem on Sept. 11. The New York Philharmonic inaugurated its new season last week.On Monday evening a much more modest, but no less meaningful, return took place when the tenor Paul Appleby and the pianist Conor Hanick presented a song recital in the elegantly intimate Board of Officers Room at the Park Avenue Armory.Just over 90 people, a near-capacity crowd for the salon-like space, attended this intelligent and beautifully performed program of German lieder — lasting two hours, with an intermission, just as concerts generally used to before everything stopped. The program repeats on Wednesday, and two more artist pairs fill out the fall in the space: Will Liverman and Myra Huang next month, and Jamie Barton and Warren Jones in November.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York TimesAppleby is best known for opera, including the title role in Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” and David in Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” which he sings next month at the Met. Yet he has long been devoted to the song literature, including many new and recent works.This Armory program arose from his desire to pair two song cycles, Beethoven’s “An die ferne Geliebte” and Berg’s “Altenberg Lieder” — both of which, as he wrote in program notes, “address ways of coping with unfulfilled wishes, with dreams that did not come true.” To place these cycles in context, he performed selected songs by Schumann and Schubert that also grapple with loss and pain and offer coping mechanisms — including, as Appleby put it, “numb nihilism.”Both cycles were historically momentous. Beethoven’s set of six songs, from 1816, offered a template for the 19th-century German song cycle. The poems, by Alois Jeitteles, present a protagonist thinking of his lost home, his distant beloved, his unfulfilled love. The songs flow from one to the next, giving the cycle the sense of a unified, if episodic, narrative. Appleby sang the tender pieces with warmth and heartache, and brought almost eerie vitality to moments of heady nostalgia. Hanick, a brilliant pianist more often heard in thorny contemporary scores, played with crispness, nuance and grace.Berg’s 1912 work, which sets five short texts by the German writer Peter Altenberg, was originally written for mezzo-soprano and lush orchestra. The public reaction when two of the songs were introduced at a concert in Vienna was so hostile that their aggrieved composer never had them performed again. But the work pointed the way to a new 20th-century musical language. Appleby and Hanick performed a version with a piano reduction that allowed the tenor — with a relatively lighter, lyric voice — to bring out subtleties in the vocal lines. And Hanick’s playing was a revelation of clarity and bite.There were lovely accounts of all the Schubert and Schumann works. I was especially gratified to hear these artists call attention to little-heard songs from Schumann’s later years, like the dreamy “An den Mond,” which opened the wonderful program, and the autumnal, harmonically tart “Abendlied,” which ended it.Paul Appleby and Conor HanickRepeats Wednesday at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.com. More