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      Overlooked No More: Sinn Sisamouth, ‘King’ of Cambodian Pop Music

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      He and his singing partner, Ros Serey Sothea, drew from a wide range of Western and local influences. They disappeared after the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.Before the singer-songwriter Sinn Sisamouth disappeared, he had become a fixture on radio programs and in nightclubs in Cambodia and beyond. For more than two decades, from the 1950s until the mid-’70s, fans praised his smooth voice and evocative lyrics about love and the Cambodian landscape.He and his bandmates — most notably the singer Ros Serey Sothea — stood out for their versatile repertoire of jazz, rock ’n’ roll and popular Khmer ballads, among other styles. Sometimes they would use the melody of a Western song — the Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” for example — while adding orchestration and writing original Khmer lyrics for it.They played a major role in defining the sound of Cambodia’s popular music industry, with Sinn Sisamouth emerging as one of the country’s most revered stars.Then, in 1975, the Khmer Rouge seized power, enacting a four-year campaign of execution, forced labor, disease and famine that killed at least 1.7 million people. The work of artists and intellectuals was brutally repressed, and Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Serey Sothea were among the many Cambodians who disappeared amid the violence and upheaval.Even now the circumstances of their deaths are unclear, though family members are certain they are no longer alive. Sinn Sisamouth’s granddaughter Sin Setsochhata said that, based on research by her father, her family believes that Sinn Sisamouth disappeared in the southern province of Kandal, which borders Vietnam. Some believe he died in a labor camp. The Guardian reported in 2007 that he had been shot. By some accounts, before his execution, believed to be in 1976, he pleaded to sing one last song.Many of Sinn Sisamouth’s recordings survived, however, and they still exert a deep influence on Cambodian culture.“He was a pioneer,” the Cambodian musician Mol Kamach said in “Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll,” a 2014 documentary film, by John Pirozzi, about Sinn Sisamouth, Ros Serey Sothea and other musicians. “He was an example to other professional singers that singing modern is like this.”Sinn Sisamouth was believed to have been born on Aug. 23, 1933, in the northeastern province of Stung Treng. (Some accounts list his birth year as 1932 or 1935.)His father, Sinn Leang, was a prison warden; his mother was Sib Bunloeu, according to a 1995 article in The Phnom Penh Post. At the age of 7 or 8, Sinn Sisamouth moved to the western province of Battambang, where his uncle helped him develop an early interest in playing traditional Khmer music on stringed instruments like the tro khmer, a type of fiddle, and the chapei, a lute.Sinn Sisamouth arrived in Phnom Penh, the capital, when he was 17 and enrolled in a medical school there with the goal of becoming a hospital nurse, but he never lost his love of music. He performed for sick patients to help them relax, his granddaughter said, and spent his breaks playing his mandolin under a tree.He later began performing live at the headquarters of Cambodia’s newly established national radio, and his profile rose.“When it came to singing technique, Sinn Sisamouth was king,” Prince Panara Sirivudh, a member of the Cambodian royal family, said in the documentary. “His voice was so beautiful, and he wrote very sweet songs.”Popular Western music was imported to Cambodia as early as the 1940s by the royal palace and by Cambodians who could afford to travel to Europe, and the country’s rock ’n’ roll scene began in earnest in the 1950s, according to a study by LinDa Saphan, the associate producer of the documentary and a professor of sociology at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in New York City.The sound blended high-pitched, operatic singing with the distorted electric guitar solos that were popular in American music at the time.Sinn Sisamouth became representative of this new style because he had an ability to write both ballads and upbeat rock songs, Saphan wrote, but the voices of Ros Serey Sothea and other female vocalists on his recordings were the “final touch that made this Cambodian mix so enticing.”Early in his career, Sinn Sisamouth was invited to perform with Cambodia’s royal ballet; he appeared in dapper suits and bow ties, his hair combed back. He also traveled overseas — to India, Hong Kong and beyond — with a traditional band formed by the queen’s son, Norodom Sihanouk, a composer and saxophonist (and future king) who played a major role in developing the country’s cultural industries in the postcolonial era.It was a hopeful time in Cambodia’s history: The country had achieved independence from France in 1953 and was shaping its identity and culture.As Sinn Sisamouth’s popularity grew, his former neighbors in the countryside marveled at hearing his songs on the radio. Some referred to him as “golden voice” or the “Elvis of Cambodia.”“A medical student — how can he sing?” the villagers said at the time, his sister recalled in the documentary.He met Ros Serey Sothea when she was 17 at the national radio station and recorded with her for more than a decade.Though they were never romantically involved, “their musical conversations were love stories filled with a sense of yearning and despair, of palpable loss, yet holding out the possibility of reconciliation,” Saphan wrote.By the early 1970s, amid a scene of go-go bands, big hairdos and youthful exuberance, the duo had produced several hit songs, including a few for Cambodian films. Sinn Sisamouth also wrote and directed the 1974 film “Unexpected Song,” which included some of his original music and a performance by Ros Serey Sothea.The duo’s music has received renewed interest. Sinn Sisamouth is the subject of a forthcoming documentary film, “Elvis of Cambodia,” and Ros Serey Sothea is the subject of a graphic novel, “The Golden Voice,” which is scheduled to be published next year.Sinn Sisamouth married one of his cousins, Khao Thang Nhoth, and they had three sons and a daughter, according to The Post. One of his sons, Sin Chanchhaya, also became a musician.For all of Sinn Sisamouth’s performing prowess, he was an introvert who spent most of his time alone, his granddaughter said. Often after having dinner with his family he would retire to his studio to compose.“All the emotions — the spirit, the connection, the interior feelings — were expressed through his music,” she said. More

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      Sri Lanka Baila Star Sunil Perera is Dead at 68

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      The frontman of his family’s popular band combined the country’s unique, Latin-influenced sound with politically biting lyrics.COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — In the end, it was only appropriate that Sunil Perera, who had entertained generations of Sri Lankans on the radio and on the dance floor with his distinctive, Latin-fused tunes, would go out singing.On his deathbed at a hospital in the capital city of Colombo, Mr. Perera had asked for a guitar, which he wasn’t provided. So he turned to what couldn’t be denied.“The doctor told me that the day before he died, he was singing and entertaining everyone there,” said Piyal Perera, Sunil’s brother and bandmate.Mr. Perera died on Monday at the Nawaloka hospital in Colombo, his brother said. He was 68. While the cause of death was not clear, Mr. Perera had been recovering from Covid-19 when he was rushed into intensive care, Piyal Perera said.Few have made such a large impact on Sri Lanka’s cultural and entertainment scene as Mr. Perera did for half a century. Often dressed in bright colors and a bowler’s hat, he produced hit song after hit song through the Gypsies, the family band, which was preparing to celebrate its golden jubilee this year.The Gypsies specialized in baila, a jolly and rhythmic genre sung mostly in Sinhalese but influenced by the Portuguese, who colonized much of the island in the 16th and 17th centuries.Over the decades he used his lyrics and his voice to amplify concerns about Sri Lanka’s shrinking democratic space. The country, still recovering from years of civil war, has been beset by government pressure against journalists, activists and minority groups. Mr. Perera frequently lambasted a decaying political elite that has become bogged down in bickering and that, he believed, was dashing the nation’s hopes.“He was both popular and a protester,” said Lakshman Joseph-de Saram, a film composer from Sri Lanka. “We rarely have a Bob Dylan and a Michael Jackson in one package.”Mr. Saram added, “He was our baila king.”Tributes poured in after his death, including from politicians Mr. Perera had openly criticized. He directed his anger at the country’s ruling Rajapaksa family and at the opposition that repeatedly disappointed him with the chaos in its ranks.President Gotabaya Rajapaksa called his passing “a great loss.” Sajith Premadasa, leader of the opposition, said Mr. Perera had “pioneered a modern day revolution in the musical history of Sri Lanka.”He was born Uswatta Liyanage Ivor Sylvester Sunil Perera in 1952 to a Roman Catholic family and grew up in the Colombo suburb of Moratuwa. He was one of 10 children of Anton Perera, a former soldier, and Doreen Perera, a homemaker.The elder Mr. Perara built the Gypsies largely around his children. Sunil was a teenager when he joined the band before becoming its lead singer. Sunil described his father as a disciplinarian who had wanted him to complete his higher education but who supported his choice when he left his studies to focus on guitar and voice training. In 2017, the Gypsies recorded a family tribute to the founder.Sunil Perera’s opinionated lyrics and public stances set him apart from other high-profile musicians in Sri Lanka. In his songs he dealt with corruption and politicians soured after their election losses. One song depicted aliens landing in Sri Lanka and turning down an invitation to stay.“It’s 72 years since we got independence,” he said in one interview. “We are in debt to the whole world. Is it the fault of the people? Whose fault is it? I don’t blame one group. I blame the entire set of politicians who ruled us.”He was open about his personal life, discussing what he saw as hypocritical attitudes about sex in Sri Lanka’s conservative society. But his language often got him in trouble, particularly when he described women as “baby machines” in a discussion about how large Sri Lankan families were in his father’s generation.His friends and family acknowledged that Mr. Perera could be divisive, but they said his outspokenness had come from his firm belief that Sri Lanka could overcome the ethnic and religious divides that have led to conflict for decades. His brother, Piyal, said Mr. Perara had declared that what would make him happiest would be if all four of his children married into four different communities.“His head was not swollen with the fame — he was simple,” said Mariazelle Goonetilleke, a fellow musician and friend. “He was not afraid to tell the truth, always spoke his mind. There were people who didn’t like that.”Mr. Perera came down with Covid-19 last month and was hospitalized for 25 days before being discharged, only to be readmitted, this time in intensive care, just days later.He is survived by his wife, Geetha Kulatunga; two daughters, Rehana and Manisha; and two sons, Sajith and Gayan.In a video message after he was initially discharged from the hospital, Mr. Perera looked weak but determined as he thanked the hospital staff and his fans and well wishers. Dressed in a white shirt and a gray hat, his usual colors were missing.“We are thankful to God for giving us such a crowd,” he said. “We will definitely get that blessing again. When we get that time, let’s meet again, like old times.” More

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      J Balvin Attempts to Reintroduce Himself on ‘Jose’

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      The Colombian star skips innovation and presents an impressionistic inventory of the sounds that established him as a global force on his sixth studio album.If there is one figure in pop music who has perfected the language of feel-good cultural affirmation, it is J Balvin. For over a decade, the 36-year-old Colombian star has claimed he is on a mission to “change the perception of Latinos in music,” using his rainbow aesthetics, smooth reggaeton textures and radio-ready trap hits as ammunition.There have been plenty of milestones, including “Mi Gente” and “I Like It”: his chart-crushing collaborations with Willy William and Beyoncé, and Bad Bunny and Cardi B. Both tracks have become flash points for jejune narratives about “booming” Latino cultural representation: a tale that flattens differences among people of distinct races, languages and countries — and suggests this music is influential only when the Anglo mainstream is paying attention.There was his performance at Coachella 2019, when Balvin became the first reggaeton artist to play the festival’s main stage. There are his cartoonish visuals, leopard-print hairstyles and flowery album covers designed by the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. And there are his ad-libs — “J Balvin, man,” “Leggo” and “Latino gang!” — signature catchphrases that have become so trite, they’re essentially begging for meme-ification.“Jose,” his sixth studio album, arrives at a moment when Balvin has finally established himself as a global celebrity. The record considers what is possible when a pop idol, especially one from Latin America, no longer needs to prove himself.At the end of “Jose,” Balvin takes a true gamble. For what may be the first time in his career, he gets deeply personal.So, allow J Balvin to reintroduce himself. “Jose,” Balvin’s first name, is a 24-track behemoth that follows in the vein of other playlists-as-albums — the kind of project intended to dominate streaming platforms, like the recent supersized releases from Kanye West and Drake. But the album struggles to truly innovate: “Jose” is an itinerant, unfocused effort that offers an impressionistic inventory of the sounds that have established him as a force: pop-reggaeton, trap and EDM.The majority of the album (about 13 of its tracks) — like “Bebé Que Bien Te Ves,” “Lo Que Dios Quiera” and “Fantasías” — falls firmly within the sphere of ultrapolished, creamy popetón. It is an unimaginative formula, and one that Balvin has mastered: blend a lilting dembow beat, a candy-coated melody and lyrics about the gushy soap opera of a dance-floor courtship or a sexual fantasy for maximum streams. Elsewhere, Balvin returns to Top 40 trap, another style he’s known for: On “Billetes de 100,” featuring the Puerto Rican star Myke Towers, Balvin offers a self-mythologizing reminder that he can actually rap. “In da Getto,” a resort-ready EDM track produced by Skrillex, elaborates on yet another sound that has helped catapult Balvin to international stardom.Some songs aim for novelty. The opener, “F40,” is a self-assured blast of reggaeton bombast that shifts tempos, slowing to an irresistible, carnal crawl. And “Perra,” a collaboration with Tokischa, is an audacious, X-rated venture into dembow, a street sound born in the barrios of the Dominican Republic that has recently caught the attention of the wider Latin music industry, despite its longtime grasp on popular music in the Caribbean country.It is only in the last third of “Jose” that Balvin takes a true gamble: For what may be the first time in his career, he gets vulnerable and deeply personal. “7 de Mayo,” named for Balvin’s birthday, is a chronicle of his rise from the streets of Medellín to eminence, featuring spoken samples of his mother, Alba, and an awards-show thank you from the reggaeton forefather Daddy Yankee. “In a barrio in the middle of Medallo, this one was born/With sweat on my forehead/Calluses on my hands,” Balvin reminisces in Spanish. While the intimacy is new for Balvin, the song follows the formula of hip-hop origin stories too closely (nearly mimicking Jay-Z’s “December 4th”). It feels like Balvin is being forced to complete a tedious homework assignment, rather than reflecting earnestly on his personal hardships.“Querido Rio,” a soft guitar ballad dedicated to his newborn son with echoes of Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven,” similarly falls flat. Its shallow lyrics and syrupy delivery land with cloying sentimentality: “I don’t just want to be your father/I also want to be your best friend,” Balvin croons in Spanish.For an artist who paints himself as pathbreaking, “Jose” feels remarkably safe. At this point, Balvin does have the power to nuke expectations — those of his own career trajectory, his imagined community and the genres he operates within. Instead, “Jose” colors inside the lines, safeguarding Balvin’s reign by reveling in the familiar.J Balvin“Jose”(Universal Music Latino) More

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      7 Events in New York Honoring 9/11

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      On Saturday, performances and memorials around the city and online will mark the 20th anniversary of the attacks. Here’s how to find them.Twenty years after four coordinated terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda killed 2,977 people — 2,753 of them at ground zero in New York City — the nation and the city remember. They remember through dance, music, museums, TV specials and light beamed into the sky.And especially now, after a war in Afghanistan, the ways we remember move beyond commemoration. They start to connect the dots between the attacks themselves and the larger historical era that followed, and continues to unfold.History echoes and reverberates in Lower Manhattan, where businesses have shuttered once more, this time because of the pandemic. There, from the rooftop of the Battery Parking Garage, two 48-foot squares of light will recreate the ghostly images of the twin towers this Saturday night.Here’s a selection of events — both in-person and virtual — for New Yorkers to remember and reflect this year. Check websites for Covid-19 protocols.Verdi’s Requiem in MemoriamThe Metropolitan Opera plays Verdi’s Requiem in commemoration often. The last time it was performed there, the piece was in honor of the beloved Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky.Before that, the music was presented as a memorial to Luciano Pavarotti (2008), President Kennedy (1964) and Verdi himself (1901). Now, in its first indoor performance for an audience since March 2020, the Met Opera will perform the Requiem on Sept. 11 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the attacks.Five hundred free tickets will be made available to the families of victims, and the remaining tickets will be $25. The event will also be broadcast live on PBS, hosted by the ballet star Misty Copeland from the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in Manhattan. From $25; metopera.org.‘Remembering 9/11’ at New York’s Oldest MuseumImages from “Here is New York,” a photographic archive of ground zero, at the New-York Historical Society. Hiroko Masuike for The New York TimesIn the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the New-York Historical Society collected materials — pieces of debris, parts of memorials — as rescues and memorials unfolded. And so began the History Responds initiative, which has since continued to document major events like the Black Lives Matter protests and the Climate Strike.Now, 20 years later, two ongoing exhibits — “Remembering 9/11” and “Objects Tell Stories: 9/11” — at the museum on Central Park West are showcasing that history. On Saturday, images from the photographic archive “Here is New York,” which documented ground zero in the moment, will be projected on digital displays in the Smith Gallery. $22 for an adult ticket; nyhistory.org.A National TV SpecialIn 2001, the rubble of the World Trade Center South Tower buried Will Jimeno — a Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police officer — for 13 hours. He survived, as did his partner, John McLoughlin.Their experiences will comprise part of “Shine A Light,” a one-hour national television special airing on CNN at 7 p.m. on Saturday. The nonprofit 9/11 Day, co-founded by David Paine, announced that the special will be hosted by Jake Tapper and feature performances by H.E.R., Brad Paisley and Common.“We hope to demonstrate that even in the face of great tragedy, good things can arise,” Paine said in a statement. “That’s an essential and powerful reminder for all of us now, 20 years later, as we continue to deal with other tragic events.” 911day.org.‘Table of Silence’Daniel Bernard Roumain, center on violin, performing “Table of Silence” at Lincoln Center last year.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesEvery Sept. 11 morning since the 10th anniversary of the attacks, Buglisi Dance Theatre has presented its “Table of Silence” — a free “public performance ritual for peace” — at Lincoln Center. The pandemic hasn’t changed that: Last year, 28 dancers draped in white fabric reached their outstretched arms toward the sky.Although that event marked the first large-scale performance at Lincoln Center since March 2020, it was closed to the public, available only as a livestream. This year, however, the 8 a.m. performance will feature both live and virtual elements. Limited standing capacity will be available on Josie Robertson Plaza, on a first-come, first-served basis. Free; tableofsilence.org.‘Memory Ground’Inside Green-Wood Cemetery, the top of Battle Hill — the highest point in Brooklyn and the setting of the largest Revolutionary battle — affords sweeping views of Lower Manhattan, including the World Trade Center. The musical performance “Memory Ground” will take place there on Saturday. The Mississippi-born and New York City-based composer Buck McDaniel will present original compositions. (Previously, his work “Detroit Cycles” premiered with the radio program The Moth.)Saxophonist Noa Even — whose solo commissioning project, “Atomic,” has toured across the country — will perform, as will the New York City-based string ensemble Desdemona. Each performance is 45 minutes, and will run at noon, 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. $10 recommended donation; green-wood.com.The Crossing’s ‘Returning’The Crossing, a new-music choir, will perform in Philadelphia on Saturday.  Jessica Kourkounis for The New York TimesLatvian composer Eriks Esenvalds’s song “Earth Teach Me Quiet” begins with the line “Earth teach me quiet — as the grasses are still with light.”The Crossing, a new-music choir, will perform pieces by Esenvalds, Ayanna Woods, Michael Gilbertson and James Primosch on Saturday at 7 p.m. at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia.While the event, “Returning” may not explicitly address the terrorist attacks, its themes — isolation, grief, confusion, hope and returning — are more than fitting. This “coming home to song” marks the opening of the Crossing’s back-to-live-performance season, in the spirit of return and renewal. $35 for general admission; thecrossing.ticketleap.com.A ‘Tribute in Light’ Across the CityAt sunset on Saturday, 88 7,000-watt light bulbs will reach four miles into the sky from the roof of the Battery Parking Garage, mirroring the shapes of the twin towers.This Tribute in Light, organized by the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, was first presented six months after the attack. Each year after that, the ghostly echoes of the towers have lighted up Lower Manhattan from dusk until dawn on the evening of Sept. 11.Buildings throughout the city, including the Empire State Building, One World Trade Center, the Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center Plaza and the New-York Historical Society will join in the memorial by lighting up their facades and rooftops in sky blue. More

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      The Trumpeter Adam O’Farrill’s Art of Avoiding the Obvious

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      The son and grandson of Latin jazz royalty is releasing a new album with his quartet Stranger Days, and it’s their most melodically engaging yet.If you pay close enough attention to jazz, Adam O’Farrill might have landed on your radar about a decade ago, when he was still an adolescent. His last name is immediately recognizable — his father and grandfather are Latin jazz royalty — but he stood apart even then, mostly by hanging back and letting his trumpet speak for itself.Since his teens, O’Farrill has prioritized restraint, so that his huge range of inspirations — Olivier Messiaen’s compositions, Miles Davis’s 1970s work, the films of Alfonso Cuarón, the novels of D.H. Lawrence, the contemporary American-Swedish composer Kali Malone — could emulsify into something personal, and devilishly tough to pin down.“I don’t really feel the need to pastiche too heavily,” he said in a phone interview last month, while visiting family in Southern California. “The point is really how you digest it — and in letting that be its own thing, and letting the influences sort of surface when you least expect.”That, he said, feels “more exciting than trying to prove that you’re coming from somewhere” in particular.Now 26, O’Farrill this year was voted the No. 1 “rising star trumpeter” in the DownBeat magazine critics’ poll, and there’s little disagreement that he is among the leading trumpeters in jazz — and perhaps the music’s next major improviser.For the last seven years he has led Stranger Days, a quartet that also features his brother, Zach O’Farrill, on drums, as well as the bassist Walter Stinson. Until last year, its tenor saxophonist was Chad Lefkowitz-Brown; after a brief hiatus, the band recently returned with a new saxophonist, Xavier Del Castillo.On Nov. 12, Stranger Days will release “Visions of Your Other,” its third album, and O’Farrill’s most melodically engaging effort yet.O’Farrill was mentored by the musicians around his father, Arturo O’Farrill, in whose Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra he still occasionally plays.Camilo Fuentealba for The New York TimesWith its spare lineup, the band has given O’Farrill ample room to play around with dimension, scale and tension in his compositions. He thinks of Stinson’s bass as the group’s sonic center, and challenges himself to orient his layers of dynamic melody around that point, even if it’s constantly shifting.Near the end of “Visions of Your Other” comes a standout, “Hopeful Heart,” a neatly balanced tune in an odd meter. O’Farrill begins his solo about halfway through the track, and it sounds as if he’s starting a conversation with a stranger, tentative and broadcasting caution. Then the harmony shifts, and he seems to find a riverbed coursing through the chord changes: His improvising begins to roll down easily, as simple and elegant as the trumpet playing on an old Mexican danzón record.But that flood of momentum only lasts a few bars; soon he pulls back again, holding his notes longer, and subtly gesturing at the influence of the contemporary trumpet star Ambrose Akinmusire. He alternates between beautifully diatonic notes and more worrisome ones, asking you to notice both.O’Farrill grew up enmeshed in New York’s jazz and Latin music scenes, and was mentored by the musicians around his father, Arturo O’Farrill, a Grammy-winning pianist, in whose Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra he still occasionally plays.He started out on piano at age 6, and was almost immediately composing tunes of his own. He took up the trumpet two years later, and started to learn the art of improvising.Anna Webber, a rising saxophonist and composer, has worked with O’Farrill in various situations since he was in high school — though she didn’t realize then how young he was. “He just had this patience and maturity and confidence to his playing,” she said. “Even when he was I guess 17 or 18, it felt like it was already there.”O’Farrill is an expert at “not throwing everything you have into a particular solo,” she said, “always trying to find something new in a given piece, but always letting the music choose which direction you go in.”“I don’t really feel the need to pastiche too heavily,” O’Farrill said. “The point is really how you digest it — and in letting that be its own thing, and letting the influences sort of surface when you least expect.”Camilo Fuentealba for The New York TimesWebber recently invited him to be a part of the band that recorded “Idiom,” her album of dense and rigorous experimental compositions. As she prepared the music, she had one-on-one conversations with each of the group’s 13 members, to ensure the ensemble would feel like an organism in motion, not a firing squad of hired guns. (That band will perform music from “Idiom” on Sep. 23 at Roulette.)Moved, O’Farrill said he was inspired to bring this approach to his own large-ensemble project, Bird Blown Out of Latitude, a nine-piece group for which he wrote a suite of electroacoustic music that surges with rock energy and toggles, sometimes abruptly, between borderline over-spill and near-total silence.Thinking about his son’s sense of efficiency and control, Arturo O’Farrill acknowledged that training in Afro-Latin music forces a trumpeter to learn the importance of precision and leaving space. But he also touched on another of Adam’s childhood pastimes: video games.“The golden rule of video games is that you don’t look at the avatar, you look at the shadow,” Arturo O’Farrill said. “It’s about not declaring. Not stating the obvious, not following the avatar.”It’s through video games that Adam first found out about Ryuichi Sakamoto, the Japanese musician whose old band, Yellow Magic Orchestra, planted the seeds in the 1970s and ’80s for what would become chiptune, or early arcade-game music. “Visions of Your Other” opens with a restive, cycling cover of Sakamoto’s “Stakra.”“He’s a real master of taking a lot of pillars of musical convention — whether it’s pop or more Romantic, Schumann-esque things — and both respecting and dismantling them,” O’Farrill said, explaining what he loves in Sakamoto’s music, though it sounded as if he could be describing his own work. “That’s what’s so brilliant about his voice: It’s both deeply individual and very grounded in musical history, and relatable.” More

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      Phil Schaap, Grammy-Winning Jazz D.J. and Historian, Dies at 70

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      His radio programs, most notably on Columbia University’s WKCR, were full of minutiae he had accumulated during a lifetime immersed in the genre.Phil Schaap, who explored the intricacy and history of jazz in radio programs that he hosted, Grammy-winning liner notes that he wrote, music series that he programmed and classes that he taught, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 70.His partner of 17 years, Susan Shaffer, said the cause was cancer, which he had had for four years.Mr. Schaap was host of an assortment of jazz radio programs over the years, but he was perhaps best known as a fixture on WKCR-FM, the student-run radio station of Columbia University, where his delightfully (some would say infuriatingly) obsessive daily program about the saxophonist Charlie Parker, “Bird Flight,” was an anchor of the morning schedule for decades.On that show, he would parse Parker recordings and minutiae endlessly. In a 2008 article about Mr. Schaap in The New Yorker, David Remnick described one such discourse in detail, relating Mr. Schaap’s aside about the Parker track “Okiedoke,” which veered into a tangent about the pronunciation and meaning of the title and its possible relation to Hopalong Cassidy movies.“Perhaps it was at this point,” Mr. Remnick wrote, “that listeners all over the metropolitan area, what few remained, either shut off their radios, grew weirdly fascinated, or called an ambulance on Schaap’s behalf.”But if jazz was an obsession for Mr. Schaap, it was one built on knowledge. Since childhood he had absorbed everything there was to know about Parker and countless other jazz players, singers, records and subgenres. He won three Grammys for album liner notes — for a Charlie Parker boxed set, not surprisingly (“Bird: The Complete Charlie Parker on Verve,” 1989), but also for “The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve, 1945-1959” (1993) and “Miles Davis & Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings” (1996).He did more than write and talk about jazz; he also knew his way around a studio and was especially adept at unearthing and remastering the works of jazz greats of the past. He shared the best historical album Grammy as a producer on the Holiday and Davis-Evans recordings, as well as on “Louis Armstrong: The Complete Hot Five & Hot Seven Recordings” (2000).Mr. Schaap surrounded by jazz albums at WKCR, which also houses his collection of jazz interviews.Ruby Washington/The New York TimesOver the years he imparted his vast knowledge of jazz to countless students, teaching courses at Columbia, Princeton, the Manhattan School of Music, the Juilliard School, Rutgers University, Jazz at Lincoln Center and elsewhere.“They say I’m a history teacher,” he said in a video interview for the National Endowment for the Arts, which this year named him a Jazz Master, the country’s highest official honor for a living jazz figure, but he viewed his role differently.“I teach listening,” he said.He had what one newspaper article called “a flypaper memory” for jazz history, so much so that musicians would sometimes rely on him to fill in their own spotty memories about play dates and such.“He knows more about us than we know about ourselves,” the great drummer Max Roach told The New York Times in 2001.Mr. Remnick put it simply in the New Yorker article.“In the capital of jazz,” he wrote, “he is its most passionate and voluble fan.”Philip Van Noorden Schaap was born on April 8, 1951, in Queens.His mother, Marjorie Wood Schaap, was a librarian and a classically trained pianist, and his father, Walter, was a jazz scholar and vice president of a company that made educational filmstrips.Phil grew up in the Hollis section of Queens, which had become a magnet for jazz musicians. The trumpeter Roy Eldridge lived nearby. He would see the saxophonist Budd Johnson every day at the bus stop.“Everywhere you turned, it seemed, there was a giant walking down the street,” Mr. Schaap told Newsday in 1995.By 6 he was collecting records. Jo Jones, who had been the drummer for Count Basie’s big band for many years, would sometimes babysit for him; they’d play records, and Mr. Jones would elaborate on what they were hearing.Seeing the 1959 movie “The Gene Krupa Story,” about the famed jazz drummer, fueled his interest even more, and by the time he was at Jamaica High School in Queens he was talking jazz to classmates constantly.“As much as they gave me a hard time and isolated me as a weirdo,” he told Newsday, “they knew what I was talking about. My peers may have laughed at me, but they knew who Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong were.”Mr. Schaap became a D.J. at WKCR in 1970 as a freshman at Columbia, where he was a history major. He set out on a lifelong mission to keep jazz’s past alive.“One thing I wanted to impart,” he told the radio program “Jazz Night in America” this year, “was that the music hadn’t started with John Coltrane.”Mr. Schaap in 2012. “He knows more about us,” the great jazz drummer Max Roach once said, “than we know about ourselves.”Angel Franco/The New York TimesHe graduated from Columbia in 1974, but he was still broadcasting on WKCR half a century later. He started “Bird Flight” in 1981 and — as the “Jazz Night in America” host, the bassist Christian McBride, noted during the recent episode devoted to Mr. Schaap — he kept the show going for some 40 years, longer than Parker, who died at 34, was alive. He also hosted an assortment of other jazz programs at WKCR and other stations over the years, including WNYC in New York and WBGO in Newark, N.J.In 1973 he started programming jazz at the West End, a bar near Columbia, and he continued to do so into the 1990s. He particularly liked to bring in older musicians from the swing era, providing them — as he put it in a 2017 interview with The West Side Spirit — “with a nice last chapter of their lives.”In the “Jazz Night in America” interview, he said the West End series was among his proudest accomplishments.“A lot of them were not even performing anymore,” he said of the saxophonist Earle Warren, the trombonist Dicky Wells and the many other musicians he put onstage there.“They were my friends,” he added. “They were my teachers. They were geniuses.”Mr. Schaap, who lived in Queens and Manhattan, also did a bit of managing — including of the Countsmen, a group whose members included Mr. Wells and Mr. Warren — and curated Jazz at Lincoln Center for a time.As an educator, broadcaster and archivist, he could zero in on details that would escape a casual listener. He’d compare Armstrong and Holiday recordings to show how Armstrong had influenced Holiday’s vocal style. He’d demand that students be able to hear the difference between a solo by Armstrong and one by the cornetist Bix Beiderbecke.Mr. Schaap’s marriage to Ellen LaFurn in 1997 was brief. Ms. Shaffer survives him.His National Endowment for the Arts honor this year was the A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship for Jazz Advocacy, presented to “an individual who has made major contributions to the appreciation, knowledge and advancement of the American jazz art form.”In a 1984 interview with The Times, Mr. Schaap spoke of his motivation for his radio shows and other efforts to spread the gospel of jazz.“I was a public-school music student for 12 years and never heard the name Duke Ellington,” he said. “Now I can correct such wrongs. I can be a Johnny Appleseed through the transmitter.” More

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      A Pandemic, Then a Hurricane, Brings New Orleans Musicians ‘to Their Knees’

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      When Hurricane Ida swept through New Orleans late last month, it took a piece of history with it. The Karnofsky Tailor Shop and Residence, a decrepit red brick building that had served as a kind of second home for Louis Armstrong during his boyhood in the early 1900s, was reduced to rubble.At the Little Gem Saloon next door, where some of the first jazz gigs were played, a three-story-tall mural paying homage to the pioneering cornetist Buddy Bolden was also ruined.Most of the city’s active music venues fared far better, suffering minor roof and water damage. But the storm was only the latest in a series of blows to the people and places that make up the jazz scene, in a city that stakes its identity on live music.“We’ve been without work for over 18 months now,” Big Sam Williams, a trombonist and bandleader, said in a phone interview from his home in the Gentilly neighborhood. “It’s a struggle and we’re just barely making it.”Doug Trager, who manages the Maple Leaf Bar in the Carrollton neighborhood, said that after 446 days of shutdown because of Covid-19, “we were just getting going” again before Ida hit. Now that the storm has created another setback, he said, “we’ll just try to keep waiting it out.”The Little Gem Saloon days after the storm.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesLittle Gem Saloon and the Karnofsky Shop sit on the same block.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesIt has now been a year and a half since the pandemic first prompted a citywide moratorium on indoor performances. On Aug. 16, the city imposed a mandate requiring all patrons at bars and clubs to be vaccinated or recently tested for Covid-19, seeming to open the door to a new phase of reopening.But as the Delta variant surged, the city’s two major jazz festivals, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and French Quarter Fest, both already pushed back from their usual springtime schedule, were called off. That meant that, for the second year in a row, musicians would have to do without the most active period of their work year, when hordes of tourists arrive for the festivals and spillover gigs at clubs often provide enough work for area performers to pay the rent for months.A week and a half after the storm, many in the city’s live-music business say they will not be resting easy, even after things come back online.In interviews, local advocates said that zoning laws had long made small venue operators’ lives difficult, and that neighborhood clubs have run into needless red tape during the pandemic as the city has sometimes enforced strict permitting regulations around outdoor entertainment.“They’re counting on the continued presence of the culture bearers and the musicians, and they’re mistaken this time,” said Ashlye Keaton, a co-founder of the Ella Project, which provides legal assistance to and agitates on behalf of New Orleans artists. “The storm, coupled with Covid, has brought musicians to their knees.”While some venues have survived since March 2020 with substantial help from federal grants, including the $16 billion Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program, other small and vulnerable clubs, particularly those nestled in the city’s working-class neighborhoods, often lacked the capacity or the wherewithal to apply. Many have held on largely thanks to fund-raisers and whatever performances they can safely pull off without raising the hackles of regulators and neighbors.In a statement, a spokeswoman for Mayor LaToya Cantrell said the city will continue to enforce permitting for outdoor live entertainment events on a temporary basis, pointing out that the mayor had lifted its usual cap on those permits during the pandemic.“The Department of Safety & Permits fully supports and is actively working with partners in the City Council to enact legislation which balances the desire for outdoor entertainment, supports local artists and venues as well as preserves the quality of life for the neighbors and residents of each community,” the statement says.Preservation Hall, the 60-year-old landmark in the well-protected French Quarter, appeared to have sustained minimal damage in Hurricane Ida.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesTipitina’s, a concert hall uptown, will require some repairs to its roof.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesMany of the city’s active venues were spared serious damage in the storm.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesPreservation Hall, the 60-year-old landmark in the well-protected French Quarter, appeared to have sustained minimal damage in Hurricane Ida, and is slated to reopen once power is restored. Tipitina’s, a concert hall uptown, located closer to the water, will require some repairs to its roof.The New Orleans Jazz Market, a stately performance center in Central City, appears to have held up well, but it was forced to significantly postpone its programming nonetheless — just days after what was supposed to have been a triumphant reopening for its fall 2021 season.“This is very reminiscent of Hurricane Katrina, and what we went through during that time, and I know a lot of New Orleans musicians are displaced,” said the drummer Adonis Rose, the artistic director of the Jazz Market and leader of its resident big band, the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra. He called the storm a “tragedy, when we were just starting to see some glimmer of hope.”The New Orleans Jazz Market held up well, but it was forced to significantly postpone its programming after the hurricane.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesKermit Ruffins, a trumpeter who runs Kermit’s Tremé Mother-in-Law Lounge, turned his club into a community gathering space during the pandemic.L. Kasimu Harris for The New York TimesKermit Ruffins, a renowned trumpeter who runs Kermit’s Tremé Mother-in-Law Lounge, said in an interview on Monday that the electricity had just come back on at the popular neighborhood club, and he planned to get the place ready to rock.During the pandemic, Ruffins’s club served as a gathering spot and a kind of improvised community cafeteria. He moved concerts outside to the club’s patio, and cooked free meals of red beans and rice for residents of the surrounding Tremé neighborhood, and for musicians who were out of work.“I figured if I cooked for myself, I’d cook for the neighborhood,” Ruffins said.Howie Kaplan, the proprietor of the Howlin’ Wolf, a venue in downtown New Orleans, also began providing meals and other services to musicians in the early days of the pandemic. The program was subsumed into the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic earlier this year; he restarted it at the Howlin’ Wolf last month, in response to Hurricane Ida.“We’ve got a James Beard Award-winning chef on the grill right now, making these fantastic steaks that came from who knows where,” Kaplan said in a phone interview, adding that restaurants had come to donate food that they wouldn’t be able to prepare because of the power outage.Shortly after Hurricane Ida passed over the city, Jordan Hirsch — the editor of the online resource A Closer Walk, which provides detailed information on New Orleans’s heritage sites — set out to determine how the city’s most vulnerable music landmarks had held up.The program providing meals returned to the Howlin’ Wolf after Hurricane Ida.Jillian Marie PhotographyWhen he got to the Karnofsky shop, on South Rampart Street downtown, he saw that the building had become wreckage and the Bolden mural nearby had crumbled. But other equally old jazz landmarks along the block, the former Eagle Saloon and the Iroquois Theater, had miraculously pulled through. All four structures are on the national historic register; it’s safe to say that no single block in the United States today houses more early jazz history.A Cleveland-based developer, GBX Group, recently bought out most of the addresses on the street, and plans to rebuild it into a center of commerce that will also trumpet its role in jazz history. After the storm, GBX hired workers to collect the Karnofsky shop’s bricks, said its C.E.O., Drew Sparacia, hoping to at least partially rebuild the structure using the original materials.But Hirsch asked why the city had not done more to demand that the owners of these historic places, which to the outside observer appear to be mostly abandoned, keep them protected from the elements.“Tropical storms and hurricanes were sort of a constant threat for those buildings,” Hirsch said. “People have been sounding that alarm for 30 years.”Some other sites that made it through Hurricane Ida remain deeply endangered, according to preservationists. John McCusker, a jazz historian and photojournalist who has worked to preserve historic buildings in the city, said that Bolden’s former home in Central City and the old Dew Drop Inn — a midcentury music venue, hotel and community hub — were both in states of relative disrepair.McCusker lamented that the sites’ landlords hadn’t been compelled to restore and preserve the buildings.“We have this wealth of these buildings connected to the birth of this music, and the mechanisms of government have just proven maladroit at protecting them with the same vigor that they would enforce an inappropriate shutter in the French Quarter,” he said. More

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      As Concerts Resume, H.E.R. Will Headline Two Festivals of Her Own

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      After a pandemic-mandated pause, the singer and guitarist’s Lights On Festival brings an R&B showcase to California and Brooklyn this fall.It was going to be the start of something big.In 2019, H.E.R. inaugurated, curated and headlined her own festival: Lights On, a one-day marathon of young R&B acts that also included Jhené Aiko and Ari Lennox. It sold out the nearly 13,000 seats at the Concord Pavilion amphitheater in Concord, Calif., so a sequel in 2020 was the obvious next step. But with the pandemic, it had to wait a year.For Lights On in 2021, H.E.R. didn’t just double down; she quadrupled, going twice as long, bicoastal and multigenerational. “I feel like it’s the perfect way to celebrate opening back up,” the singer and guitarist said by phone from Brooklyn earlier this summer, before rising Covid-19 cases had the concert business stopping, starting up again and adding rules about vaccines, tests and masks. For the events this fall, the festival will be following the rules mandated by each location’s local government. The 2021 Lights On Festival in Concord expanded from one day to two, Sept. 18-19, to be headlined by H.E.R. and the earth mother of neo-soul, Erykah Badu; it sold out immediately. Then H.E.R. announced an East Coast edition of Lights On: two days at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn Oct. 21-22, with H.E.R. and the suave 1990s hitmaker Maxwell topping the bill. (On both coasts, the lineup also includes Bryson Tiller; H.E.R. did her first national tour, in 2017, opening for Tiller.)With more than a dozen acts on the festival bills — along with surprise guests, H.E.R. promised — each day’s show is scheduled to run about eight hours. The California version of Lights On extends outdoors, with carnival rides, game arcades and sponsored exhibitions like Fender House, where concertgoers can try playing guitar. The large lobby at Barclays will also house some festival-style attractions.R&B “makes you want to fall in love,” H.E.R. said. “It tells stories. It helps you through heartbreak. It’s literally the soundtrack of our lives.”Natalia Mantini for The New York TimesH.E.R., 24, was born Gabriella Wilson; she has said that H.E.R. stands for Having Everything Revealed. She has been performing her own songs since she was a teenager: singing, rapping and playing keyboards, guitar and bass, flaunting an old-school, hands-on musicianship in the lineage of Prince and D’Angelo. H.E.R. won her first Grammy awards in 2019 for best R&B album (“H.E.R.”) and best R&B performance. When Shawn Gee, the president of Live Nation Urban, approached H.E.R. to build her own festival, she had a clear concept.“R&B is not dead — that’s the slogan, that’s the theme,” H.E.R. said. “Rhythm and blues is the foundation of everything. It’s raw, authentic, organic — just truth and feeling, straight feeling. It makes you want to fall in love. It tells stories. It helps you through heartbreak. It’s literally the soundtrack of our lives. There’s so many different elements of R&B that live in other music, like country and pop and so many other genres. It’s in everything. And people show up for R&B.”When the pandemic shut everything down, H.E.R. said she considered mounting a virtual festival, but, “It didn’t work out the way that we wanted it to.”But she still had nationwide exposure during the pandemic. She sang Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” for the Emmy Awards in 2020, “America the Beautiful” before the Super Bowl in February 2021 and “Hold On” as a duet with the country singer Chris Stapleton at the CMT Awards in June. In April, she performed “Fight for You” — the song she wrote for the film “Judas and the Black Messiah” — at the Oscars; it won the award for best original song.During the pandemic, all sorts of musicians did webcasts from their homes or in other bare-bones settings. H.E.R. started an Instagram Live series, “Girls With Guitars,” that became a showcase for fellow female songwriters. She believes the pandemic reminded listeners of the value of unvarnished, hands-on musicianship. “I think people forgot how much they loved that intimate feeling of just a singer and a guitar,” she said. “Like, ‘I haven’t seen that in a long time. I haven’t felt that in a long time.’ Now you’re watching me from my living room, and not a big stage, and you get a different feeling. I definitely think people were missing that.”H.E.R. onstage at Lights On in 2019.Tim Mosenfelder/Getty ImagesBut H.E.R. got nostalgic for making live music in person again. “There’s nothing like performing in front of an audience that’s there for you, and that knows the songs,” she said. “It’s a different energy when you can be connected to the fans in that way. That’s what I’m looking forward to the most with everything coming back — just that connection.”H.E.R. also used the isolation of quarantine, she said, to center herself after years of touring: to cook and play video games along with writing and recording songs. She completed an album, “Back of My Mind,” that was released in June, while in 2020 she also wrote “I Can’t Breathe,” her response to the police murder of George Floyd and to Black Lives Matter protests. “I Can’t Breathe” won the Grammy for song of the year in 2021.“Seeing somebody that looks like me being killed or attacked — of course I’m going to write about it and feel very deeply about it,” she said. “As I grow older, and I’m seeing more and I’m understanding more and I’m learning more about my history, I think all artists should feel a responsibility to talk about what they feel. And how could you not feel something towards an event like that?”As the prospect of live concerts re-emerged, H.E.R. was eager to resume and expand Lights On. “With more people vaccinated and things opening up, being able to put on a festival didn’t seem ridiculous,” she said. “We knew that things would have to come back eventually. We’ve been planning for the past year, but really just locking everything in” since January, H.E.R. said.Putting on a festival in 2021 means reactivating complex mechanisms: staging, sound systems, lighting, security, food, promotion, sponsorships and more. But Gee, of Live Nation, said production logistics were easier to restart than might have been expected.H.E.R. said she used the isolation of quarantine to center herself after years on the road.Natalia Mantini for The New York Times“Everyone was ready to go back to work, but everyone had to wait until when they were told when they could go back to work,” he said by phone from Philadelphia. “Fans were ready to go back and experience live music again in a safe, healthy environment. As an industry we listened to science, and we listened to governance. Each local government decided what can be done. And once everyone got the green light to start productions again, ramping back up was almost like muscle memory.”Concert production companies had not been entirely dormant during quarantine. They had geared up to produce livestreams and other online shows instead. “Every virtual event still needed a big production team,” said Jeanine McLean-Williams, the president of MBK Entertainment, which manages H.E.R. “There was so much Covid testing! Even now, to this day, I’m vaccinated, but we’re Covid tested three times a week.”The latest surge in infections, and the rise of the Delta variant, still presents uncertainties. “Honestly, we’ve just been praying everything goes well, and it always works out,” H.E.R. said. “We’ve been very blessed to have everything just fall into place. And if it didn’t, then it was for a reason and we recognize that later. So I’m going all in on this and I’m excited and I’m hopeful.” More