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      Jesse Colin Young, Singer Who Urged Us to ‘Get Together,’ Dies at 83

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      As the leader of the Youngbloods, he sang one of the enduring anthems of the peace-and-love era. He went on to have a prolific career as a solo artist.Jesse Colin Young, whose sincere tenor vocals for the Youngbloods graced one of the most loving anthems of the hippie era, “Get Together,” a Top Five hit in 1969, before he went on to pursue a solo career that lasted more than five decades, died on Sunday at his home in Aiken, S.C. He was 83.His death was announced by his publicist, Michael Jensen, who did not specify a cause.Mr. Young didn’t write “Get Together.” It was composed by the folk singer Dino Valenti, later a member of the band Quicksilver Messenger Service, under the pseudonym Chet Powers. But Mr. Young’s voice idealized it, and the chorus he sang — “Come on people now/Smile on your brother/Everybody get together/Try to love one another right now” — became one of the best-known refrains of the 1960s.“The lyrics are just to die for,” Mr. Young told the website The Arts Fuse in 2018. “To this day, it gives me a thrill to play it.”He composed many other key pieces of the Youngbloods’ repertoire during their prime in the late 1960s, including the brooding “Darkness, Darkness,” which reflected the terror he imagined American soldiers were experiencing during the Vietnam War; “Sunlight,” a ravishing ode to passionate love; and “Ride the Wind,” a jazzy paean to freedom.The lyrics to many of Mr. Young’s songs celebrated the gifts nature gives, from the dreamy play of sunlight on skin to the unfettered sweep of wind in the hair.“Love of the natural world is as much a theme in my music as romantic love,” he told the website Music Aficionado in 2016. “I get more out of walking over the ridgetop in Marin and looking out at the national seashore than any drugs I ever did” — a reference to the Northern California county where he lived for much of his career.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Visits Kennedy Center for First Time Since Taking It Over

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      President Trump visited the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington on Monday for the first time since he stunned the cultural and political establishment nearly five weeks ago by taking over the institution.“We’re here to have our first board meeting,” he told reporters as he toured the center with his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and a few of the people he has appointed to the center’s board, including the country singer Lee Greenwood (he sings “God Bless the U.S.A.”) and the Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiromo.He had some thoughts about programming.“I never liked ‘Hamilton’ very much,” he said, taking a poke at a show that canceled a planned tour there next year to protest his takeover of the institution, which had long been bipartisan.When he was a young man Mr. Trump had dreams of one day becoming a Broadway producer himself. Now, he said, the Kennedy Center’s focus would be on producing “Broadway hits.”“We’re going to get some very good shows,” he said. “I guess we have ‘Les Miz’ coming.” (Before he was elected to a second term, the Kennedy Center had announced that “Les Misérables,” a longtime Trump favorite, would be performing there in June and July.)Mr. Trump made himself chairman of the Kennedy Center’s board last month after dismissing all of the Biden-era appointees, upending a bipartisan tradition that had endured for decades.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Universal Music Calls Drake’s ‘Not Like Us’ Lawsuit ‘Misguided’

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      The label behind Drake and Kendrick Lamar filed a motion on Monday to dismiss Drake’s lawsuit, which accused it of defamation and harassment over the diss song.With the Drake takedown “Not Like Us,” by Kendrick Lamar, now officially the most celebrated rap diss ever, the record label behind both artists is seeking to dismiss Drake’s defamation lawsuit, arguing that its lyrics are merely “a series of hyperbolic insults,” the lingua franca of any hip-hop feud.In a filing on Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the company, known as UMG, provided its first substantial response to the lawsuit brought in January on behalf of Drake, the artist born Aubrey Drake Graham. He accused the label of defamation and harassment, claiming that Lamar’s track “intended to convey the specific, unmistakable, and false factual allegation that Drake is a criminal pedophile, and to suggest that the public should resort to vigilante justice in response.”Last month, “Not Like Us,” which accuses Drake of liking young girls, among other personal attacks, won five Grammy Awards, including song and record of the year, and provided the centerpiece for Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime performance.According to UMG, Drake “lost a rap battle that he provoked and in which he willingly participated” and then “sued his own record label in a misguided attempt to salve his wounds.” The label, citing in its filing lyrics by both artists tied to last year’s heavyweight fight, added that Drake had leveled “similarly incendiary attacks at Lamar” and that the tone and context of the back-and-forth made the defamation claim impossible to prove.The lawsuit, UMG said in its filing, “disregards the other Drake and Lamar diss tracks that surrounded ‘Not Like Us’ as well as the conventions of the diss track genre,” adding: “diss tracks are a popular and celebrated artform centered around outrageous insults, and they would be severely chilled if Drake’s suit were permitted to proceed.”In the suit, lawyers for Drake had argued that “Not Like Us” was beyond the pale of a typical rap beef because the song’s accusations were framed as fact — for instance, using as its cover art a map of Drake’s home with sex offender markers superimposed on top — and that it led to real world violence, citing a shooting at the residence days after the song’s release that injured a security guard, calling it “the 2024 equivalent of ‘Pizzagate.’” The claim also cited two other attempted trespassers in the days that followed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘We Are the Lucky Ones’ Gives Operatic Voice to a Generation

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      This new opera assembles a compassionate, haunting portrait of the middle class that emerged from World War II and considers what they leave behind.Theaters are never truly dark. In between performances, a simple floor lamp is placed onstage and switched on. It’s called a ghost light, and depending on whom you ask, it’s either a practical safety measure or a way to ward off spirits. Some say it actually welcomes them.As audience members entered the auditorium of the Dutch National Opera on Friday for the world premiere of “We Are the Lucky Ones,” they were greeted by a ghost light that, true to its history, was open to interpretation.For one, it was a signal of artifice. “We Are the Lucky Ones” may be a moving work of music theater, but it is, ultimately, theater: a space for storytelling and reflection. The ghost light, though, also had a hint of the supernatural, summoning eight singers to an uncanny, purgatorial space so they could share their secrets, regrets and worries for the future.Their stories are, for the most part, true. “We Are the Lucky Ones,” with music by Philip Venables and a libretto by Ted Huffman and Nina Segal, is based on interviews with about 80 people born between 1940 and 1949, distilled into a headlong rush through time.What emerges, in an opera as compact and overwhelming as “Wozzeck,” is a portrait of a generation told with compassion, wisdom and artfulness. You can imagine a version of this story as an indictment of the age group that, as one character admits, “made a mess of things.” But while opera thrives on simplicity, with love blossoming over the few minutes of an aria, “We Are the Lucky Ones” is anything but simple.Stucker, left, and Rosen, in the opera, which is based on interviews with about 80 people born between 1940 and 1949.Dutch National Opera. Photo: Koen BroosWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Louis Ballard, the ‘Father’ of Native American Composers, Hasn’t Gotten His Due

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      More than 50,000 spectators filled Kennedy Stadium in Washington on Nov. 27, 1977, for a football game between two bitter rivals, the Washington Redskins and Dallas Cowboys.There was drama in the game, with both teams in the hunt for a playoff berth, but more unusual was the entertainment before and at halftime: an enormous spectacle of Native American music, dance and history. It was, The Washington Post reported, “part of a new movement to re-establish American Indians as first-class citizens in the United States.”At the center of the event was the National Indian Honor Band — 150 students chosen from 80 tribes in 30 states — which played four pieces by Louis W. Ballard. With tens of thousands of listeners, this was probably the most prominent platform a Native American composer had ever had.The performance was a career highlight for Ballard, a pioneering figure who paved the way for the broad upswing in Native composers over the past few decades. He was among the first to negotiate issues that younger artists still face: melding Native and Western classical traditions; the role of his music in social and political activism; expressing his community’s deep history and culture in a modern way.“Ballard was the grandfather of Native American composers,” Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, one of that next generation of artists, said in an interview. Tim Long, a conductor and teacher, echoed that sentiment: “He is the father of all of us who are Native people in classical music right now.”A composer as well as a pianist, conductor, filmmaker, writer, teacher, compiler of Native songs and national curriculum specialist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Ballard had his music performed throughout the United States and Europe. He studied with Darius Milhaud and brought Stravinsky to a ceremonial Deer Dance in New Mexico.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Larry Bell’s Vast Collection of 12-String Acoustic Guitars

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      The artist Larry Bell has amassed a vast collection of acoustic instruments, carefully stored in a climate-controlled room.In My Obsession, one creative person reveals their most prized collection.The artist Larry Bell, 85, was born with severe undiagnosed hearing loss. “I didn’t know it, and neither did my parents,” he said. Unsurprisingly, music lessons were a struggle but, when he was about 17, he saw a strange guitar hanging in a pawnshop window in Downtown Los Angeles. “I had never seen anything quite like it because it had 12 strings instead of six,” he said. “I asked the man behind the counter if I could see it. I just dragged the back of my nails across the strings, and it was a complete epiphany. I heard it. And not only did I hear it, I could feel it.” Bell, who is best known for minimalist glass sculptures that explore the properties of light and color, has been collecting 12-string guitars ever since. Hundreds hang in their own climate-controlled room in his studio in Taos, N.M. Twelve-strings are more sensitive than six-strings: They’re difficult to tune and hard to play, and that’s what Bell appreciates. “My collection is about my passion for improbable things,” he said.The collection: Acoustic 12-string guitars.Number of pieces in the collection: “Roughly 300.”Recent purchase: “I had some spare time [during the run of the retrospective ‘Larry Bell: Improvisations’ at the Phoenix Art Museum], and one of the curators drove me around to see some guitar shops. I came across a fantastic instrument made in Vietnam. The sound’s sort of a cross between a harpsichord and an organ.”Weirdest: “In my mind, they’re all unusual because 12-strings aren’t a popular kind of guitar. Years ago, I commissioned a fantastic musician to make me a 12-string guitar that was small enough to slip under the seat of an airplane.”Most expensive: “Ten thousand dollars for a McPherson [a guitar handmade in Sparta, Wis.].”Most precious: “A little Mexican instrument that was made [about 50 years ago] in a town called Paracho, Michoacán. I paid about $600 [for it] at a store in L.A. It probably cost someone $12 when it was new. As it turned out, it was absolutely extraordinary in terms of its playability. How much a guitar costs is not necessarily what determines how good it is.”One previously owned by somebody famous: “Actually, it’s just the opposite. A few musicians borrowed them and never gave them back.”One that was damaged: “They crack all the time. It’s very dry here. I have four humidifiers that run around the clock to feed these guys water so they don’t turn to dust.”Plans for the collection: “I wonder how many people’s guitars burned up in the terrible situation in Los Angeles. I’m thinking of giving the whole collection to somebody who can put the instruments in the hands of those who might need them.”This interview has been edited and condensed. More

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      So You Think You Can Be a Cabaret Star

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      On a crisp Saturday morning in late February, Rachel Murdy joined a group of singers of various ages and experience levels at the 92nd Street Y and sang “Party Hat,” delivering the refrain “I’m going to put a party hat on my cat” with a playful spark.Murdy, a seasoned 56-year-old performer and director, had brought along her 7-year-old Chihuahua, Bibi. “I’m not a cat person,” she noted. But she said she could relate to the lyric, which advocates tackling loneliness with giddy defiance.Joe Iconis, the composter, lyricist and performer, who had been swaying enthusiastically throughout Murdy’s presentation, approved. “You’re so right on,” he said, as he would repeatedly when the participants, chosen from a pool who had submitted videos, performed. “It’s about a human being looking for a connection.”Rachel Murdy entertaining her classmates during the 92NY workshop.Hannah Edelman for The New York TimesThe group had gathered for a cabaret performance workshop that aims to foster fresh talent in a classic art form that has long been pronounced dead, only to rise again and again. Each had prepared a song by Iconis, whose musicals include the Tony Award-nominated “Be More Chill” and “The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical,” set to arrive in Washington, D.C., in June.“I’ll do anything I can to help light a fire, especially in young people,” Iconis said in an interview, “to show them you can have all those things that are exciting about pop singing and also learn how to interpret the lyric, and make the performance of a song a dramatic experience.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Seeks More Sway in Picking Kennedy Center Honorees

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      When President Trump was criticized by some of the artists who were recognized at the annual Kennedy Center Honors program during his first term, he responded by boycotting the show, breaking with decades of precedent.Now, as he leads a sweeping takeover of the Kennedy Center in his second term, Mr. Trump is seeking changes that will allow him greater sway in the selection of honorees, according to two people briefed on the matter who were granted anonymity to describe confidential discussions.Mr. Trump, who is now the chairman of the Kennedy Center, is scheduled to speak at a meeting of its board on Monday afternoon, when proposed changes to the honors advisory committee will be on the agenda, according to the individuals and a copy of the agenda that was obtained by The New York Times.Since 1978, the Kennedy Center has named honorees to be recognized each year at a star-studded televised gala without interference from the White House. The center has honored a broad spectrum of artists and performers, including Lucille Ball, Dolly Parton, Clint Eastwood, Fred Astaire and the Grateful Dead.But Mr. Trump is seeking a more direct role. He replaced all the Biden appointees on the center’s once-bipartisan board, was elected chairman and installed a loyalist, Richard Grenell, as its president. The board is scheduled to meet Monday to consider a resolution, which has not been previously reported, that would give Mr. Trump more control over the selection of honorees.The resolution states that members of the committee responsible for selecting honorees “shall be appointed by the chairman of the board, and shall serve at the pleasure of the chairman,” according to a copy obtained by The Times. That would give Mr. Trump broad power to hire and fire those who help decide who will receive the honor, which recognizes people and institutions for lifetime artistic achievement. The committee will recommend a slate of honorees to the Kennedy Center’s president for approval, the resolution says.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More