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      Chai, a Band With an Ethos, an Aesthetic and a Sound All Its Own

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      This Japanese quartet undercuts traditional ideas about cuteness, gender and rock bands. Its latest album, “Wink,” is arriving on Sub Pop in the United States.The Japanese band Chai is a professional purveyor of whimsy. In concert, its four members perform wearing an array of colorful, coordinated outfits — loads of pink, lots of orange, some reds and greens, but never black. Its lead singer and keyboardist, Mana, will sometimes deliver exuberant monologues about “Neo-Kawaii,” a band-created ethos meant to redefine modern ideals of cuteness. (The phrase translates directly to “new cute.”) The group has been known to cover Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon.” The refrain of one of its most popular songs, “N.E.O.,” goes “You are so cute! Nice face!”“We’ve always been kind of energetic,” Mana said in a recent video interview from Tokyo, through the band’s translator. “It’s not that we decided to just go out and be extroverts.”That said, the band ran into a minor problem when working on the follow-up to its 2019 breakout record, “Punk”: Channeling all that energy in the studio wasn’t so easy, and its attempts to “dumb it down” weren’t very fun. “It’s actually harder for us than to go all out onstage,” Mana said.But when the pandemic forced the group to remain in Japan rather than continue touring the world, its members found themselves with an unexpected moment to breathe. They pursued other interests — Mana started an Instagram for dog lovers; the bassist/lyricist Yuuki got into pottery — and more consciously considered the new music they wanted to make, now that they didn’t have to hunt for studio time in between global commitments.Owing to the band’s growing debt to hip-hop, the drummer Yuna started experimenting with her playing technique in GarageBand. And Mana, who primarily drives the band’s music, worked on cultivating an album she described as “more than a human friend — someone you can go to when you’re upset, someone you go to when you’re happy, when you wake up first thing in the morning, when you want to cry.”“We didn’t fit into this definition of cute, which was considered the biggest form of accomplishment in Japan,” Mana said.  “Once we started exchanging our insecurities, it gradually became a kind of comfort blanket.”Shina Peng for The New York TimesThe result is “Wink,” out Friday, a record that doesn’t dim Chai’s enthusiasm so much as redirect it across genres and moods. Because Chai looks like a traditional four-piece band, it’s easy to see it as a rock group, when in reality its sound reflects a style-bending pool of influences. On “Wink,” the scrappiness of Chai’s early records is peeled back to reveal a dreamier collection of melodies driven by Yuna’s sprightly and varied drumming.A song like “Nobody Knows We Are Fun” lingers in a hazy, whispered register before suddenly flowering into a chanted singalong, while “End” energetically toggles between rapping and singing. (Mana cited the R&B group TLC and the rapper Mac Miller as influences.) “Wink” will be released in Japan through Sony, but the band signed with the prestigious indie label Sub Pop — one of a handful of suitors — for its American release.“As a listener, you never really know what to expect when you hear a new song,” said Julien Ehrlich of the band Whitney, who toured with Chai at the beginning of 2020. “It’s completely not formulaic, the way that they create things — and they’re always trying to change it, which is really exciting.”The groundwork for Chai was laid nearly a decade ago when Mana and her twin sister, Kana, met Yuna at their high school’s music club in Nagoya. Not long after, Mana and Yuuki were introduced through mutual friends in their undergraduate program. Though Yuuki had never played an instrument before, she immediately bought into her new friend’s vision of forming a band.“We never really had this expectation of what exactly a band is, because none of us had ever officially done it before,” she said. “But we just naturally became friends, and it kind of all shaped on its own.”Growing up, the members of Chai hadn’t been exposed to much Western music. That changed in college, when a friend of Yuna’s made them a playlist of eclectic artists who would become formative influences: Basement Jaxx, Tune-Yards, Justice. Very quickly, the band formed a distinct identity — matching outfits, an obsession with food — and bonded over its alienation from the beauty standards of its native country.“We didn’t fit into this definition of cute, which was considered the biggest form of accomplishment in Japan,” Mana said, while wearing a basic red T-shirt reading “Overdressed” on the front. “Once we started exchanging our insecurities, it gradually became a kind of comfort blanket.”She pointed to their adoption of the color pink, widely considered a childish hue in Japan, as one such way of repudiating those expectations. Early on, the members also claimed they used stage names as a way of obscuring their identities. Over time they’ve admitted that Yuuki and Yuna are real names, while Mana and Kana are adopted from nicknames — it was just cooler to imagine otherwise, and definitely cooler when styled in all caps, as the band does.“It’s actually really fun to get more recognition overseas, because then we can actually bring that back to Japan,” Yuuki said.Shina Peng for The New York TimesWhile the band initially struggled to find local support, it accrued momentum with every foray out of the country. After successful appearances at South by Southwest and Pitchfork Music Festival in 2019, the members realized they were finding the audience they’d been looking for. “It’s actually really fun to get more recognition overseas, because then we can actually bring that back to Japan,” Yuuki said. “Even if they don’t understand, we can actually say ‘Hey, the world understands, so I think we’re OK with it.’”The Devo co-founder Gerald Casale, who met the band at a 2018 show, said this sense of exclusion from contemporary music had also animated Devo’s entry into the industry. “We were reacting to just how far off-track we thought pop music had gotten, and how lame it was,” he said. He praised Chai’s “precise, architectural” stage presence, and said that he’d hoped to bring them aboard for a planned (but eventually canceled) Devo tour.One of Chai’s more identifiable and charming traits is its lyrical preoccupation with food: “Karaage,” which analogizes young love to a hot meal, is named for Japanese-style fried chicken, while “Maybe Chocolate Chips” compares body moles to the confection in the title. Asked about this, Yuuki, who composes the band’s lyrics, said food was directly tied to the band’s mission of self love. “I feel like the first type of love you recognize is ‘what I want to eat,’” she said. “Music is important to us, but food is, too — it easily just connects for us.” (The band lives its credo: Whitney’s Ehrlich said that Chai had sought out an ice-cream parlor every day of its tour.)Japan has pitched from one state of lockdown to another, but the band has started scheduling live concerts for the summer and beyond. Finding a way to perform these quieter songs in concert is a new challenge, as is resuming the band’s momentum, but the Chai members were sanguine about the future. “It’s because it’s the four of us that we have a special message to say,” Mana said. “We never even really consider ourselves just a band — we dance, sometimes we do D.J. sets, we do all different types of things. We consider our genre just ‘Chai.’” More

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      T.I. and Tiny Under Investigation by Los Angeles Police

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      The Atlanta rapper and his wife, a singer, have faced accusations from multiple women who said that they were drugged and sexually assaulted by the couple. T.I. and Tameka Harris have denied the allegations.The multiplatinum rapper T.I., born Clifford Harris, and his wife, Tameka Harris, an R&B singer known as Tiny, are the subjects of an active criminal investigation in Los Angeles following claims that they drugged and sexually assaulted women there, authorities said on Tuesday.Tyrone A. Blackburn, a lawyer representing multiple women who have made accusations against the Harrises in several states, said that one of his clients had met virtually last month with detectives for the Los Angeles Police Department regarding an incident that occurred in 2005. A police spokesman, Officer Jader Chaves, confirmed that the investigation into T.I. and Ms. Harris was active.The woman, a military veteran who requested anonymity to protect her family, said in an earlier interview with The New York Times that she met the famous couple in the V.I.P. section of a Los Angeles club. Ms. Harris offered her a sip of a drink that the veteran later came to believe was spiked with a drug that left her incapacitated. T.I. and Ms. Harris then raped her in a hotel room, the woman said, calling the incident a life-altering trauma. The couple has denied any instances of non-consensual sex.The statute of limitations for most rape cases in Los Angeles before 2017 is typically 10 years. But Mr. Blackburn noted that there are exceptions allowing the authorities to pursue older cases, as they did recently when they brought charges against Harvey Weinstein related to an incident that took place more than a decade ago.The Los Angeles police declined to discuss the investigation except to confirm that it was active. News of the investigation was first published by The Daily Beast.Steve Sadow, a lawyer for T.I. and Ms. Harris, said that they had not been contacted by the Los Angeles police or “any member of law enforcement from any other jurisdiction in the country.” Mr. Sadow added that the woman’s anonymity was “preventing us from being in a position to disprove or refute her allegations — or even examine them.”In February, Mr. Blackburn sent letters to law enforcement authorities in Georgia and California calling for criminal inquiries on behalf of 11 people who said they had been victimized by the Atlanta-based couple or members of their entourage. The letters described “eerily similar” experiences of “sexual abuse, forced ingestion of illegal narcotics, kidnapping, terroristic threats and false imprisonment” at the hands of T.I., Ms. Harris and their associates.At the time, representatives for the couple called the claims “a sordid shakedown campaign.”In a statement on Tuesday, Mr. Blackburn said he was pleased by the progress of the investigation in Los Angeles. The identities of the women “are known to law enforcement, and that’s what matters,” he said. “We await further updates from the L.A.P.D.”In addition to the military veteran who spoke with investigators, Mr. Blackburn said in an interview that he represented at least two additional clients who wished to speak with the Los Angeles police.One woman, Rachelle Jenks, originally met T.I. and Ms. Harris in Las Vegas in 2010, when she said she was drugged and sexually assaulted, according to a police report filed there this month. Ms. Jenks said she was then transported to Los Angeles by the couple and again forced to engage in sex acts. Mr. Blackburn said that he expected her case to be referred to the Los Angeles police.The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department confirmed in a statement that it had received a claim of sexual assault involving the couple, but said that the incident fell outside of the statute of limitations for the crime. “Based on this, the case was closed, which is standard procedure for crimes reported outside of the statute,” the Las Vegas police said.A third woman, referred to anonymously in Mr. Blackburn’s letters to law enforcement, was an old friend of Ms. Harris who started working for the celebrity couple in 2005, traveling with them from Atlanta to Los Angeles as part of their entourage. Mr. Blackburn wrote in the letters that the couple had “forced her to engage in sexual acts with different women against her will,” and the woman confirmed that account in interviews with The Times.In addition to his success in music, T.I., 40, has reinvented himself as a businessman and community leader in Atlanta, and he has starred in reality shows that focus on his parenting of a blended family with Ms. Harris, 45. Production of the show “T.I. & Tiny: Friends & Family Hustle” was postponed by VH1 and MTV Entertainment following the sexual assault allegations earlier this year. More

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      Mixing Healing and Strife, the Met Opera Sings Again

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      The company’s continuing labor tensions hovered over two consoling concerts featuring its orchestra and chorus.On Sunday evening, 430 days after the coronavirus pandemic closed the Metropolitan Opera, the company returned.Members of the Met’s orchestra and chorus, conducted by its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and joined by four soloists, twice presented a 45-minute program for an audience of 150.The location wasn’t the company’s home at Lincoln Center; instead, the concerts were held at the Knockdown Center, a door factory turned rough-hewed art and performance space in Queens. But these were truly, finally Met forces, brought together amid the contentious labor disputes that still threaten the company’s official reopening, planned for September.“What a privilege it is to say good evening to you, to welcome you here,” Nézet-Séguin told the audience before beginning the concert. The purpose, he added, was primarily to “resume what we do” — that is, to make music. But the performances were also intended as an expression of gratitude to essential workers; some tickets were set aside for emergency medical staff affiliated with Mount Sinai’s hospital in Queens.Owens sang an aria from Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesNézet-Séguin, left, conducted as Costello sang.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesHovering over the concerts were the Met’s continuing labor tensions. The company’s closure has cost it some $150 million in revenue, and its many union workers were furloughed early in the pandemic. Peter Gelb, the general manager, has, like administrators at performing arts institutions everywhere, been trying to exact long-term concessions from the Met’s labor force, which the unions are strongly resisting.Just days ago, the Met reached a deal with the union representing its chorus, dancers and some others. But talks with the orchestra musicians, who agreed in March to begin accepting some payments in exchange for returning to the bargaining table, are ongoing. And on Thursday, the union representing the stage hands, who have been locked out since December, held a boisterous rally outside Lincoln Center.Without glossing over the strife, the Queens concerts (I attended the second) came across as a genuine gesture of good will and shared artistic commitment. Nézet-Séguin told the crowd that he and the artists had tried to devise a program that reflected the hardships we’ve all endured, but also offered comfort and hope.The program also made it clear that the Met is attempting to address longstanding issues of inequity brought to the forefront of the nation’s consciousness in months of demonstrations against racial injustice last year. Three of the four superb solo singers were Black, and the offerings included an aria from Terence Blanchard’s opera “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which is planned to open the Met’s season in September — the first work by a Black composer ever presented by the company.Blue sang the tender “Ave Maria” from Verdi’s “Otello.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAustin sang an aria from “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the Terence Blanchard opera planned to reopen the Met in September.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOn Sunday the young baritone Justin Austin sang “Peculiar Grace,” in which Charles, the main character in the opera — which is based on a memoir by Charles M. Blow, an opinion columnist for The New York Times — thinks back to his troubled youth, growing up poor in Louisiana, “a Black boy from a lawless town,” he sings in the words of Kasi Lemmons’s libretto.“Where everyone carries a gun,” Austin sang with burnished sound and vulnerability,” “I carried shame in a holster ’round my waist.”The concert opened with the 12 choristers and 20 orchestra players giving a soft-spoken account of the poignant “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s Requiem. Then the soprano Angel Blue brought radiant sound and aching sensitivity to the “Ave Maria” from Verdi’s “Otello.”Next came several excerpts from Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte,” starting with the overture, which here sounded less an introduction to a comedic romp than a sublime prelude to a tale of a quest for wisdom, purpose and love. The young quester, Prince Tamino, sings an aria of smitten devotion to an image of the lovely Pamina, touching music sung ardently here by the tenor Stephen Costello. And when the stentorian bass-baritone Eric Owens sang Sarastro’s “In diesen heil’gen Hallen,” whose German words translate to “Within these sacred portals revenge is unknown,” seemed fitting for the Knockdown Center, which felt like a spacious yet intimate community sanctuary.An audience of about 150, included some tickets reserved for emergency workers from Mount Sinai’s hospital in Queens, was allowed into the concerts.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe program continued with Blue and the choristers giving a serene account of “Placido è il mar” from Mozart’s “Idomeneo”; Blue and Costello in a duet from Verdi’s “La Traviata”; Blue and the chorus in the consoling “Laudate dominum” from Mozart’s “Vesperae Solennes de Confessore”; and, to end, Owens and the chorus in the affirming final scene of “Die Zauberflöte.”The Queens concerts were not the only demonstration on Sunday of the Met trying, in the face of continuing hardships from the pandemic, to keep its mission going. Typically, the finals of the company’s National Council Auditions attract a large, enthusiastic audience to the opera house, where 10 or so young finalists in this prestigious competition perform two arias each onstage, with the orchestra in the pit.This year the entire competition, which has been renamed for the Met donors Eric and Dominique Laffont, took place online. On Sunday, 10 impressive finalists performed live from various locations across the United States — as well as two from Seoul, where it was early in the morning. Rather than a full orchestra, each singer was accompanied by a pianist; not surprisingly, the quality of the transmissions varied, and assessing these young voices remotely hardly compared with hearing them at the house. I did not envy the judges.Raven McMillon, a soprano from Baltimore, was among the five winners of the Met’s annual young artists competition.via Metropolitan OperaStill, the five winners all came across as gifted singers with great potential: Emily Sierra, a mezzo-soprano from Chicago, who brought a rich, secure voice to arias from “Die Fledermaus” and “La Clemenza di Tito”; Raven McMillon, a soprano from Baltimore, who sang radiantly in selections from “Cendrillon” and “Der Rosenkavalier”; Duke Kim, a tenor from Seoul, who was excellent in Tamino’s aria from “Die Zauberflöte” and gleefully tossed off the nine high C’s of “Ah! mes ami” from “La Fille du Régiment”; Emily Treigle, a mezzo-soprano from New Orleans, who gave assured accounts of arias from “Orfeo ed Euridice” and “La Clemenza di Tito”; and Hyoyoung Kim, a coloratura soprano from Seoul, who seemed set for a big career singing from “Lakmé” and “Rigoletto.”The other, also worthy finalists were Brittany Olivia Logan (soprano), Erica Petrocelli (soprano), Timothy Murray (baritone), Murrella Parton (soprano) and Jongwon Han (bass-baritone).You couldn’t help but think that several of them will end up singing someday with the company at the Met’s theater. It was a prospect that made reopening the house an even more exciting and urgent matter. More

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      Jack Terricloth, Punk Rocker With a Cabaret Air, Dies at 50

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      As the devilishly smarmy vocalist and ringleader of the World/Inferno Friendship Society, he melded punk defiance with decadent theatricality.To old friends who met him backstage, he was Pete Ventantonio, a punk rocker from Bridgewater, N.J. On his records, he sometimes preferred whimsical credits like Marcello DiTerriclothia or Favorite Singer Who Goes With Everything.But to the fans who swarmed his concerts, he was Jack Terricloth: the crooning, bellowing, devilishly smarmy vocalist and ringleader of the World/Inferno Friendship Society, a band with an ever-changing lineup that melded punk defiance with the decadent theatricality of Weimar-era cabaret.Over more than 20 years, the group built a cultlike following with a rock sound embellished by piano, violin and a brass section. Its live shows — featuring Jack Terricloth in a dark suit and slicked-back hair, like a 1930s dandy — were key to the rise of the so-called punk cabaret movement in the mid-2000s, which also included Gogol Bordello and the Dresden Dolls.Although largely ignored by the mainstream music industry, World/Inferno, which was based in Brooklyn, made inroads with major arts institutions like the Public Theater in New York and the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. in Charleston, S.C., for one of Jack Terricloth’s signature projects: an exploration of the life of Peter Lorre, the goggle-eyed character actor known for movies like “Casablanca” and “M.”“I find Peter Lorre a strangely charismatic, extremely creepy person, which I think most punk rockers can identify with,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2009. “It’s the lure of the other. He’s the underdog, the outsider.”To fans and fellow musicians, Jack Terricloth was an inspirational if remote figure who preached what he considered the central philosophical lesson of rock ’n’ roll: the freedom to reject society’s programming and reinvent oneself anew.He was found dead on Wednesday at his apartment in Ridgewood, Queens. He was 50. His sister, Lisa Castano, said the cause was hypertensive cardiovascular disease.He born Peter James Ventantonio on June 11, 1970, and grew up in Bridgewater. His father, James Ventantonio, was a lawyer and municipal judge; his mother, Anita (Winkler) Ventantonio, was an elementary-school teacher.As a teenager, he was inspired by punk rock and by stars like David Bowie who created their own personas, said Mike Cavallaro, a childhood friend who played with him in the band Sticks and Stones in the 1980s and ’90s.By the mid-90s, as punk went mainstream, Peter began to conceptualize a genre offshoot that would incorporate theatrical presentation and a charismatic, world-weary frontman character. The World/Inferno Friendship Society’s first album, “The True Story of the Bridgewater Astral League,” in the style of a musical, was released in 1997.“We are a punk-rock band, and we play punk-rock shows, but our music couldn’t be more different,” he told The Times. “Kids see us and think: ‘Guys in suits and makeup at a hard-core show? Come on.’ But we always have them by the third song, and then we’re something they have to accept about the punk rock scene and about the world. We’ve now entered into the great dialogue that is our culture.”The album “Addicted to Bad Ideas: Peter Lorre’s Twentieth Century” (2007) became the band’s biggest moment. It was adapted into a self-described “punk songspiel” of the same title, performed at rock clubs and in high-profile arts series like Peak Performances at Montclair State University in New Jersey.After its concerts, the group often mingled with its fans — who called themselves Infernites. Performances, like its elaborately staged annual Halloween shows, were embraced by both the audience and fellow musicians as communal rituals.“He made you feel that you were part of a secret society,” Franz Nicolay, who played keyboards in the band in the 2000s, said in an interview.In addition to his sister, Jack Terricloth is survived by his partner, Gina Rodriguez.The group’s self-mythologizing sometimes made its history murky. Even the name Jack Terricloth has various apocryphal origin stories. Mr. Cavallaro recalled his friend acquiring it from an old girlfriend. Others said he took the name to distinguish himself from another Pete during his early days in the New Jersey punk demimonde.The ultimate reason seemed to matter less than the act of self-reinvention, and his audience’s being in on the act.Early last year, the World/Inferno Friendship Society released an album, “All Borders Are Porous to Cats,” and, like artists everywhere, was grounded by the pandemic. Yet Jack Terricloth was determined to find a way to preserve its Halloween tradition for its biggest fans, said Bill Cashman, his friend and the group’s manager.So the band devised a scavenger hunt in which clues to the location of an outdoor performance were scattered throughout Brooklyn. About 50 to 60 fans made it to the show, on the roof of the Brooklyn Children’s Museum.“It meant a lot to us to do that, even if we did it for a small amount of people,” Mr. Cashman said. “Just for the sake of doing our thing.” More

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      Bob Koester, Revered Figure in Jazz and Blues, Dies at 88

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      Mr. Koester’s Delmark Records and his Chicago record store were vital in preserving and promoting music the big labels tended to overlook.Bob Koester, who founded the influential Chicago blues and jazz label Delmark Records and was also the proprietor of an equally influential record store where players and fans mingled as they sought out new and vintage sounds, died on Wednesday at a care center in Evanston, Ill., near his home in Chicago. He was 88.His wife, Sue Koester, said the cause was complications of a stroke.Mr. Koester was a pivotal figure in Chicago and beyond, releasing early efforts by Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, Jimmy Dawkins, Magic Sam and numerous other jazz and blues musicians. He captured the sound of Chicago’s vibrant blues scene of the 1960s on records like “Hoodoo Man Blues,” a much admired album by the singer and harmonica player Junior Wells, featuring the guitarist Buddy Guy, that was recorded in 1965.Delmark captured the sound of Chicago’s vibrant blues scene in records like Junior Wells’s “Hoodoo Man Blues.” It also documented early examples of the avant-garde jazz being promulgated in Chicago by musicians like Anthony Braxton.“Bob told us, ‘Play me a record just like you played last night in the club,’” Mr. Guy recalled in a 2009 interview with The New York Times, and somehow he caught the electric feel of a live performance. In 2008 the record was named to the Grammy Hall of Fame.About the same time, Delmark was recording early examples of the avant-garde jazz being promulgated by the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams and other members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, an organization formed in Chicago in 1965. The company’s recordings were not, generally, the kind that generated a lot of sales.“If he felt something was significant, he wasn’t going to think about whether it would sell,” Ms. Koester said by phone. “He wanted people to hear it and experience the significance.”As Howard Mandel, the jazz critic and author, put it in a phone interview: “He followed his own star. He was not at all interested in trends.”For decades Mr. Koester’s record store, the Jazz Record Mart, provided enough financial support to allow Delmark to make records that didn’t sell a lot of copies. The store was more than an outlet for Delmark’s artists; it was packed with all sorts of records, many of them from collections Mr. Koester bought or traded for.“The place was just an amazing crossroads of people,” said Mr. Mandel, who worked there for a time in the early 1970s. Music lovers would come looking for obscure records; tourists would come because of the store’s reputation; musicians would come to swap stories and ideas.Mr. Koester in an undated photo. His store was packed with all sorts of records, many of them from collections he bought or traded for.Chicago Sun-Times“Shakey Walter Horton and Ransom Knowling would hang out there, and Sunnyland Slim and Homesick James were always dropping by,” the harmonica player and bandleader Charlie Musselwhite, who was a clerk at the store in the mid-1960s, told The Times in 2009, rattling off the names of some fellow blues musicians. “You never knew what fascinating characters would wander in, so I always felt like I was in the eye of the storm there.”Mr. Mandel said part of the fun was tapping into Mr. Koester’s deep reservoir of arcane musical knowledge.“You’d get into a conversation with him,” he said, “and in 10 minutes he was talking about some obscure wormhole of a serial number on a pressing.”Ms. Koester said the store held a special place in her husband’s heart — so much so that when he finally closed it in 2016, citing rising rent, he opened another, Bob’s Blues and Jazz Mart, almost immediately.“He loved going into the studio in the days when he was recording Junior Wells and Jimmy Dawkins,” she said, “but retail was in his blood.”He especially loved talking to customers.“Often they came into the store looking for one thing,” she said, “and he pointed them in another direction.”Robert Gregg Koester was born on Oct. 30, 1932, in Wichita, Kan. His father, Edward, was a petroleum geologist, and his mother, Mary (Frank) Koester, was a homemaker.He grew up in Wichita. A 78 r.p.m. record by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in his grandfather’s collection intrigued him when he was young, he said in an oral history recorded in 2017 by the National Association of Music Merchants. But, he told Richard Marcus in a 2008 interview for blogcritics.com, further musical exploration wasn’t easy.“I never liked country music, and growing up in Wichita, Kansas, there wasn’t much else,” he said. “There was a mystery to the names of those old blues guys — Speckled Red, Pinetop Perkins — that made it sound really appealing. Probably something to do with a repressed Catholic upbringing.”College at Saint Louis University, where he enrolled to study cinematography, broadened his musical opportunities.“My parents didn’t want me going to school in one of the big cities like New York or Chicago because they didn’t want me to be distracted from my studies by music,” he said. “Unfortunately for them, there were Black jazz clubs all around the university.”Music lovers would come to the Jazz Record Mart looking for obscure records; tourists would come because of the store’s reputation; musicians would come to swap stories and ideas.Sally Ryan for The New York TimesHe also joined the St. Louis Jazz Club, a jazz appreciation group. And he started accumulating and trading records, especially traditional jazz 78s, out of his dorm room. The rapidly growing record business crowded out his studies.“I went to three years at Saint Louie U,” he said in the oral history. “They told me not to come back for a fourth year.”His dorm-room business turned into a store, where he sold both new and used records.“I’d make regular runs, hitting all the secondhand stores, Father Dempsey’s Charities, places like that, buying used records,” he told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1993 for an article marking the 40th anniversary of the founding of his record label. “And I’d order records through the mail. Then I’d sell records at the Jazz Club meetings. That was the beginning of my retail business.”He had started recording musicians as well. He originally called his label Delmar, after a St. Louis boulevard, but once he relocated to Chicago in the late 1950s he added the K.He acquired a Chicago record shop from a trumpeter named Seymour Schwartz in 1959 and soon turned it into the Jazz Record Mart. His label not only recorded the players of the day but also reissued older recordings.“He loved obscure record labels from the ‘30s and ‘40s, and he acquired several of them,” Mr. Mandel said. “He reissued a lot of stuff from fairly obscure artists who had recorded independently. He salvaged their best work.”Mr. Koester was white; most of the artists he dealt with were Black.“He was totally into Black music,” Mr. Mandel said. “Not only Black music, but he definitely gave Black music its due in a way that other labels were not.”That made Mr. Koester stand out in Chicago when he went out on the town sampling talent.“When a white guy showed up in a Black bar, it was assumed he was either a cop, a bill collector or looking for sex,” Mr. Koester told blogcritic.com. “When they found out you were there to listen to the music and for no other reason, you were a friend. The worst times I had were from white cops who would try and throw me out of the bars. They probably thought I was there dealing drugs or something.”It was the atmosphere of those nightclubs that he tried to capture in his recording studio.“I don’t believe in production,” he said. “I’m not about to bring in a bunch of stuff that you can’t hear a guy doing when he’s up onstage.”In addition to his wife, whom he met when she worked across the street from his store and whom he married in 1967, Mr. Koester is survived by a son, Robert Jr.; a daughter, Kate Koester; and two grandchildren.Ms. Koester said their son will continue to operate Bob’s Blues and Jazz Mart. Mr. Koester sold Delmark in 2018.Mr. Koester’s record company played an important role in documenting two musical genres, but his wife said that beyond playing a little piano, he was not musically trained himself.“He would say his music was listening,” she said. More

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      Curtis Fuller, a Powerful Voice on Jazz Trombone, Dies at 88

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      He was a fixture on the New York jazz scene since shortly after his arrival in 1957. He also made his mark as a composer.Curtis Fuller, a trombonist and composer whose expansive sound and powerful sense of swing made him a driving force in postwar jazz, died on May 8 at a nursing home in Detroit. He was 88.His daughter Mary Fuller confirmed the death but did not specify the cause.Mr. Fuller arrived in New York in the spring of 1957 and almost immediately became the leading trombonist of the hard-bop movement, which emphasized jazz’s roots in blues and gospel while delivering crisp and hummable melodies.By the end of the year, he had recorded no fewer than eight albums as a leader or co-leader for the independent labels Blue Note, Prestige and Savoy.That same year he also appeared on the saxophonist John Coltrane’s “Blue Train,” among the most storied albums in jazz, on which Mr. Fuller unfurls a number of timeless solos. On the title track, now a jazz standard, his trombone plays a central role in carrying the bold, declarative melody.Mr. Fuller’s five-chorus solo on “Blue Train” begins by playing off the last few notes of the trumpeter Lee Morgan’s improvisation, as if curiously picking up an object a friend had just put down. He then moves through a spontaneous repertoire of syncopated phrases and deftly wrought curlicues.In his book “Jazz From Detroit” (2019), the critic Mark Stryker wrote, “The excitement, authority and construction of Fuller’s solo explain why he became a major influence.”Mr. Fuller was also responsible for naming “Moment’s Notice,” another now-classic Coltrane composition on that album. “I made a comment,” Mr. Fuller said in a 2007 interview for the National Endowment for the Arts, recalling the scene at Van Gelder Studio in New Jersey. “‘John, you put this music on us on a moment’s notice. We got three hours to rehearse this music and we’re gonna record?’ And that became the title of the song.”Mr. Fuller carried his knack for a concisely stated melody, and for elegantly tracing the harmonic seams of a tune, into his work as a composer. Among his many original tunes are “À La Mode,” “Arabia” and “Buhaina’s Delight,” all of which are now considered standards.Those three pieces found their way into the repertoire of the drummer Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, hard bop’s flagship ensemble, of which Mr. Fuller was a core member from the early to the middle 1960s. The band was arguably at its peak in those years, when its membership included the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, the saxophonist Wayne Shorter, the pianist Cedar Walton and the bassist Jymie Merritt (later replaced by Reggie Workman).“I owe a lot to Art Blakey, in so many ways,” Mr. Fuller said. “We were all driven by the fact that he encouraged us all to write. There wasn’t such a thing as a leader.”In 2007, Mr. Fuller was named an N.E.A. Jazz Master, the country’s highest official honor for a living jazz musician.In addition to his daughter Mary, he is survived by seven other children, Ronald, Darryl, Gerald, Dellaney, Wellington, Paul and Anthony; nine grandchildren; and 13 great-grandchildren. His first marriage, to Judith Patterson, ended in divorce. His second wife, Catherine Rose Driscoll, died in 2010, after 30 years of marriage.Curtis DuBois Fuller was born in Detroit on Dec. 15, 1932. (His birth year was incorrectly reportedthroughout his life — a discrepancy that was not cleared up until after his death — partly because at 17 he had exaggerated his age by two years so that he could join the work force.)His father, John, who hailed from Jamaica, worked at a Ford Motor Company plant, but died of tuberculosis before Curtis was born. His mother, Antoinette (Heath) Fuller, a homemaker, had come north from Atlanta. She died when Curtis was 9, and he spent the next few years at an a orphanage run by Jesuits.While his mother was alive she had paid for Curtis’s sister, Mary, to receive piano lessons. He would listen through the wall, learning the fundamentals of music secondhand. He showed an interest in the violin at the orphanage but was discouraged after a teacher told him it was an unsuitable instrument for Black people to play.Soon after that, he saw J.J. Johnson, bebop’s leading trombonist, in concert alongside the saxophonist Illinois Jacquet, and he became enthralled by the trombone’s “majestic sound,” he told Mr. Stryker in an interview.“Illinois Jacquet was an act: honking and screaming, biting the reed, squealing and that stuff. The crowd would go wild,” Mr. Fuller said. “But J.J. just stood there and played, and he looked like the guy, the person who really knew what he was doing.”Mr. Fuller, center, with two of his fellow N.E.A. Jazz Masters, the saxophonists Jimmy Heath, left, and Frank Wess, at Jazz at Lincoln Center in 2011.Chad Batka for The New York TimesHe was also impressed by the local trombonist Frank Rosolino, whom he heard perform soon after, and who became his teacher. He fell in with a coterie of young jazz musicians in Detroit, many of whom were destined for jazz prominence, including the pianist Barry Harris and the guitarist Kenny Burrell.“That was like a network in Detroit; we generally stuck together,” he said in 2007. “There was a lot of love and real closeness.”In 1953 Mr. Fuller was drafted into the Army, where he joined one of the last all-Black military bands, whose other members included the future stars Cannonball Adderley and Junior Mance.After leaving the armed forces, he returned to the Detroit scene before traveling to New York in 1957 with the saxophonist Yusef Lateef’s band. When Miles Davis offered him a job, he decided to stay.Playing with Davis led to his meeting two particularly important people: Coltrane, who was the band’s tenor saxophonist, and Alfred Lion, a founder of Blue Note Records, who heard Mr. Fuller onstage with Davis’s band and invited him to record for the label.As he began to make his name as a bandleader, Mr. Fuller also found work alongside prominent musicians including Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie and James Moody.Holiday, who became a mentor, encouraged him to bear in mind the range and pacing of his own speaking voice when he improvised. “When I came to New York, I always tried to impress people, play long solos as fast as I could — lightning fast,” Mr. Fuller said in 2007. “And all of a sudden Billie Holiday said, ‘When you play, you’re talking to people. So learn how to edit your thing, you know?’ I learned to do that.”In 1959, Savoy released “The Curtis Fuller Jazztet,” a lively album that included the saxophonist and composer Benny Golson as a featured guest. Soon after, Mr. Golson and the trumpeter Art Farmer began a separate band under the Jazztet name, with Mr. Fuller as a side musician. It would be one of the quintessential jazz ensembles of the 1960s, but Mr. Fuller soon moved on to other endeavors. (He and Mr. Golson remained close friends until his death.)The untimely deaths of Coltrane, who was also a dear friend, and Mr. Fuller’s sister in 1967 sent him into a depression, and he left the music business, taking a job with the Chrysler Corporation in downtown Manhattan. But about a year later, Gillespie persuaded Mr. Fuller to join his band for a world tour, and he re-entered the jazz scene for good. He spent two years in Count Basie’s orchestra in the mid-1970s, and also returned to leading his own ensembles.In the 1990s, he survived a bout with lung cancer (despite never having been a smoker) and had part of one lung removed. He spent two years reinventing his trombone technique to accommodate his compromised breathing power. He succeeded, and released a string of well-received albums in the late 1990s and 2000s.But as his health continued to deteriorate he turned more attention to teaching, joining the faculty at the University of Hartford’s Hartt School of Music and at the Kennedy Center’s Betty Carter Jazz Ahead program.Asked in 2007 to describe the signature sound that had left such an indelible mark on jazz, Mr. Fuller mentioned the importance of embracing one’s distinct identity. “I try to be warm. Warm and effective, you know. And sometimes I’m cold and defective,” he said. “That’s the way water runs. I’m not God, I’m not perfection. I’m just me.” More

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      Met Opera Protest: Union Rallies Against Proposed Pay Cuts

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      The Metropolitan Opera hopes to reopen in September after its long pandemic closure, but simmering labor tensions have called that date into question.As New York prepares for the long-awaited reopening of its performing arts sector, with several Broadway shows putting tickets on sale for the fall, it is still unclear whether the Metropolitan Opera will be able to reach the labor agreements it needs to bring up its heavy golden curtain for the gala opening night it hopes to hold in September.There have been contrasting scenes playing out at the opera house in recent days.On the hopeful side, the Met is preparing for two concerts in Queens on Sunday — the company’s first live, in-person performances featuring members of its orchestra and chorus and its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, since the start of the pandemic. And it recently reached a deal on a new contract with the union that represents its chorus, soloists, dancers and stage managers, among others.But the serious tensions that remain with the company’s other unions were put on vivid display outside Lincoln Center on Thursday, as hundreds of union members rallied in opposition to the Met’s lockout of its stagehands and management’s demands for deep and lasting pay cuts it says are needed to survive the pandemic. The workers’ message was clear: their labor makes the Met what it is, and without them, the opera can’t reopen.The Met’s stagehands have been locked out since December. James J. Claffey Jr., president of their union, Local One of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, said that the season cannot open without them.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“That’s not the Met Opera,” said James J. Claffey Jr., president of Local One of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which represents Met stagehands, pointing over to the opera house. “The greatest stage, the largest stage — it’s empty. It’s nothing without the people that are right in front of me right now.”Masked stagehands, musicians, ticket sellers, wardrobe workers and scenic artists packed the designated rally space, greeting each other with elbow bumps after more than a year of separation. They wore union T-shirts and carried signs with messages like, “We Paint the Met” and “We Dress the Met.” The same chant — “We are the Met!” — was repeated over and over throughout the rally.The protest made clear the significant labor challenges that the Met must overcome to successfully return in the fall.Although the opera season is not scheduled to begin until September, the company will need to reach agreements with Local One, which represents its stagehands, much sooner to load in sets and hold technical rehearsals over the summer. The Met has been hoping to bring a significant number of stagehands back to work beginning in June, but Claffey said union members were holding out for a labor agreement.The Met locked out its stagehands in December after contract negotiations stalled. The union has been fiercely opposed to the Met’s assertion that it needs to cut the payroll costs for its highest-paid unions by 30 percent, with an intention to restore half of those cuts when ticket revenues and core donations returned to prepandemic levels (the Met has said the plan would cut the take-home pay of those workers by about 20 percent).“Regardless of the Met’s plans, Local One is not going to work without a contract,” Claffey said in an interview. “There’s a lockout when you didn’t need us, but when you really need us, it’s going to transition from a lockout to a strike.”Although the Met recently struck a deal with the union representing its chorus, tensions remain high with the unions representing its orchestra and stagehands.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Met said in a statement on Thursday that it had “no desire to undermine” the unions it works with but that it had lost more than $150 million in earned revenues since the pandemic forced it to close, and that it needs to cut costs to survive. The statement said the Met had “repeatedly” invited the stagehands’ union to return to the bargaining table.“In order for the Met to reopen in the fall, as scheduled,” the statement said, “the stagehands and the other highest paid Met union members need to accept the reality of these extraordinarily challenging times.”The rally was organized by Local One, which represents the Met’s roughly 300 stagehands. Speaking outside the David H. Koch Theater because metal barriers blocked the path to the Metropolitan Opera House, union leaders railed against the monthslong lockout that has prevented its workers from returning to the Met in full force.“A lot of us stagehands have had to pivot or leave the industry entirely,” said Gillian Koch, a Local One member at the rally. “And we are showing up to say that is not OK, and we all deserve to have our careers after this pandemic.”Tensions rose even higher when the stagehands learned that the Met had outsourced some of its set construction to nonunion shops elsewhere in this country and overseas. (In a letter to the union last year, Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, wrote that the average full-time stagehand cost the Met $260,000 in 2019, including benefits; the union disputes that number, saying that when the steady extra stagehands who work at the Met regularly, and sometimes full-time, are factored in, the average pay is far lower.)The stagehand lockout has not been absolute. Claffey said that at the Met’s request, he has allowed several Local One members to work at the Met under the terms of the previous contract, particularly to help the union wardrobe staff who are on duty.But although the Met has now reached a deal with the American Guild of Musical Artists, which represents its chorus, it has yet to reach one with Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, which represents the orchestra. Both groups were furloughed without pay for nearly a year after the opera house closed before they were brought back to the bargaining table with the promise of partial pay of up to $1,543 per week.Adam Krauthamer, the president of Local 802, pointed out that because of the Met’s labor divisions, other performing arts institutions were ahead of the Met in reopening.“Broadway is selling tickets; the Philharmonic is doing performances; they’re building stages right before our eyes,” Krauthamer said in a speech at the rally. “The Met is the only place that continues to try to destroy its workers’ contracts.”The rally had the backing of several local politicians who spoke, including Gale Brewer, the Manhattan borough president, and the New York State Senators Jessica Ramos and Brad Hoylman, who had a message for the Met’s general manager: “Mr. Gelb, could you leave the drama on the stage, please?” More

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      Pervis Staples, Who Harmonized With the Staple Singers, Dies at 85

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      He sang alongside his father and sisters as his family’s gospel group achieved renown in the late 1950s and ’60s.Pervis Staples, who sang harmony and also provided quieter forms of support during the rise to gospel stardom of his family’s group, the Staple Singers, died on May 6 at his home in Dolton, Ill. He was 85.The death was confirmed by Adam Ayers, a spokesman for Mr. Staples’s sister, Mavis Staples. Mr. Ayers did not specify the cause.Pervis Staples joined two of his sisters, Cleotha and Mavis, and their father, Roebuck Staples, known as Pops, on travels through the gospel circuit in the late 1950s and ’60s. Their sound was heavily influenced by the Delta blues that Roebuck had learned during his youth in rural Mississippi. Roebuck and Mavis were the lead vocalists; Cleotha and Pervis sang harmony.At a time when performers like Bobby Womack and Curtis Mayfield were starting their careers singing hymns and spirituals, the Staples were gospel stars. They performed in their Sunday best, with Pervis and Roebuck wearing matching dark suits and shiny alligator shoes while Cleotha and Mavis wore bridesmaids’ dresses.In an interview with Greg Kot for his 2014 biography of Mavis Staples, “I’ll Take You There,” Pervis compared their effect on ecstatic church audiences to “a miracle or the hand of God.”The group contributed to the soundtrack of the civil rights movement, touring with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and recording some of Bob Dylan’s more political songs, including “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Masters of War.”Pervis also helped write vocal arrangements, protected his sisters and ventured into segregated towns to buy groceries.As popular tastes changed in the 1960s, Pervis encouraged his father, the leader of the group, to expand its range beyond gospel music, asking, “Do you think religion was designed to make pleasures less?”Even as their lyrics retained a social message, the Staple Singers went on to adopt more of a soul-music style. They placed several records in the Top 40 in the 1970s and in 1972 had a No. 1 hit, “I’ll Take You There.”But by that time, Pervis had left to pursue his own ventures.He tried his hand as an agent, representing the R&B group the Emotions, and opened Perv’s Place, a nightclub in Chicago that was popular in the mid-1970s, before the rise of disco.He rejoined the family group when they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1999.Pervis Staples was born on Nov. 18, 1935, in Drew, in western Mississippi, and raised in Chicago. His father shoveled fertilizer in stockyards and laid bricks before putting the family vocal group together. Pervis’s mother, Oceola (Ware) Staples, worked as a maid and laundress at a hotel.He attended grammar school with the future singing stars Sam Cooke and Lou Rawls. After class, Pervis and his friends would practice singing under street lamps and in Cooke’s basement. The boys had voices so sweet, “they could make the mice come down the pole and watch,” he told Mr. Kot.When Roebuck Staples formed the Staple Singers in 1948, Pervis sang second lead and hit the high notes. He was replaced as second lead by Mavis when his voice dropped an octave during puberty.Pervis Staples graduated from Dunbar Vocational High School in 1954. He was drafted into the Army in 1958 and honorably discharged in 1960.Another sister, Yvonne, replaced Pervis when he left the Staple Singers. After Perv’s Place closed, he remained active in the music business.Mr. Staples’s two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his sister Mavis, who is now the last surviving member of the Staple Singers, as well as five daughters, Gwen Staples, Reverly Staples, Perleta Sanders, Paris Staples and Eala Sams; a son, Pervis; seven grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.The Associated Press contributed reporting. More