Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      DJ Khaled Reaches No. 1 With ‘Khaled Khaled’

      by

      The album, titled after the star’s full name, has guest appearances by Drake, Megan Thee Stallion, Justin Bieber and more than a dozen others.Two years ago, a pair of hip-hop luminaries, DJ Khaled and Tyler, the Creator, faced off on the Billboard album chart, hawking not just music but also T-shirts, lawn signs and energy drinks.The contest between them — Tyler won, Khaled came in second — stirred up long-simmering frustrations in the industry over the use of retail bundles to increase music sales and goose artists’ chart positions. The fallout from that chart battle, and others like it, led to Billboard tightening its rules late last year.This week, with bundling largely banished to the dustbin of industry sales gimmicks — a very crowded dustbin — DJ Khaled took No. 1 with his latest release, “Khaled Khaled,” which had the equivalent of 93,000 sales in the United States, including 107 million streams and 14,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to MRC Data. It is DJ Khaled’s third time at No. 1.The album, titled after the star’s full name, is a textbook example of DJ Khaled’s style: hyper-pumped affirmations of glory and humility (“Thankful” is the first track, not to be confused with “Grateful” a couple albums ago), delivered with a deep bench of guest stars — this one features Drake, Megan Thee Stallion, Lil Wayne, Nas, Justin Bieber, Justin Timberlake, Post Malone, Jay-Z and more than a dozen others. In addition to DJ Khaled, the album’s credited executive producers include his two young sons, Asahd and Aalam.Also this week, “A Gangsta’s Pain” by the Memphis rapper Moneybagg Yo fell to No. 2 in its second week out. Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” holds at No. 3; Bieber’s “Justice” is in fourth place; and “Slime Language 2,” the project led by the rapper Young Thug, is No. 5. More

    • 63 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      How Operas Are Going Green

      by

      During the pandemic, some houses have continued finding ways to make their spaces and performances more environmentally sustainable.The coronavirus pandemic has challenged day-to-day norms in the opera industry. But while addressing those challenges, some houses have found new ways to tackle another crisis with potentially broader implications: climate change.One of them is La Scala, in Milan, which will install solar panels on the roof of its new office tower in December 2022 while further digitizing operations to cut back on an estimated 10 tons of paper per year. The house has reduced carbon emissions by over 630 tons since 2010 through a partnership with the energy company Edison, which has been illuminating the theater since 1883 and now provides LED bulbs and smart lighting.Those initiatives are part of a growing movement across the music industry.The Sydney Opera in Australia has been a front-runner internationally, having already achieved its aim of becoming carbon-neutral three years ago and having built an artificial reef alongside the house’s sea wall in 2019 (where eight new marine species have since been identified).The Opéra de Lyon in France has reduced its consumption of electricity by 40 percent since 2010 and has joined forces with Sweden’s Goteborg Opera, the Tunis Opera in Tunisia and four specialized organizations to explore production methods in keeping with the principles of a circular economy.In Britain, a hub of cultural initiatives to combat the climate crisis, Opera North in Leeds has been working to reduce its carbon footprint since 2018. It now manages waste through a local company that drives lower-emission trucks and it will eliminate the use of natural gas in its new restaurant space, scheduled to open in October. In February, the theater will present its second set created entirely out of recycled or repurposed materials, in a production of Handel’s “Alcina.”La Scala has reduced carbon emissions by over 630 tons since 2010 through a partnership with the energy company Edison.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesThe pandemic has made environmental consciousness a more urgent and passionate issue. Alison Tickell, founder and chief executive of the London-based charity Julie’s Bicycle, which fosters action in the cultural sector against climate change, said that there was now “much less appetite for the lavish, over-the-top experiences” to which opera audiences were accustomed.“The production values and the idea of spectacle need to change,” she said. “Here’s a wonderful invitation to rethink it.”Lockdowns during the pandemic have also obliged opera companies to rummage through storage. In March, La Scala streamed a performance of Weill’s “Die sieben Todsünden” (The Seven Deadly Sins) in an ad hoc staging by Irina Brook that included an island of plastic bottles.Dominique Meyer, who was installed as the house’s artistic director and chief executive in March 2020, said that as a “flagship” in Italian culture, it had a major role to play in mobilizing the younger generation.“Everyone observes what La Scala does or doesn’t do,” he said. “It is a duty to commit oneself — for all theaters.”La Scala partners with the mineral water company Ferrarelle, which has its own certified system to recycle plastic, and the coffee company Borbone, which uses recycled filters.The theater, which has since 2017 hosted the Green Carpet Fashion Awards celebrating sustainable design, is pursuing the same agenda in its costume department by asking designers to work with recyclable fabric. It has also partnered with BMW since 2016 to make operations greener with a fleet of three BMW i3 electric cars.An ecologically sustainable infrastructure can also be economically advantageous given the opportunity to save energy and resources. Jamie Saye, senior technician at Opera North and co-founder of the Leeds-based consortium SAIL, which unites organizations across the city toward the goal of creating a zero-carbon future for its cultural sector, said that the pandemic-related constraints of the past year had forced the opera company to become “more innovative.”“We haven’t been able to go to a set constructor because they’re all closed down,” he explained. “We’re like, why weren’t we doing this years ago?”LED lighting above the stage at La Scala.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesOpera North will install solar panels this year and is working to reduce carbon emissions by offering employees discounted bus travel and tax breaks if they commute to work by bicycle.The issue of employing local artists is also a hot topic, given both the effects of Britain’s exit from the European Union and growing climate awareness. Mr. Saye said that while opera companies “exist to bring in the best” talent, a possible strategy could include allotting a “carbon budget” to a specific production so that if an artist must be brought in by plane, emissions would be cut back in another area of operations.On a more abstract level, freshly commissioned stage works have raised awareness. In 2015, La Scala premiered the Giorgio Battistelli opera “CO2,” a surreal tale about a climatologist, David Adamson (“son of Adam”), that found its inspiration in Al Gore’s 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” Four years later, the Scottish Opera in Glasgow unveiled “Anthropocene,” exploring the current human-centric, geological age through the story of an icebound expedition ship.One of three BMW i3 electric cars used by La Scala.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesFor Ms. Tickell, creating art about the environmental crisis is “as important as taking practical action.”“It’s how we breathe life into something that can very often be scientific or technocratic,” she said.Mr. Saye also believes that the cultural sphere has a leading role to play by helping people find an “emotional connection to climate change.” He cited as an example the image of a sea turtle with a plastic straw stuck up its nostril during an episode of the television documentary “Blue Planet II” in 2018, which set off a movement to ban plastic straws.Opera North has provided “carbon literacy training” to its staff members and, starting Tuesday, it will begin offering the workshops to the general public as online courses. Topics include the Paris Agreement’s goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.Julie’s Bicycle is taking the next step in social activism by exploring the intersection of culture and the climate emergency “through the lens of justice and fairness,” as Ms. Tickell explained, “also just in terms of who gets to enjoy this stuff.”“The environmental crisis with justice at its core,” she said, “needs to be at the heart of everything we do.” More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      E-40, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg and Too Short Form New Rap Group

      by

      Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, E-40 and Too Short — the old school titans in this new supergroup — made their live debut at an event featuring pop stars and TikTok influencers.ATLANTA — Many people have reconnected with old friends and undertaken new projects during the pandemic. On a Friday night in April, in a large, brightly lit room deep in the bowels of Mercedes-Benz stadium in downtown Atlanta, four of them gathered to introduce their new venture to the world.The voluble E-40, who has released more than 25 albums of distinctive, loquacious street rap, gingerly removed his face mask and offered Tycoon cognac, a product of his own spirits company, to the 20 or so others present, including his old friends Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg and Too Short.“You got a cup?” Ice Cube asked, shooting a withering glance at E-40. “What, you gonna pour it in my hand?” Cube is a bullish figure whose blunt, confrontational bearing has made him an intimidating presence as an M.C., a comic one in films like “Friday” and “21 Jump Street” and the object of occasional good-natured mockery among this cohort.Clear plastic cups were located. E-40 poured the liquor, then dipped his nose into his cup before tossing back a shot.Snoop cackled from behind a black face mask he’d yet to remove. “You made the drink and you’re sniffing it like you’ve got to check it?” he said. “It’s your drink!”E-40 shook his head. “You’re supposed to. It’s the same with wine. Cognac is a grape.” He began to expound on his beverage’s fragrant qualities before Cube cut him off.“Save the commercial until after the photo shoot.”The four rap veterans bantered and bickered — about baby powder, about Ric Flair, about the correct amount of time to microwave shrimp fried rice — the way you’d expect from guys who’ve known each other for 30 years. Despite their long, often intertwined histories, it took a global crisis to clear enough time in their schedules to form the supergroup that Cube christened Mount Westmore, a nod to the members’ stature in rap and their West Coast roots.Clockwise from top left: Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, Too Short and E-40, a few decades ago. “We can hang with the youngsters or take you back down memory lane,” Ice Cube said.Top l-r: Brian Rasic/Getty Images; Al Pereira/Getty Images, via, Michael Ochs Archives Bottom l-r: Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images; Toby Canham/Getty ImagesThe four were at the stadium to do their first interview and photo shoot together, followed by a rehearsal and taping of Mount Westmore’s first performance, which was broadcast the next night as part of a pay-per-view package featuring pop stars and TikTok influencers, headlined by a live boxing match between the YouTuber Jake Paul and the retired MMA fighter Ben Askren. (Snoop is an investor in Triller, the social media platform that promoted the event, and a partner in its Fight Club series.)The collaboration initially took root early in the pandemic at E-40’s initiative. By last summer, the four were recording vocals in their home studios and dropping them into a group chat. Although rapping separately deprived them of some creative friction, it allowed everyone to work on their own schedule.“I can’t rap in the daytime,” Snoop said.“And I can’t rap late at night,” Too Short replied.Nonetheless, competition was fierce. “We come from that school of being around dope people that push us,” Snoop explained.Ice Cube nodded. “Working with Dre back in the day, if your verse wasn’t tight, you weren’t getting on the song.”Deep friendships fostered frank dialogue. “One of the earliest conversations was, ‘If something you do is wack, I’m going to tell you,’” said Too Short, who got his start selling tapes of his gleefully lascivious rhymes from the trunk of his car around the Bay Area in the mid-1980s.“What did you say?” Snoop asked, nodding toward Cube then lowering his voice an octave in a spot-on imitation of his friend’s trademark snarl. “‘I ain’t getting on that love song!’” The quartet recorded 50-plus songs, which they plan to spread across multiple releases, with the first planned for later this year.At the photo shoot, Cube suggested playing tracks from the upcoming album. A member of the group’s road crew fiddled with Snoop’s branded Bumpboxx, a digital boombox wrapped with the cover artwork from his classic 1992 debut, “Doggystyle,” but music was not immediately forthcoming. Snoop, tall and lean with long, dark hair that’s graying near his temples, walked over to investigate.“Turn the power off, then back on,” yelled Too Short. “That always fixes that.”E-40 sighed loudly. “Man, am I going to have to do this? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this out.”Finally, the Bumpboxx sparked to life, playing Freddie Jackson’s 1986 R&B slow jam “I Don’t Want to Lose Your Love.”“Well, that’s music,” said Cube. “It ain’t the right music, but it’s music.”Attention turned back to the camera. Too Short, who was wearing a colorful Versace T-shirt and dark jeans over his compact frame, had a suggestion. “Let’s make it look like some old New Edition pictures,” he said. “Or like the Temptations, how they line up the four dudes.”Cube balked at profile shots. “I don’t want to show the Volkswagen,” he said, putting his hands on his belly.E-40 turned sideways and twisted his third and fourth fingers to form a “W” with his left hand. “That hurts my fingers though,” he said. “I had surgery on those fingers.”Mount Westmore performing “Big Subwoofer” as part of a pay-per-view  event presented in Atlanta that included a live boxing match.Jeff Kravitz/Getty Images for TrillerAging can be a humbling process, but it’s especially fraught in hip-hop. The inevitable march of time has generally been treated as an unforgivable weakness in a culture that often celebrates a particular masculine idea of strength. As a then-26-year-old Compton rapper the Game once put it in a presumed shot at Jay-Z: “You 38 and you still rapping? Ugh.” (The Game is now 41 and reportedly preparing to release a new album this year.) The mid-to-late-30s has long been viewed as retirement age for rappers despite the fact so many qualities required of the job — sharp mind, quick tongue, storytelling acumen, life wisdom — are as likely to be growing as diminishing in middle age.So where does that leave Mount Westmore? At 49, Snoop is, in his words, “the baby of the bunch.” Ice Cube is 51, E-40 is 53 and Too Short is 55.“People have their hangups about it,” said Cube, “but if people love what’s coming out of the speakers, they’ll tolerate some gray hairs.”Snoop noted that the Rolling Stones are in their late 70s, and that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards don’t always seem to get along. “You’ve got that being praised and we’re being questioned,” he said. “We should be praised because we’re in our right mind, we love each other, we’re family men, we’re business men, and we’re Black men. If you look at the Cubes, the Will Smiths, the Jay-Zs, the Puffys, the Snoops, the Dr. Dres, the E-40s, whoever — they all flipped from rap to other businesses to show that if you close that door, we’ve got seven or eight other doors we’ve opened up.”Accordingly, music is only a part of the Mount Westmore plan. There’s talk of brand partnerships with Monster energy drink and the Cash app, a documentary, a scripted movie, podcasts and NFTs. As such, introducing the project during a social media-focused, music-heavy event spotlighting a former star of “Bizaardvark” boxing against a guy who’d never boxed before has a certain kind of insane logic to it.At 1 a.m., the four rappers were onstage, sitting side-by-side on large black thrones a few feet from a boxing ring on the stadium’s main floor. About 75 people gathered around, some working, many others just perched on a catwalk between the ring and a large camera crane, watching. The floor rumbled a little underfoot as the bass from the group’s song “Big Subwoofer” boomed from the sound system.The track, which they plan to release as an NFT, is a bouncy, trunk-rattling party anthem that feels like a not-too-distant-cousin of Snoop’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” as well as a pretty precise sum of its parts. The foursome rehearsed the song three times, trading playful verses over the spare, thumping beat, growing more confident and animated with each run through. Then, after Cube gave the group some final instructions — “Shut up and sit down. Let’s do this.” — they performed the song twice more as the cameras rolled. Job done.“We have all kinds of different songs,” said Cube. “We’ve got a mixture of what you always love from us as individuals but also records that show our range. We can hang with the youngsters or take you back down memory lane.”As Too Short had explained while the four friends huddled together after the photo shoot, “The hip-hop spirit doesn’t really age. It’s like a little kid thing you’ve got that’s your spark of life.”“What do we call ourselves?” E-40 asked him.“Old-ass youngsters,” Too Short replied. “That’s what it is.” More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      La Scala Takes a Big Step With a Small Audience

      by

      Emerging from pandemic lockdowns, the opera house in Milan will be filled with the music of Wagner, Verdi, Brahms and more, and up to 500 fans.After suffering through the coronavirus pandemic’s devastation and lockdowns in the Italian region of Lombardy, La Scala is making a comeback: It is opening its doors in Milan to a live audience — capped at 500 people, sitting in the balconies and loges — for the first time since October.On Monday, the music director Riccardo Chailly leads the house orchestra and choir in a program of Wagner, Verdi, Purcell and more, featuring Lise Davidsen, a rising star soprano. On Tuesday evening, Riccardo Muti and the Vienna Philharmonic will be in Milan to perform works by Brahms, Mendelssohn and Schumann, commemorating the 75th anniversary of La Scala’s reopening after World War II, which featured a legendary concert under Arturo Toscanini.Also coming up are streaming performances of a ballet program featuring work by eight choreographers (Saturday) and Rossini’s “L’italiana in Algeri” (May 25) in a revival of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s classic staging.All this is taking place under the leadership of Dominique Meyer, who began his tenure as artistic director and chief executive of La Scala in March 2020 while wrapping up nearly a decade as general director of the Vienna State Opera.The theater is undergoing renovations, including relocating its set and costume workshops, and modernizing its storage space.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesLa Scala had been lying low in recent months, presenting occasional performances for streaming while Mr. Meyer and his staff overhauled the infrastructure to become both more digitally advanced and more ecologically sustainable.This year, the house’s budget decreased to an approved 86 million euros, about $104 million, from €133 million in 2019. But it has achieved a record high in private funding, recently bringing aboard the Armani Group and the supermarket chain Esselunga as new sponsors.Meanwhile, the theater has proceeded with extensive construction plans. A high-rise building designed by the Swiss architect Mario Botta, budgeted at €17 million and scheduled to open in two years around the corner from La Scala, will include administrative offices and a rehearsal room that doubles as a recording studio. The theater is also expanding its academy into a university with its own campus, relocating its set and costume workshops, and modernizing its storage space; all those projects are expected to be complete in five years.In addition, Mr. Meyer has been developing outreach plans. “I am probably in my last position,” Mr. Meyer, a 65-year-old native of France’s Alsace region, said in a video interview from his office in Milan. “I have 33 or 34 seasons behind me. Now is the time to invest my experience in this theater and work with the young generation of La Scala on the future of this house.”The following conversation, conducted in German, has been translated, edited and condensed.Is it a challenge to bring traditional houses like the Vienna State Opera and La Scala into the 21st century?I don’t see it that way. The problem for many opera houses is that they can be quite self-referential. But people remain very faithful.In Vienna, we installed a streaming system and tablets with subtitles. I was heavily criticized at the time. Now, one is happy to broadcast an opera every evening during this period.This summer, we will install cameras not just in the auditorium but in the foyers because performances also take place there. I didn’t do this in Vienna and very much regretted it. We want to stream the whole program: operas, ballets and many concerts.Tell us more about your first season at La Scala.You can’t come to a house like La Scala and criticize everything. If you do, then you are the foreign body.The first thing we had to do was a kind of screening or X-ray of the house. The second was to mobilize the young [employees].It turned out that we had progress to make with regard to the administrative use of computers. After a year of Covid, I had, in fact, seen that some things don’t work — that bills or salaries were paid too late. And so these different problems made it possible to make reforms at a fast pace.A crisis sometimes offers the opportunity to do things new and differently. We will have empty seats, and so I want to do something for families here, so that parents can bring their children to the front rows of the theater for €15.Work is under way to clean the exterior of the theater for the  reopening. Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesNorthern Italy was, of course, hit very hard during the first wave of the pandemic. Was it difficult to make the right decisions under those conditions?Yes and no. I have a lot of understanding for politicians because I used to work for the French government. When one is at the steering wheel, it is not easy. So I understand when mistakes are made.What I didn’t like is that everyone wanted to be better than their neighbor. And so a situation emerged where the rules are so different: There are not two countries where quarantine has the same duration.The virus is the same, so why isn’t it possible to create a reasonable way of working together? Some people give themselves an air of importance because they have the best conditions. Later on, things will look different. More

    • 100 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Where Is Country Music Making Room for Women?

      by

      For the last several years, the obstacles female performers face in country music have been widely documented and discussed, yet conditions haven’t improved much. The genre favors a handful of big stars, and offers few opportunities for growth to younger ones.That said, recently some rising singers — Gabby Barrett, Carly Pearce, Ingrid Andress, Lainey Wilson — have found success on the historically inhospitable country radio airwaves. And TikTok has provided an avenue to getting heard that elides Nashville infrastructure altogether, allowing performers like Priscilla Block a side door to a wide fan base, and then a record deal.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the myriad ongoing barriers faced by women in the country music business, and the ways they are manifested in the music itself.Guests:Marissa Moss, co-author of the Don’t Rock the Inbox newsletter and author of a forthcoming book on women in country music, “Where Have All the Cowgirls Gone?”Natalie Weiner, co-author of the Don’t Rock the Inbox newsletter and writer about music for Billboard and others More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Review: A ‘Party in the Bardo’ for a City in Transition

      by

      At the Park Avenue Armory, Laurie Anderson and Jason Moran gathered fellow artists to conjure a sonic environment haunted by the pandemic.New York City is in a liminal state: partially vaccinated while still in the grip of Covid-19; beckoning cautiously masked people outside with the blossoming spring; and reopening indoor performance venues at last, but with caveats that color every show with reminders of the continuing pandemic.This moment of in-betweenness is like “that scene in the movie when the prisoner wakes up, and the jail door has swung open and no one’s around,” the polymathic artist Laurie Anderson said on Friday during “Party in the Bardo,” her collaboration with the jazz luminary Jason Moran at the Park Avenue Armory. “So … what’s happening next? Can I just go?”Anderson supplied violin and vocals in between sections of poetic spoken word.Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesFacing Anderson from the opposite side of the room was Moran at the piano.Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesThere’s another fitting metaphor, the one that gives Anderson and Moran’s project its title: the bardo, the Tibetan Buddhist transition between death and rebirth that has been described as a 49-day process during which energy prepares to take on a new life. It’s a long-held preoccupation of Anderson’s, the theme of her poetic 2015 film, “Heart of a Dog,” and the namesake of a late-night radio show she hosted last year as part of a Wesleyan University residency — also called “Party in the Bardo,” whose guests included Moran.“Party in the Bardo” — the version at the Armory, presented to an audience of a little more than 100 in its 55,000-square-foot drill hall — is, like many projects by both Anderson and Moran, difficult to label. It would be too limiting to call it a performance or an elegy. Or an installation, though it included one in the form of “Lou Reed: Drones,” a sound-bathlike work assembled from Reed’s guitars by his former technician Stewart Hurwood. (Reed, who died in 2013, was Anderson’s partner for the last two decades of his life.)Lou Reed’s guitars resounded in “Lou Reed: Drones,” assembled by his former technician, Stewart Hurwood.Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesThe tai chi master Ren GuangYi continuously practiced under a spotlight.Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesMore than anything, “Party in the Bardo” is a vibe — an hourlong immersion into an environment that is both intensely visual, with continuous tai chi by Ren GuangYi and Haobo Zhao, and a large mirror ball kinetically reflecting lights on every surface of the drill hall; and chaotically musical, with Anderson, Moran and a small group of fellow artists in a series of structured, often simultaneous improvisations layered atop “Drones.” Those of us in the audience were given cardboard mats, to feel it all through the floor if we wanted. I spent a good 20 minutes lying in savasana, vibing.Spread throughout the space, the players — Louie Belogenis and Stan Harrison on saxophone, Susie Ibarra on percussion and Vernon Reid on guitar, in addition to Moran on piano and Anderson on violin and vocals — were not unlike the ethereal, chattering personalities in the colloquy-as-novel “Lincoln in the Bardo,” by George Saunders. There were distinct notes, distinct voices, but they were only fleeting, coming and going as quickly as the lights on the floor.Vermon Reid offered structured improvisations on guitar.Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesAnd Stan Harrison played saxophone, along with Louie Belogenis.Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesThe clearest sounds came in moments of transition: at the start, Anderson bowing the lowest string of her violin while Moran rumbled the piano’s deepest registers as if building a foundation; and at a later ebb, when the drones were pierced by painfully human wails coming from the saxophones at opposite ends of the room.Two readers, Afrika Davis and Lucille Vasquez, spoke text I couldn’t make out until I realized, near the end, that it was a list of the pandemic’s victims. How many, of the nearly 33,000 in New York City alone, could have been named in an hour? To do them justice would require mourning on a mass scale — bigger than Friday’s artistic expression of grief for a privileged few.Members of the audience were provided with cardboard mats to lie on and feel the music’s vibrations through the floor.Amr Alfiky/The New York TimesWith the worldwide death toll continuing to inch higher by the day, it will take time to truly process the tragedies of the past year. It will take time, too, for live performances to resume comfortably. During the curtain call at the Armory, the artists bowed with their arms out but their hands at a safe distance — a reminder that we may have spent an hour partying in the bardo, but we are still very much in it.Party in the BardoThrough Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Martin Bookspan, Cultured Voice of Lincoln Center Telecasts, Dies at 94

      by

      The longtime announcer for “Live From Lincoln Center,” he said he wanted his audience “to become involved, to love what they’re hearing.”Martin Bookspan, who parlayed a childhood grounding in classical music into a career as the announcer for the “Live From Lincoln Center” telecasts and the radio broadcasts of the Boston Symphony and the New York Philharmonic, died on April 29 at his home in Aventura, Fla. He was 94.The cause was congestive heart failure, his daughter Rachel Sobel said.Mr. Bookspan started violin lessons when he was 6, but he realized by the time he entered college that he would never be the next Fritz Kreisler or Jascha Heifetz. After an early career behind the scenes at radio stations in Boston and New York, he established himself as a stalwart of “Live From Lincoln Center,” the PBS program that became America’s premier source of classical music on broadcast television. He joined the program when it went on the air in 1976.“Live From Lincoln Center” was, for him, not that different from radio — he was heard but not seen. He would open the broadcast, then hand off to on-camera hosts like Beverly Sills, Dick Cavett or Hugh Downs.“The camera was never on Marty,” said John Goberman, the program’s longtime executive producer. But, he added, Mr. Bookspan “was more than just the announcer. The comfortable and familiar part of every broadcast was Marty Bookspan.”Mr. Bookspan’s voice “didn’t sound like a lion,” Mr. Goberman said. “He spoke in a very straightforward, friendly, conversational way.” The Palm Beach Post, describing Mr. Bookspan’s voice after an interview in 1994, said: “Even on the telephone, it’s a voice that resonates with the rarefied air of high culture, the sort of voice you might hear on a public-television pledge drive. But it’s not so stuffy that you couldn’t imagine it delivering the play-by-play of your favorite team.”Mr. Bookspan himself said, “If I have a technique, it’s the technique of the sportscaster.”“As sportscasters make the game come alive, I hope I have made concerts come alive,” he explained in 2006, as he prepared to leave “Live From Lincoln Center” after 30 years. “I want the audience to become involved, to love what they’re hearing.”By then, the “Live From Lincoln Center” audience was accustomed to hearing his preconcert warm-ups and his postconcert signoffs. With a well-dressed crowd in the audience and big-name performers on the stage, the proceedings had a touch of glamour, but not necessarily for Mr. Bookspan. He and his microphone were sometimes installed in dressing rooms, closets — even, at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, in what had been a women’s restroom. He was connected to the stage through his headphones and a video monitor.The soprano Renée Fleming and the conductor Louis Langrée on opening night of the Mostly Mozart Festival in 2005, which was broadcast on “Live From Lincoln Center.”Richard Termine for The New York TimesMartin Bookspan was born on July 30, 1926, in Boston. His father, Simon, was a dry goods salesman who later switched to selling insurance; his mother, Martha (Schwartz) Bookspan was a homemaker. Simon Bookspan was passionate about Jewish liturgical music and took his son to hear prominent cantors.At Harvard, Martin majored not in music but in German literature. He graduated cum laude in 1947.He was also heard on the campus radio station, where he conducted his first important interview in 1944. His guest was the composer Aaron Copland, who revealed that he was considering writing a piece for the choreographer Martha Graham. It turned out to be the ballet “Appalachian Spring.”In his future broadcast career, Mr. Bookspan would interview more than 1,000 performers and composers, from the conductor Maurice Abravanel to the composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.After working as the music director at WBMS, a classical-music station in Boston, he joined the staff of the Boston Symphony in 1954 as its radio, television and recordings coordinator. In 1956, he moved to New York to become the director of recorded music at WQXR, then owned by The New York Times.At WQXR, he hired John Corigliano, at the time a fledgling composer, as an assistant. He proved to be a concerned boss.Mr. Corigliano called in sick one summer morning. “I should’ve known better, because Marty was so considerate, he called later in the afternoon,” Mr. Corigliano, who won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2001, said in an interview. “I went off to the beach. Marty called, and my roommate answered the phone. Marty said, ‘How is John feeling?’ My roommate said, ‘Oh, he’s great. He’s at the beach.’“The next day I walked in. There’s Marty. I approached him slowly and said, ‘I’ll never do it again.’”Mr. Bookspan left WQXR in 1967 and joined the music licensing agency ASCAP as coordinator of symphonic and concert activities. He was later vice president and director of artists and repertoire for the Moss Music Group, an artists’ management agency. He was also an adjunct professor of music at New York University.In the 1960s and ’70s, he was an arts critic for several television stations, including WABC and WPIX in New York and WNAC (now WHDH) in Boston. He was a host of “The Eternal Light,” an NBC program produced with the Jewish Theological Seminary, and, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the announcer for the CBS soap opera “The Guiding Light.”He also wrote reviews of recordings for The New York Times (on open-reel tapes in the 1960s and compact discs in the 1990s). He wrote several books, including “101 Masterpieces of Music and Their Composers” (1968) and, with Ross Yockey, biographies of the conductors André Previn and Zubin Mehta. He handled radio broadcasts for the Boston Symphony and later for the New York Philharmonic.His wife, Janet Bookspan, died in 2008. Besides Ms. Sobel, he is survived by a son, David; another daughter, Deborah Margol; six grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.The tenor Jan Peerce called Mr. Bookspan’s knowledge of music “encyclopedic,” and it served him well when he had to ad-lib.One night in 1959, he was the announcer for a Boston Symphony broadcast that featured the pianist Rudolf Serkin playing Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Mr. Bookspan did his usual introduction before Serkin and the conductor Charles Munch made their way across the stage. Mr. Bookspan told The Berkshire Eagle in March that once they plunged in, “I did the one thing that I learned I should never do again: I left my broadcast booth.”With Serkin “flailing away with a vengeance, pounding the pedals for all they were worth, caught up in the work and oblivious to all else” — as Mr. Bookspan recalled in a different interview — he headed to the green room to chat with Aaron Copland, who was on hand for the concert.Suddenly, in the second movement of the Brahms, there was silence.“I ran across the backstage and up the stairs, and en route picked up the news that there was a problem with the piano,” he told The Eagle. “I got to the microphone and huffed and puffed my way through, reporting, ‘There was a problem with the piano’ and that ‘as soon as I catch my breath, I’ll tell you what’s going on.’”Mr. Bookspan talked nonstop for more than 15 minutes until the piano had been fixed and Serkin and the orchestra started playing again. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Lloyd Price, ‘Personality’ Hitmaker, Is Dead at 88

      by

      His “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” was a rhythm-and-blues smash that hooked white listeners in 1952, anticipating the rise of rock ’n’ roll. Even bigger records would follow.Lloyd Price, who provided some of the seeds for what became rock ’n’ roll with his New Orleans rhythm-and-blues hit “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” in 1952 and later had major pop hits with “Personality” and “Stagger Lee,” died on Monday at an extended-care center in New Rochelle, N.Y. He was 88. The cause was complications of diabetes, said Jeffrey Madoff, the writer and producer of “Personality: The Lloyd Price Musical,” a stage show scheduled to open next year in Pennsylvania.Nicknamed Mr. Personality after his most recognizable hit, which reached No. 2 on the Billboard singles chart in 1959, Mr. Price found success with Black and white audiences alike. He was a prolific songwriter as well as a gifted singer — a combination that was relatively uncommon at the time — and his songs were covered by many others. Among the artists who recorded versions of “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” were Elvis Presley and Paul McCartney.He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1998.Mr. Price found success early: He was still in his teens when he recorded “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” its title an exclamation borrowed from a local disc jockey, for Specialty Records, an independent label founded by Art Rupe. On that session, recorded in New Orleans, he was accompanied by a band, led by the local musician and songwriter Dave Bartholomew, that included the pianist Fats Domino.“Lawdy Miss Clawdy” topped the Billboard R&B chart for seven weeks and introduced Mr. Price’s emotionally direct vocal style and infectious New Orleans beat to white listeners years before the term “rock ’n’ roll” was in wide use. Mr. Rupe later recalled, “That was the first Black record that wasn’t intended to be a white record — it became a white record, versus the previous Black records which were designed for the white market.”Mr. Price’s career was interrupted by Army service, and by the mid-1950s other Black artists, among them Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Mr. Domino, were achieving comparable crossover success. Mr. Price made up for lost time with huge pop hits of his own.Mr. Price in concert at the Apollo Theater in Manhattan, probably in the mid-1960s.Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives-Getty ImagesAlong with his successful music career, Mr. Price had an entrepreneurial streak: He founded record labels, managed other performers, owned nightclubs, promoted boxing matches, ventured into real estate and even promised to champion the sweet potato with his company Lloyd Price Icon Food Brands.But the songs came first. “Music brings my soul more joy than anything else does, or can,” he once said. “It makes my heart beat faster with excitement; and my love for music has never changed! If you love music, you know what I’m talking about.”Lloyd Price, a self-described “country boy,” was born on March 9, 1933, in Kenner, La., one of 11 children — eight boys and three girls — of Beatrice and Louis Price, who owned the Fish ’n’ Fry Restaurant. As a child, Lloyd sang in the gospel choir at his family’s church, picking up trumpet and piano along the way while also working at the family business.A high school dropout, Mr. Price started his first band, the Blue Boys, at age 18. To the dismay of his parents, he also got a job at a New Orleans nightclub, but he quit at their insistence to work construction.His breakout success with Specialty Records came to an end when he was drafted in 1953, leaving the label to focus instead on Little Richard and Larry Williams, Mr. Price’s onetime chauffeur.After returning to civilian life in 1954, Mr. Price founded his own record company, KRC, with two partners. The label did not make much of an impact, but one single he released on KRC, the ballad “Just Because,” was leased to ABC-Paramount Records and reached the Top 40 pop chart in 1957. Mr. Price was then signed directly to ABC-Paramount and soon had his greatest success with the song “Stagger Lee.” His upbeat take on a folk song that had been recorded numerous times since the 1920s, it reached No. 1 on both the pop and R&B charts in 1959.Mr. Price’s crossover success did not come without some compromise. Dick Clark, the producer and host of the immensely popular television show “American Bandstand,” decided that the lyrics of “Stagger Lee,” which involved gambling and ended with a fatal barroom shooting, were too violent for his show. Mr. Price, ever the savvy businessman, recorded a new version in which the song’s rivals are fighting over a woman and make up at the end: “Stagger Lee and Billy never fuss or fight no more.” (The cleaned-up version was not released commercially at the time, but it was included many years later on a compilation album.)That same year, “Personality” became almost as big a hit, certifying Mr. Price as a bona fide rock ’n’ roll star. In 1962, he set out on his own again, starting Double L Records with Harold Logan (who had also been a partner in his earlier label), with a roster that included a young Wilson Pickett. Mr. Price and Mr. Logan opened a nightclub, the Turntable, on the former site of the celebrated jazz club Birdland in Midtown Manhattan in 1968. Mr. Logan was murdered in 1969.Mr. Price reached the Top 40 for the last time with a version of the standard “Misty” in 1963, but by that time his star in the music world was fading. He wisely dipped into other arenas, including a partnership with Don King to help promote Muhammad Ali’s “Rumble in the Jungle” against George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire, in 1974 and “Thrilla in Manila” against Joe Frazier in the Philippines the next year. Concurrently with the Zaire fight, he helped promote a music festival with a lineup that included James Brown and B.B. King. He lived in Nigeria from 1979 to 1983.Mr. Price is survived by his wife, Jackie Battle; three daughters, Lori Price, D’Juana Price and December Thompson; two sons, Lloyd Price Jr. and Paris Thompson; a sister, Rose Moore; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.In the 1980s, Mr. Price invested in real estate — he backed the construction of homes in the Bronx — and ran a limousine company. By 2007, at the age of 74, he was talking up his Miss Clawdy line of sweet-potato products to The Wall Street Journal. “It’s going to do things,” he said. “It’s going to bring attention back to the sweet potato.” His company also sold organic cereals and energy bars.There was always music in the background. Mr. Price helped organize oldies tours, on which he shared the bill with other early rhythm-and-blues acts like Little Richard and Ben E. King, throughout the ’90s and into the 21st century.Mr. Price released his last album, “This Is Rock and Roll,” in 2017. He published an autobiography, “Lawdy Miss Clawdy: The True King of the 50’s,” written with William E. Waller, in 2009, and a collection of essays, provocatively titled “sumdumhonky,” in 2015.Peter Keepnews contributed reporting. More