Music

Judy Drucker, a South Florida impresario who for decades brought the stars of concert music, opera and dance to Miami, elevating the city’s cultural scene with inexhaustible enthusiasm and self-confidence, died on March 30 at a care facility in Miami. She was 91.Her daughter Vicki Schwartz said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.From the late-1960s until about a decade ago, Ms. Drucker presented a panoply of talented artists to the Miami area. The list includes Beverly Sills, Isaac Stern, Vladimir Horowitz, Yo Yo Ma, Leonard Bernstein, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Richard Tucker, Twyla Tharp, Zubin Mehta, Pinchas Zukerman, Daniel Barenboim, Wynton Marsalis and the Three Tenors.She also arranged for performances by many of the world’s foremost orchestras and dance companies, like the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the Bolshoi Ballet.Ms. Drucker was a tireless promoter and fund-raiser. She created and ran several different organizations, including the Great Artists Series and the Concert Association of Florida. She staged performances at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami, the New World Center, what is now the Jackie Gleason Theater in Miami Beach and the Broward Center for the Performing Arts in Fort Lauderdale. Though her operations’ finances were often precarious, she still delivered top performers, decade after decade.Mark Bryn, a lawyer and friend of Ms. Drucker’s who supported many of her musical ventures, said in a phone interview that she “was not fettered by the fact that she didn’t have all the pieces in place at the same time.”“She figured that if she could get the artist, she’ll get the funding, or if she got the funding, she’d get the artist,” Mr. Bryn said. Ms. Drucker, who had trained as a soprano and a pianist, formed bonds with the artists she enticed to Miami and went to great lengths to make them happy.She reportedly convinced the owners of Joe’s Stone Crab restaurant, a Miami institution, to feed Mr. Baryshnikov long after closing time; made sure that Luciano Pavarotti was able to cook in his hotel suite; and had a supply of fresh gray sole flown to Miami from Massachusetts for Mr. Horowitz.The Siberian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky told The Miami Herald in 2001 that Ms. Drucker was a master of fulfilling what he called “the three Fs.”“She pays the fee, she fills the house and she feeds you,” Mr. Hvorostovsky said. “It’s something like you would expect from your mother.”Ms. Drucker welcomed artists into her home, letting them practice on her Steinway concert grand piano and cooking them elaborate meals. Such warmth was an expression of her admiration and fondness for the artists, people who knew her said, as well as a lure for their return.“I don’t think of Judy as a sort of ‘local impresario,’” the violinist Itzhak Perlman told The Miami Herald in 1985. “I think of her as a friend of mine, and I come and play for her.”Judith Reva Nelson was born in Brooklyn on June 20, 1928, to Isidore and Lillian (Levine) Nelson. Her mother was an opera singer and pianist who kindled her daughter’s fascination with music. Her father was a Russian Jewish immigrant who ran a women’s clothing and hosiery business.Judith grew up singing and playing piano in New York. When she was in junior high school the family moved to Florida, where she missed performing. She took to singing in nightclubs.During the summers she studied singing at the Juilliard School in Manhattan, and after she graduated from high school in Miami Beach in 1945 she studied music at the University of Miami while singing at the renowned Latin Quarter club by night. She met David Drucker, a law school student and former Marine, in college. They married shortly before she graduated, and she mostly stopped singing to become a homemaker, though she did not give it up entirely. She met Pavarotti while singing in the chorus during his American debut, a performance of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” in Miami in 1965.Ms. Drucker became an impresario in the mid-1960s as a way to escape domestic life. She felt so directionless at the time, she told The Herald in 1985, that during the day she thought she was “going to pass out standing there in the kitchen.”So she contacted the rabbi of Temple Beth Sholom in Miami Beach to propose a series of lectures. The synagogue agreed, and the series included appearances by the writers David Halberstam and Elie Wiesel. Those lectures eventually expanded into musical performances that became the Great Artists Series.In June 2007, Ms. Drucker left her position as president and artistic director of the Concert Association after having differences with the board over budget deficits. By August she had become the senior artistic adviser for the Florida Grand Opera.In addition to her daughter Vicki, she is survived by another daughter, Kathy Drucker; a son, Andrew; seven grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.Ms. Drucker said that her hard work in service of Miami’s cultural scene was motivated by one thing.“I wanted to hear beautiful music,” she said in 1985. “You’ve got to have music where you live. So you just go out and you get it.” More

In Texas last month before the coronavirus shut down touring, one fan at an Yves Tumor concert got a little too excited. “He bit me on my neck!” said the musician (real name: Sean Bowie) by phone. “I was signing his album after the show and was like, ‘Why did you bite me? There’s a pandemic going on.’ He said he just wanted to know what I tasted like.”Mixing it up with the audience is part of the Yves Tumor proposition. Bowie, who uses both gender-neutral and he/him pronouns, is a master of anarchic energy with plenty of stories about bloodying fans’ noses at shows. (They never seemed to mind.) The Yves Tumor sound has frequently shifted since Bowie started releasing albums in 2015, encompassing cacophonous electronic noise and smoky rhythm & blues. Some of the music has been so confrontational, it’s even caused its creator some concern: They said they find “Hope in Suffering (Escaping Oblivion & Overcoming Powerlessness),” a 2018 track that begins with what sounds like a gathering swarm of bees before collapsing into machine-gun blasts and a demonic voice, almost too “terrifying” to listen to.The latest Yves Tumor album, “Heaven to a Tortured Mind,” which was released on Friday, veers closer to standard pop. It’s an album of (relatively) approachable tracks about the common push and pull of the heart, blending tart psychedelia and maximal glam rock. Though earlier work relied on software and samples, here Bowie mostly used live instrumentation. They produced the album along with Justin Raisen, known for a deft hand with both big pop refrains and fuzzy guitar grit in work for Kim Gordon, Angel Olsen and Sky Ferreira. A number of notable vocalists turn up for steamy duets, including the progressive cellist Kelsey Lu and Julia Cumming of the Brooklyn indie band Sunflower Bean.“It’s a buffet of sonnets and emotions,” Bowie said. While Yves Tumor lyrics have often been about end times, love is currently the most spine-chilling thing on the docket. “It’s scary,” Bowie said. “It’s like being on a roller coaster. You know there’s going to be a huge plummet, but then there’s an uprise.”On “Kerosene!,” a duet with the R&B singer Diana Gordon over trippy guitar, Bowie’s voice slithers and croaks, imagining a hookup as something flammable. “He’s in charge, using his sensuality,” said Shayne Oliver, the designer behind the avant-garde fashion label Hood by Air and a close friend of Bowie’s. “You don’t see black men moving like him, a male figure identifying with feminine energy. Tupac and D’Angelo understood it — people think it’s freakish, but it’s just attractive in a new way.”As an artist committed to mystique, Bowie doesn’t share much about their upbringing. They were born in Miami and grew up in Knoxville, Tenn., and figured out how to play the guitar as a teenager by riffing on Nirvana and Green Day songs. After Bowie’s parents confiscated the instrument over poor grades, the young musician learned keys on the family piano, honed a sense of rhythm that came from being raised on Motown and Jimi Hendrix, and started to make amateur recordings in the basement.After a brief stint in college, Bowie moved to Los Angeles and fell in with artists like the queer punk rapper Mykki Blanco, who took them on tour. Bowie started releasing music under various monikers, but Yves Tumor stuck, and the project’s early music, which patched together field recordings, harsh noise and slinky funk, attracted a devoted audience.It didn’t take long for Yves Tumor live shows to become the stuff of legend. “I would find the biggest guy in the audience and use him as a prop,” Bowie said. “Crawl on him, hang from his neck by my legs.”While their production techniques and sonic aesthetics have undergone several transformations, Bowie has remained devoted to visual shock. In a clip for the new album’s “Gospel for a New Century,” horns and furry goat legs make them appear as Pan, Greek god of the wild and Pagan symbol of male virility. “Yves Tumor is the rock star of our generation,” said Jordan Hemingway, a photographer and director who worked on the album’s artwork. “The way he acts, that’s something that’s not taught.”Bowie knows that the term “rock star” is an anachronistic, even cheesy label now. “It’s fun to act like one, to look like one,” they said. “It’s a persona.” Still, there’s power in that pose, enough to ignite crowds for good and, occasionally, for creepy. “I do get a lot of strange attention,” Bowie said, perhaps still feeling the vampire kiss on their neck. “It’s hard to draw the line.” More

MONTREAL — As pungent pot smoke filled the air in a bunkerlike, dimly lit basement recording studio in Montreal, the Quebec rapper Snail Kid pondered a question befitting these pandemic times: What word rhymes with Purell?Mulling how to fit the hand sanitizer into his latest rap lyric, he considered the English words “well,” “smell” and “toaster strudel” before toying with the French words “pluriel” and “ruelle.”Then, Snail Kid, 30, a member of the popular Quebec hip-hop group Dead Obies began to rap:Le monde ici est cruelOn n’est plus well(The world here is cruel. We are no longer well.)“Now everyone is going to be competing to find the best rhyme for ‘quarantine’ or ‘corona,’” mused Snail Kid, whose real name is Gregory Beaudin. Mr. Beaudin grew up speaking the native English of his Jamaican-born father, a reggae singer, as well as the French of his Montreal-born mother, a French teacher.The bilingual wordplay in the cavernous recording studio reflected how the coronavirus has changed not only how we live, but popular culture. It was also notable for another reason particular to Montreal: The group was rapping in Franglais or “Frenglish,” mixing English and French with artistic abandon that irks some purists.The Dead Obies are part of a new generation of young Quebec hip-hop artists who meld the language of Shakespeare and Voltaire with the urban poetry of Montreal’s street life and the bling-bling, drug-fueled themes of some American hip-hop.Other artists of this generation are Loud and FouKi.To their legions of fans, the groups give voice to the bilingual vernacular of a multicultural city, marinated by its past French and British rulers, the forces of globalization and successive waves of immigration.“Franglais rappers reflect that the younger generation in Quebec don’t care about old orthodoxies and are open to the world,” said Sugar Sammy, a Quebec comedian with Punjabi roots who became a global sensation after pioneering a bilingual comedy show.But they have also spawned a backlash in Quebec, a majority French-speaking province, where critics have castigated them as self-colonizers who are “creolizing” the French language and threatening its future.And they have lost out on lucrative federal government funding for Francophone artists because their content wasn’t French enough.Mathieu Bock-Côté, a sociologist and influential columnist at Le Journal de Montréal, said Franglais rappers were a worrying sign that the younger generation in Quebec had lost sight of the fragility of the French language in the city and were turning to English as a default to show emotion and express themselves.“Franglais is a slippery slope toward Anglicization,” he said. “These bourgeois-bohemian adolescents who think speaking English or Franglais will make Montreal into a New York are deluded because it is the French language that gives the city its cachet.”“Without French, Montreal would be Pittsburgh,” he added.Questions of language are inextricably bound up with identity in Quebec, a province of about 8.5 million people where the British minority exerted its language and culture after Quebec was ceded to Britain in 1763 following France’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War.French-speakers of a certain age can still recall being admonished by members of the Anglophone minority at factories to “speak white,” or speak English.Today, language laws require that French be the official language of government, business and the courts.Concerned that the Franglais greeting of “Bonjour-hi” was becoming too ubiquitous in Montreal shops and restaurants, the Quebec government in late 2017 passed a nonbinding resolution calling for shopkeepers to say only “Bonjour” instead.A French citizen was recently denied a certificate she needed to settle permanently in Quebec. Her offense? Writing a chapter of her doctoral thesis in English rather than in French. After an outcry, the right-leaning Quebec government granted her the document.Yet in recent years, Quebec’s influential language watchdog has shown some flexibility, alluding to the evolving nature of language.It ruled that using “grilled-cheese” on menus instead of the more long-winded “sandwich au fromage fondant” would not breach Quebec’s language rules, while cocktail, drag queen, and haggis were also deemed acceptable in French.At the same time, the watchdog has been successful at encouraging Quebecers to say “courriel” instead of the pervasive English word “email” used by many in France.Mr. Beaudin, who grew up in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, a working-class neighborhood in the eastern part of Montreal, said the Dead Obies hadn’t set out to make a political statement. Rather, they were merely mimicking the language and sounds of Québécois French, where words and expressions like “c’est le fun” (it’s fun) and “mon chum” (my boyfriend) were commonplace.Brought up on English video games and Facebook, he said he and his friends didn’t have neuroses about language. Moreover, he argued, a society that attacked its artists was ​discriminatory, insecure and misguided.“You can be more creative when you are rapping in two languages,” he added.To make his point, he rapped a few lines from a Dead Obies song that switches midsentence from French to English:Je te jure que Billie Jean is not my loverNope, nopeC’est juste une fille que je meet sur le “E” dans le after hours(I swear to you that Billie Jean is not my lover. Nope, nope. It’s just a girl I meet on E at the after-hours.)As a biracial teenager in Montreal, Mr. Beaudin said he had been attracted to rappers like Eminem and Jay-Z and had turned to Franglais rap for cultural affirmation. Rapping in two languages spliced with street slang was also a way to revolt against a Québécois cultural elite dominated by white Francophone artists.But he said rapping in Franglais has come at a heavy cost. The group lost subsidies of about $18,000 on their second album from a national government fund for Francophone artists because it was 55 percent French and 45 percent English.The funding was predicated on an album having at least 70 percent French content.The equivalent Anglophone fund stipulated that French content on an album be no more than 50 percent, making them ineligible for that, too.“Now we count how many words we say in French or in English,” he said. “In a small domestic market like Quebec, artists need subsidies to survive.”Nicolas Ouellet, host of a popular music show on Radio-Canada, Canada’s leading French-language radio station, said Franglais rappers were largely omitted from commercial radio stations and sneered at for not being part of Quebec’s “folklore.”But, he said, “rather than bastardizing Québécois French, they are acting as a bridge between Quebec and the rest of North America.”Montreal has become among the most bilingual cities in North America, alongside Miami and Los Angeles. According to 2016 national census figures, about 18 percent of Canadians speak both English and French, with Quebec driving the bilingualism.While some guardians of the French language fear creeping bilingualism, the resistance to Franglais rap is more than just a question of language.FouKi, a popular Quebec rapper whose real name is Léo Fougères, observed that Franglais rapping didn’t just irritate those determined to preserve French.“My father will hear my raps and say to me, ‘Isn’t there a word for that in French?’” he said. “But other older people say to me, I don’t understand anything you say.”Nasuna Stuart-Ulin contributed reporting. More

Drake’s new single “Toosie Slide” was released on Friday, but that’s only if you think of a song’s release in an old-fashioned way — which is to say, a full song and an accompanying official video put out by the artist himself.“Toosie Slide” was truly let loose a few days earlier, when a well-known viral hip-hop dancer named Toosie posted a clip of himself and some of his dance celebrity friends — Ayo & Teo, Hiii Key — doing a smooth floor routine to a small section of the then-unnamed song, including the crucial dance-instruction hook: “Right foot up, left foot slide/Left foot up, right foot slide.”The voice was Drake’s, but the track was a mystery. Instantly the snippet, and more crucially the dance step, entered the slipstream of content on TikTok, where it began to spread.Drake, who has been in a symbiotic relationship with the viral internet for almost his entire career, had commissioned the dance clip, and by the time he made it official, “Toosie Slide” was already a hit. In the song’s proper video, Drake saunters around his Toronto mansion in a balaclava and gloves — a socially distanced lifestyle of the rich and famous — and is sure to hit the essential step. But there’s something uncanny happening: He’s participating in a scheme of his own invention, but also is just another person emulating a popular dance step, as if he weren’t both the alpha and the omega.“Toosie Slide” sets a low bar for participation — it’s a dance song that even those who can’t really dance can dance to. It is marketing stratagem first, song second. Maybe this is inevitable, though. Attention spans are shrinking, and the most effective modes of distribution favor the brief and interactive.TikTok videos end up like the equivalent of a movie trailer released before the film’s completion. The platform’s power goes hand in hand with the rise of snippet culture, in which sections of songs played by rappers — Playboi Carti and Lil Uzi Vert, among others — on social media become cult favorites, and sometimes more popular than actual hits. Increasingly, the way to cut through the clutter is to do less, and leave behind a thirst — and an opportunity — for more.This has been happening organically on TikTok since the app’s beginning: TikTokers mine music (new and old alike) for snippets they can reinvent as short dances or comic films. Look at recent popular dances, like the one-pose-per-mood routine to Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage” (“I’m a savage/Classy, bougie, ratchet/Sassy, moody, nasty”), or the soundtrack to the Renegade craze: “Lottery,” by K. Camp — or at least the beginning of “Lottery,” a song that K. Camp eventually raps on. In the case of Jack Harlow’s “Whats Poppin,” the clips don’t feature a dance, but umpteen thousands of handsome young people shamelessly flirting with their phone cameras.“Toosie Slide” merely anticipates the response — why not just cut to the chase?Drake had already done this, unintentionally, with “Nonstop,” his 2018 song that recently became the soundtrack to one of TikTok’s funniest routines — see Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez flipping the switch and swapping outfits.And he is no stranger to feeding the viral maw. In 2015, the “Hotline Bling” video, with its lush neon-tone backgrounds and easily legible dance steps and facial expressions, was engineered for the meme era, every scene a potential GIF.But less well-known artists who are savvy enough to read online tea leaves can do something similar. For them, TikTok can also serve as a test run, a way to gauge potential interest in an idea, a sound or a lyric, before committing resources to it.Such is the case with The Kid Laroi, an Australian rapper who last month posted a snippet of a song on TikTok — “I need a bad bitch/Addison Rae/Shawty the baddest” — name-checking the TikTok superstar with 31 million followers, who’s been part of the dominant Hype House collective.With everyone in quarantine glued to their phones, a strategic @ mention can reach its intended recipient, no matter how famous that recipient is. On her Instagram story, Rae filmed herself listening to the clip, surprised, and then posted a clip of herself playing it for her mother on TikTok. Eventually Laroi and Rae spoke. “She was like, ‘Is this song, like, a real song?’ and I was like yeah, it is, and it wasn’t, but I was like yeah, it is,” he said in an interview with Genius.And so, in short order, it became a real song — keyword optimized, algorithm friendly, half-cooked but just cooked enough. Most newborn rap songs from relative unknowns have just the faintest chance at survival in the harsh digital clime. But a nurturing boost from one of the most famous young women on the internet might make it last.Choosing to name your song after someone famous is something of a gimme, however. Taking less obvious source material and reframing it into a song requires a touch more improvisational savvy. That’s not a phrase one has historically associated with Tyga, a genial hip-hop hanger-on for at least a couple of generations. But quarantine has extracted something strange, cheerful and winning from him.Curtis Roach, a TikTok comedian, posted a video at the beginning of March where he eye-rollingly rapped “bored in the house and I’m in the house bored” while banging out a beat on the floor. It was catchy, and just the right degree of comically exasperated.Soon after, Tyga posted a clip of himself dancing in his kitchen and spinning on his hoverboard to Roach’s audio (as have around 400,000 others). Before long, he posted a second clip, more ornate than the first — jumping from couch to couch, dancing on his pool table, washing his hands, walking like a cat on the mantle in front of his television. (Tyga has a big house, too, though perhaps not quite so Brobdingnagian as Drake’s.) He’d added a beat to Roach’s words — bubbly and light, like the jerk music that dominated Los Angeles hip-hop in the late 2000s — and in the caption, announced that he’d made a song with Roach.For the song “Bored in the House,” both recorded humorous verses. Tyga: “Tell the bitch chill like refrigerator doors/We can heat up some ramen, can’t go to the store”; Roach: “Locked down, I’ma stay stayin’ in-in/Ramen noodles every night for my din-din/Hulu, binge watchin’ episodes of ‘Ben 10,’” and so on. It is primo comedy rap, the stuff of morning-zoo radio, and an elegant example of spinning gold from hay.Where “Toosie Slide” plays like a royal benediction — the world’s most savvy and influential pop musician spinning an entire digital platform on his fingertip — “Bored in the House” feels like from-the-ground-up playtime. We are all left to our own devices now — how nice it is to make a meaningful, if brief, connection across the social distance. More