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      in Music

      How Ella Jenkins Revolutionized Children’s Music

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      Over seven decades, she brought a world of genres and ideas to songs for the young. On her centennial, what she would really like to do is perform again.When Ella Jenkins began recording young people’s music in the 1950s and ’60s, her albums featured tracks that many of that era’s parents and teachers would probably never have dreamed of playing for children: a love chant from North Africa. A Mexican hand-clapping song. A Maori Indian battle chant. And even “Another Man Done Gone,” an American chain-gang lament whose lyrics she changed, turning it into a freedom cry.“She found this way of introducing children to sometimes very difficult topics and material, but with a kind of gentleness,” said Gayle Wald, a professor of American studies at George Washington University and the author of a forthcoming biography of Jenkins. “She never lied to them. She certainly never talked down to them.”Jenkins’s unorthodox approach became a huge success: She is the best-selling individual artist in the history of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, surpassing even such stalwarts of the label as Woody Guthrie and her friend Pete Seeger. A champion of diversity long before the term became popular, Jenkins helped revolutionize music for the young, purposefully encouraging Black children.Jenkins at a Grammy ceremony where she received a special honor.R. Diamond/WireImageIn addition to introducing global material, which she often recorded with children’s choruses, she wrote original, interactive compositions like “You’ll Sing a Song and I’ll Sing a Song,” now part of the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry.“Before Ella, very few people actually composed for children,” Wald said in a video interview.You might think that Jenkins, who will celebrate her 100th birthday on Tuesday, would now want to relax and savor her many accolades, among them lifetime achievement awards from both the Grammys and ASCAP, the music licensing agency, as well as a designation as a National Endowment for the Arts Heritage Fellow. But in a brief telephone conversation from her home in an assisted-living center in Chicago, she seemed unconcerned with plans for her centenary in the city, which include a Tuesday morning celebration with young students from the Old Town School of Folk Music, and a showcase on Wednesday with performances by children from Kids on the Move Summer Camp.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Who’s Afraid of Being Black? Not Kamala, Beyoncé or Kendrick.

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      With her response to Donald Trump’s comments about her background, Kamala Harris showed that Blackness doesn’t need to be explained or defended — an idea underscored by her campaign theme song.Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t take the race bait.A few hours after Donald J. Trump falsely claimed that she suddenly decided to become “a Black person,” Ms. Harris reminded the crowd at a Black sorority convention in Houston that Mr. Trump was resorting to a familiar script. It was the “same old show,” she said, of “divisiveness and disrespect.”She chose not to deflect attention away from her multicultural heritage or to double down on it. That tactic nullified an implication that being Black is something that needs to be authenticated, explained, disavowed or defended. It underscored that Blackness isn’t something that can be turned on or off.Like Ms. Harris, my father is the child of an Indian mother and a Black father. Both he and his parents were born in and emigrated from Trinidad and Tobago. Because of him, I saw up close what Ms. Harris is conveying: that it’s possible to refuse to pit one heritage against the other even as you embrace Blackness as your primary political identity.“My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters,” Ms. Harris wrote in “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey,” her 2019 memoir. “She knew her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.”Ms. Harris, like my dad, considers her Blackness something to be celebrated and, at times, protected.Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar perform her song “Freedom,” now used by the Kamala Harris campaign, at the BET Awards in 2016.Matt Sayles/Invision, via Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Meshell Ndegeocello Could Have Had Stardom but Chose Music Instead

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      A good musician’s relationship with the past is tricky. You want to move forward without entirely forsaking what you’ve already done. You don’t want it defining you when so much future defining lies ahead. It’s a dilemma Meshell Ndegeocello was thinking through at her dining room table in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, on a recent afternoon.Ndegeocello happens to be much more than merely a good musician. She’s been playing professionally since the early 1990s and, at 55, is about to release her 14th album, a collection of songs that excites her. The past — the repertoire, the old stuff, the hits — can start to feel like “karaoke of myself,” she said, even if that’s never what it’s been like for us folks in the audience. Take her performances earlier this year at the Blue Note, the essential Greenwich Village jazz club.Over the course of a month, she and the six assiduous, deliriously skilled musicians in her band turned a rush-hour subway car of a venue into their hearth. To fuel these shows, Ndegeocello could have reached into three decades of her own music, an eclectic body of work whose spine is funk — she’s all but synonymous with the bass — and guided by her insinuating baritone. Yet on one January night, her ensemble’s layered mantras and lacquered grooves were the fruit of a long-gestating project built around the existential straits of being Black in America that now comprise this new album, “No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin.”“No one does anything alone,” she said. “There are artists like Prince and Stevie Wonder who can do that all themselves. I just like band experience.”Andre D. Wagner for The New York TimesThe room swayed and rhythmically nodded as rapt, reverent congregants. More than halfway through: a change-up. A jewel from the Ndegeocello trove, “I’m Diggin’ You (Like an Old Soul Record),” off her 31-year-old debut album, “Plantation Lullabies.” The song had essentially been reconsidered, infused with the solemnity and rumination befitting the rest of the set. But the women at the table inches behind mine flipped out with the gratitude of recognition. They were at a party and had run into an old friend who kicked things up a notch. (“It’s her birthday!” one of the women exclaimed to me, about her pal.)That moment at the Blue Note came back to me watching Ndegeocello and her band rehearse one afternoon last month at her studio in Long Island City, in Queens. They were getting ready for an NPR Tiny Desk concert. Ndegeocello had planned to stock it with selections from “No More Water,” which arrives on Friday. (Its release coincides with Baldwin’s centennial.) Running through the set list, she mentioned “Outside Your Door,” a quiet-storm slow burn from “Plantation Lullabies” that a casual Ndegeocellist might be expecting. Then she reconsidered, wary of NPR’s request that she perform a hit.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Looking for the Best in Black Cinema? Try Brown Sugar.

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      The streaming service highlights some of the finest movies starring, and often directed by, Black artists.As the name-brand streaming services struggle to show profits and broker cable-esque bundling packages to cut costs, the most successful streamers are proving to be niche services, which curate specialized libraries for a specific target audience. We’ve spotlighted several such streamers in this space, most of them focusing on clearly defined genres or sensibilities; this month, we look at a service with an eye on one particular culture.Brown Sugar, which started in 2016, promises on its site “hit movies and TV shows along with the largest collection of classic Black cinema, uncut and commercial-free.” Its library features programming about the Black experience, predominately by Black creators, and aimed primarily at Black audiences (while recognizing that those audiences are seeking all sorts of entertainment). There is a robust selection of Black cinema from the 1970s, the vaunted blaxploitation era, including titles from Ossie Davis, Rudy Ray Moore and Richard Roundtree, as well as cult titles like “The Harder They Come” and “Putney Swope,” and ’80s favorites like “Hollywood Shuffle” and “Beat Street.”That era initially dominated the service’s library, but it has since broadened its offerings to include more contemporary romantic comedies, action thrillers, heartwarming dramas, and historical and true crime documentaries. It’s also cultivated a partnership with Bounce TV that gives viewers access to such long-running and popular shows as the soap opera “Saints & Sinners,” the rags-to-riches sitcom “Family Time” and the barbershop-set comedy “In the Cut.”Subscription is a bargain, running only $3.99 per month (after a one-week free trial) or $42 for a year. Brown Sugar is available on desktop and a variety of streaming devices, including Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire. Image quality varies wildly — some films and shows are Blu-ray quality, but occasional older and less-cared-for titles may well have been mastered from VHS. But it’s worth the risk for the hidden gems the service offers.Here are a few highlights from the current library:Pryor plays an outlaw and Williams a federal agent in Sidney J. Furie’s film.Paramount Pictures‘Hit!’: “Lady Sings the Blues” was one of the first and most successful (critically and commercially) films of ’70s Black cinema; this 1973 effort reunited that film’s director, Sidney J. Furie, with two of its co-stars, Billy Dee Williams and Richard Pryor, this time for an action extravaganza that more resembled “The French Connection” than “Lady.” Williams plays a federal agent who goes after an international drug cartel after his daughter dies of a heroin overdose; Pryor is one of the team of outlaws and outcasts he puts together to get the job done when his superiors veto the mission. The result is fast-paced and funny (thanks primarily to the always-reliable Pryor), and filled with thrilling action beats.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares109 Views

      in Theater

      At ‘Slave Play’ in London, a ‘Black Out’ Night Emerges From Controversy

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      Critics slammed the idea of “restricting audiences on the basis of race,” but at a recent performance, Black spectators praised producers for creating a safe space.Elaine Grant was pleased with the scene unfolding outside the Noël Coward Theater in London on Wednesday night.Unlike most nights at the theater in the West End, there was a sea of majority Black faces laughing and jovially chatting in a line that snaked around the block before a performance of Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play.”Grant, who works in the arts, had organized a group of more than 100 people, mostly Black women, to see the show. “A lot of the people that I work with don’t necessarily go to the theater a lot,” she said, and so it was important for them to be in a space where they could feel safe experiencing a range of emotion.This was a “Black Out” performance, an idea Harris first announced for his play’s Broadway 2019 run, in which he invites Black audience members to attend a specific performance, to experience and discuss art away from the white gaze. Joaquina Kalukango, an actress in the show’s New York run, told the Times in 2020 that she felt on those nights that she was performing to an audience “that fully understood the story and understood where these characters were coming from.”In London, the mood on the theater steps was upbeat and there seemed little concern that when this “Slave Play” transfer — including two Black Out performances — was announced in February, it drew the wrath of some British commentators, and got caught up in ongoing debates over race in British cultural institutions. Even the office of the prime minister at the time, Rishi Sunak, chimed in, saying, “restricting audiences on the basis of race would be wrong and divisive.”Harris responded to the widespread criticism on social media, addressing what he called a “moral panic” among parts of the British public.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Shay Youngblood, Influential Black Author and Playwright, Dies at 64

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      She wrote memorably about her upbringing by a circle of maternal elders and the life lessons they imparted, and of her yearning for the mother she lost.Shay Youngblood, a novelist and playwright whose works about her upbringing by a churchgoing cohort of “Big Mamas” and her adventures in Paris as a young aspiring writer inspired a generation of young Black women, died on June 11 at the home of a friend, Kelley Alexander, in Peachtree City, Ga. She was 64.Ms. Alexander said the cause was ovarian cancer.Ms. Youngblood, whose mother died when she was 2 years old and whose father was not in her life, grew up in a housing project in Columbus, Ga., where she raised by her maternal grandmother and great-grandmother, along with a close circle of eccentric and adoring maternal stand-ins.The Big Mamas — stoic, arthritic and wise — had much to impart to the young Shay: their dim view of most men; their love of music, dancing and church; their often bawdy humor; their dignified, powerful resistance to the indignities and horrors visited upon them by the racist white employers for whom they worked as maids.Ms. Youngblood said that she prayed often for her mother to return, but that as she grew older, she appreciated the richness of her upbringing and turned the experience into her first book, “The Big Mama Stories” (1989), which before being published was adapted into her first play, “Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery.” First produced by the Horizon Theater Company in Atlanta in 1988, it has since been staged all over the world, in schools and local theaters.“The simple act of centering on the stories of Black women, with barely any references to the men (white or Black) in their lives, is itself an act of resistance,” Kerry Reid wrote in a review for The Chicago Tribune when “Shakin’ the Mess Outta Misery” was produced in Chicago in 2017, 20 years after its first staging there. “And the women we meet in Youngblood’s unapologetically fierce, funny and ultimately hopeful memory-play-with-music might make you want to jump up at the curtain call and ask all of them to run for office.”Lisa Adler, Horizon’s longtime co-artistic director, recalled that when Ms. Youngblood gave her the play in its original raw form in the early 1980s, when they were both in their early 20s, she thought: “This isn’t quite a play, but it’s something. I’ve got to do something!” She convened the director Glenda Dickerson and the dramaturgs Gayle Austin and Isabelle Bagshaw, and together they shaped the work.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      ‘The Interview’: Eddie Murphy Is Ready to Look Back

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      Eddie Murphy has been so famous for so long, occupying such a lofty place in the cultural landscape, that it can be easy to overlook just how game-changing a figure he actually is.Let’s start, as Murphy’s career did, with standup. There had been star comics before — Steve Martin, Richard Pryor — but none exploded with anything like Murphy’s speed or intensity. Swaggering, magnetic and able to bounce between sweet personal storytelling and controversial, defiantly un-P.C. material, he was, and forgive me for mixing disciplines, a rock star. “Eddie Murphy: Raw,” released in 1987 when he was only 26, is the highest-grossing standup-comedy film ever — still. The scale of his success, and the fact he achieved it without dulling his edge, redefined what a comedian could do, paving the way for the likes of Kevin Hart and Chris Rock.Listen to the Conversation With Eddie MurphyDavid Marchese talks to the comedy legend about navigating the minefield of fame, “Family Feud” and changing Hollywood forever.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon Music | NYT Audio AppHe also, of course, cast his spell on TV. When Murphy arrived at “Saturday Night Live” in 1980, the show was thought to be on the verge of cancellation. Through sheer force of charisma as well as instantly iconic, hilariously unpredictable recurring characters like his crotchety Gumby and the Mr. Rogers parody Mr. Robinson, Murphy brought the show back to life. A highly plausible argument can be made that without him, television’s most reliable comedy-star-making machine might not have made it to a 10th anniversary, let alone be nearing its 50th.But Murphy made his greatest mark in movies, where he reached new heights, for comedians and Black performers, of popularity and bankability. He helped pioneer the action-comedy genre with his quippy, improvisational-feeling performances in movies like “Beverly Hills Cop” and “48 Hrs.” And then in the mid-1990s, after a bit of a career dip, he transitioned to family-friendly films like “Shrek” and “The Nutty Professor” (one of multiple comedies in which Murphy virtuosically played wildly different characters), and continued to score giant hits.All of which is to say that American pop culture looked different after Eddie Murphy came along. Now he’s returning to the character that sent his career into the stratosphere with “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F,” which comes to Netflix on July 3. It arrives 40 years after the first film in the series, in which Murphy stars as the wisecracking detective Axel Foley. He is clearly comfortable with the role — and with himself. In recent years, Murphy has been a somewhat enigmatic offscreen presence, but as I found out over the course of our two long conversations in the spring, he can be open and relaxed. He was eager to reflect on what he has achieved, share some Hollywood stories, explain why doing standup doesn’t appeal to him anymore and reveal the dream project he has never gotten off the ground. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Black Barbie: A Documentary’ Review: Becoming the Main Character

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      A new Netflix documentary explores what led to the release of Black Barbie in 1980, both celebrating her existence and recognizing her limitations.For more than four decades, Lagueria Davis’s aunt, Beulah Mae Mitchell, worked at Mattel. Davis, the director of the new Netflix documentary “Black Barbie,” was not a fan of dolls, but was drawn to the subject by her aunt, who is a devoted collector.On the surface, the documentary is about what led to the 1980 release of Black Barbie, but the issues it explores run much deeper: the harm of lacking a “social mirror,” the slow pace of progress and the tensions around darkening a white fictional character.There were already Black dolls in the Barbie universe before Black Barbie, but all were ancillary — friends of Barbie’s. The Black version of Barbie, created by the company’s first Black designer, Kitty Black Perkins, was meant to be a main character.What is most interesting about the documentary is the question of whether Black Barbie ever managed to escape her predecessors’ marginalization, as white Barbie remains the standard. Does society need Black versions of white cultural products or new products in which Blackness is centered?Featuring a wide range of Mattel employees, academics, cultural commentators and women who have had Barbies made in their image, such as the Shondaland founder Shonda Rhimes, the ballerina Misty Copeland and the fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad, Davis complicates our understanding of Black Barbie, both celebrating her existence and recognizing her limitations.“Black Barbie” looks at a Black toy company that produced multiracial dolls and a line within Mattel that was focused on stand-alone Black characters, created by Stacey McBride-Irby, a protégée of Perkins. Staying with these scenes a little longer, exploring what worked and did not, would have expanded the conversations taking place in the film and the dissonance inherent in trying to make a white doll Black.Black Barbie: A DocumentaryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More