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      in Movies

      Lin-Manuel Miranda responde a las críticas sobre el elenco de ‘In the Heights’

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      La película generó malestar por presentar actores latinos de piel clara en los papeles principales, a pesar de la prevalencia de latinos de piel oscura en el barrio donde se rodó.Lin-Manuel Miranda reconoció las críticas de que la adaptación cinematográfica de su musical In the Heights no había representado adecuadamente a la población afrolatina de piel oscura de Washington Heights, el barrio del Alto Manhattan en el que está ambientado, y también se ha disculpado por quedarse corto al “intentar pintar un mosaico de esta comunidad”.La película, adaptación del musical de Broadway, ganador de un Tony por mejor guion, sobre el propietario de una bodega que sueña con volver a República Dominicana, se estrenó en los cines y en HBO Max la semana pasada, obteniendo críticas positivas y elogios por todo lo alto.Sin embargo, la película también suscitó críticas en internet por la decisión de los cineastas de seleccionar actores latinos de piel clara para los papeles principales, a pesar de la prevalencia de latinos de piel oscura en el barrio donde se rodó la película.Miranda, que formó parte del equipo creativo de la película, dijo en su declaración que estaba prestando atención a las opiniones en línea, incluidas las muestras de pesar y frustración por el colorismo y por “sentirse aún invisibles” en la película.“Empecé a escribir In the Heights porque no me sentía visto”, escribió Miranda en un comunicado publicado en Twitter el lunes por la noche. “Y durante los últimos 20 años todo lo que quería era que nosotros —TODOS nosotros— nos sintiéramos vistos”.“He oído que sin suficiente representación de afrolatinos de piel oscura”, continuó, “la obra se siente explotadora de la comunidad que tanto queríamos representar con orgullo y alegría”.“En los comentarios puedo escuchar el pesar y la frustración por el colorismo, por sentirse aún invisibles”, dijo en el comunicado.La película, un proyecto que tardó una década y que tuvo un presupuesto de 55 millones de dólares, fue protagonizada por Anthony Ramos como el dueño de la bodega, Melissa Barrera como una aspirante a diseñadora de moda y Leslie Grace como Nina, una estudiante de Stanford en dificultades.En una entrevista reciente, la guionista de la película, Quiara Alegría Hudes, habló de la decisión de hacer de Nina un personaje afrolatino en la versión cinematográfica. “Quería hacer conscientemente que Nina fuera afrolatina en esta versión de In the Heights. Desde que estrenamos el espectáculo en Broadway, se ha producido esta conversación nacional en torno a las microagresiones y cosas realmente interesantes que siento que serían aplicables a la situación de Nina”.Corey Hawkins, que interpreta al interés amoroso de Nina y empleado del servicio de taxis de su padre, es negro, pero no latino (algunos también criticaron a los realizadores por eliminar un punto de la trama, que había existido en el musical, en el que el personaje de Hawkins dice que el padre de Nina no cree que sea lo suficientemente bueno para ella). More

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      in Music

      New Report Paints Bleak Picture of Diversity in the Music Industry

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      The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative examined 4,060 executives at six types of companies, and found 19.8 percent were from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups.A year ago, as protests spread across the country following the murder of George Floyd, the music industry promised to change.Major record labels, streaming platforms and broadcasters pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in charitable donations. The diversity of the music industry itself — a business that relies heavily on the creative labor of Black artists — came under scrutiny, with calls to hire more people of color and to elevate women and minorities into management and decision-making positions.But how diverse is the music business? The answer, according to a new study: not very.A report by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California, released Tuesday, examined the makeup of 4,060 executives, at the vice president level and above, at 119 companies of six types: corporate music groups, record labels, music publishers, radio broadcasters, streaming services and live music companies.Among those executives, 19.8 percent were from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, including 7.5 percent who were Black. Women made up 35.3 percent of the total.Delving deeper into the numbers, the authors of the 25-page report, led by Stacy L. Smith and Carmen Lee, found that the representation of women and minorities seemed to shrink as they looked higher up music companies’ organization charts.After filtering out subsidiaries, the researchers looked at the uppermost leadership positions — chief executives, chairmen and presidents — in a subset of 70 major and independent companies, and found that 86.1 percent of those people were both white and male. The 10 people of color who held those positions were all at independents, and just two were women: Desiree Perez, a longtime associate of Jay-Z who leads his company Roc Nation, and Golnar Khosrowshahi, the founder of Reservoir, which owns music rights.The report includes some stark findings. For example, among the 4,060 people in the study’s sample, the researchers found 17.7 white male executives for every Black female one.“Underrepresented and Black artists are dominating the charts, but the C-suite is a ‘diversity desert,’” Dr. Smith said in a statement. “The profile of top artists may give some in the industry the illusion that music is an inclusive business, but the numbers at the top tell a different story.”Each year since 2018, the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has tracked the artists, songwriters and producers behind the biggest hits. Again and again, it has found that women are far outnumbered by men, yet revealed some encouraging numbers for underrepresented groups: People of color have made up about 47 percent of the credited artists behind 900 top pop songs since 2012.Yet the group’s new report, called “Inclusion in the Music Business: Gender & Race/Ethnicity Across Executives, Artists & Talent Teams,” and sponsored by Universal Music Group, shows that women and people of color are poorly represented in the power structure of the industry itself.The variation across different job levels and industry sectors is notable. Black executives fared best within record labels, making up 14.4 percent of all positions, and 21.2 percent of artist-and-repertoire, or A&R, roles, which tend to work most closely with artists. Black people hold just 4 percent of executive jobs in radio, and 3.3 percent in live music.According to U.S. census data, 13.4 percent of Americans identify as Black.Women posted their highest executive numbers in the live music business, holding 39.1 percent of positions. But drilling down, the study found, most of those women were white. Even at record labels, where Black executives were best represented, Black women held only 5.3 percent of executive jobs.The U.S.C. report is one of a number of efforts underway to examine the music industry and evaluate its progress in reaching stated goals of diversity and inclusion. This week, the Black Music Action Coalition, a group of artist managers, lawyers and other insiders, is expected to release a “report card” on how well the industry has met its own commitments to change.Much of the data used in the U.S.C. report, the researchers said, came from publicly available sources, like company websites. The report suggests that a lack of participation in the study by music companies was a reason.“Companies were given the opportunity to participate and confirm information, especially of senior management teams,” the report says. “Roughly a dozen companies did so. The vast majority did not.”The authors of the report, who also include Marc Choueiti, Katherine Pieper, Zoe Moore, Dana Dinh and Artur Tofan, said they want to spur the industry toward change. The report recommends a number of steps that companies can take to make their executive ranks more diverse, including making career pathways more flexible and “fast tracking” leaders with support and mentoring.“Our hope,” Dr. Lee said, “is that the industry will come together to tackle this problem in a way that creates meaningful progress.” More

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      in Music

      Amythyst Kiah Found Her Powerful Voice. Now She Has a Sound to Match It.

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      The 34-year-old singer and songwriter fuses folk, blues, rock and once-hidden emotion on her new album, “Wary + Strange.”NASHVILLE — Before Amythyst Kiah made her new album, “Wary + Strange,” she veered between two distinct aesthetics. Her 2013 debut, “Dig,” was filled with spare acoustic renditions of old-time material. Then came a more robust set of indie rock.“I do not understand what the hell my brain was doing separating the two,” she said recently, resting her elbows on a park picnic table. “I can do whatever the hell I want with the songs.”When Kiah and the producer Tony Berg recorded “Fancy Drones (Fracture Me),” a song about her excruciating awareness of being cut off from her emotions, in early 2020, the goal was to join the two halves of her artistic identity at last. The result: Kiah’s country-blues phrasing bent around a lurching groove, with the guttural buzz of Berg’s bass harmonica substituting for bass guitar.“When we were done with it, we looked at each other as if to say, ‘What the hell was this?’” Berg, who has worked with the indie-rock singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers and the band Phantom Planet, recalled in a phone interview.To Kiah, this was the sound of self-actualization: “It was one of the best days of my life,” she said.It wasn’t like she’d invented arbitrary reasons to corral her music into categories; developing her taste as an introspective Black listener and musician, she’d noticed that some genres are marked, and marketed, as white domains. There was, she recalled, “no talk about how Black people have consistently and always played integral roles in shaping industry and shaping culture and shaping music.”Kiah resides in East Tennessee, where she’s spent the entirety of her 34 years next to the Appalachian Mountains in one modest-size municipality or another, but she’d driven 300 miles west to Nashville to appear in a documentary about Black voices in country and roots music alongside Allison Russell, one of her bandmates in Our Native Daughters.That string band, convened in early 2018 by Rhiannon Giddens, is a group of banjo-playing Black women with significant overlapping experiences, but distinct sounds and sensibilities. Kiah’s contributions include one of her first pointedly topical compositions, “Black Myself,” a down-home, defiant testimony to Black pride that earned a Grammy nomination for best American roots song.On Friday, “Wary + Strange,” Kiah’s first nationally distributed solo release will arrive. It’s the work of an artist weary of correcting perceptions, book ended by the resolved refrain “Soapbox,” a slight song with a serious purpose: to reject the rejection she’s felt (“You can keep your sophistry”).Kiah took up the task of defining who she is when she grew aware that others were doing it for her. She was the only child of a manufacturing plant supervisor and a drugstore manager, one of the few families of color — or households that didn’t attend church — in their Chattanooga suburb. “We were all in the same socioeconomic bracket,” she said, “but at the end of the day, I was still Black, and there came a point where people that I used to hang out with just started ignoring me.”It was a revelation when she made an artistically inclined friend who had access to an older sibling’s Nine Inch Nails and Tori Amos CDs: “I was just like, ‘Oh, there’s other ways of being.’”“For the first time, I didn’t feel like I had to close off a part of myself,” Kiah said of making “Wary + Strange.”Liam Woods for The New York TimesKiah got into alternative metal bands, hearing echoes of her own unexpressed anger, but it was in the mystical, expansive angst of Amos’s piano epics that she found an approach to own. Instead of a piano, she requested an acoustic guitar. Her father, Carl Phillips, who’d played Southern rock, country, soul and pop in otherwise white gigging bands, and listened to plenty else besides, understood.“I don’t remember ever telling her that a particular category of music was bad, because I had a little bit of everything,” he said in an interview.Kiah dealt with intense social anxiety, so she was content to be a bedroom shredder. Learning classical fingerstyle guitar, with its blending of rhythm and lead, made her feel self-sufficient, like she had “this tiny orchestra beneath me.”A switch to an arts high school brought some respite. “I met the first Black nerds that I ever met in my life,” she said. “On top of that, I was able to be openly gay and literally no one cared.”That didn’t mean she was eager to play in front of others. Her third public performance was at her mother’s funeral, where she sang a momentous original. “She committed suicide,” Kiah said, “so my whole thing was, ‘Why did you leave me?’” She re-examines that loss, and how she dealt with it, in her new song “Wild Turkey.” “When I was 17, I pretended not to care, stayed numb for years to escape despair,” she sings, acknowledging her stoic self-protection.A decade, and much therapy, passed between those two compositions. “I just completely stopped writing down my feelings about anything,” Kiah explained. “I just wanted to be like a robot.”After her mother’s death, Kiah and her father went to live with her paternal grandmother in the considerably smaller Johnson City, Tenn., and she enrolled in a bluegrass guitar class at East Tennessee State University. A new fascination with flatpicking technique developed into a study of old-time music when she learned about the Black string band tradition concealed beneath the whitewashed narrative of what was once sold as hillbilly music.“To see that history unveiled before me, I was like, ‘Oh, so I do have a place in this country,” she said. “I am an American. I am Appalachian. This music is part of my heritage, and it influenced everything else that I listen to. Why wouldn’t I want to play it?’”Her father learned alongside her, borrowing textbooks and never missing a performance when she joined the school’s marquee old-time band. “Most of the places that they went to, it was majority culture and her,” he said, referring to white crowds. “I couldn’t imagine her being there by herself.”Receiving encouraging feedback about her singing convinced Kiah to focus on her voice, too. She worked up modern interpretations of mountain standards like “Darlin’ Corey,” dropping the key to suit the stern resonance of her low range. And she played on the regional circuit, with her father serving as informal tour manager. A band she called Her Chest of Glass was her first venture into full-band rock arrangements.No lineup has mattered more to Kiah’s career or consciousness than Our Native Daughters. She sensed the significance of their mission — recovering the musical agency of enslaved people and their descendants — but figured the album they released through Smithsonian Folkways would mostly have an “archival, academic” impact. To her surprise, its heartfelt historicity has registered with less scholarly audiences. “I didn’t think enough people were really prepared to accept these stories,” Kiah said.The potency of those vignettes emboldened her to take a personalized approach to folk and country-blues, and to record both stripped-down and muscled-up versions of her growing pile of material. At the Grammys, she met an A&R executive from Concord Music, who paired her with Berg. They agreed to scrap her existing recordings and start over. On “Wary + Strange,” she depicts a nightmarish netherworld of abandonment by spectral women — her mother; a lover — and a self-aware descent into melancholy, boozy depths. “There’s this feeling of being haunted and feeling slightly uncomfortable at all times,” Kiah said.Kiah reached for literary terms, “Southern Gothic” and “magical realism,” to describe her ideal sound to Berg: “This idea that you have a setting that is very familiar, very real, but then there’s these weird, otherworldly bits and pieces within it,” she explained.Berg foregrounded Kiah’s voice and guitar, and called in impressionistic instrumentalists like Blake Mills and Ethan Grushka. “What I wanted them to bring,” Berg said, “was something other than what you might expect. Sometimes it’s unrecognizable noise in the background, and that noise can represent the static that impedes the expression of ideas.”It’s had the opposite effect for Kiah. “For the first time” creating a record, she said, “I didn’t feel like I had to close off a part of myself.” More

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      in Television

      How Jodie Turner-Smith Is Reshaping Anne Boleyn's Story

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      Jodie Turner-Smith portrays the ill-fated wife of Henry VIII in a new mini-series. The show has stirred debate in Britain, which is sort of the point.LONDON — Britain’s most recent rendering of the story of Anne Boleyn, the second of Henry VIII’s six wives, begins at the end. When the new mini-series “Anne Boleyn” opens, it’s 1536, the queen is pregnant and powerful — and has five months left to live.Anne’s story, which occupies a special place in the British collective imagination, has spawned an abundance of fictionalized depictions onscreen (“The Tudors”) and in literature (“Wolf Hall”). It is generally told as a morally dubious young woman seducing an older king into leaving his wife and his church, before she is executed for failing to give birth to a male heir.But the new mini-series, which premiered last week on Channel 5, one of Britain’s public service broadcasters, attempts to reframe Anne’s story, instead focusing on her final months and how she tried to maintain power in a system that guaranteed her very little.In the three episode-long series, Anne is played by Jodie Turner-Smith, best-known for her role in the film “Queen & Slim.” It is the first time a Black actress has portrayed the Tudor queen onscreen.“We wanted to find someone who could really inhabit her but also be surprising to an audience,” Faye Ward, one of the show’s executive producers, said in an interview. Since there were already so many depictions of Anne Boleyn, the show’s creators “wanted to reset people’s expectations of her,” Ward said.Turner-Smith’s Anne Boleyn, center, desperately tries to maintain power in a system that guarantees her very little.Sony Pictures TelevisionAnne (Turner-Smith) and her brother George (Paapa Essiedu).Sony Pictures TelevisionMadge Shelton (Thalissa Teixeira), Anne’s cousin and lady-in-waiting.Sony Pictures TelevisionThe series employs a diverse casting playbook, in a similar vein to the Regency-era Netflix drama “Bridgerton.” But whereas that show’s characters are fictional, in “Anne Boleyn” actors of color play several white historical figures: The British-Ghanian actor Paapa Essiedu plays Anne’s brother George Boleyn, and the British-Brazillian actress Thalissa Teixeira portrays Madge Shelton, Anne’s cousin and lady-in-waiting.Although race does not figure overtly in the show’s plot, the program makers adopted an approach known as “identity-conscious casting,” which allows actors to bring “all those factors of yourself to a role,” Ward said.For Turner-Smith, that meant connecting her experiences with the ways in which Anne, who was raised in the French court, was an outsider and suffered at Henry’s court.“As a Black woman, I can understand being marginalized. I have a lived experience of what limitation and marginalization feel like,” Turner-Smith, 34, said in an interview. “I thought it was interesting to bring the freshness of a Black body telling that story.”Casting Turner-Smith as one of Britain’s best-known royal consorts has caused debate in the press and particularly on social media in Britain, with “Anne Boleyn” trending on Twitter the day after the series premiere.In the newspaper The Daily Telegraph, the writer Marianka Swain called Turner-Smith’s casting “pretty cynical” and wrote that it was designed to have “Twitter frothing rather than adding anything to our understanding of an era.”Others, though, have welcomed the show’s perspective. Olivette Otele, a professor of the history of slavery and memory of enslavement at the University of Bristol, noted in The Independent newspaper that the series arrived at a time when Britain was “soul searching” about how to understand its colonial past. “The past is only a safe space if it becomes a learning space open to all,” she wrote in praise of the series.It was important to the show’s creators to center the narrative around Anne’s perspective, rather than Henry’s (played by Mark Stanley).Sony Pictures TelevisionDuring the show’s press run, Turner-Smith’s comments about the royal family’s treatment of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex — including that having her in the family was “a missed opportunity” for the monarchy — made headlines in Britain.Meghan’s treatment by the palace — which she told Oprah Winfrey in a bombshell March interview had driven her to thoughts of suicide — is representative of “just how far we have not come with patriarchal values,” Turner-Smith said.“It represents how far we have not come in terms of the monarchy and in terms of somebody being an outsider and being different, and being able to navigate that space,” she said, adding that “you can draw so many parallels if you look for them” between Anne and Meghan’s attempts to figure out life within a British palace.“There is very little room for someone brown to touch the monarchy,” said Turner-Smith — who, upon being cast as Anne, fully expected the move to draw criticism in the country.For the actress, that presented even more reason to push back against people’s assumptions about Anne. “Art is supposed to challenge you,” she said. “The whole point of making it this way was for a different perspective. What is going to resonate with somebody by putting a different face to this and seeing it in a different way?”Dr. Stephanie Russo, the author of “The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: Representations of Anne Boleyn in Fiction and on the Screen,” said there were many reasons for Britain’s fascination with and attachment to the Tudors, and Anne specifically. The “soap opera” of a younger woman disrupting a long-term marriage remains fascinating, she said, as does the rise and fall of a powerful woman.There is also a patriotic element, Russo said: Anne’s daughter was Elizabeth I, the monarch who oversaw Britain’s “golden age,” when William Shakespeare was writing his plays and many historians credit the British Empire as having been born.The series was conceived as a feminist exercise, unpacking what Eve Hedderwick Turner, the show’s writer, called “those big, insulting and detrimental terms” attached to Anne, which at the time included accusations of treason, adultery and an incestuous relationship with her brother.“There is very little room for someone brown to touch the monarchy,” Turner-Smith said.Sony Pictures TelevisionIn the mini-series, Anne falls out of favor with Henry after a stillbirth. No matter how nominally powerful or ambitious she is, she is no match for the forces that seek to extinguish her, which come to include her husband, his advisers and the country’s legal system. All the while, she tries not to show vulnerability in public.It was important, Hedderwick Turner said, for the creators to put “Anne back in the center of her story, making her the protagonist, seeing everything from her perspective.”The political machinations of Henry VIII and his advisers, his internal life and his motivations are largely obscured in the series. Instead, viewers are privy to Anne’s state of mind and her relationship with her household’s ladies-in-waiting.“Henry is spoken about as this great man, because he had all of these wives” and killed some of them, Turner-Smith said. “It’s just like: Actually, there’s a woman at the center of this story who is so dynamic and fascinating and interesting.”Hilary Mantel, the author of the “Wolf Hall” trilogy charting Thomas Cromwell’s life serving Henry VIII, wrote in a 2013 piece for the London Review of Books about how fictionalized accounts of Anne’s life communicate society’s contemporary attitudes toward women.“Popular fiction about the Tudors has also been a form of moral teaching about women’s lives, though what is taught varies with moral fashion,” she said.What, then, does this “Anne Boleyn” say about today’s world?“We’re finally getting to a place where we’re allowing women to become more than just a trope,” Turner-Smith said.Traditionally, when playing a female character, “you’re either the Madonna or you’re the whore, right?” she said. But in this series, “We’re saying we’re unafraid to show different sides of a woman.” More

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      in Music

      Bobby Rush Lived the Blues. Six Decades On, He’s Still Playing Them.

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      On the heels of winning his second Grammy, and on the verge of publishing a memoir, the singer, guitarist and harmonica player is enjoying a long-delayed moment of recognition.The air was thick with termites when Bobby Rush stepped onto an outdoor stage in New Orleans for one of his first live performances in over a year — an uncharacteristically long break, the result of pandemic shutdowns, in a career that began in the wake of World War II.It was early May, and the swarming was so bad that the blues musician wove the insects into his lyrics: “Somebody come get these damn bugs.” He later moved to the ground in front of the stage, determined to continue his show in the dark, beyond the reach of the termite-attracting lights.“I never seen anything like that before,” Rush said by phone a week later, from his home in Jackson, Miss. “I could hardly play my guitar.”Rush has relied on practical improvisations, often in unglamorous circumstances, his entire life. His first guitar was a diddley bow he made from hay wire nailed to the side of his childhood home. Much later, Rolling Stone christened him “The King of the Chitlin Circuit,” an acknowledgment of the years he spent touring the network of small clubs for Black performers and audiences, mainly in the South, in a 1973 Silver Eagle Trailways bus he customized himself.On the heels of winning his second Grammy in March, and on the verge of publishing a memoir in June, Rush, now in his 80s, is enjoying a moment of recognition. A lesser-known figure compared to many of the luminaries he has considered friends and mentors, including Elmore James, Muddy Waters and B.B. King, Rush is one of the last remaining Black blues musicians who experienced the horror of Jim Crow-era racism and participated, however tangentially, in the genre’s postwar flowering.“I may be the oldest blues singer around, me and Buddy Guy,” he said in October, during the first of several conversations, this one via video conference. Rush sat at the edge of a couch at his son’s house in Jackson, slouching to peer into a laptop screen and trotted out a quip he uses onstage: “If I’m not the oldest, I’m the ugliest.”Rush’s book offers three possible birth years — 1940, 1937 and 1934. “All I know is in 1947, I was plowing in the field with a mule,” he said.Imani Khayyam for The New York TimesHe wore the same New Orleans Saints baseball cap over his Jheri curls during an in-person interview a week later, at the Grammy Museum in Cleveland, Miss. Speaking through a mask, he reflected from a dressing room chair about the “heavy” experience of outliving so many contemporaries. He was there to accept the Crossroads of American Music Award, a lifetime achievement of sorts.“I’ve known so many of these cats,” he said. “I’ve lived the history.”Scott Billington, a veteran producer who has worked with many blues musicians, including Rush, said the singer, guitarist and harmonica player is indeed among the last of a dying breed. “Bobby’s almost unique in the blues world today, because he has connections that go back so far,” he said. “He’s made this transition into a sort of iconic American figure.”Rush believes the racial awakening triggered by the murder of George Floyd, and reinforced by the pandemic, leaves him well positioned to reach a public primed to hear the blues with fresh ears. “I think what we thought was forwards wasn’t forwards,” he said of the suggestion that Floyd’s killing represented a step backward in the struggle for racial justice. “I been having feet on my neck all my life.”Rush’s memoir, “I Ain’t Studdin’ Ya: My American Blues Story,” written with Herb Powell and due out June 22, is frank about many things, including the reason he’s received so many standing ovations in recent years.“I’ve got enough good sense to know they are not applauding because I’m a household name,” he writes. “What they’re standing for is that I’m still here, doing it my way.”Rush onstage in 2000. He has become known for his over-the-top shows filled with music, comedy and quips.Linda Vartoogian/Getty ImagesFor much of his career, Rush tailored his show — a mix of soul, funk and blues interspersed with bawdy storytelling — to an audience he says was “99 percent Black.” He went decades without ever cracking into the broader, mainly white audience that brought fame (if not always fortune) to the blues’ biggest stars.That started to change around the turn of this century, when Rush starred in “The Road to Memphis,” one in a series of documentaries about the blues, executive produced by Martin Scorsese, that aired on PBS in 2003. Rush was a senior citizen by then, or about to be. His book offers three possible birth years — 1940, 1937 and 1934. Rush claims not to know the answer.“All I know is in 1947, I was plowing in the field with a mule,” he said.Rush was born Emmett Ellis Jr. in northwest Louisiana. His father, Ellis Sr., was a preacher and sharecropper; his mother, Mattie, a mixed-race homemaker who passed for white. Rush, the sixth of 10 children, said his mother acted differently when the family went into town.“Many times when I was in the public, she wasn’t my mom. She was my babysitter, and my dad was her chauffeur,” he said. “It was a strange situation.”Rush’s family moved to Sherrill, a small town in the Arkansas Delta, when he was still a child. By his early teens, Rush was regularly sneaking into the music clubs in nearby Pine Bluff, a hub of Black culture and commerce.In his book, the Arkansas Delta years are when Rush becomes a character in the history of the blues. It is where he befriended Elmore James, learned to wear his hair like Big Joe Turner, absorbed the harp playing of Sonny Boy Williamson, and first saw the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, the Black vaudeville group that he briefly joined.Arkansas is also where Rush fell in love with the spaces where African-American culture flourished in the segregated South, and changed his name. In “juke joints we fixed onto being segregated. Being in the thick of ourselves with our own groove,” he writes. “There was freedom in these places.”Rush stands over six feet and has a taste for dapper clothes.Imani Khayyam for The New York TimesRush joined the Great Migration north when he moved to Chicago in the early ’50s. He got a job pumping gas, and started a family with his first wife, Hazel. As a musician, he spun his wheels.He was in Chicago over a decade before he cut his first single, “Someday,” released in ’64. He bought a hot dog cart to park outside clubs where he played — and ended up making more money selling hot dogs. In 1969, he opened Bobby’s Barbeque House.He was a savvy, prolific networker. Rush’s book is strewn with lessons in life and music gleaned from legends like Waters, Jimmy Reed and Little Walter, a neighbor who taught him the basics of tongue-blocking, a harmonica technique. In his memoir, he recalls the harp player explaining, “That’s how you git it dirty — make them notes bend.”Rush was ultimately more successful living the blues in Chicago than playing them. The chapter of his book where he discovers Hazel was cheating on him — including with a police officer who put Rush in jail for a night in order to be with her — is one of many where he admits feeling inferior to his more successful friends.“Hidden behind the hurt of her infidelity were feelings of inadequacy,” he writes. “My status in the world felt small.”Part of the hurt came from discovering that racism in the North was comparable to what he knew in the South. The memoir includes a story about a gig in the 1950s he took in a small theater outside Chicago, where he and his band were forced to play behind a curtain. The job was offered to him by a Black musician friend. In one of our interviews, Rush said he wished he could go back in time and ask the friend, “Why you recommend me to a place where I got to play behind the curtain? Why you think I would do that?”The raw vulnerability was at odds with Rush’s physical presence. He stands over six feet and is fit for a person of his age, which, coupled with a taste for dapper clothes — he changed into a tuxedo to record a solo acoustic performance at the museum — allows him to slip easily into the role of an eminent, occasionally immodest bluesman. (He often claims to have made nearly 400 records; the discography in his memoir lists 67, including singles.)Powell, Rush’s co-author, said the musician softened as he reflected on the pain he’d experienced — including the deaths of three of his four children, from complications of sickle cell disease — during interviews for the book.“When we started to look back at his formative years, it created a bond between us that allowed the sensitivity — unusual for a man of his age — to come through,” Powell said. “He cried a bit, which was beautiful.”“I’ve lived the history,” Rush said.Imani Khayyam for The New York TimesThe way Rush talks about affairs of the heart suggests a greater emotional complexity than many of his songs, and his stage show, would imply. In our first conversation, he discussed the inspiration for the song “Porcupine Meat” that a casual listener could assume is about little more than sex. The truth is deeper.“I loved her more than she loved me,” he said. “I wanted to leave her, but I was afraid that she would find someone else better than I, and I’d never find someone that compared to her.”Rush moved from Chicago to Jackson in 1983, to be closer to family and the Black fans who frequented the Black-owned juke joints where he’d found a loyal audience — and better money.“A Black man will pay another Black man what he’s worth,” he said.Rush continued to play live, finding ways to reach new ears. Christone Ingram, the 22-year-old blues guitarist and singer, was in grade school in Clarksdale, Miss., when he first heard Rush’s music coming through the windows of his neighbor’s house.“I just loved his style,” Ingram said in a phone interview. “He was the first one I heard that brought the funk to the blues.”In the mid ’90s, while playing a blues festival in the Netherlands, Rush realized the vaudeville-inspired show that delighted the juke joint crowds didn’t go over as well with larger, mainly white blues audiences. Vasti Jackson, a guitarist and longtime collaborator, was in Rush’s band at the time. “His thing was as much about the talking, telling stories, the comedy,” Jackson said. Jackson recalled advising Rush, “To get this kind of audience, you got to make it raw.”Rush ultimately took the advice to heart. In 2016, the producer Billington convinced him to record what became the album “Porcupine Meat” with a group of New Orleans musicians.“Chorus after chorus he never repeated himself. There was one great idea after another,” Billington said of Rush’s harmonica playing during the sessions. “The sound of his playing has such depth and authority that you couldn’t mistake it for anyone else in contemporary blues.”“Porcupine Meat” went on to win a Grammy, Rush’s first, a validation of his turn toward a rootsier blues sound.Scott Barretta, a blues historian based in Greenwood, Miss., likened Rush’s success with white audiences to the second act Big Bill Broonzy had in the ’50s, after transitioning from urban to folk-blues and receiving support from white taste makers Studs Terkel and Alan Lomax.A difference, he said, is that Rush has “been able to keep a foot in both markets” — something Rush calls “crossing over, but not crossing out.”The past 16 months have been good to Rush, even though they started with him contracting a fever so persistently high he wondered, “Am I going to make it out of this thing alive?”Rush’s battle with what he assumes was Covid-19 — he was never tested — made news not long before he was ready to promote the August 2020 release of “Rawer Than Raw.” It’s a collection of solo acoustic blues songs, a mix of originals and standards by Mississippi blues legends like Howlin’ Wolf, Skip James and Robert Johnson.Rush performed a sample of the songs at the museum last fall, stomping his foot to keep rhythm. Asked if there was a club he was eager to play when the pandemic was over, he mentioned Blue Front Café, in Bentonia, Miss., the oldest surviving juke joint in the state. It’s tiny.“I’d probably have to play outside,” he said. “I don’t mind playing the juke joint, but I’m bigger than that now.” More

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      National Black Theater Plans Next Act in a New Harlem High-Rise

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      The pathbreaking company plans to replace its Harlem home with a 21-story building with apartments, retail and a new theater.It was more than 50 years ago that Barbara Ann Teer rented space in a building at 125th Street and Fifth Avenue in Harlem that would serve as the home of a nascent organization called National Black Theater.The theater blossomed into an important cultural anchor, presenting productions by, and about, Black Americans when their stories rarely appeared on mainstream stages, and hosting artists including Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Nina Simone, Nikki Giovanni and Maya Angelou. When the building was destroyed in a fire in 1983, many feared that the theater was doomed, said Sade Lythcott, Teer’s daughter. But Teer had another idea: She decided to buy the damaged 64,000-square-foot building on Fifth Avenue, with a vision of revitalizing it and trying to use real estate to help pay for the theater’s work.Sade Lythcott, the theater’s chief executive, sees the development as a continuation of the plans that her mother, Barbara Ann Teer, made after founding the theater.Braylen Dion for The New York Times“She saw it as the next piece of this temple to Black liberation, which is ownership,” said Lythcott, the theater’s chief executive. “Ownership would allow the real estate to subsidize the art, which was a model that would disrupt the standard practice of nonprofit theater funding.”The move did not solve all their problems. There were struggles over the years, and a series of financial disputes that at one point left the theater on the brink of losing its home, but the work continued. Now National Black Theater is getting ready for its next act: It is replacing its longtime home with a 21-story building that will include a mix of housing, retail and, on floors three through five, a gleaming new home for the theater.Lythcott and other National Black Theater leaders see the $185 million project, and the partnership they are entering with developers, as a new chapter with the financial and institutional backing to allow them to live out the dream of Teer, who died in 2008: to nurture a space where Black artists can thrive, and the company can work to bring a deeper sense of racial justice to the American theater industry.“What we’re building today really has been informed in all ways by this blueprint that Dr. Teer put into place starting in 1968,” Lythcott said. “It feels like what our community of Black artists and the community of Harlem deserve.”To realize the development project, National Black Theater has partnered with a new real estate firm, Ray, which was founded by Dasha Zhukova, a Russian-American art collector and philanthropist. Also joining the project are the subsidized housing developer L + M, the architect Frida Escobedo, the firm Handel Architects, and the design firms working on National Black Theater’s space, Marvel, Charcoalblue, and Studio & Projects.The planning for the new development has come at a turning point in the theater world. With theaters closed for more than a year because of the pandemic, many institutions have been called on to turn inward and interrogate their own histories of racism and inequity, with many prominent voices calling for change when theaters reopen. It is the kind of discussion National Black Theater has been involved in for decades. This year Lythcott has advised Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on reopening the arts and, as chair for the Coalition of Theaters of Color, has spoken up about racial justice in arts budget negotiations.Before they decided to work together, Lythcott and Zhukova had to have a frank conversation early on about a high-profile misstep in Zhukova’s past.On Martin Luther King’s Birthday in 2014, an online fashion magazine published a photo of Zhukova sitting on a chair — designed by the Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard — that was constructed from a cushion arranged atop a sculpture of a partially clothed Black woman laying on her back, in some sort of bondage. Zhukova apologized for the photo, saying that using this artwork in a photo shoot was regrettable, “as it took the artwork totally out of its intended context.”Lythcott learned of this photo just before she met Zhukova for dinner for the first time — in fact she was Googling Zhukova on her phone at the restaurant before they met to discuss the development project. At the dinner, Zhukova brought up the incident first, Lythcott said, explaining that she would understand if the episode cast too much of a shadow on the project. But Lythcott wasn’t fazed by it, she said, because it was clear all that Zhukova had learned from the incident.“Perhaps that chair was the best thing that ever happened to Dasha,” Lythcott said, “because it was catalytic in expanding the lens by which she sees the world.”In an email, Zhukova said that she was “deeply sorry” for the photo and said that it had started her on a “journey of continued learning and education.”“I am so grateful that Sade sees the person I am trying to be on my continued journey toward personal growth,” she wrote.Barbara Ann Teer, center foreground, founder of National Black Theater, with the cast of one of her productions in 1970.via National Black Theater ArchivesThe new building being planned, for 2033 Fifth Avenue, is slated to include 222 units of housing, an event space and a communal living room where people might eat, work and hang out; a news release says “amenities will include health and wellness programming.”The development project is more than a decade in the making, with several false starts. Lythcott and her brother — Michael Lythcott, who is the chair of the National Black Theater’s board — see it as a realization of their mother’s dream, while recognizing that she might not have taken some of the paths they chose.“She never would have partnered with someone like Ray; she never would have had financing from Goldman Sachs,” Michael Lythcott said, noting that Teer had wanted full control over the building, and preferred to keep involvement limited to those inside the community.But it is all a means to an end that their mother energetically championed throughout her life: an “ecosystem by which Black people in particular are full-throated, full-voiced, fully rooted in their own liberation,” Sade Lythcott said.By the time construction starts this fall, theater in New York is likely to be back in full force. While the new building is going up, National Black Theater will use the Apollo Theater’s office space and two of its performance spaces. And by the time construction is slated to end, in spring 2024, National Black Theater leaders hope that the space will become a place to convene, both for art and the kind of community interaction that was sorely missed over the past year.“In the wake of this pandemic,” said Jonathan McCrory, National Black Theater’s executive artistic director, “there’s going to be a kind of psychic grief that is going to need to have a healing center.” More

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      A Writer’s One-Act Plays Debut, Continuing Her Resurrection

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      By staging Kathleen Collins’s rich psychological portraits of Black women, a theatrical group aims to enlighten, heal and inspire.“No one is going to mythologize my life,” the playwright and filmmaker Kathleen Collins said in 1984 to a group of film students at Howard University. “No one is going to refuse me the right to explore my experiences of life as normal experiences.”Collins’s insistence on portraying the ordinariness of African American women’s lives rather than reproducing the Hollywood narratives that pathologized or mythologized them is resonating with a new generation of Black women artists who have recently discovered Collins and her work. Part of what makes Collins’s writing so appealing is her attention to the complex internal struggles and external journeys, of what Elizabeth Alexander calls those “Bohemian Black women” who often work as artists and academics, and have a robust intellectual life. Because she renders them with such care and imbues them with such vulnerability, her characters have heightened insights and are aware that they are both liberated and alienated by their knowledge of how others see and stereotype them.Such rich psychological portraits of Black women are what originally drew Afrofemononomy, a group of Black femme theater artists, to Collins’s plays. In addition to adapting that Howard University speech into a monologue, they are also performing “Begin the Beguine,” a quartet of Collins’s one-acts that have never been produced before.Over the past two weekends, under a program titled “Work the Roots,” Afrofemononomy performed the title play “Begin the Beguine,” about the actress Ruby Dee and her son, the blues guitarist Guy Davis, as well as “The Healing,” “The Reading” and “Remembrance” at various locations in New York City (from a lawn in Harlem to a park in Bedford-Stuyvesant). On Saturday, May 29, they will present the premiere of a mixed-media installation called “Gold Taste” that is a response to “The Essentialisn’t,” a theatrical work by one of the group’s members, Eisa Davis. The piece will be available for viewing until June 27 at Performance Space New York’s Keith Haring Theater.Jennifer Harrison Newman dances with audience members as part of the performance.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe debut of Collins’s plays is part of a continuing resurrection of her works after her death from breast cancer in 1988 at the age of 46. Largely because of her daughter Nina Lorez Collins’s commitment to preserving her mother’s legacy, we are now able to access the gifts of Collins’s ambitions and archive, including the theatrical release in 2015 of her 1982 film, “Losing Ground”; the publication of her short story collection “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?” in 2016; and, in 2019, the arrival of “Notes From a Black Woman’s Diary,” a mélange of her short stories, plays, diary entries and film scripts.Davis, an actress and playwright recently seen in HBO’s “Mare of Easttown,” first became acquainted with Collins’s writing when she was asked to do a public reading of Collins’s short stories at the Brooklyn Public Library in 2017. But, she now realizes, Collins has been with her a lot longer. “She is a literary foremother for me that has just been under my nose all this time,” Davis said. “When Nina first gave me these plays, I was like, ‘Kathleen Collins, Kathleen Collins, Kathleen Collins,’ and then I looked at my bookshelf and I found ‘9 Plays by Black Women,’ an anthology from the 1980s, and her ‘The Brothers’ in there. It’s the only play of hers that was ever produced, [a production of the Women’s Project, now WP Theater] at American Place Theater.”A line from Collins’s play “Remembrance” on a wall at Performance Space New York reads, “Last night, I dreamt I danced in the image of God.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesOnce she read Collins’s other plays, she immediately shared them with her friends and other Black female theater artists with whom she frequently collaborated in the most quotidian of ways: over dinner, on museum trips and visits to the beach, via texts, after seeing plays together, and, in the past year, over Zoom. By 2019, their casual interest in Collins’s plays turned into the more concrete idea of staging and sharing them with the broader public.“In a lot of ways, this was an attempt to take the model of our friendship and then apply it to the conditions under which we collaborate,” Davis said.The director Lileana Blain-Cruz (“Marys Seacole”) said learning about Collins’s plays enabled her to take different risks. For the project, she has thoughtfully transformed Collins’s “The Reading,” a 30-minute play that anticipated our conversations about racial microaggressions today. Set in a Black psychic’s waiting room, a tense conversation ensues between Marguerite (Kara Young), a Black fashion designer, and Helen (Amelia Workman), a white romance novelist. As Helen tries to assert her entitlement, Marguerite pushes back, and eventually denies Helen an opportunity to take up the space that she, as a white woman, feels obligated to inhabit.Amelia Workman in “The Reading.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAudience members at the performance.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesFood, books and more were on display.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“For me, the celebration and the exploration collectively around Kathleen Collins’s work is another way of seeing each other before we even knew how to see each other in existence and collectivity,” she said. “That, for me, is really moving because I was like, ‘Oh, this is somebody that I should have known.’” She added, “Now I get to discover, and I don’t have to discover alone.”In addition to the moving performance by individual actors, these plays, which were not open to critics to review, were made even more engaging because of the casting and staging. Collins wrote “The Healing” and “The Reading” with white characters but because Afrofemononomy cast from within their group, they provided a space in which Black actresses were always front and center. This gesture was intensified by the intimacy of their set. At the end of “The Reading,” the audience was led by the actress Jennifer Harrison Newman to dance with the cast, an invitation that turned the luminescent installation and graffiti scrawled wall that read “Last night, I dreamt I danced in the image of God” (a line from another Collins play in the quartet) into a communal party celebrating Black women’s creativity.April Matthis, left, and Stacey Karen Robinson perform “Begin the Beguine,” by Kathleen Collins, at El Barrio’s Artspace PS109 in Manhattan. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBy inviting us to these tender moments in which Collins’s Black female characters pull back their layers, the performances themselves transport both those fictional characters and this real-life Black cast far beyond the strict racial and gender categories that envelop them and us.“These are stories about the interior lives of Black women,” Nina Lorez Collins told me. “One of the reasons I like the “Begin the Beguine” is because it is about race, but it is also not. It’s really about the interior life of this artist, this young woman. And I just don’t think we’ve seen anything like it.” As avant-garde as Collins’s characters were in her time, they still remain singular today, giving us rare social insights into how we can navigate our unique moment of slowly returning to each other, to public spaces, and ultimately, live, in-person performances. In the foreword to “Notes From a Black Woman’s Diary,” the fiction writer Danielle Evans described Collins as “a master of the moments when the interior becomes the exterior, when all pretense drops away.”This blurring between our inner selves and the identities projected back onto Black women was at the heart of Afrofemononomy’s take on “Remembrance,” described as “a kind of personal séance.” Under the directorial consultation of Jackie Sibblies Drury (“Fairview”) and featuring Davis as The Woman and Kaneza Schaal as Collins talking to the Howard students, this becomes a conversation between two Black women who, while each giving their own monologue — one taking place in a bathroom, the other at a lectern — end up, at times, dissolving into each other. All the while they demand the audience see Black women in public with the same clarity that we see ourselves in private.April Matthis and Stacey Karen Robinson performed “Begin the Beguine” at El Barrio’s Artspace PS109 in Manhattan. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBut such revelations and reversal of gazes will also be critical to large swaths of the American theater community that is still grappling with debates about inclusion, equity and white gatekeepers as it seeks to attend to the harm of racism, and institutionalize the healing that Collins’s vision offers for her Black characters and for the Black female theater artists who embody them.After spending two weeks performing, and a couple of years studying Collins, Afrofemononomy decided to close with Davis’s music theater piece “The Essentialisn’t” in the group installation “Gold Taste,” and reimagine a much earlier moment when the Harlem Renaissance writers W.E.B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen debated racial representations in their era. It begins with the ever vexed question, “Can You Be Black and Not Perform?”Extending Collins’s legacy to Davis, the Afrofemononomy member Kaneza Schaal said, “Eisa is [also] sitting on a trove of plays she has written. And it is up to us, to see to it, that our own daughters are not the first people to produce that work.” She continued, “It is urgent to address Davis and Collins simultaneously. The intellectual harmony Eisa creates with her foremothers is astounding, and yet another extension of this fabric.”The Essentialisn’t: Gold Taste installationMay 29-June 27 at Performance Space New York, 150 First Avenue; performancespacenewyork.org. More

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      A Black Composer’s Intense Opera Gets a Rare Staging

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      William Grant Still’s one-act “Highway 1, U.S.A.” runs in St. Louis through June 17.The composer William Grant Still was a student of the renowned experimentalist Edgard Varèse, an arranger for the blues icon W.C. Handy and the creator of the enduringly winning “Afro-American Symphony.” Thanks to his rich catalog of symphonic and chamber music, Still, who died in 1978 at 83, was widely known as the pathbreaking “dean” of Black American composers.But his operas have struggled to gain a foothold in the repertoire. “Troubled Island,” about the Haitian revolution and its aftermath, boasted a libretto by Langston Hughes and additional lyrics by Verna Arvey, a writer who was married to Still. It premiered at New York City Opera in 1949, but continues to wait for a second production. (A fascinating, if scratchy, recording of the premiere can be purchased from the Still estate.)Still was known as the “dean” of Black American composers, but his operas have struggled to gain a foothold in the repertoire.Carl Van Vechten Collection/Getty ImagesStill’s one-act stunner “Highway 1, U.S.A.,” premiered in 1963, has also been a rarity. But it will enter the limelight this weekend with the opening of a new staging, directed by Ron Himes, at Opera Theater of St. Louis. (It runs there through June 17.)In its two scenes — which together last under an hour — the filling-station owner Bob and his wife, Mary, deal with the ingratitude and arrogance of Bob’s younger brother, Nate, a spendthrift academic whose studies were underwritten by the couple. The plot — its lurid flights counterbalanced by the wholesome devotion of Bob and Mary — swiftly deals with complex, compelling ideas about familial expectation and duty.Conducted by Leonard Slatkin, a veteran advocate for American music, and featuring a cast of rising stars, the St. Louis production is an early highlight of opera’s fledgling return to live performance as the pandemic eases.But this “Highway” likely wouldn’t have happened without the pandemic. In a phone interview between rehearsals, the soprano Nicole Cabell said that both she and the baritone Will Liverman had originally been scheduled to perform “Porgy and Bess” in St. Louis this summer.Though widely loved, “Porgy” — written by white artists — has long overshadowed works by Black composers; the pandemic, in this case, overturned its typical dominance. “Porgy,” Cabell said, was “obviously a production that was too big.”St. Louis realized that its contracted soprano and baritone leads could play the married couple in Still’s “Highway.” And Cabell credited the company with finding a way to forge ahead with an operatic work of “cultural significance.”Liverman said that, after 15 months away from performances with an orchestra, “it’s a special thing to come back to work and do a piece by a Black composer, especially after all of the things that have happened with the pandemic, and George Floyd, and how we’re changing our conversations about inclusion.”“It jumps around quite a bit, in terms of the mood,” said Cabell, left, with Gibbs.Eric WoolseyStill was a fan of Wagner from an early age, an affection that can be seen in the fluid way he handles narrative transitions. “Nobody has arias that have really clear endings, in my opinion,” Cabell said.“I feel like you have to be on your toes if you sing Mary,” she added. “Because she is, of course, struggling with lots of conflict: her love of Bob, her suspicion of Nate, her desire to expose him. It jumps around quite a bit, in terms of the mood.”The tenor Christian Mark Gibbs, who plays Nate, described the effect as “conversational.” Like the other singers, he had not had deep exposure to the work of Still before this production.“I heard of him, through the course of some of my studies,” Gibbs said. “I did question, while I was in school: ‘Oh, how come we don’t look at any of those things?’ But then you get back to your studies.”Nate doesn’t have a lot of stage time. He enters mean in the second scene, and only gets meaner. The character’s motivations are barely sketched as the plot moves toward a twisty climax.“He does leave a lot for your imagination,” Gibbs said. “I can come up with a great back story for this character, before he even sings his first line.”Himes, the director — who has moved the setting slightly forward, into the 1960s — has his own view of Nate’s troubles: “He may have been a victim of some racial attacks, while he was in school. He is probably suffering from some kind of trauma.”The cast in St. Louis is relishing what amounts to a highly unusual opportunity in opera. “I think there’s a special energy for them, being an all-Black company,” Himes said. “That’s very rare for all of them in their careers so far, in this classical world.”There have been few productions or recordings of the work. In the 1970s, Columbia’s Black Composers Series included a pair of excerpts from the opera on an album. It took until 2005 for a complete studio recording to be released, featuring the St. Olaf Orchestra led by Philip Brunelle. (The Mary on that recording, Louise Toppin, also directed a production at the University of Michigan in 2019.)Gibbs said he has found himself memorizing the other characters’ music. “I walk around singing some of Bob’s melodies all the time,” he said. “I grew up listening to a little jazz and listening to blues and gospel. It has that soul type of feeling.”That’s the case even though Still, a committed integrationist, didn’t want his work to be viewed merely through a racial lens. “In this opera, there’s no race mentioned at all,” Gibbs said. “That’s another area where it’s open. It can be done by multiple people. He wanted it to be done by various cultural groups.”Slatkin, the conductor, said he has inserted small touches — including “an occasional flutter-tongue” — to give the orchestration behind Nate’s music a bit more bite. He added that some of the score’s harmonies reminded him of Kurt Weill, but that the music has its own clear identity: “As I’ve really gotten into it, I find that there’s something very fresh and appealing about it.”“Still’s voice — simply historically, because of when he lived, what he did and what he accomplished — needs to be heard,” Slatkin said.St. Louis plans to film the performances with an eye to streaming the work later this year. For Liverman, that documentation is crucial. “That’s the thing with Black composers in general,” he said. “I think the music’s out there. It’s just not performed enough. You’re not going to find a million interpretations, like ‘Winterreise’ or something like that. A lot of those works are just hard to come by.”But he thinks the power of “Highway” will speak for itself. “The show moves right along,” he said. “It’s sort of like a short film or an episode on a show — and it works beautifully in that way.” More