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      The Former Youth TV Star on a Mission to Transform the BBC

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Former Youth TV Star on a Mission to Transform the BBCJune Sarpong has been a familiar face on British screens for two decades. Now, she’s in charge of bringing greater diversity to the country’s public broadcaster.June Sarpong, the BBC’s director of creative diversity, says the broadcaster has been “incredibly successful in terms of what you see, but in terms of below the line, behind the camera, certainly not.” Credit…David M. Benett/Getty ImagesJan. 6, 2021LONDON — When June Sarpong was 21 and an up-and-coming presenter on MTV in Britain, she walked past a newsstand and saw a magazine in its racks. On the cover was a story about successful women at the music station.She grabbed a copy, only to discover she wasn’t featured. Sarpong — who is Black — hadn’t been asked to go along to the cover photo shoot with her white colleagues, even though she was the co-host of one of the station’s most successful shows. She wasn’t mentioned in the article.“It was heartbreaking,” she recalled in a recent interview.Soon, viewers noticed her absence too, and started calling MTV to ask why she had been left out. “It was this real teachable moment for the network,” Sarpong said.Now 43, Sarpong is still trying to improve the diversity of British television — just at a much larger, and more politically fraught, level. In November 2019, she was named the BBC’s director of creative diversity, a high-profile role in which she is responsible for making Britain’s public broadcaster more representative of the country.In recent months, she has announced her first policies to achieve that. Beginning in April, all new BBC television commissions will have to meet a target requiring 20 percent of jobs offscreen to be filled by people of color, disabled people or those from lower socioeconomic groups.She has also secured 100 million pounds — about $136 million — of the BBC’s commissioning budget for new, diverse programming over three years. (The total commissioning budget is over £1 billion a year.)Sarpong speaking at the release of her first report in her new role last month.Credit…Hannah Young, via BBCAt first glance, the BBC might already seem to be making strides. Some of its biggest shows last year were led by and focused on people of color, such as Michaela Coel’s “I May Destroy You,” about a Black woman confronting hazy memories of a rape, and Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” series of films about Black British history. The BBC has also beaten an internal target, set before Sarpong took up her job, for people of color to make up 15 percent of its on-air talent.Away from the spotlight, however, Sarpong said, the picture was far less encouraging. Last month, Sarpong issued her first major report in her new role, highlighting some of the challenges ahead.“The BBC has been incredibly successful in terms of what you see,” she said, “but in terms of below the line, behind the camera, certainly not.”The job also places Sarpong at the center of a political battlefield. The BBC is funded by a compulsory license fee for all television owners, and, though less ubiquitous than it once was, the corporation plays an enormous role in national life, with dominance in everything from online news to toddler cartoons to orchestral music. The average British person spends well over two hours a day with BBC output, according to an estimate by an official regulator.It is also, increasingly, a political punching bag. Over the past year, conservative politicians have repeatedly criticized the organization, claiming that it was promoting a “woke agenda,” including when it proposed omitting the lyrics to jingoistic songs traditionally performed at an annual classical concert.Left-wing commentators have been equally critical, especially when a story emerged claiming that the broadcaster had barred employees from attending Black Lives Matter protests or Pride marches. (The BBC said its rules had been misinterpreted.).Sarpong said she’d gotten “a few more gray hairs since starting” her role, but added, “Whatever criticism I get is worth it, as there’s a bigger mission here.”Sarpong, center, in 2017 on “Loose Women,” a British discussion show akin to ABC’s “The View.” She was an occasional contributor for over a decade.Credit…Ken McKay/ITV, via ShutterstockSarpong was born in east London to Ghanaian parents. She spent her early years in Ghana, until a coup forced her parents to flee back to London, where she lived in public housing.As a teenager, she was involved in a car accident that left her unable to walk for two years, she said. While she was in the hospital, she watched Oprah Winfrey on television and it made her realize she could work in TV, she added. Her school reports had always said she “must talk less,” Sarpong said. “I remember watching Oprah thinking, ‘Oh my God, you can be paid to talk!”Sarpong soon got an internship at Kiss FM, a radio station specializing in dance music. She turned up wearing a neck brace, and recalled what it was like to have to explain her accident to every person she met.Sarpong at an awards ceremony organized by the men’s magazine Maxim in 2001, when she was making her name as a youth TV host.Credit… William Conran/PA Images, via Getty ImagesHer rise from that small role, then MTV, was swift. Sarpong became a youth TV star in Britain after moving to a more mainstream network, Channel 4, where she presented a popular weekend show and interviewed the likes of Kanye West and Prime Minister Tony Blair. She was known especially for her laugh — “An irresistible elastic giggle,” according to The Guardian.But she hit problems when she tried to move further up the TV ladder, she said. She went to meetings about “shiny-floor shows,” a reference to big Saturday-night entertainment programs, but was told their audiences weren’t ready for a Black host, she said. She moved to America, and, increasingly, into activism.Friends and acquaintances of Sarpong said in telephone interviews that she has the character to change the BBC. “They’ve actually hired an attack-dog who will not let go,” said Trevor Phillips, a former TV news anchor who was also the chairman of Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission, in a telephone interview.Lorna Clarke, the BBC executive in charge of its pop music output, described her as charming, but firm. “I’ve seen her in action here and it is impressive,” she added. “She’s there saying, ‘We can do this, can’t we?’”Some of the BBC’s critics say the most alarming area in which the corporation lacks diversity is not in terms of race, sexuality or disability, but in the political outlook of its staff. Ministers in Britain’s Conservative government, and others on the right, have used the language of diversity in criticizing what they claim is the BBC’s liberal bias, with the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, saying the broadcaster needed to do more to reflect “genuine diversity of thought.”Simon Evans, a self-described right-leaning comedian who sometimes appears on BBC radio shows, said in a telephone interview that the BBC’s comedy output was dominated by left-wing views. “You have to get people in who have diversity of opinion, and views, and skin color as well,” Evans said. “That will crack the ice cap over the culture of the organization,” he added.Sarpong said diversity of opinion at the BBC would increase if her policies succeeded. “If we’re doing our job, you will have that,” she added.Hosting a 90th birthday concert for Nelson Mandela in London’s Hyde Park, 2008.Credit…Gareth Davies/Getty ImagesSarpong has mingled with stars throughout her career, but she said she’d also gone to every corner of Britain while making TV shows. She knew what made the British people tick, she said, and that would help her succeed. “You’ve got to be looking at how to bring the majority along with you,” she said, and convince them that diversity isn’t a zero-sum game where one group benefits at the expense of others.“Everybody has their role to play, and it’s very important to know what your role is,” Sarpong said. “I’m very clear about what mine is.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Bridgerton’ Takes On Race. But Its Core Is Escapism.

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Notebook‘Bridgerton’ Takes On Race. But Its Core Is Escapism.The Netflix hit departs from the homogeneous casting of most period drama, imagining an 18th-century Britain with Black royalty and aristocrats.Adjoa Andoh and Regé-Jean Page confer in an episode of the Netflix series “Bridgerton.”Credit…Liam Danniel/NetflixJan. 5, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ET“We were two separate societies divided by color until a king fell in love with one of us,” the quick-witted Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh) tells her protégé, the Duke of Hastings. “Look at everything it is doing for us, allowing us to become.” She insists, “Love, Your Grace, conquers all.”Appearing in the fourth episode of “Bridgerton,” the first series produced by Shonda Rhimes as part of her powerhouse Netflix deal, this conversation between the show’s main Black characters is the first explicit mention of race in a story that revolves around the duke, a Black man named Simon Basset (Regé-Jean Page), and his passionate courtship of Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor), the eldest daughter in the wealthy, white and titled Bridgerton family.The show’s casting diversity is its most immediately striking quality, not just in Black aristocratic characters like the duke and Lady Danbury, but also in the entrepreneurial Madame Genevieve Delacroix (Kathryn Drysdale) and the working-class couple Will and Alice Mondrich (Martins Imhangbe and Emma Naomi). All of them are central to the complicated social caste system that make up the show’s version of early 1800s London.“Bridgerton” is not Rhimes’s first dalliance with a multiracial cast in a British period drama. In 2017, she produced “Still Star-Crossed” on ABC, a story that began after the deaths of Romeo and Juliet and focused on their cousins Benvolio Montague and Rosaline Capulet, who were forced to marry in order to heal the family rift. Though Benvolio and Rosaline are intentionally cast as a interracial couple, race was neither a point of contention nor grist for social commentary. Instead, viewers were asked to suspend our contemporary racial perceptions in order to accept the colorblind Verona of the past. (This strategy, among others, was largely unsuccessful — “Still Star-Crossed” was canceled after only one season.)“Bridgerton” is set in an early 19th century Britain ruled by Queen Charlotte, who is portrayed by Golda Rosheuvel.Credit…Liam Daniel/NetflixIn contrast, the characters of “Bridgerton” never seem to forget their blackness but instead understand it as one of the many facets of their identity, while still thriving in Regency society. The show’s success proves that people of color do not have to be erased or exist solely as victims of racism in order for a British costume drama to flourish.Chris Van Dusen, the “Bridgerton” showrunner, was a writer on Rhimes’s “Grey’s Anatomy” before going on to be a co-executive producer on “Scandal,” a show that both recognized but did not entirely revolve around the interracial tensions of Olivia Pope’s romantic relationships. Applying that same approach to his adaptations of Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton novels, Van Dusen places us in an early 19th century Britain ruled by a Black woman, Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel).“It made me wonder what that could have looked like,” Van Dusen told The New York Times in a recent feature about the show. “Could she have used her power to elevate other people of color in society? Could she have given them titles and lands and dukedoms?”Such a move pushes back against the racial homogeneity of hit period dramas like “Downton Abbey,” which that show’s executive producer, Gareth Neame insisted was necessary for historical accuracy. “It’s not a multicultural time,” he said in a 2014 interview with Vulture. “We can’t suddenly start populating the show with people from all sorts of ethnicities. It wouldn’t be correct.”“Bridgerton” provides a blueprint for British period shows in which Black characters can thrive within the melodramatic story lines, extravagant costumes and bucolic beauty that make such series so appealing, without having to be servants or enslaved. This could in turn create openings for gifted performers who have avoided them in the past.“I can’t do ‘Downton Abbey,’ can’t be in ‘Victoria,’ can’t be in ‘Call the Midwife,’” the actress Thandie Newton told the Sunday Times of London in 2017. “Well, I could, but I don’t want to play someone who’s being racially abused.” She went on, “There just seems to be a desire for stuff about the royal family, stuff from the past, which is understandable, but it just makes it slim pickings for people of color.”For all its innovations, “Bridgerton” has its own blind spots. I found it strange that it is only the Black characters who speak about race, a creative decision that risks reinforcing the very white privilege it seeks to undercut by enabling its white characters to be free of racial identity.Stephanie Levi-John plays a Black woman in Tudor England in “The Spanish Princess.”Credit…Nick Briggs/Starz, via Associated PressWhen Lady Danbury expresses her optimistic belief in the power of love, the duke is more circumspect, countering that Black progress is fragile and dependent on the whims of whichever white king is in charge. But to actually see narrative evidence of this precariousness, you have to turn to other recent British period dramas that featured integral Black characters, like “The Spanish Princess” and “Sanditon.”Taking place in Tudor England, “The Spanish Princess” on Starz features Stephanie Levi-John as a Black woman named Lina who came to England as Catherine of Aragon’s lady-in-waiting. Based on an actual historical figure, the show thoughtfully fictionalized her struggle between her loyalty to Catherine and her love for her Moorish husband, Oviedo, and their twin boys as xenophobia rises throughout the kingdom, and Catherine’s marriage to King Henry VIII unravels.The series is set in the 16th century during a historical epoch in which slavery and race were not inextricably linked to each other. Here, Lina’s brown skin merely indicates her foreignness rather than marks her oppression, giving us insight into how such differences were interpreted and experienced before anti-Black racism was codified in Europe (and the Americas) as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.By the time we reach the early 19th-century world of PBS’s “Sanditon,” however, the long arm of the slave trade has reached the British seaside resort of the title. Adapted by Andrew Davies from an unfinished novel by Jane Austen, “Sanditon” expands the story of Miss Georgiana Lambe, Austen’s first Black character. Described briefly (and offensively) in the manuscript as a “mulatto” born to a white slaveholding father and enslaved Black mother in the British colony of Antigua, Georgiana in the series is an heiress, played by Crystal Clarke, whose wealth and exotic beauty make her the most sought after young woman in England’s south coast. Ultimately, I found Georgiana’s rarefied status to be the show’s biggest representational challenge: As I reveled in her splendor, I also found myself forgetting the enslaved labor that created it.Crystal Clarke as Georgiana Lambe in “Sanditon,” a series adapted from an unfinished novel by Jane Austen.Credit…Simon Ridgway/PBSBut racial trauma remains. Despite the attention that she receives, Georgiana is ultimately alienated in England because of her race, an experience that I found more realistic than Marina Thompson’s (Ruby Barker), another biracial debutante who also finds herself alone at court in “Bridgerton.”Other complex portrayals of Britain’s participation in the slave trade can be found in Amma Asante’s standout 2013 movie “Belle,” or in Pippa Bennett-Warner’s character on Hulu’s “Harlots,” who lives as a free but formerly enslaved Black woman in London in the 1780s.I’m also looking forward to the mini-series “The Long Song,” debuting later this month on PBS. Based on Andrea Levy’s novel of the same name, it unfolds at the dawn of emancipation in Jamaica in the 1830s. It is another story of England and the central role its Black subjects played in building its wealth and grandeur under King George and Queen Charlotte’s rule, though we’ll probably see far fewer corsets and society balls.By avoiding both slavery and the fervent British abolition movement that flourished in London in the early 19th century, “Bridgerton” ultimately opts for “Downton” escapism over a nuanced exploration of real-time racial dynamics, mostly relegating such aspects to the story’s past. In flashbacks we learn that the first Duke of Hastings was ruinously consumed by his newfound status, demanding, to the point of verbal abuse, absolute perfection from his wife, who dies in childbirth, and his son, who stutters as a child. (Shades of Papa Pope of “Scandal,” who once admonished his daughter, “You have to be twice as good as them to get half of what they have.”)With more seasons presumably to come, given the show’s popularity, I’m curious how far “Bridgerton” is willing to depart from Quinn’s novels in order to fill in the worlds of its other Black characters, especially Black women like Lady Danbury, Queen Charlotte and Madame Delacroix. They are the show’s most intriguing characters and they remain mostly unexplored — will they eventually be afforded as much complexity as the duke? As Daphne’s entire family?In a society in which gender and sexual mores dominate the actions and attitudes of all its characters, I want to see how these women learned to navigate those same structures differently shaped than everyone else. Because despite Lady Danbury’s beliefs that love conquers everything, I could not help but think that history ends up validating the duke’s skepticism and his sense that Black progress is always a fragile thing.But who knows? Maybe if I knew how Lady Danbury or Queen Charlotte came to be, I’d be so convinced that I’d finally be able to revel in a past that I haven’t quite seen myself in before.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Tyshawn Sorey: The Busiest Composer of the Bleakest Year

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookTyshawn Sorey: The Busiest Composer of the Bleakest YearAn artist straddling jazz and classical styles had perhaps the most exciting fall in new music.Tyshawn Sorey, a composer and multi-instrumentalist, conducting his song sequence “Cycles of My Being” in a filmed presentation by Opera Philadelphia.Credit…Dominic M. MercierJan. 1, 2021“Everything Changes, Nothing Changes”: Tyshawn Sorey wrote the string quartet that bears that title in 2018. But the sentiment is so tailor-made for the past year that when the JACK Quartet announced it would stream a performance of the work in December, I briefly forgot and assumed it was a premiere, created for these tumultuous yet static times.I should have known better. Mr. Sorey already had enough on his plate without cooking up a new quartet. The final two months of 2020 alone brought the premieres of a pair of concerto-ish works, one for violin and one for cello, as well as a fresh iteration of “Autoschediasms,” his series of conducted ensemble improvisations, with Alarm Will Sound.Mr. Sorey leading a rehearsal for Alarm Will Sound’s virtual performance of “Autoschediasms,” one of his series of conducted ensemble improvisations.Credit…via Alarm Will SoundThat wasn’t all that happened for him since November. Mills College, where Mr. Sorey is composer in residence, streamed his solo piano set. Opera Philadelphia filmed a stark black-and-white version of his song sequence “Cycles of My Being,” about Black masculinity and racial hatred. JACK did “Everything Changes” for the Library of Congress, alongside the violin solo “For Conrad Tao.” Da Camera, of Houston, put online a 2016 performance of “Perle Noire,” a tribute to Josephine Baker that Mr. Sorey arranged with the soprano Julia Bullock. His most recent album, “Unfiltered,” was released early in March, days before lockdown.He was the composer of the year.That’s both coincidental — some of this burst of work was planned long ago — and not. Mr. Sorey has been on everyone’s radar at least since winning a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2017, but the shock to the performing arts since late winter brought him suddenly to the fore as an artist at the nexus of the music industry’s artistic and social concerns.Undefinable, he is appealing to almost everyone. He works at the blurry and productive boundary of improvised (“jazz”) and notated (“classical”) music, a composer who is also a performer. He is valuable to ensembles and institutions because of his versatility — he can do somber solos as well as large-scale vocal works. And he is Black, at a time when those ensembles and institutions are desperate to belatedly address the racial representation in their programming.From left: Mr. Sorey, the soprano Julia Bullock and the flutist Alice Teyssier in Da Camera’s presentation of “Perle Noire,” inspired by Josephine Baker’s life and work.Credit…Ben DoyleHe’s in such demand, and has had so much success, that the trolls have come for him, dragging him on Facebook for the over-the-topness of the biography on his website. (Admittedly, it is a bit adjective-heavy: “celebrated for his incomparable virtuosity, effortless mastery,” etc.)The style for which he has been best known since his 2007 album “That/Not,” his debut release as a bandleader, owes much to the composer Morton Feldman (1926-87): spare, spacious, glacially paced, often quiet yet often ominous, focusing the listener purely on the music’s unfolding. Mr. Sorey has called this vision that of an “imaginary landscape where pretty much nothing exists.”There is a direct line connecting “Permutations for Solo Piano,” a 43-minute study in serene resonance on that 2007 album, and the first of the two improvised solos in his recent Mills recital, filmed on an upright piano at his home. Even the far briefer second solo, more frenetic and bright, seems at the end to want to settle back into gloomy shadows.“Everything Changes, Nothing Changes,” a hovering, lightly dissonant 27-minute gauze, is in this vein, as is the new work for violin and orchestra, “For Marcos Balter,” premiered on Nov. 7 by Jennifer Koh and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Sorey insists in a program note that this is a “non-certo,” without a traditional concerto’s overt virtuosity, contrasting tempos or vivid interplay between soloist and ensemble.Xian Zhang conducting the violinist Jennifer Koh and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in Mr. Sorey’s “For Marcos Balter.”Credit…Sarah Smarch“For Marcos Balter” is even-keeled, steadily slow, a commune of players rather than a metaphorical give-and-take between an individual and society. Ms. Koh’s deliberate long tones, like cautious exhalations, are met with spectral effects on the marimba. Quiet piano chords amplify quiet string chords. At the end, a timpani roll is muted to sound almost gonglike, with Ms. Koh’s violin a coppery tremble above it.It is pristine and elegant, but I prefer Mr. Sorey’s new cello-and-orchestra piece, “For Roscoe Mitchell,” premiered on Nov. 19 by Seth Parker Woods and the Seattle Symphony. There is more tension here between discreet, uneasy minimalism and an impulse toward lushness, fullness — more tension between the soloist receding and speaking his mind.The piece is less pristine than “For Marcos Balter,” and more restless. The ensemble backdrop is crystalline, misty sighs, while the solo cello line expands into melancholy arias without words; sometimes the tone is passionate, dark-hued nocturne, sometimes ethereal lullaby. “For Roscoe Mitchell” feels like a composer challenging himself while expressing himself confidently — testing the balance of introversion and extroversion, privacy and exposure.The cellist Seth Parker Woods and the Seattle Symphony perform the premiere of “For Roscoe Mitchell.”Credit…James Holt/Seattle SymphonyBut it’s not right to make it seem like an outlier in this respect; Mr. Sorey’s music has never been solely Feldmanian stillness. In Alarm Will Sound’s inspiringly well executed virtual performance of “Autoschediasms,” Mr. Sorey conducted 17 players in five states over video chat, calm at his desk as he wrote symbols on cards and held them up to the camera, an obscure silent language that resulted in a low buzz of noise, varying in texture, and then, excitingly, a spacey, oozy section marked by keening bassoon tones.And he isn’t afraid of pushing into a kind of Neo-Romantic vibe. “Cycles of My Being,” featuring the tenor Lawrence Brownlee and texts by the poet Terrance Hayes, nods to the ardently declarative mid-20th-century American art songs of Samuel Barber and Lee Hoiby, just as “Perle Noire” features, near the end, a sweetly mournful instrumental hymn out of Copland.“Cycles,” which felt turgid when I heard it in a voice-and-piano version three years ago, bloomed in Opera Philadelphia’s presentation of the original instrumentation, which adds a couple of energizing strings and a wailing clarinet. And after a year of protests, what seemed in 2018 like stiffness — in both texts and music — now seems more implacable strength. (Opera Philadelphia presents yet another Sorey premiere, “Save the Boys,” with the countertenor John Holiday, on Feb. 12.)The cellist Khari Joyner playing in “Cycles of My Being.”Credit…Dominic M. MercierThe violinist Randall Goosby.Credit…Dominic M. Mercier“Perle Noire” still strikes me as the best of Sorey. Turning Josephine Baker’s lively numbers into unresolved meditations, here is both suave, jazzy swing and glacial expanse, an exploration of race and identity that is ultimately undecided — a mood of endless disappointment and endless wishing. (“My father, how long,” Ms. Bullock intones again and again near the end.)In works this strong, the extravagant praise for which some have ribbed Mr. Sorey on social media — that biography, for one, or the JACK Quartet lauding “the knife’s-edge precision of Sorey’s chess-master mind” — feels justified. And, anyway, isn’t it a relief to talk about a 40-year-old composer with the immoderate enthusiasm we generally reserve for the pillars of the classical canon?AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Jazz Onscreen, Depicted by Black Filmmakers at Last

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookJazz Onscreen, Depicted by Black Filmmakers at Last“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “Sylvie’s Love” and “Soul” understand the music and its place in African-American life, a welcome break with Hollywood history.Hitting the right notes: The pianist Joe (voiced by Jamie Foxx) playing in a combo led by a saxophonist (Angela Bassett) in “Soul.”Credit…Disney Pixar, via Associated PressDec. 29, 2020, 1:33 p.m. ETMidway through “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” the new Netflix drama based on August Wilson’s acclaimed stage play, the title character drifts into a monologue. “White folk don’t understand about the blues,” muses Rainey (Viola Davis), an innovator at the crossroads of blues and jazz with an unbending faith in her own expressive engine.“They hear it come out, but they don’t know how it got there,” she says as she readies herself to record in a Chicago studio in 1927. “They don’t understand that that’s life’s way of talking. You don’t sing to feel better, you sing because that’s your way of understanding life.”Time seems to roll to a stop as Rainey speaks. The divide between her words and what white society is ready to hear lays itself out wide before us. That, you realize, is the fertile space where her music exists — an ungoverned territory, too filled with spirit, expression and abstention for politics and law to interfere.But maybe this scene is only so startling because of how rare its kind has been throughout film history. The movies, with few exceptions, have hardly ever told the story of jazz through the lens of Black life.Now, inexcusably late, that is beginning to change.Ma Rainey (Viola Davis) views her music as a way to understand life.Credit…David Lee/NetflixPiloted by the veteran theater director George C. Wolfe, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” is one of three feature films released this holiday season that center on jazz and blues; all were made by Black directors or co-directors. The other two are New York City stories: “Sylvie’s Love,” by Eugene Ashe, a midcentury romance between a young jazz saxophonist and an up-and-coming TV producer, and “Soul,” a Pixar feature directed by Pete Docter and co-directed by Kemp Powers that uses a pianist’s near-death experience to pry open questions about inspiration, compassion and how we all navigate life’s endless counterpoint between frustration and resilience.The films present Black protagonists in bloom — musically, visually, thematically — giving these characters a dimensionality and a depth that reflects the music itself. It calls to mind Toni Morrison’s explanation for why she wrote “Jazz,” her 1992 novel: She wanted to explore the changes to African-American life wrought by the Great Migration — changes, she later wrote, “made abundantly clear in the music.”The new films outrun many, though not all, of the issues dogging jazz movies past, which have historically done a better job contouring the limitations of the white gaze than showing where the music springs from or its power to transcend. White listening and patronage don’t really enter these new films’ narratives as anything other than a distraction or necessary inconvenience.A jazz musician lands in a relationship that ultimately works in “Sylvie’s Love,” starring Nnamdi Asomugha and Tessa Thompson. Credit…Amazon StudiosEarlier this year, the critic Kevin Whitehead published “Play the Way You Feel: The Essential Guide to Jazz Stories on Film,” a survey of jazz’s long history on the silver screen. As he notes, jazz and cinema grew up together in the interwar period. But in those years and well beyond, Whitehead writes, the movies consistently whitewashed jazz history: “In film after film, African-Americans, who invented the music, get pushed to the margins when white characters don’t nudge them off screen altogether.”It was true of “New Orleans,” a 1947 film starring Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday that was supposed to be about Armstrong’s rise but was rewritten, at the behest of its producers, to put a tale of white romance at the center. It was true of “Paris Blues,” a 1961 vehicle for Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier, based on a novel about two jazz musicians’ interracial love affairs; that key element, however, was more or less erased in the screenplay. Ultimately the movie is about the struggle of Newman’s trombonist, Ram, to convince himself and others that jazz is worthy of his obsession. He insists that a career as an improvising musician requires such singular devotion that he won’t be able to sustain a relationship.In the past few years, jazz has shown up onscreen most prominently in the work of Damien Chazelle. His “Whiplash” (2014) and “La La Land” (2016) tell the stories of young white men who, like Ram, are torturously committed to playing jazz and the feeling of excellence it gives them. In these movies, jazz is a challenge and an albatross. But in “Sylvie’s Love,” “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” and “Soul,” the music is more a salve: a river of possibility running through a hostile country, and — as Rainey says in Wilson’s script — simply the language of life.In “Whiplash,” Miles Teller plays a driven drummer being pushed by J.K. Simmons’s relentless teacher.Credit…Daniel McFadden/Sony Pictures Classics“Whiplash” focuses on the relationship between a demonic music teacher (played by J.K. Simmons in an Oscar-winning performance) and his most committed young student, Andrew (Miles Teller), who is driven by the desire to become a master drummer. The film offers a glimpse into jazz’s current afterlife in conservatories, where students learn its language through charts and theoretical frameworks, but most teachers give little attention to the spiritual or social makings of the music. Here again, we come up against the slightly misogynistic — and deeply depressing — idea that devotion to the music can’t coexist with romantic love and care: Andrew’s dating conduct is disastrous, and he proudly explains that it’s because of the music.“La La Land” follows a pianist, Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), who’s a few years out of music school. At the start, he’s seen dyspeptically punching the tape deck in his convertible, trying to memorize the notes on a Thelonious Monk recording as if they’re times tables. He views himself as a guardian of jazz’s past glories, and he’s committed to opening a club that will preserve what’s often framed as “pure” jazz. It’s a cultural legacy that, as a fellow musician played by John Legend gently reminds him, has not exactly asked for his help — though that doesn’t deter him.There’s a stark difference between these characters’ ways of relating to jazz and those of, say, Robert (Nnamdi Asomugha), the saxophonist in “Sylvie’s Love,” or Joe, the pianist in “Soul.” As Sylvie watches Robert play, she’s seeing him settle into himself deeply. There’s no gap between who he is on and offstage, except that he may be freer up there. Performing doesn’t become an unhealthy obsession; it’s life.While “Sylvie’s Love” hinges on a “Paris Blues”-like tension between art and romance, the two are ultimately able to coexist. Spike Lee’s “Mo’ Better Blues” (1990) and “Crooklyn” (1994) got halfway there, showing what it looks like for jazz musicians to have loving marriages. (Lee, whose father is a jazz musician, does not make it seem easy. But possible? Yes.) “Sylvie’s Love” takes that conflict and melts it away, as a great screen romance can.In “Soul,” Joe says that “the tune is just an excuse to bring out the you.”Credit…Disney Pixar, via Associated PressOn many levels, the most expansive and affecting of the new jazz films is “Soul.” A pianist and middle-school band teacher, Joe, is on the brink of death when his spirit sneaks into the Great Before, where uninitiated souls prepare to enter bodies upon birth. There he meets 22, a recalcitrant soul whom the powers that be have failed to coax into a human body.In his classroom, Joe (voiced by Jamie Foxx) preaches the glories of jazz improvisation, drawing on a true story that the famed pianist Jon Batiste, who ghosted the music that Joe plays, had told the movie’s director, Docter, and co-director, Powers. “This is the moment where I fell in love with jazz,” Joe says, recalling the first time he stepped into a jazz club as a kid. He caresses the piano keys as he speaks. “Listen to that!” he says. “See, the tune is just an excuse to bring out the you.”After an accident lands Joe in intensive care and his soul drifts out of his body, he and 22 hatch a plan to get him back to life. All souls, he comes to find out, need a “spark” that will touch off their passion and guide them through life. He knows immediately that his is playing the piano. That, he says, is his purpose in life. But one of the spiritual guides-cum-counselors that populate the Great Before (all named Jerry) quickly sets him straight. “We don’t assign purposes,” this Jerry says. “Where did you get that idea? A spark isn’t a soul’s purpose. Oh, you mentors and your passions — your ‘purposes,’ your meanings of life! So basic.”Their conversation is left wonderfully open-ended. But the point becomes clear, subtle as it is: Above meaning, above purpose, above any means to an end, there’s just life. Which is to say, music.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      For His Second Act, Nnamdi Asomugha Made Preparation His Byword

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFor His Second Act, Nnamdi Asomugha Made Preparation His BywordThe former pro football player has pushed himself in acting classes, onstage and in films. His latest drama, “Sylvie’s Love,” also meant returning to an early passion: music.Nnamdi Asomugha gave up piano for football early in his life. Now he’s playing a jazz saxophonist in a new movie.Credit…Erik Carter for The New York TimesDec. 28, 2020The lead in a romance may seem like a prize for most actors, but the star of the new drama “Sylvie’s Love” had reservations.“There was no way that I was going to do a romantic film until I read the script and saw that there were Black people falling in love in the ’50s and ’60s,” Nnamdi Asomugha, 39, said. “And then immediately I was like, OK, I think people need to see this film.”“Sylvie’s Love,” which made its Amazon premiere on Dec. 23, is set largely in midcentury New York and explores the ebbs and flows of the relationship between Robert (Asomugha), a charismatic jazz saxophonist, and Sylvie (Tessa Thompson), a determined television producer.Asomugha is considered a rising star in Hollywood: In 2017, his breakout performance in the drama “Crown Heights” earned Indie Spirit and NAACP Image Award nominations. Earlier this year, he made what the Hollywood Reporter called “a promising Broadway debut” in a new staging of “A Soldier’s Play” by Charles Fuller. Behind the scenes, he has helped produce projects through his production company, iAm21 Entertainment, including “Sylvie’s Love,” “Crown Heights” and “Harriet,” as well as the Broadway play “American Son” (2018), which starred his wife, the actress Kerry Washington.Asomugha opposite Tessa Thompson in “Sylvie’s Love.”Credit…Amazon StudiosBut before acting and producing, Asomugha was considered one of the best cornerbacks in the National Football League, playing 11 seasons for the Oakland Raiders and other teams before retiring in 2013.It’s “mind-boggling that I would even want to go from one career where you’re under such a microscope in an extreme way to another career where the microscope might even be bigger,” Asomugha said. “You can’t help what you fall in love with, and I fell in love with acting.”He spoke recently via video about making the transition from football to acting, preparing for “Sylvie’s Love” (directed by Eugene Ashe) and the unexpected experience of appearing on Broadway. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.You’ve gone from a successful N.F.L. career to an acting career. What was the timeline for you?I was just obsessed with movies and television growing up. When I finished playing, the advice I kept getting from former players was find something to do that you are absolutely in love with. Because the love you have for it is what will sustain and lead you. And I knew that this was an avenue. I didn’t know that it was necessarily going to be producing, but I knew I wanted to go into acting.Were you still an N.F.L. player when you got bit by that bug, or was this after your career?While I was still in the N.F.L., but I didn’t make the decision until probably a year after [retiring]. You go through this period of soul-searching when you finish doing something that you’ve done for the last 20-something years of your life. It’s an identity crisis, like, do I have any more things to look forward to in life? All the traumatic things you tell yourself.On top of that, I knew that I wasn’t 20. I wasn’t just coming out of Yale or Juilliard. The window felt so much shorter to me. So I didn’t want to wait. I wanted to just start creating the projects so people can say, oh, OK, he does know what he’s doing.Do you often take lessons and experience from your football career and apply them to your acting career?I advise people all the time, get your kids into sports because sports shaped my life — from discipline and patience and hard work and falling down and needing to get back up and not complaining. But the No. 1 thing I think is the preparation. The same preparation I need to get ready for a football game or football season, I’ve brought that to acting.Asomugha, right, in 2008 when he was playing for the Raiders.Credit…Paul Buck/European Pressphoto AgencyWhen did you start playing football?I was 12. The first year I played football was the last year I played the piano. One day, I was late for practice and my coach said, where were you? I said I’m sorry, I had a recital. And he laughed so hard. It was this big thing and I had to run laps. That was the last time I ever played the piano. And that was the start of my football career. It was both devastating and also affirming. Like, OK, I need to focus on this. This is going to be what I do now.You found your way back to an instrument.I did!Did you have to learn how to play the tenor saxophone for “Sylvie’s Love”?I didn’t have to, but I chose to because I love preparation. I love the process more than anything, sometimes even more than the actual moment. I got a saxophone coach who was also in the film and we played for just over a year. And I learned that I was really good at playing the saxophone. I say “was” because I haven’t played it in a while, so I’ve lost a lot of that. But I wanted it to look authentic.The film is set during the civil rights movement in America. But with these two Black characters and an almost entirely Black cast, the backdrop isn’t politics, it’s jazz. We see some of those elements play out but that wasn’t the focus. Can you explain the intent behind that?It was important for us to make those elements nuanced and not in your face. We wanted to focus on the love. We’ve been so defined by that period as Black people. We know about marches and protests and water hoses and dogs and struggle. But we were also falling in love. We were having families, getting married, going to the dance. My father-in-law says we used to go to “the dance,” we didn’t call it the club. We had that as a part of our culture of Black people and to not celebrate that is a crime. It robs us of our humanity and just an entire aspect of our lives that really helped us get through those difficult moments. So for us, the thought was, why not show that? Why not illuminate the love that we had for each other during this time period?And it also was a reason some people passed on making the film because they felt like it should have been rooted in the civil rights movement. But that wasn’t the film we wanted to make. We felt that there was an audience for not just Black love, but love in general.What are some moments from the film you hope resonate with viewers?I think it was really important for us to show a level of vulnerability in men, especially Black men.I hope that it will further the conversation of it being OK for men to be expressive, to tell how they feel. The important thing for us was showing men doing that in front of their women.Asomugha went toe to toe with David Alan Grier in “A Soldier’s Play” on Broadway.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYou’ve produced a few films, some of which you starred in. Why did you go the producer route?The projects that I was seeing, not only did they not interest me, I wasn’t getting them. It’s not like the projects are there and they were like, “Here’s your job!”I was so serious about this that I didn’t want to use football to get in the door. So it meant having to stand up [in classes] in front of a bunch of people that know who you are because they know football and you have to be doing a scene in front of them.It’s just to say that there was a level of discipline that I had to have because I do want it to be something that’s sustaining.How do you and Kerry Washington support each other as actors? Are there plans to collaborate with each other in a film?I produced “American Son,” but as actors, there’s no plan as of now for that collaboration. We’re very supportive of each other’s journeys, but we’ve always been that way. We always want the best for each other in whatever we’re doing. And so it’s not in the detail of specific things; It’s just an overall appreciation for the hard work.Do you hope to do more plays on Broadway?I had no dream or aspiration of being on Broadway. I didn’t know that doing plays was going to be in my cards at all until I did an Off Broadway play and I fell in love with being on the stage. And then the next year, for me to be on Broadway in “A Soldier’s Play” and to be in a role originated by Denzel — I was just like, what is happening?AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      In ‘Soul’ on Disney+, Pixar Has Its First Black Lead Character

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Soul’ Features Pixar’s First Black Lead Character. Here’s How It Happened.Mindful of animation’s history of racist imagery, the studio aimed to make the jazz pianist at the center of the film as specific as possible.The movie centers on Joe Gardner, a jazz pianist with a day job as a middle-school music teacher.Credit…Disney/PixarDec. 22, 2020, 3:15 p.m. ETAll Pixar features arrive with technical innovations, but “Soul,” opening Dec. 25 on Disney+, breaks important new ground: The movie centers on the studio’s first Black protagonist, Joe Gardner, a jazz pianist on what might be the biggest day of his life, and the creative team includes the company’s first Black co-director, Kemp Powers.In general, Black stories and talent remain underrepresented in American animation, onscreen and off. You can hear Black stars in supporting roles (Samuel L. Jackson as Frozone in the “Incredibles” movies) or voicing animals (Chris Rock and Jada Pinkett Smith in the “Madagascar” series). But “Soul” is only the fourth American animated feature to make Black characters the leads, following “Bebe’s Kids” (1992), “The Princess and the Frog” (2009) and “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” (2018).“To me, Joe represents a lot of people who aren’t being seen right now,” said Jamie Foxx, who provides Joe’s voice. “Joe is in all of us, regardless of color. To be the first Black lead in a Pixar film feels like a blessing, especially during this time when we all could use some extra love and light.”Knowing their work on “Soul” would be minutely scrutinized, the director Pete Docter, the co-screenwriter Mike Jones and the producer Dana Murray, who are white, set out to create a character who would be believably Black while avoiding the stereotypes of the past.The journey of Joe Gardner — and “Soul” — began four years ago, when Docter felt at loose ends after winning his second Oscar, for “Inside Out.” Murray recalled, “Pete had this feeling, ‘Is this it? Do I just do this again?’ I don’t know if it was a midlife crisis as much as a midlife what-am-I-doing? moment.”Docter began wondering about the origins of human personalities, and whether people were born destined to do certain things. Jones added, “In our first meeting, he told me, ‘Think about an idea set in a place beyond space and time, where souls are given their personalities.’”Docter said he and Jones worked for about two years to develop Joe, a Black middle-school music teacher and musician from Queens. But something was missing. “We wanted somebody who could speak authentically about this character and bring some depth to him,” Docter said. “That’s when Kemp Powers came on,” as the film’s co-directorPowers’s background is in live action and journalism; he adapted the coming film “One Night in Miami” (also due Dec. 25) from his own play. But he felt at home in the new medium. “Animation is a very collaborative, iterative form, which felt very akin to live theater,” he said. He was initially hired for 12 weeks as a writer, but his contract was extended. “Later, I got promoted to co-director, because Pete really wrapped me into the process.”Nevertheless, Powers understood the pitfalls of his role: “Some people might relish the idea of saying they speak for Black people, Black Americans, whatever: I am not one of those people,” he said, adding, “I’m absolutely a Black man, and I know my history; at the same time, I can’t speak for all the Black men who are from New York; I can’t speak for my generation.”Kemp Powers, co-director of “Soul,” said the filmmakers were aware of animation’s history of racist imagery. “At the same time, we didn’t want them to be white characters who happen to be brown-skinned. We had to give them distinct looks.”Credit…Texas Isaiah for The New York TimesMurray said Pixar recognized that “if Joe’s going to be Black, we’d need a lot of help,” She said Britta Wilson, the company’s vice president of inclusion strategies, helped build an internal “Cultural Trust” made up of some of the studio’s Black employees, a group that was diverse in terms of gender, jobs and age. “We also talked to a lot of external consultants and worked with Black organizations to make sure we were telling this story authentically and truthfully,” Murray added.Powers said they were all aware of the specificity needed for Joe’s character. “Treating the Black experience as a monolith makes things a lot easier: You can have one Black person rubber-stamp something and use that as your excuse for not having tried harder to get it right.”He recalled that the individual consultants brought a range of viewpoints: “We’d have 20 Black people in a room: We’d ask a question and get 20 different answers.” Their debates sometimes “broke along generational lines, which was interesting: Things I think are fine may seem offensive to the younger generation. Everyone had a different take, which made the job exponentially harder, but that care was needed.”Further complicating their work was the fact that animation is a medium of caricature: No human is as squat and angular as Carl in Pixar’s “Up,” yet audiences accept him as a crabby old man. For “Soul,” the Pixar crew strove to create characters who were recognizably Black while avoiding anything that recalled the racist stereotypes in old cartoons, from Mammy Two Shoes, the Black maid in the Tom and Jerry cartoons, to George Pal’s stop-motion Jasper.Docter, who has written about animation history, acknowledged, “There’s a long and painful history of caricatured racist design tropes that were used to mock African-Americans.”He recalled that when he was making “Up,” he worried about how the design of the Asian-American scout Russell might be perceived. Docter said his fellow Pixar director Peter Sohn, a Korean-American artist, advised him, “‘Korean eyes are shaped differently than Caucasian eyes. Look at me and draw what you see: The truth isn’t racist.’”Powers agreed that there was an important difference between “leaning into and taking pride in those features and making fun of those features.” Pixar, he said, was mindful of the sorry images from animation history. When it came to designing appealing but stylized characters, the artists “took care not to make them insulting. At the same time, we didn’t want them to be white characters who happen to be brown-skinned. We had to give them distinct looks, so they’re not just boring, monotone characters.”To create those looks, Pixar artists and technicians needed to capture the textures of Black hair and the way light plays on various tones of Black skin. Murray said they brought in the cinematographer Bradford Young, whose work includes “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” to consult as well.Finding the voice that fits an animated character is as challenging as finding the best performer for a live-action role. “You have a voice in your head that you can write to,” Jones explained. “We needed Joe to have ambition, to want to play music at the highest level, but we also needed Joe to be excited to teach what he loves — jazz — to his students, all of which Jamie provided.”Although Foxx has voiced animated characters before, he still had to adjust his performance. “When I got in the recording booth, I was delivering the lines with all kinds of facial expressions and gestures,” Foxx said. “They were like, “Uh, Jamie, let’s try that again and remember … we can’t see you.”During the film, Joe argues — and bonds — with a recalcitrant soul known as 22, who refuses to enter a human body. As 22, Tina Fey found the purely vocal performance liberating. though she too has done other voice-overs before: “I could let go of any worry about how I looked. Even as a comedy person, you’re always thinking a little bit about finding your light and standing up straight. It’s so freeing to not have to do that.” (The relationship between Joe and 22 grows increasing complicated, but neither actor wanted to say anything that might spoil the plot twists.)Reflecting on the creation of “Soul,” Powers said, “When someone told me I was Pixar’s first Black director, I said that can’t be right. Pete said — and my hope is — this is an indicator of changes that are going to be pretty rapid.” There are more animators of color and women in the business than there were 15 or 20 years ago, he noted. “It’s sad it’s taken this long, but I’m glad it’s coming finally.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Stanley Cowell, Jazz Pianist With a Wide Range, Dies at 79

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyStanley Cowell, Jazz Pianist With a Wide Range, Dies at 79His playing consolidated generations of musical history. He was also a composer, an educator and the founder of an important artist-run record label.The pianist and composer Stanley Cowell in performance at the Beacon Theater in New York in 2017. He was known for his adaptability and his vast command of the jazz language.Credit…Dia Dipasupil/Getty ImagesDec. 20, 2020, 3:06 p.m. ETStanley Cowell, a pianist, composer, record-label impresario and educator who brought a technician’s attention to detail and a theorist’s sophistication to his more than 50-year career as a jazz bandleader, died on Friday in Dover, Del. He was 79.Sylvia Potts Cowell, his wife, said that the cause of his death, at a hospital, was hypovolemic shock, the result of blood loss stemming from other health issues.Mr. Cowell’s playing epitomized the piano’s ability to consolidate generations of musical history into a unified expression, while extending various routes into the future. And when he needed to say more than the piano allowed, he expanded his palette. He was among the first jazz musicians to make prominent use of the kalimba, a thumb piano from southeastern Africa. In his later decades he worked often with a digital sound-design program, Kyma, that allowed him to alter the pitch and texture of an acoustic piano’s sound.In 1971, together with the trumpeter Charles Tolliver, Mr. Cowell founded Strata-East Records, a pioneering institution in jazz and the broader Black Arts Movement. It would release a steady run of pathbreaking music over the coming decade, becoming one of the most successful Black-run labels of its time.Mr. Cowell and Mr. Tolliver met in the late 1960s, as members of the drummer Max Roach’s ensemble. After recording a now-classic album with Roach, “Members, Don’t Git Weary,” in 1968, they formed a quartet called Music Inc., which released its debut LP, “The Ringer,” on Polydor in 1970. But Mr. Cowell and Mr. Tolliver found themselves unable to find a label that would pay what they considered a fair advance for their next album, at a time when jazz’s commercial appeal was fading.Inspired by the Black musicians’ collectives that had recently sprouted up in cities across the country, and by the artist-run Strata label in Detroit, Mr. Cowell and Mr. Tolliver founded Strata-East. Their second album together, “Music Inc.,” with the quartet fleshed out into a large ensemble, was the label’s first release.“The aesthetic ambition was to compose, play and extend the music of our great influences, mentors and innovators, while keeping the distinguishing features of the jazz tradition,” Mr. Cowell said in a 2015 interview for the Superfly Records website.Over the coming decade, Strata-East would release dozens of albums with a similar goal at heart, including some gemlike LPs by Mr. Cowell: “Musa: Ancestral Streams” (1974), a solo album of understated breadth; “Regeneration” (1975), an odyssey equally inspired by pop music and pan-Africanism; and a pair of singular albums with the Piano Choir, a group of seven pianists, “Handscapes 1” (1973) and “Handscapes 2” (1975).Mr. Cowell was also becoming one of New York’s most in-demand side musicians, known for his adaptability and his vast command of the jazz language. In the coming decade he would play an integral role in the Heath Brothers band and groups led by the saxophonists Arthur Blythe and Art Pepper and the vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson.After becoming a full-time music professor in the 1980s, Mr. Cowell eventually stepped back from public performances and recordings.His quartet’s appearance at the Village Vanguard in 2015 was his first weeklong engagement in New York in nearly two decades. Reviewing one of those shows for The New York Times, Ben Ratliff wrote, “Mr. Cowell can create impressive momentary events, but what’s best about him is his broad frame of reference and the general synthesis he is proposing.”Mr. Cowell leading a quartet at the Village Vanguard in New York in 2015. It was his first weeklong engagement in New York in nearly two decades, after many years in academia.Credit…Michael Appleton for The New York TimesIn addition to his wife, Mr. Cowell is survived by their daughter, Sunny Cowell Stovall; a sister, Esther Cowell; another daughter, Sienna Cowell, from a previous marriage; and two grandchildren. He had homes in Maryland and Delaware.Stanley Allen Cowell was born in Toledo, Ohio, on May 5, 1941, to Stanley Cowell and Willie Hazel (Lytle) Cowell, who kept a wide variety of music playing in the house at all times. The couple ran a series of businesses, including a motel that was among the only places in Toledo where touring Black musicians could stay. Many artists became friends of the family, including the stride piano master Art Tatum, himself a Toledo native.During a visit to the family home when Stanley was 6, Tatum played a version of the show tune “You Took Advantage of Me” that Mr. Cowell would never forget. When he recorded his first album as a leader in 1969, “Blues for the Viet Cong,” he included a dazzling stride rendition of “You Took Advantage of Me” alongside his own forward-charging originals.As a child, Mr. Cowell played and composed constantly. By the time he arrived at the Oberlin College Conservatory in Ohio at age 17, he had already written a number of pieces, including “Departure,” which would become the opening track on “Blues for the Viet Cong.” He studied for a time in Austria, then went on to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he received a graduate degree in classical piano while working six nights a week in a jazz trio.Mr. Cowell at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Hall in 2011.Credit…Ruby Washington/The New York TimesHe also fell in with the experimental improvisers and poets of the nearby Detroit Artists Workshop. That experience opened his mind to new artistic possibilities, while planting a seed of passion for artist-led organizing.His connections in Detroit led him to the saxophonist Marion Brown, who helped him land on his feet after moving to New York City in the mid-1960s. Mr. Brown brought the young pianist to his first recording session, in 1966, for the album “Three for Shepp.”Mr. Cowell recorded “Blues for the Viet Cong” with a trio in 1969, and followed it with “Brilliant Circles,” a sextet date. He went on to make over a dozen albums in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, including a run for the Steeplechase label while in his 40s and 50s that, while generally unsung, represents one of that era’s most consistently brilliant stretches of jazz recordings.In the 1980s, Mr. Cowell began to focus more heavily on his work as an educator — first at the City University of New York’s Lehman College and later at Rutgers. He expanded his inquiries into electronic instrumentation and orchestral composing, becoming adept at Kyma and teaching courses on electronic music. He composed a lengthy “Juneteenth Suite” for chorus and orchestra, inspired by the celebrations of Black Americans after the Emancipation Proclamation.After retiring from teaching in 2013, Mr. Cowell revved up his performing career again. He reconnected with his old cohort, including Mr. Tolliver and other former members of the Strata-East roster, touring under the name the Strata-East All Stars. And in 2015, Mr. Cowell released the album “Juneteenth,” featuring what he called “a solo piano reduction” of the suite.In an echo of his experiences almost 50 years earlier, he had been unable to find a record label willing to invest in recording the suite with a full orchestra. Eventually a small French label, Vision Fugitive, offered to put out the solo-piano version.He often noted the irony of his inability to find an American label for the record, which celebrates a suppressed legacy of American music. But he was proud to have put it out anyway, upholding his understanding of the musician’s role.“We are not just artists, we are citizens of our respective nations, and ultimately citizens of the world,” he told Superfly Records. “In our own personal ways, and when necessary, in unity with others, we should add our ‘fuel’ to the cleansing fire against injustice.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Viola Davis and Company on ‘Ma Rainey’ and Chadwick Boseman’s Last Bow

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsBoseman and Davis head the cast of the new drama. It’s the story of “a woman who was known for her autonomy, who did not barter for her worth, and the men who were around her,” Davis said.Credit…Photo illustration by Jennifer Ledbury/The New York Times; Photos by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images Europe; David Lee/NetflixSkip to contentSkip to site indexViola Davis and Company on ‘Ma Rainey’ and Chadwick Boseman’s Last BowMembers of the creative team discuss what it took to adapt the August Wilson play for Netflix and trying not to be “outdone” by the late actor.Boseman and Davis head the cast of the new drama. It’s the story of “a woman who was known for her autonomy, who did not barter for her worth, and the men who were around her,” Davis said.Credit…Photo illustration by Jennifer Ledbury/The New York Times; Photos by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images Europe; David Lee/NetflixSupported byContinue reading the main storyDec. 17, 2020Updated 10:57 a.m. ETA nation riven by racial violence, an industry with a history of exploiting Black culture, white executives eager to portray themselves as allies, and Black artists at the center of it all, contending with a system that would toast them with one arm and pick their pockets with the other.The story of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” August Wilson’s acclaimed 1982 play about Black pride, white power and the blues in 1927 Chicago, is as incendiary today as the day it was written. A new feature film adaptation, due on Netflix Dec. 18, revives Wilson’s historical narrative in a contemporary moment when so much and so little has changed.The second entry in his 10-play American Century Cycle, chronicling the Black experience in each decade of the 20th century, “Rainey” won three Tonys for its original run on Broadway. The film adaptation is already an awards contender for next year, thanks to a searing lead performance from Viola Davis and a powerful showing by Chadwick Boseman, in his final film role before his death from cancer in August.To play Ma Rainey, Viola Davis said she looked to “my Aunt Joyce and other Black women that I know to fill in the blanks.”Credit…David Lee/NetflixDavis plays Ma, an indomitable performer based on the real-life “Mother of the Blues,” whose unprecedented superstardom has taken her from tent shows in Barnesville, Ga., to a recording session in Chicago. The white men overseeing the session, visions of dollar signs dancing in their heads, fear and respect Ma like everyone else in her gravity-bending orbit, including her girlfriend Dussie Mae (Taylour Paige) and quartet of seasoned backing musicians: Levee (Boseman), Cutler (Colman Domingo), Toledo (Glynn Turman) and Slow Drag (Michael Potts). But when Levee’s own career ambitions put him at odds with the group, its fragile infrastructure threatens to implode.The Tony winner George C. Wolfe (“Angels in America”) directed the film from a script adapted by Ruben Santiago-Hudson. In a recent round-table conversation, conducted via video chat, Wolfe, Davis, Domingo, Turman and Potts discussed working with Boseman, Rainey’s potent legacy and asserting your worth in a world built on your devaluation. These are edited (and spoiler-free) excerpts from our conversation.The movie is dedicated to Chadwick Boseman, who delivers an unforgettable performance as Levee. What are some of your memories of working with him? What did he bring to the performance that you saw as his collaborators that we might not know about as viewers?GEORGE C. WOLFE I remember one time, when the band was just sitting around during rehearsal, he started to launch into one of his final monologues. It had all been very casual. And then, at a certain point, it wasn’t casual — it was a fully invested moment that was full of energy and intensity and truth. I just remember thinking, “Oh, we’re going there?” And he went there. We were all sort of half the characters and half who we were, and then, in that moment, the half that was the character took over. And it was kind of glorious.From left, Glynn Turman, Chadwick Boseman, Michael Potts and Colman Domingo.Credit…David Lee/NetflixGLYNN TURMAN I loved the way he always had his cornet nearby. He was always doing something with it, becoming familiar with it, discovering how a musician and his instrument become one. Anytime he picked it up, it was in the right position. Anytime he set it down, it was in the right position. Anytime he put it to his mouth, it was in the right position. He became a musician. It was wonderful to watch that. We all kind of took that cue not to be outdone, as actors do. [Laughter]COLMAN DOMINGO That’s the truth.WOLFE Who, this group? I’m confused. [Laughter]I wonder, when you look at his performance now or when you watch the film, does it play differently at all for any of you in light of his passing? Has its meaning changed for you in any way?DOMINGO Absolutely. I watched it the other night and I heard Chad’s language in a different way. You see his strength and his humor. It brought tears to my eyes very early on, knowing what I know now. And knowing we were all very well able-bodied people and we were doing this tremendous work, showing up and wrestling with August’s language. This man had another massive struggle on top of that. I don’t know how he did it. I sat with myself for a good 15 minutes after watching it and I had a little cry, especially when I saw the dedication. It truly struck me that he’s not with us. I knew he wasn’t, but to see that written, it kind of decimated me.VIOLA DAVIS There was a transcendence about Chad’s performance, but there needed to be. This is a man who’s raging at God, who’s lost even his faith. So [Boseman has] got to sort of go to the edge of hope and death and life in order to make that character work. Of course, you look back on it and see that that’s where he was.I always say, a carpenter or anyone else that does work, they need certain tools in order to create. Our tool is us. We’ve got to use us. There’s no way to just sort of bind whatever you’re going through and leave it in your hotel. You’ve got to bring that with you, and you need permission to do that. And he went there, he really did.Boseman “became a musician,” Turman recalled. “It was wonderful to watch that. We all kind of took that cue not to be outdone, as actors do.”Credit…David Lee/NetflixGeorge and Viola, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” is the only play in August Wilson’s American Century Cycle that is inspired by a real-life public figure. What do you think it is about her story that is ripe for drama?WOLFE I think one of the reasons that August was drawn to her is [that] she lived outside the rules. And when somebody lives outside the rules, it becomes very clear what the rules are. I love that she’s going to fight the fight, not thinking about the consequences. She’s going to fight the fight because she must. She reminds me of … my grandmother was like this. If you were a Black woman, if you waited around for somebody to acknowledge your power, it was never going to happen. So you had to claim your power. She has that quality that everybody has to evolve if you are an artist, period, and if you are an artist of color, magnified: This is the truth and this is my talent, and this is what I’m willing to do and this is what I’m not willing to do. I think she lived her life so purely that way. And if you set that in 1927, you’ve got drama, because the world isn’t acknowledging any of that.DAVIS One of the things I love about August is he gives us something that we have not had in a lot of narratives, especially in movies: autonomy. We’re always sort of shown in a filter of a white gaze. It’s like how Toni Morrison talks about “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison. She’s like, “Invisible to whom?” August defines us in private. If you ask any one of us who are on this Zoom call if we know anyone like Ma Rainey, who could beat your ass on Thursday and be in church on Sunday, who is unapologetic about their value, we grew up with people like that. And certainly, I think that it’s a great start for a narrative, to have a woman who was known for her autonomy, who did not barter for her worth, and the men who were around her.George C. Wolfe said that for Ma Rainey and other Black women, “if you waited around for somebody to acknowledge your power, it was never going to happen.”Credit…David Lee/NetflixViola, talk to me about stepping into the character of Ma Rainey. There is literally stepping into the costume, but there’s also the way she carries herself and the way she interacts with the world around her. Where did you find inspiration, and what did it feel like to become her on set?DAVIS You just have to look at the given circumstances. They said she had makeup that was like grease paint that was melting off her face. In the tent [during her performances], she always looked like she was covered in sweat. She was always wet-looking. She had a mouth full of gold teeth. She was described as not attractive. But because she was such a nurturer, some people were attracted to her.Like everything, I always say that if someone did a story about my life and they went to my husband and daughter, maybe talked to my mom, you’d still only get about 40 percent of me. The other part, you have to rely on your observations in life. You have to in order to get at what is driving that person. What are they living for? That’s when I had to get into my Aunt Joyce and other Black women that I know to fill in the blanks. Who was she in private? Who was she when she was with her women? Even if you didn’t necessarily see it, I had to use that as fuel.Glynn, Colman and Michael, so much of the electricity of the film comes from the interactions between the boys in the band. There’s a kind of jocularity and a camaraderie among you, but there’s also a current of tension and rivalry. Tell me about how you worked together to create that dynamic.TURMAN It starts from a place of really being able to enjoy each other’s company. I think we had a dinner one evening after rehearsal where we all went out after just meeting one another. Our friendship built on that foundation. Just like in real life, the pains and the discomfort come from how well you know one another, because the people who you know are the only people that can really get to you. So we all took great pain in trying to get to know one another within the time frame we had. That way, we were comfortable cussing each other out and giving each other [expletive]. And that took place onscreen and offscreen. [Laughter]MICHAEL POTTS It never stopped. You’re on set with a bunch of men who ain’t got no sense. They ain’t got no damn sense at all. [Laughter]Potts, above, Domingo, below left, and Turman. Along with Boseman, the actors playing the musicians set out to know one another, first over dinner, to get at how relationships in a band work.Credit…David Lee/NetflixCredit…David Lee/NetflixCredit…David Lee/NetflixDOMINGO I remember Chad came in one day. It was early in the rehearsal. He would come in with his hat cocked to the side and the trumpet with him. He comes in a room quietly, very gracefully. And I don’t know if it’s the Cutler in me as well, but I’m like, “Oh, so you just think you ain’t going to speak to nobody when you come in? You walk indoors and don’t talk to nobody?” [Laughter] He said, “Ah, no, no!” We were jocular in that way. But, from then on, he made sure every morning he came and said hello to his brothers and showed respect. Because the feeling was: We can’t be in our own heads. We’ve got to come in and just give over to each other. And that’s what we did.One of the major questions presented by the film is how you come to terms with your place in the world — as an artist and entertainer, but also as a Black person at the bottom of a rigid racial hierarchy. I’m curious if there were elements of the characters’ stories that resonated with any of you in your own artistic and professional journeys.DOMINGO I think that’s why this play is so resonant, especially for Black artists. You’re always trying to make sure your voice is heard, just speaking up and speaking the truth and saying, “No, my place in the world should be elevated because of what I give. I’m just asking for what I deserve, that’s it.” I think [the characters] are asking for that. I know, truly, that I’m asking for it. We’re all asking for it every day. We wake up fighting for it, go to sleep thinking about fighting for it. And we’re fighting for the next generation more than anything, trying to move the dial.DAVIS I find it exhausting. I do. I find it very necessary but exhausting. You’re fighting for your place. You’re fighting to be seen. You’re fighting to be heard. It’s always a fight. And it’s a fight for the simplest things that are given to other people without an exchange.My big thing is when I have to fight for my ability. I can’t stand that. That part of me is the part that went to 10 years of acting school, that did all of that theater, Off Broadway, Broadway, did TV, or whatever. And then you go into a room in Hollywood and you see that has a short shelf life when it’s attached to somebody Black. That’s what pisses me off. I don’t like when people question my ability. But I feel like that’s what all of August’s plays are about — fighting for one’s place in the world. And here’s the other thing: You don’t have to be a king or a queen. You don’t have to be someone up high. He has infused importance into our lives, even if we didn’t make it into a history book.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More