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      in Music

      Pervis Staples, Who Harmonized With the Staple Singers, Dies at 85

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      He sang alongside his father and sisters as his family’s gospel group achieved renown in the late 1950s and ’60s.Pervis Staples, who sang harmony and also provided quieter forms of support during the rise to gospel stardom of his family’s group, the Staple Singers, died on May 6 at his home in Dolton, Ill. He was 85.The death was confirmed by Adam Ayers, a spokesman for Mr. Staples’s sister, Mavis Staples. Mr. Ayers did not specify the cause.Pervis Staples joined two of his sisters, Cleotha and Mavis, and their father, Roebuck Staples, known as Pops, on travels through the gospel circuit in the late 1950s and ’60s. Their sound was heavily influenced by the Delta blues that Roebuck had learned during his youth in rural Mississippi. Roebuck and Mavis were the lead vocalists; Cleotha and Pervis sang harmony.At a time when performers like Bobby Womack and Curtis Mayfield were starting their careers singing hymns and spirituals, the Staples were gospel stars. They performed in their Sunday best, with Pervis and Roebuck wearing matching dark suits and shiny alligator shoes while Cleotha and Mavis wore bridesmaids’ dresses.In an interview with Greg Kot for his 2014 biography of Mavis Staples, “I’ll Take You There,” Pervis compared their effect on ecstatic church audiences to “a miracle or the hand of God.”The group contributed to the soundtrack of the civil rights movement, touring with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and recording some of Bob Dylan’s more political songs, including “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Masters of War.”Pervis also helped write vocal arrangements, protected his sisters and ventured into segregated towns to buy groceries.As popular tastes changed in the 1960s, Pervis encouraged his father, the leader of the group, to expand its range beyond gospel music, asking, “Do you think religion was designed to make pleasures less?”Even as their lyrics retained a social message, the Staple Singers went on to adopt more of a soul-music style. They placed several records in the Top 40 in the 1970s and in 1972 had a No. 1 hit, “I’ll Take You There.”But by that time, Pervis had left to pursue his own ventures.He tried his hand as an agent, representing the R&B group the Emotions, and opened Perv’s Place, a nightclub in Chicago that was popular in the mid-1970s, before the rise of disco.He rejoined the family group when they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1999.Pervis Staples was born on Nov. 18, 1935, in Drew, in western Mississippi, and raised in Chicago. His father shoveled fertilizer in stockyards and laid bricks before putting the family vocal group together. Pervis’s mother, Oceola (Ware) Staples, worked as a maid and laundress at a hotel.He attended grammar school with the future singing stars Sam Cooke and Lou Rawls. After class, Pervis and his friends would practice singing under street lamps and in Cooke’s basement. The boys had voices so sweet, “they could make the mice come down the pole and watch,” he told Mr. Kot.When Roebuck Staples formed the Staple Singers in 1948, Pervis sang second lead and hit the high notes. He was replaced as second lead by Mavis when his voice dropped an octave during puberty.Pervis Staples graduated from Dunbar Vocational High School in 1954. He was drafted into the Army in 1958 and honorably discharged in 1960.Another sister, Yvonne, replaced Pervis when he left the Staple Singers. After Perv’s Place closed, he remained active in the music business.Mr. Staples’s two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his sister Mavis, who is now the last surviving member of the Staple Singers, as well as five daughters, Gwen Staples, Reverly Staples, Perleta Sanders, Paris Staples and Eala Sams; a son, Pervis; seven grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.The Associated Press contributed reporting. More

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      in Theater

      Taking Over Victory Gardens to Make a ‘Theater for All’

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      CHICAGO — Ken-Matt Martin, the incoming artistic director of Victory Gardens Theater here, said he never has revealed this publicly before, but he has a Sankofa bird tattooed on his back.This mythical creature, with a name that means “return to retrieve” in Ghana’s Akan language, is depicted with its feet pointing forward and its head turned backward — a reminder, Martin said, of “making sure you have a reverence and understanding of the past so that as you move into the future, you know what the hell you’ve come from. That’s key to how I move, how I operate in the world.”And that’s the delicate balance Martin, at 32, intends to strike as he takes the reins of this 47-year-old Tony Award-winning institution that had an even more tumultuous 2020 than most theater companies.Between late May and early June, a key group of affiliated playwrights quit en masse, protesters demonstrated outside the boarded-up Lincoln Park theater, and its white executive director, who recently had been named artistic director as well, and board president resigned.Victory Gardens has a new board president, Charles E. Harris II, and a new acting managing director, Roxanna Conner, and on March 17 it announced that Martin would become its third artistic director since its 1974 founding. He begins April 19.That this new leadership triumvirate is entirely Black represents a first for Victory Gardens, a theater that has championed diversity while sometimes struggling to live up to those ideals. And this shift is being echoed throughout the Chicago arts scene, where Black leaders have secured the top jobs at House Theater, Sideshow Theater Company, Hubbard Street Dance and the Second City.These moves came in the wake of the social-justice movement spurred by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and fueled by the demands of the “We See You, White American Theater” national coalition of theater artists of color.“I would not be in the position I’m in if we had not had that collective awakening this past year,” said Lanise Antoine Shelley, the House Theater’s new artistic director.“Sure, something is shifting,” Martin said, “but you’re also talking about highly qualified people getting jobs that they’re more than qualified for.”The cast of “Prowess,” a play by Ike Holter that Martin directed at the Pyramid Theater Company, which he co-founded in Des Moines, Iowa.Mark TurekPunctuating his assertions with laughter while sitting outside a South Loop cafe blocks from his apartment, the Little Rock, Ark., native was casual and comfortable as he discussed the weighty issues facing theater and the larger culture.“I woke up this morning and was like: You know? I’m not going to be cagey today. I’m just going to tell it straight,” he said.He wore a baseball cap from Brown University, where he received his M.F.A. in directing, and a black mask from Chicago’s Goodman Theater, where he was serving as associate producer alongside the longtime artistic director Robert Falls when he landed the Victory Gardens job.He was introduced to the entertainment world at age 12, when his mother drove him to Atlanta to audition for the Nickelodeon series “All That.” He landed a bit part and when that contract later prohibited him from taking a role on another network, he said he became determined to learn the business side of entertainment.In Little Rock, Martin said, the majority of his classmates — as well as teachers, principals, and doctors — were Black. Moving to predominantly white Des Moines, Iowa, where he earned degrees in musical theater and public relations at Drake University, and encountered racism on the street, was a shock to the system.Yet he remained in the city to pull off what he said will remain his crowning achievement: He co-founded the Pyramid Theater Company, which has thrived connecting the work of Black playwrights and artists to majority-Black audiences.Martin said it took “chutzpah” to make that happen in such an environment: “There were people saying, ‘We don’t need another theater. You all need to be working to make the theaters we already have more diverse.’ ”Antonio Woodard, left, and Tiffany Johnson in the Pyramid production of James Baldwin’s “Amen Corner,” which Martin directed.Andrea MarkowskiIn 2015 Martin began a yearlong Goodman Theater apprenticeship. Afterward, as he pursued his M.F.A. at Brown University, he did work at the affiliated Trinity Repertory Company, where he recalled being asked at a meeting: “Hey, can you help us figure out how to better market this show to Black audiences?”“Mind you, I’m a student.” He laughed. “What does that say that you have to come to me to figure that thing out?”As producing director at the Williamstown Theater Festival, he spent the non-summer months in New York City negotiating contracts and transfer deals while having such random encounters as passing Adam Driver in a stairwell while the “Star Wars” actor practiced lines for a play.“I’m the only person of color, period, in 90 percent of the conversations that I’m having,” Martin recalled, “and yet here I am, just this kid from Little Rock, and I can run into Kylo Ren on the way to my office.”The Goodman enticed Martin to return to Chicago in November 2019 to take the No. 2 artistic position to Falls. Martin did hands-on work with such productions as Jocelyn Bioh’s “School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play,” which had an artistic team of all Black women.“None of us had been in a room like that before,” the show’s director, Lili-Anne Brown, said. “He understood how significant that was, and he worked to uplift it and protect it.”Ciera Dawn in the Goodman Theater production of “School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play,” which had an artistic team of Black women.Liz LaurenThen the pandemic hit, live performances were suspended, and the team had to navigate a new path through the shutdown and ensuing social unrest.Martin stressed the need for “nuance” as he discussed the Goodman. He referred to Falls and the Goodman executive director Roche Schulfer each as a “mentor” and “dear, dear friend” yet said his experiences there and at Williamstown and Trinity Rep solidified his determination to pursue a leadership position.“What I wasn’t interested in doing any longer was being the Black or brown shield and token within some of these larger institutions that had snatched me up,” he said.“The theater’s mission literally says to be a theater for all,” Martin says.Nolis Anderson for The New York TimesA few miles north of the Goodman, Victory Gardens had its own problems.Founded in 1974 and now based in the historic Biograph Theater in upscale Lincoln Park, the theater has traditionally focused on a diverse range of new work by Chicago writers. The theater’s first official playwrights’ ensemble included Steve Carter, Gloria Bond Clunie and Charles Smith, as well as John Logan, Jeffrey Sweet and Claudia Allen, who wrote extensively about L.G.B.T.Q. characters. The Cuban-American playwright Nilo Cruz joined later.In 2001, Victory Gardens became the third Chicago recipient of the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theater. When Dennis Zacek, the first artistic director, announced his retirement in 2010 after 34 years, the board named the acclaimed director and playwright Chay Yew as his successor, making Yew a rare artistic director of color at a major American theater.Lucas Hnath’s “Hillary and Clinton” had its premiere at Victory Gardens and later was presented on Broadway, starring John Lithgow, left, and Laurie Metcalf.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYew shook things up over his nine years in the top job, bringing in his own ensemble of playwrights while aiming for a younger, more diverse audience and tallying his share of successes. (Lucas Hnath’s “Hillary and Clinton” had a Broadway production in 2019.) After Yew announced his departure, the board in May 2020 named Erica Daniels, already its executive director, as its new executive artistic director. In response the playwrights’ group resigned, blasting the board for not communicating with the theater’s artists or for conducting a national search.The administration’s decision in early June to board up the theater’s frontage — at a time when other theaters in Chicago and New York were opening their doors to protesters decrying racial injustice — inflamed tensions. About 100 activists assembled outside the Biograph on June 6 and posted messages such as “BLACK LIVES MATTER. But do they matter to this theater?”Two days later, Daniels resigned, as did Steve Miller, the board chair. A more inclusive, transparent search process followed.“I was one of the loudmouths yelling at them, and months later they asked me, ‘Do you want to be one of the people who helps us chose our next artistic director?’” said Brown, the “School Girls” director. “Victory Gardens’ board has done more work at transformation than anyone else I’ve seen.”She was pleased with the choice of Martin, saying, “I think this is an opportunity to show everyone in the national theater forum what it really can look like to gut rehab a historically white institution.”Falls said seeing Martin leave the Goodman was “bittersweet,” but “it’s a fantastic moment for him and the city of Chicago and nationally. He’s an extraordinary person and a wonderful artist who brings a plethora of skills that most people do not have in running a theater.”Like just about every theater company, Victory Gardens is trying to figure out when and how it will welcome live audiences back into the building.Martin said he also intends to use the connections he made at Williamstown to give more Victory Gardens productions an afterlife in New York and elsewhere. And he expressed interest in bringing back older Victory Gardens playwrights to foster “larger intergenerational conversations.”“But at the same time, yeah, I’m going to have some new writers,” he said, “because I know a lot of dope writers.”He spoke most energetically about the need for Victory Gardens, onstage and off, to reflect and engage with the city’s broad range of communities. “The theater’s mission literally says to be a theater for all,” he said.He hopes to draw on the wisdom of an emerging “cohort” of fellow artistic directors of color in theater — not to mention the inspiration of that Sankofa bird — to pull it off.He’s not worried.“If I figured out how to get Black people to come to a theater in Des Moines,” he said, “I can probably figure out how to get all peoples within this larger beautiful city to come out as well.” More

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      in Music

      Damon Locks and the Black Monument Ensemble’s Spiritual, Funky Escape

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      The Chicago musician’s group is following up its 2019 album, “Where Future Unfolds,” with an LP reacting to the events of 2020 titled “Now.”During the summer of 2020, as protesters took to the streets after the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, and the United States once again reckoned with fierce racial and ideological divides, the Chicago-based vocalist, producer and sound artist Damon Locks found himself at a creative impasse.“Where Future Unfolds,” his 2019 album as the leader of the 18-member Black Monument Ensemble, expressed the pain of seeing Black people killed without adequate justice. Should — and could — Locks gather the Ensemble during the pandemic to record new music in response to what was happening around them?“The challenge was, ‘What would I say now?’” Locks, 52, said in a recent phone interview from Logan Square. “And when breath is the most dangerous thing around, how do you record up to six people singing?”He emailed a local studio engineer about recording with a condensed version of the group in the building’s backyard garden. Two obstacles made themselves evident. One, it was hot. “I think it was like 93 degrees the first day, which is a lot,” Locks said. Then there were the cicadas; they were chirping so loudly you would’ve thought they were in the band.“They were seriously right on beat a number of times,” said the clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid, who plays in the Ensemble.Undeterred, Locks and the Ensemble convened at Experimental Sound Studio in late August and recorded what would become “Now,” the band’s new album, out Friday. Where the group’s 2019 LP spun racial disharmony into a sacred celebration of Blackness, the new record envisions an alternate universe of infinite possibility. “The moment ‘now’ is not accounted for,” Locks said. “So anything can happen, you know?”Partially inspired by sci-fi shows like HBO’s “Watchmen” and “Lovecraft Country,” where Black people literally transport themselves out of perilous situations, “Now” uses up-tempo electro-funk and lyrics that spin societal despair into forward-looking optimism. The album — and Locks’s music, in general — also explores the concept of “the Black nod,” or the unspoken mode of communication between Black people in public spaces. In turn, Locks’s Ensemble work — with all its spiritual jazz arrangements, vibrant drum breaks and esoteric movie clips — feels overtly communal, like a private conversation between those who understand the nuances of Black culture.“To me, the nod speaks to this destabilized scenario in the United States and acknowledges that you’re here,” Locks said. “‘I understand that this is crazy, so I see you.’” Locks, who also teaches art in Chicago Public Schools and at the Stateville Correctional Center, a maximum security men’s prison about an hour outside of Chicago, said he was encouraged by the activism he saw in the wake of protests and the pandemic. “I took inspiration from people checking in on people, people trying to get money from one place to the other, trying to find ways to get food to people who didn’t have food,” he said.Locks grew up in Silver Spring, Md., and was introduced to punk as an eighth-grader. One year later, he started going to punk and hardcore shows just down the road in neighboring Washington, D.C., where he saw now-legendary bands like Minor Threat and Bad Brains.As a nascent musician and visual artist, he loved the freedom these groups exercised onstage. That inspired him to create work based on his own feelings, regardless of what was popular. In 1987, as a freshman at the School of Visual Arts in New York, he became fast friends with a classmate named Fred Armisen, who’d only gone to the college to form a band. (“Because all of my favorite bands were art school bands,” Armisen said in a recent interview.) Armisen couldn’t really find anyone to play with, until he met Locks, who had spiky red-and-black dreadlocks.Locks discovered punk rock as a teen and played in the group Trenchmouth with Fred Armisen and Wayne Montana for eight years.Jermaine Jr. Jackson for The New York Times“Damon had a jacket with the Damned painted on it, and I loved the Damned,” Armisen remembered. A year later, Locks transferred to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Instead of saying goodbye, Armisen dropped out of S.V.A. and moved too. Another friend and bandmate, the bassist Wayne Montana, followed suit. “That’s how much I believed in him,” Armisen said. They started the experimental rock band Trenchmouth in 1988.The band lasted eight years, during which Locks earned acclaim as a powerful vocalist, performer and visual artist. He made the band’s fliers, collagelike drawings mixing intricate sketches and printed images, which he photocopied at Kinko’s. “That’s the first place where I was like, ‘Oh, this guy is just a genius,” Armisen said. “This is a brilliant person who cares about every millimeter of what something looks like and sounds like.”After Trenchmouth split, Locks and Montana formed the Eternals, an amorphous outfit with a sound rooted in reggae and jazz. Where Trenchmouth scanned as punk and post-hardcore, the Eternals tried to be even weirder. “We let that free openness overtake the music,” Montana said. “We started using some samples and clips from movies in Trenchmouth, but as we got older and bought more equipment, it allowed tonal things to happen that we were always reaching for.”Locks was doing a studio residency at the Hyde Park Art Center in 2017 when he had the idea of putting singers together to expand the sound of his performances. He contacted Josephine Lee, the director of the Chicago Children’s Choir, who sent him a list of five adult singers who could bring his songs to life. The first performance was in his art center studio, where “I just opened the doors and put chairs out in the hall,” he said. The band landed a gig at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The percussionists Arif Smith and Dana Hall agreed to do the show. The cornetist Ben LaMar Gay, a friend of Locks’s, joined, too.The band’s breakthrough performance came in 2018 at the Garfield Park Conservatory as part of the Red Bull Music Festival, where Locks brought in dancers, a few new singers and Dawid, who filled in for Gay. The Black Monument Ensemble was born; “Where Future Unfolds” is a live recording of the Garfield Park performance. The group’s membership, and size, is fluid: “Some of the singers have changed over time but I consider it a family and possibly folks might show up again,” Locks said.On “Now,” Locks purposely left studio chatter on the album to underline the band’s kinship. (Listeners can experience the joy that comes after the sessions are done, as the melody fades and the Ensemble applauds the take.) “For it to be such a hard time right now, and for us to have this time to record, it was absolutely beautiful,” Dawid said. “We were just thankful to see each other again.”Locks said that his art is designed to speak one-on-one with the receiver. “I’m just trying to communicate as a human being,” he said. “The idea is to be in classrooms talking to students, to be in Stateville talking to artists who are incarcerated, trying to get their voices out there.” And with the collective anguish endured over this past year, he hopes “Now” can bring some positivity: “I’m talking about things that inspire me and passing that along.” More

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      in Music

      Bonzie Longs for a Post-Pandemic ‘Reincarnation’

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      On her third album, the Chicago-based songwriter offers melody, mystery and prized imperfections.Nina Ferraro, the songwriter who records as Bonzie, had been working since 2018 on her third album, “Reincarnation.” It would be the continuation of a fully independent career that has consistently yielded richly melodic and mysterious songs. Then Covid-19 hit, and, like everyone else, she had to change her plans. She moved from Los Angeles to Chicago, where she had lived before; she learned how to be her own recording engineer; she immersed herself in studying Japanese. The centerpiece of her album-in-progress became a song she wrote during quarantine: “Alone,” an understated, haunted, not quite acoustic ballad that she released in 2020.As she continued writing and recording, the songs for the album — released on March 16 — converged into a narrative arc from separation to reconnection, pondering mortality and tenacity. “Either you want to die or you don’t want to die/Both are so lethal/Me, I’m stuck in the middle of the glorious combat,” she sings, gently and matter-of-factly, in “Lethal.” It’s a song she wrote before the pandemic.“That’s just the nature of this unstable rock that we’re on,” Bonzie said on a Skype video call from her home in Chicago. “We feel some of these things very strongly right now, but they have always been there. It’s impossible not to be affected by the world situation, but a lot of things are constant for me.”Bonzie, 25, was wearing a hoodie with a design by one of her favorite songwriters, Daniel Johnston. It showed the “Silver Sufferer” (a skull-faced parody of the Marvel superhero Silver Surfer) singing the opening line of the Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends.” An electric bass and an electric guitar leaned against the walls; her Yorkie, Kiraki (“Sunday” in Armenian), spent time in her lap.Behind her was a large picture frame holding a small yellow rectangle: a sketch on a Post-it note made by the prolific Chicago producer Steve Albini, one of Bonzie’s early supporters. It showed a bell curve of creativity — a burst of inspiration and work followed by quickly diminishing returns.Bonzie said she was inspired by the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi: “You preserve these natural imperfections that are actually beautiful details.”Alexa Viscius for The New York Times“I just thought it was funny,” she said. “There are two people in you at all times. One is this endless spirit soul, that’s just creative and will go forever. And then the other one is trying to gently guide that person, to remind you that you’re physical material. The curve represents time spent creatively, and then the X represents where you stop.”On the new album, Bonzie’s music merges the singer-songwriter staples of guitar, piano and finely turned melodies with synthesizers and programmed beats. For most of the album, Bonzie worked with a co-producer, DJ Camper, who has extensive credits in hip-hop and R&B. One song, the trap-tinged “Up to U,” was co-produced by Yeti Beats, better known for working with Doja Cat. The album’s title song, “Reincarnation,” envisions a post-pandemic renaissance: “We will change, I swear we’re gonna change,” its chorus insists.Bonzie was 12 when she began singing her own songs weekly at a coffeehouse in her hometown, Racine, Wis. She didn’t want to use her own name, and eventually chose Bonzie as an abstract word that also looked good graphically in capital letters. Using a stage name “just felt better to be able to say everything I wanted to say,” she said, “and not be worried when I was singing about all of these dark, deep secrets that I wouldn’t tell anybody.”She moved with her family to Chicago, where, as a high schooler, she performed at well-known clubs like Schubas Tavern and Beat Kitchen. She self-released a debut EP as Nina Ferraro when she was 15, followed by her full-length debut album as Bonzie, “Rift Into the Secret of Things” — a phrase from Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” — in 2013. She had already begun to mingle folky coffeehouse basics with electronic experimentation, and she found fans among the city’s indie musicians.“I was impressed by her drive and her seriousness at a very early age,” Albini said by phone from his Chicago studio, Electrical Audio. “She was more serious about her decisions and about her aesthetic than a lot of people her age. It was clear that she had listened and thought very deeply about what she was doing. And the thing that made her stand out immediately was just a singular drive — not to get famous, not just to become known, but to express herself in a way that meant something to her.”Bonzie’s music grew more elaborate on her second album, “Zone on Nine,” released in 2017. It roved from straightforward acoustic strumming to the delicate sonic apparitions and intricate backup vocals of freak-folk to the crunch of hard-rock guitars; her lyrics could be startlingly direct or poetic and elusive. Now, with “Reincarnation,” she has stripped back her music. “I wanted it to be more personal,” she said.Her interest in Japanese culture — which began with high-school exposure to Pokémon and anime — led her to the aesthetic of wabi-sabi, the idea that “artifacts that come from your medium, that you didn’t intend, are what you highlight and you keep,” she said. “You preserve these natural imperfections that are actually beautiful details. It’s accepting the nature of your imperfect humanness. When producing this record, I thought about that a lot. Like, that’s not perfect with my voice, and that’s not like the most shiny, brilliant, beautiful take, but loving that imperfection that we all have.”She was also seeking what she had heard in gospel music. “Some of the best voices in the world are gospel singers,” she said. “And I like the way that it feels like there’s nothing that’s unneeded in gospel production.”Once the pandemic is over, “I think it’s inevitably going to birth a new type of life,” Bonzie said. “I think that there could be a lot of positive things that come on the other side.”Alexa Viscius for The New York TimesShe came across the productions of DJ Camper — who has worked with Brandy, Drake, Jay-Z, Tamar Braxton and H.E.R. — while living in Los Angeles. By coincidence, she found his Twitter account on his birthday, which was also her older brother’s birthday. She contacted him. “We kind of felt like we’d known each other for a really long time,” she said. “He’s a musician’s musician. We related on that level where we would be producing and we didn’t even talk at all. We would find something and we’d just, like, look at each other for a second. And then that would mean like, yeah.”“Reincarnation” begins with “Caves,” which has psychedelia-tinged electric guitars and lyrics that could be about obsessive love or addiction. “I’ve been waiting my whole life/To feel this good for just one night,” Bonzie sings.She said, “You have to start off in a place of letting go of stuff, and then you can explore other things.”In “Slated,” she sings about a lonely oblivion, intoning, “I hope that you will find me,” as electronic tones ripple around her; in “Eternity,” she fingerpicks quietly and repeats, “I wish that you could stay, but these things fade,” as harp, orchestral strings and electronics materialize and vanish around her lustrous voice. But she ends the album with a hymnlike affirmation: “Come to Me.” Floating on synthesizers and organ chords, she sings, “Hold you up/No fear/We are free.”She said, “I feel like so much has changed so fast, and we’re still adapting to the pandemic. We’re still in a shock period. Once we get out of it, I think it’s inevitably going to birth a new type of life. I think that there could be a lot of positive things that come on the other side of this era of humanity.”Like Bonzie’s other songs, “Come to Me” isn’t simply topical, conceptual or autobiographical. “A lot of things go into the pot,” she said. “And then there’s some alchemy, and then the song comes out.” More

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      in Television

      Before Lockdown, This Super Fan Went to 105 Shows in One Season

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeFall in Love: With TenorsConsider: Miniature GroceriesSpend 24 Hours: With Andra DayGet: A Wildlife CameraAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHe Went to 105 Shows in One Season. Now He Watches TV.What has this year been like for the most voracious of culture vultures? A super fan in Chicago lets us into his life without the arts.Edward T. Minieka, a 77-year-old arts enthusiast, in the doorway of the Chicago apartment where he has spent much of his time during lockdown, unable to take in live events.Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesMarch 11, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETEdward T. Minieka was 5 years old when his parents started taking him to see shows.The Miniekas lived in Bridgeport, on Chicago’s South Side, and hopped a streetcar to get downtown. They watched “King Midas and the Golden Touch” at the Goodman Children’s Theater, plus family programs at Symphony Center and the Civic Opera House. On good days, there might be a visit to the Woolworth’s lunch counter; on really good days, the Walnut Room at Marshall Field’s.Minieka is now 77 years old. He still lives in Chicago. And he still loves the arts.In the last prepandemic season, he bought tickets for 105 live performances — symphony, opera and lots of theater.Then, thanks to the lockdown, he got a TV.With his new (to him) TV, Minieka is watching British shows and the occasional movie. But he has no use for digital theater.Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesThe performing arts depend on people like Minieka — culture vultures, often retired, who fill the seats at many a show. And that dependence is mutual. There are lots of people, many of them older, for whom the arts are a way to stay connected to the world — intellectually, emotionally and socially.This last year, when live performance before live audiences has been largely banned, has hit the most devoted especially hard.“What I miss most of all is the community,” Minieka said in one of a series of telephone interviews from the antiques-filled downtown apartment where he has been holed up for most of the year, but for the occasional walk, weather permitting, and a weekly early morning trip to the grocery.A former professor of management and statistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he is accustomed to solitude, having lived alone for a long time. “I tried living with boyfriends off and on,” he said, “but I’m better off having my own space.”He pauses to reflect. “It’s OK,” he added. “I have a nice apartment. I’ve got the TV set up. I just got a new phonograph — my old one died after 25 years — and I’ve been listening to some of the old opera recordings my father gave me just before he died.”Opera recordings, antique English furniture and old master paintings fill Minieka’s art-filled apartment. (Maria Callas is one of his favorite sopranos.)Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesHe’s been quite intentional about maintaining social ties. He doesn’t like video chatting, but schedules one to three phone calls a night. He makes lists of what he wants to talk about, just to jog his memory.But it’s not the same. One day, taking the bus to a doctor’s appointment, he ran into a woman he knew from the art world, and it hit him, the absence of serendipity. “A phone call is arranged,” he said. “I don’t run into chums, and get some buzz from them — that someone who has just come home from New York, and tells you about what show they saw. That’s gone, and there’s no way to replace that.”The Same Seat at the SymphonyIn the before times, Minieka would put on a coat and tie every Thursday and take a bus to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, settling into the same seat in the back corner of the sixth floor where he’s sat for years. “I close my eyes and listen,” he says. “I just want to hear them.” During intermission, he and his gang would meet in the Symphony Center’s ballroom, saying hello and trading gossip.He’s been a regular attendee since his undergraduate days at Illinois Tech, when he’d buy $1 tickets; he still remembers seeing Fritz Reiner conduct. “They didn’t have an elevator then, but I didn’t mind walking up six floors,” he said, “and the sound in the top gallery is sublime.”More than anything, Minieka (sitting before a prized and rare 19th century piano) says he misses the community that comes with attending cultural events.Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesMinieka began grad school at Stanford, and while there he’d visit the San Francisco Opera; he finished up at Yale, where he learned to love plays at the drama school, and where he organized a car pool to New York to see productions at the Metropolitan Opera.He’s not interested in Broadway in Chicago or the big nonprofits — too commercial. But he subscribed to the Court and TimeLine and Steep and Redtwist and A Red Orchid, key pieces of the city’s thriving small and storefront theater scene, as well as to the Lyric Opera.He’s a pensioner, and money is tight, so he bargain hunts — balcony seats, discounts, last-minute tickets. “It’s my own fault, buying antiques,” he shrugs. “There were smarter things to buy.”There are so many memories — just last season, there was the Pride Films and Plays production of the musical “A Man of No Importance,” which Minieka attended with 20 friends, and the series of short plays by women at the Broken Nose Theater’s summer Bechdel Fest.During the live performance shutdown, he has visited one museum. “I went once during the last year, to see the El Greco show,” he said, “but the problem was people were congregating around the captions. It was just too risky.”He’s also stopped, after 40 years, going in person to the solemn high Mass at the Church of the Ascension, known for its music. “Now they have reservations, but I don’t want to do it,” he said. “It’s not going to be the same.”Will Minieka return to live performance? “I’ve kind of gotten used to sitting at home, and not paying for tickets, or spending a couple of nickels to have things streamed,” he said.Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesArt fills his life, literally. He lives in a vintage apartment filled with his collection of English furniture and old master paintings, plus, of course, shelves of opera on vinyl. “I like to pull out some of the old ones,” he said. “You come to a new level of understanding.”Before the pandemic, he enjoyed playing host. Every winter since 1978, he had convened a series of Wednesday night salons, inviting curators, collectors, artists and art lovers to gather at his apartment. “It’s amazing the conversations that happen around midnight,” he said.His final night out was March 9, 2020, when he went with friends to Petterino’s Monday Night Live, a cabaret showcase. “It was full throttle,” he said, “as if everyone knew the lockdown was coming.”A few days later, he dressed up and boarded the bus to watch the symphony perform “Rhapsody in Blue” and “Boléro.” He arrived, found out the performance had been canceled, and went back home. That was March 12.Late to Binge WatchingMinieka never had much use for television. For years he had a hand-me-down black-and-white he used to watch the Oscars and the elections, but when the tubes started leaking, he threw it out. At the start of the pandemic, a friend offered him her old TV — she was upgrading — and he decided it was time to hook up cable and figure out streaming.He’s bingeing “Downton Abbey,” “The Crown” and “Brideshead Revisited.” He watches the occasional movie. But he has no patience for digital theater. “I just don’t enjoy it,” he says. “I’ve been to the real thing.”Now he’s had both vaccine doses, and he’s planning to celebrate by seeing a Monet exhibit at the Art Institute. But will he go back to live performance? He’s not sure.“I’ve kind of gotten used to sitting at home, and not paying for tickets, or spending a couple of nickels to have things streamed,” he said. “And it used to be you had an 8 o’clock curtain, and if I wasn’t there they’d close the doors. Now I can start whenever I want, and I don’t have to wear a matching tux.”“I was running at full steam, going out every night,” Minieka said. “Suddenly it all stops, and I adjust.”Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesHe describes this period as a “sabbatical,” and ponders what he would want to see next; at other times, he says he thinks of this as a second retirement, and that he might just move into a retirement community and stop going out. After all, he has a heart condition, he takes 16 pills a day, he uses a cane for balance, so maybe it’s time?“I was running at full steam, going out every night,” he said. “Suddenly it all stops, and I adjust. In a way, it puts a coda on that part of my life.”As for his annual salons? “March 4, 2020 was the last one,” Minieka said. “I’m too old to do it. It’s a lot of work. And it’s nice to end something when you don’t know it’s the closing night.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Erica Faye Watson, Comedic ‘Hidden Gem of Chicago,’ Dies at 48

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesRisk Near YouVaccine RolloutNew Variants TrackerAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThose We’ve LostErica Faye Watson, Comedic ‘Hidden Gem of Chicago,’ Dies at 48Best known as a regular on a local morning talk show, she also wrote plays and acted in movies. She died of complications of Covid-19.Erica Watson  was a regular on “Windy City Live,” a morning TV talk show in Chicago. She also did stand-up comedy and acted in movies.Credit…Patti K. GillMarch 4, 2021, 6:23 p.m. ETThis obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.When a candidate for state’s attorney in Cook County, Ill., held a lunchtime fund-raiser in downtown Chicago in 2016, the campaign hired a local comedian and television personality named Erica Faye Watson to warm up the crowd.Ms. Watson had never met the candidate, Kim Foxx, but that didn’t keep her from diving into an extended riff about Ms. Foxx’s hair. “I had never been publicly roasted before,” Ms. Foxx said in an interview. “I was like, who is this woman?”But the jokes were just a setup for Ms. Watson’s real point: what it would mean to have a Black woman as the county’s chief prosecutor, and how proud she would be to see Ms. Foxx in that role. The two became fast friends.“She was very much about empowering Black women,” said Ms. Foxx, who is now in her second term. “She was fighting not just for herself but for people like her.”Ms. Watson was a Chicagoland celebrity, best known as a regular on “Windy City Live,” a morning talk show on WLS-TV, Chicago’s ABC affiliate. She also performed stand-up comedy, wrote and directed plays and acted in movies.Ms. Watson died on Saturday in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She was 48. The cause was Covid-19, Patti Gill, her former agent, said.“Erica was a hidden gem of Chicago and a voice for overlooked businesses and causes,” said Ms. Gill, who cast her in “BlacKorea,” a short film she wrote, in 2017.Erica Faye Watson was born on Feb. 26, 1973, in Chicago, to Henry Watson, a postal worker, and Willie Mae Watson, a homemaker.Her survivors include her parents and her brother, Eric.Ms. Watson attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was a fixture on the school’s Black arts scene.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

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      ‘Judas and the Black Messiah’: What to Know About the HBO Max Film

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Judas and the Black Messiah’: What to Know About the HBO Max FilmThe Shaka King movie dramatizes the life and death of Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party. Here’s a guide to the people and the issues of the day.Daniel Kaluuya, top, as Fred Hampton, and below him Lakeith Steinfeld as the informant William O’Neal  in “Judas and the Black Messiah.”Credit…Glen Wilson/Warner BrosFeb. 12, 2021, 12:18 p.m. ETTo Black Americans in the 1960s who were targeted and harassed by the police, 21-year-old Fred Hampton was an empowering figure.To the F.B.I. and its director, J. Edgar Hoover, Hampton, the chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, was a radical threat.Hampton was killed by Chicago police officers early on the morning of Dec. 4, 1969, during a raid on his West Side apartment, which was a block south of the Black Panther Party’s Chicago headquarters. The ambush, and the months of F.B.I. surveillance of Hampton and the Panthers that preceded it, are dramatized in Shaka King’s film “Judas and the Black Messiah,” which begins streaming Friday on HBO Max.At the time of Hampton’s death, Chicago was the site of political protests and violent clashes with law enforcement. The infamous trial of the Chicago 7, a court battle that involved seven Vietnam War protesters charged with conspiring to incite riots during the 1968 Democratic National Convention (a saga chronicled in Aaron Sorkin’s recent film “The Trial of the Chicago 7”), had been underway for a little over two months.King, who co-wrote the script with Will Berson, drew mostly from fact while taking viewers inside the Black Panther Party in the months leading up to Hampton’s death, though they took a few dramatic liberties. For instance, the film’s star, Daniel Kaluuya, is a decade older than the 21-year-old Hampton was when he was killed.Here is a guide to the real-life people, groups and events that feature in “Judas and the Black Messiah.” Be warned, there are spoilers, if such a thing is possible when speaking of history.Who were the Black Panthers?Bobby Seale, left, and Huey P. Newton at the Black Panther Party headquarters in San Francisco.Credit…Ted Streshinsky/Corbis via Getty ImagesThe Black Panther Party was founded in 1966 in Oakland, Calif., by a pair of Black college students, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, to oppose police brutality and racism in local neighborhoods. The Panthers, who were known for their military-style black berets, leather jackets and raised-fist salute, believed in removing abusive officers from communities by any means necessary, including armed resistance.The F.B.I. viewed the Panthers as a radical group capable of galvanizing a militant Black nationalist movement. (Hoover, the bureau’s first director, called the Black Panther Party “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country”). But the Panthers also launched a number of social initiatives: Members ran medical clinics, provided free transportation to prisons for family members of inmates, and started a free breakfast program that fed thousands of schoolchildren.Who was Fred Hampton?Fred Hampton at the “Days of Rage” rally in Chicago, less than two months before he was killed.Credit…David Fenton/Getty ImagesThe charismatic community organizer enjoyed a meteoric rise that took him from campaigning for an integrated community pool and recreational center in his hometown, Maywood, Ill., to preaching to thousands as the chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party.In 1969, a few months after helping to found the party’s Illinois chapter, the 20-year-old Hampton brokered an alliance he called the Rainbow Coalition, which united the Black Panthers, the Young Patriots (Southern white leftists) and the Young Lords (a Puerto Rican civil and human rights organization) in an effort to combat poverty and racism in their Chicago communities.Hampton’s rapid ascent through the ranks of the Black Panther Party landed him in the cross hairs of a secret F.B.I. counterintelligence program, known as Cointelpro, that Hoover formed to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize the activities of Black nationalist, hate-type organizations.” Targets included both the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Ku Klux Klan. Hoover declared in an internal memo that he sought to prevent the “rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify and electrify the militant Black nationalist movement.”Under Cointelpro, the F.B.I. tried a number of tactics to sow discord within the Black Panther Party at the national and local levels, including sending bogus letters to two of its leaders, Eldridge Cleaver and Huey P. Newton, which claimed that each sought to depose the other. Authorities also arrested Hampton and several other Panthers in an effort to publicly discredit the group. In the months before the raid on Hampton’s apartment, the Panthers and the police also faced off in two gun battles: One in July 1969 at the party’s West Side headquarters in which five police officers and three Panthers were injured, and a South Side fight that November that left two officers and one Panther dead.Who was William O’Neal?At 17, O’Neal (Lakeith Stanfield) already had a criminal record when the F.B.I. agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons) tracked him down after he stole a car in 1966. But O’Neal soon took on a new role: F.B.I. informant. Given the choice between facing felony charges or agreeing to infiltrate the Panthers, he opted for the latter: as a security captain in the Illinois Black Panther Party, he infiltrated Hampton’s inner circle.In 1969, O’Neal sketched a floor plan of Hampton’s West Side apartment, including where everyone slept, which the F.B.I. then shared with the Chicago Police Department, the agency that conducted the fatal raid. But unlike the character in “Judas and the Black Messiah,” the real O’Neal did not see his actions as a betrayal of Hampton or the Panthers. “I had no allegiance to the Panthers,” he recalled in an interview for the PBS docuseries “Eyes on the Prize,” which chronicled the history of the civil rights movement in the United States.What happened the morning Fred Hampton was killed?Demonstrators in Boston in 1970 protested the killing of Fred Hampton. Credit…Spencer Grant/Getty ImagesFourteen Chicago police officers showed up before dawn on Dec. 4, 1969, at Hampton’s apartment, acting on the orders of Edward V. Hanrahan, the Cook County state’s attorney. Over the course of about 10 minutes, more than 80 shots were fired. When the smoke cleared, Hampton, 21, and another party leader, Mark Clark, 22, were dead, and four other Panthers and two police officers were wounded.At first, the police claimed they killed Hampton in self-defense after people in the apartment began firing shotguns at them as they tried to execute a search warrant for illegal weapons. But ballistics experts determined that only one of the bullets was probably discharged from a weapon belonging to an occupant of the apartment. A federal grand jury investigation also revealed that the “bullet holes” in the apartment’s front door, which officers had cited as evidence that the Panthers had shot at them, were in fact nail holes created by police.Though the Chicago Police Department had led the raid, the grand jury concluded that it had been coordinated by the F.B.I. as part of Hoover’s mission to cripple the Black Panther Party — and an F.B.I. memo later revealed that the bureau had authorized a bonus payment to O’Neal.The first federal grand jury declined to indict anyone involved in the raid, and though a subsequent grand jury indicted Hanrahan and the police officers who participated in the shootings, all the charges were dismissed. In 1982, without admitting any wrongdoing, the federal government, the City of Chicago and Cook County agreed to pay $1.85 million to the families of Hampton and Clark and to survivors of the raid.Clarence M. Kelley, who succeeded Hoover as head of the F.B.I. in 1973, issued a public apology three years later for the bureau’s abuse of power in the “twilight” of Hoover’s career. “Some of those activities were clearly wrong and quite indefensible,” Kelley said. “We most certainly must never allow them to be repeated.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      R. Kelly Is Set to Face Trial in Chicago in September

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesThe Stimulus DealThe Latest Vaccine InformationF.A.Q.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyR. Kelly Is Set to Face Trial in Chicago in SeptemberA judge acknowledged that the date for the singer’s federal trial on child pornography and obstruction charges could change because of pandemic-related delays.R. Kelly and two associates have been accused by federal prosecutors in Chicago of paying witnesses and victims in a previous child pornography trial to change their stories.Credit…Pool photo by E. Jason WambsgansDec. 22, 2020, 6:55 p.m. ETA date was set on Tuesday for the singer R. Kelly’s federal trial in Chicago on child pornography and obstruction charges, but even the judge said the date was “not set in stone” given the pandemic-related delays that continue to bog down the court.Judge Harry Leinenweber of U.S. District Court set Kelly’s trial for Sept. 13, five months after another federal trial Kelly faces in New York.Prosecutors in the Northern District of Illinois told Leinenweber they would need three weeks to present evidence against Kelly, who is facing charges that he and two former employees conspired to fix his 2008 state trial in Cook County on child pornography charges by paying off witnesses and victims to get them to change their stories.Mr. Kelly is also scheduled to face trial on April 7 in New York on racketeering charges. In that case, an indictment filed in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn alleges that Kelly, whose full name is Robert Sylvester Kelly, and his associates ran a criminal enterprise that recruited women and underage girls for illegal sexual contact and then isolated and threatened them to keep them under control and prevent them from going to the authorities.If convicted in the New York case, Mr. Kelly faces up to 20 years in prison. The federal charges in Chicago have the potential to add decades more in prison, and Kelly is also facing state charges of criminal sexual abuse that were filed in Chicago in February 2019.Kelly, 53, has been held in the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago since his arrest in July 2019. Since then, his lawyer, Steven Greenberg, has unsuccessfully made at least six arguments for Kelly’s release, citing the danger of the coronavirus and an attack on Kelly over the summer by another prisoner, a member of the Latin Kings street gang who was later sentenced to life in prison on an unrelated racketeering conviction.Most cases in federal court in Chicago were halted in the spring, but jury trials resumed in August with new safety protocols. Even so, Leinenweber has said that Chicago’s federal courthouse would not be able to accommodate a trial with three defendants with those protocols in place.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More