Classical Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Onstage, It’s Finally Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas Again

      by

      The Rockettes are high-kicking their way through the Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall. The Sugarplum Fairy, after an unsought interregnum, is presiding over the Land of Sweets at the New York City Ballet. All around the country, choirs are singing hallelujahs in Handel’s “Messiah” and Scrooges are learning to replace bahs with blessings.After two years of Christmastime washouts — there was 2020, when live performance was still impossible in many places, and then last winter, when the Omicron wave stopped many productions — arts-lovers and arts institutions say that they are determined that this will be their first fully staged holiday in three years.“It feels absolutely like the first Christmas post-Covid — there are more tourists in town, Times Square feels very alive again, people are venturing out in a way that I haven’t witnessed since 2019, and sales are more robust across the board,” said Eva Price, a Broadway producer whose musical last year, “Jagged Little Pill,” permanently closed as Omicron bore down, but whose new musical, “& Juliet,” is thriving as this year’s holidays near.Performances of holiday fare, including “The Nutcracker,” Handel’s “Messiah” and, here, “A Christmas Carol,” have become treasured rituals for many families.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesFor arts lovers and arts presenters, late December looms large. Performances of “The Nutcracker,” “A Christmas Carol” and “Messiah” are cherished holiday traditions for many families. Those events are also vital sources of revenue for the organizations that present them. And on Broadway, year-end is when houses are fullest and grosses are highest.“‘A Christmas Carol’ is the lifeblood of our institution,” said Kevin Moriarty, the artistic director of Dallas Theater Center, which first staged an adaptation of the Dickens classic in 1969, and had been doing so annually since 1979 until the pandemic. Most seasons, the play is the theater’s top seller.Last year, Moriarty’s effort to bring the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future back onstage — still with mask and vaccine requirements for the audience — faltered when Omicron hit, and the final 11 days of the run were canceled. “It just felt like the knockout blow we hadn’t seen coming — it felt like things will never get back to normal,” Moriarty said.Handel’s “Messiah” was back at Trinity Church Wall Street in Manhattan. Calla Kessler for The New York TimesDallas was one of many arts institutions wounded by Omicron. The Center Theater Group of Los Angeles canceled 22 of 40 scheduled performances of “A Christmas Carol,” losing about $1.5 million. On Broadway, grosses dropped 57 percent from Thanksgiving week to Christmas week, when 128 performances were canceled. Radio City Music Hall ended its run of the “Christmas Spectacular” with the Rockettes more than a week before Christmas. And the New York City Ballet canceled 17 of 47 scheduled performances of “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker,” costing it about $5 million.“The virus just made it impossible to go on,” said Katherine E. Brown, the executive director of the New York City Ballet, where “The Nutcracker” has been a tradition since 1954. “It was more than a little depressing, and there were lots of disappointed people, onstage and off.”This year: so far, so good. “It’s going really well,” Brown said. “I don’t want to tempt the fates by saying that too loudly, but it’s actually back to prepandemic levels, and even slightly higher. It feels like we’re really back, and the energy in the houses is just phenomenal.”Of course there are still viruses in the air this year: public health officials are warning of a “tripledemic” of the coronavirus, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus, known as R.S.V. Covid cases and hospitalizations have risen nationally since Thanksgiving, and New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, donned a face mask on Tuesday as he urged New Yorkers to take precautions. One new Broadway play, “The Collaboration,” had to cancel several performances this week, including its opening night, after someone in the company tested positive for the coronavirus.But with Christmas just days away, there have yet to be the wholesale closings that marred last year. And now most people over six months old can be vaccinated, and there is a new bivalent vaccine, lowering both risk and anxiety.“We learned a lot from last year: there are more understudies in place, there is more crew coverage, and we have contingency plans that feel more spelled out,” Price said. Brown agreed, saying, “Through the school of hard knocks, we’re better at managing through it.”“George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker” is being staged once again by New York City Ballet, which had to cut its run short last winter because of Omicron. Sterling Hyltin danced the Sugarplum Fairy in a performance last month. Erin BaianoThe upheaval last winter upended many holiday plans.Mike Rhone, a quality assurance engineer in Santa Clara, Calif., had tickets to the Broadway musicals “Hadestown,” “Flying Over Sunset” and “Caroline, or Change,” and planned to propose to his partner in front of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.Instead he proposed at home, on the couch. But they’ll try again this year, with tickets to “Kimberly Akimbo,” “Ohio State Murders,” “Merrily We Roll Along” and the Rockettes. “We’ll definitely get that photo in front of the Rockefeller Center tree,” Rhone said, “just as married people instead of newly-engaged.”Shannon Buster, a civil engineer from Kansas City, Mo., had tickets last year to several Broadway shows and a set of hard-to-score restaurant reservations. “The night before we left, we watched handsome David Muir deliver dire news about Omicron surging, Broadway shows closing, restaurants closing, and we canceled,” she said. This year, she was determined to make the trip happen: “I swear by all that is holy that even an outbreak of rabid, flesh-eating bacteria will not keep me from it.” Last weekend, she and her husband made the delayed trip, trying out some new restaurants and seeing “Death of a Salesman” and “A Strange Loop.”For performers, this year is a welcome relief.Scott Mello, a tenor, has been singing Handel’s “Messiah” at Trinity Church Wall Street each Christmas season since 2015. Last year he found himself singing the “Messiah” at home, in the shower, but it wasn’t the same. “It didn’t feel like Christmas,” he said. This year, he added, “feels like an unveiling.”Ashley Hod, a soloist with New York City Ballet, has been part of its “Nutcracker” for much of her life — she performed in it as a child, when she was studying at the ballet’s school, and joined the cast as an apprentice in 2012; since then she has performed most of the women’s roles. Last year she rehearsed for two months to get ready to go on as the Sugarplum Fairy, but the show was canceled before her turn arrived.“It was devastating,” she said.This year, she’s on as a soloist, and thrilled. “We all have a new appreciation for it,” she said. “Everyone feels really lucky to be back.”On Broadway, things are looking up: Thanksgiving week was the top-grossing week since theaters reopened. And there are other signs of seasonal spending: Jefferson Mays’s virtuosic one-man version of “A Christmas Carol,” which he performed without an audience for streaming when the pandemic made in-person performances impossible, finally made it to Broadway, and is selling strongly as Christmas approaches.Beyond Broadway, things are better too. In New Orleans on Tuesday night, Christmas Without Tears returned — it’s a rambunctious and star-studded annual variety show hosted by the performers Harry Shearer and Judith Owen to raise money for charity (this year, Innocence Project New Orleans).Some “Messiah” fans seemed to be in the Christmas spirit. Calla Kessler for The New York Times“The audience was so primed, ready, and wanting the show,” Owen said. “It was like they’d waited two years for this.”But there are also reasons for sobriety: Broadway’s overall grosses this season are still about 13 percent below what they were in 2019, and this fall a number of shows, struggling to find audiences, have been forced to close. Around the country, many performing arts organizations have been unable to bring audiences back at prepandemic levels.Not everyone is rushing back. Erich Meager, a visual artist in Palm Springs, had booked 10 shows over six nights last December. Then the Rockettes closed, then “Jagged Little Pill,” then two more. “Each morning we would wake up and see what shows were canceled and search for replacements, a less than ideal theater experience,” he said. “This year we are staying close to home for the holidays, but next year we’ll be back.”But many patrons are ready to celebrate.“There have been so many virtual performances, but it’s not really the same thing,” said Luciana Sikula, a Manhattan fashion industry worker who had been attending a performance of “Messiah” annually at Trinity Church Wall Street until the pandemic, and finally got to experience it again in person again this month.Jeffrey Carter, a music professor from St. Louis who had booked and canceled five trips to New York since the pandemic began, finally made it this week; he checked out the new Museum of Broadway as well as an exhibit at the Grolier Club, caught the Oratorio Society of New York’s “Messiah” at Carnegie Hall, and saw “A Man of No Importance,” “A Strange Loop” and “Little Shop of Horrors.” “I’m packing in N.Y.C. at Christmastime in four days and four nights,” he said, “and I’m catching up — in person — with people I love.” More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Elayne Jones, Pioneering Percussionist, Is Dead at 94

      by

      She challenged racial barriers when she joined the San Francisco Symphony in 1972. But she became embroiled in a legal battle when she was denied tenure two years later.Elayne Jones, a timpanist who was said to be the first Black principal player in a major American orchestra when she joined the San Francisco Symphony in 1972, and who mounted a legal battle over racial and sexual discrimination when she was denied tenure two years later, died on Saturday at her home in Walnut Creek, Calif. She was 94.Her daughter Cheryl Stanley said the cause was dementia.The charismatic, Juilliard-trained Ms. Jones was not only a rare woman among the orchestral percussionists of her time; she also helped lead a generation of Black musicians in confronting the pervasive — and enduring — racism of the classical music industry. Her appointment in San Francisco, under that ensemble’s modish music director, Seiji Ozawa, “projected a forward-looking vision of classical music,” the scholar Grace Wang has written.Admired for her lyricism and finesse, Ms. Jones was an instant hit in San Francisco. “Her playing is so outlandish in quality, one gets the titters just thinking of it,” the critic Heuwell Tircuit wrote in The San Francisco Chronicle of her debut. Arthur Bloomfield of The San Francisco Examiner wrote that her work in a seemingly straightforward passage of “Norma,” at the San Francisco Opera, was “so rounded and suave I just about fell out of my seat.”Once described in a headline as “the groovy tympanist,” Ms. Jones had seen the San Francisco auditions as a last chance to win a permanent post, a success that had been denied her during the two decades she spent toiling to challenge the color line as a freelancer in New York City.“I had to prove that music could be played by anyone who loves it,” she said in 1973. “It’s been a terrible burden because I always felt I had to do better, that I wouldn’t be allowed the lapses other musicians have. It’s true even now.”Orchestral musicians typically serve probationary periods before being granted tenure. Approval seemed a formality in Ms. Jones’s case, but a seven-man committee of the San Francisco players voted against her — and a bassoonist, Ryohei Nakagawa — in May 1974, despite Mr. Ozawa’s advice to the contrary; two rated her competence at 1 out of 100.As audience members launched pickets and petitions, many white critics portrayed the incident primarily as a challenge to Mr. Ozawa’s authority; though the conductor denied any link, he soon quit. Ms. Jones saw things differently.“I’ve had good vibes everywhere. Now I wonder what the hell is wrong and what do I do that’s so wrong?” she said that June, announcing her intention to sue the orchestra and the musicians’ union. “Was it because I was a woman or a Black? Or both?”Ms. Jones played on for a season while her lawsuit made its way through the courts. But when a judge ordered a second, supervised vote in August 1975, a new committee of players turned her down again, citing concerns about her intonation. Although she performed, tenured, in the pit of the San Francisco Opera until 1998, her effective firing at the symphony stayed with her.“It has been quite difficult,” she said in a television interview in 1977, “not only playing but trying to live through all this, and living with myself too, which is kind of hard because you begin to question, well, am I really a good performer, am I worthy person?”But, she went on, “I listen to other people, and I have more confidence in myself.”Ms. Jones looked on as the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and the conductor Seiji Ozawa acknowledged the audience’s applause after a performance by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory in 1973.Bruce Beron, courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony ArchivesElayne Viola Jones was born on Jan. 30, 1928, in Harlem, the only child of immigrants from Barbados. Her father, Cecil, was a porter and then a subway conductor; her mother, Ometa, dreamed of becoming a professional pianist, but had to enter domestic service. They had a piano in their apartment, and Elayne used it to play along with the big-band jazz she heard on the radio. She was 6 when her mother introduced her to classical music.“At first, I thought it was strange to have music that people didn’t dance to, because we all loved dancing to swing music,” Ms. Jones wrote in her autobiography, “Little Lady With a Big Drum” (2019). “However, I didn’t reject this different kind of music and practiced it every day, growing to enjoy its irregularities.”She qualified for the High School of Music & Arts (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and the Performing Arts), and she hoped to add the violin to her studies on the piano; she was given drumsticks instead. “We all know that Negroes have rhythm,” she recalled a teacher saying.Ms. Jones was sufficiently talented to win a scholarship to the Juilliard School in 1945, under the sponsorship of Duke Ellington. Her tutor was Saul Goodman, the storied timpanist of the New York Philharmonic, and after she graduated, in 1949, he persuaded New York City Opera to hire her as its timpanist.But the City Opera season was limited, and she had to scrounge for jobs for much of the year; on tour with the company, she was forced to sleep in separate hotels from the other musicians, stopped at stage doors as white colleagues walked through, and told to perform hidden from view.Politically a leftist, Ms. Jones became an insistent activist. When the critic Howard Taubman wrote in The New York Times in 1956 that “if there are capable Negro musicians” they would deserve major-ensemble jobs, she visited him to demonstrate that such musicians did, in fact, exist. She worked on an Urban League report about racism in the music world; within weeks of its publication in 1958, she found herself filling in at the New York Philharmonic. Although the Philharmonic’s records of substitute players are sparse, archival documents name her as the first Black musician to perform as part of the orchestra.Ms. Jones left City Opera in 1960 at the request of her husband, the doctor and civil rights activist George Kaufman, who asked that she spend more evenings with him and their three children. But Leopold Stokowski, long a fan, quickly tapped her for his American Symphony Orchestra, for which she performed until 1972. She was one of the driving forces behind the founding of the integrated Symphony of the New World in 1965, and she joined other Black musicians to urge that the initial rounds of auditions be held blind, with the musicians behind a screen, to reduce bias. The San Francisco Symphony was an early adopter of that approach.“I wouldn’t have gotten the job if the screen wasn’t in play,” she later told Dr. Wang. “I’m the recipient of a thing that I worked on.”Ms. Jones’s marriage to Dr. Kaufman ended in divorce in 1964. In addition to her daughter Ms. Stanley, she is survived by her son, Stephen Kaufman, a violinist and performance artist also known as Thoth; another daughter, Harriet Kaufman Douglas; and three grandchildren.As a single mother, Ms. Jones often had to take her children to rehearsals, she told The Times in 1965. She hoped, she said, that she offered them an example.“All youngsters need an image to project to, Negro youngsters even more than white,” she said. “When they can see Negroes playing in the orchestra, they may feel that they can get there someday, too.” More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      ‘Everyone Wants to Hear’ This One Chord in a Christmas Carol

      by

      A moment in “O Come, All Ye Faithful” is so popular, it’s printed on T-shirts. But it’s also symbolic, and important to music history.Of all the music heard around Christmas, few passages rival the awe and mystery of one chord, known as the “Word of the Father” chord.It’s a rare instance of powerful drama in holiday liturgical music, more akin to Edward Elgar’s depiction of God in “The Dream of Gerontius,” or the opening of the fifth door in the Bartok opera “Bluebeard’s Castle”: a moment of total release, embracing the unknown.In British choral circles, this moment is referred to simply as “The Chord.” It comes halfway through the final verse of the popular Christmas carol “O Come, All Ye Faithful” (or “Adeste Fideles”), in a mid-20th century arrangement by David Willcocks, an original editor of the widely used “Carols for Choirs” series and a former director of music at King’s College, Cambridge. Willcocks, following a rising figure full of anticipation, places an explosive, half-diminished seventh chord under the text “Word,” resolving it elaborately over the next few measures.“It’s a startling moment,” David Hill, the musical director of the Bach Choir, said in a telephone interview. “I remember being a boy of 10 playing it in my church in Carlisle, and loving every moment of it, thinking: ‘What is this? This is outrageous!’”There’s a youthful glee in the way the popularity of “The Chord” has grown; today, the discerning church musician can get it printed on pretty much anything, including T-shirts and tree ornaments. It’s a moment, Hill said, that “everyone wants to hear. It puts a great big smile on your face.”But “The Chord” is much more than just a crunchy harmonic moment: It carries a deep symbolic resonance for the Christian community, and represents a key moment in the creation of Britain’s carol industry.Willcocks’s arrangement of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” appeared in Carols for Choirs 1, published by Oxford University Press in 1961. The idea behind the anthology — conceived by the press’s head of music, Christopher Morris — was to create a practical, codified resource for choral societies at Christmas.But what followed was far from a utilitarian compilation, with a series of florid descants, and elaborate arrangements of traditional carols like “God Rest You, Merry Gentlemen,” and “The First Nowell.” “What were ordinary carols for people to sing up to this point were, by and large, very ordinary,” Hill said. With the new Carols for Choirs hymn arrangements, he added, “you had a whole new approach to carols, which was post-Holst and Vaughan Williams.”Estimates of how many copies were sold differ, but they are measured in the millions. A sixth volume, with a more international outlook, is due for publication in 2023, edited by Hill and a fellow choral director, Bob Chilcott. Of particular acclaim in the first volume was the arrangement of “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” but not necessarily because of “The Chord.” Instead, it was the descant of the sixth verse, with its swirling setting of “Glory to God” (borrowing from “Ding Dong Merrily on High”), that drew more attention.Other musicians have their own favorite corners: a juicy chord here, an archaic lyric there, or a moment in which standard congregational hymns can be spiced up with a touch of chromatic alteration. Dr. Martin Clarke, the head of music and a senior lecturer at the Open University, said, “There are interesting moments in Willcocks’s other arrangements too; towards the end of ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’ is pretty satisfying to sing and play.” But that moment in “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” he said, “goes just a bit further.”The words set in the final verse refer to the prologue from the Gospel of John, a reading usually reserved for Christmas morning. The opening lines, “Yea, Lord we greet thee, born this happy morning,” confirm that; with some helpful amendments of tense, though, the verse has become more of a fixture at Advent services. Within its fleeting presence, “The Chord” nods to centuries of tradition: moments from Bach’s “St. John Passion,” the personal predilections of previous King’s College organists and the wider history of final-verse reharmonizations within the Anglican worship tradition.In addition, the progression that follows bears a striking resemblance to music by the English composer John Stainer, who used the same dramatic chord and elegant escape in his setting of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” — which concluded his Epiphany anthem “I Desired Wisdom,” published in 1876. But the crucial difference in Willcocks’s more famous setting is the matching of harmony with subject. Where Stainer opts to add a diminished chord to “Glory,” Willcocks instead chooses the more symbolically rich “Word.”The passage from John referenced in the final verse — “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God” — departs from the poetic images of angels, shepherds and Magi usually referenced at Christmastime. “John gets the greater sense of divine mystery and the complex significance of what he’s trying to communicate here,” Clarke said. “To line it up with that chord not just reinforces the mystery of the text; it grabs you, makes you concentrate, and makes you confront it.”“I don’t think the resonance of those words and what they refer to in the Christian tradition would really come across as strongly without that harmonization, without that chord,” he added. “It exemplifies confronting that mystery.”That power is compounded by Willcocks’s arrangement. Following the pageantry and grandeur of the sixth verse, the seventh follows in meaty unison. “It feels completely different,” Clarke said. “The great power comes from the feeling of difference that comes to everybody — not just the choristers, soloists, choir. Absolutely everybody in the congregation can get that feeling of being part of that sound. You’re right in the middle of that chord, whoever you are.” More

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Stanley Drucker, Ageless Clarinetist of the N.Y. Philharmonic, Dies at 93

      by

      He played in the orchestra for 60 years, performing under the baton of five music directors. He personified the orchestra’s brilliant, even brash, character.Stanley Drucker, who was known as the dean of American orchestral clarinets during a 60-year career with the New York Philharmonic, putting his mark on countless performances and recordings under a legion of celebrated conductors, died on Monday in Vista, Calif., outside San Diego. He was 93.His death, at the home of his daughter, Rosanne Drucker, was confirmed by his son, Lee.Mr. Drucker, who retired in 2009, was only the fourth principal clarinetist of the Philharmonic since 1920 when he took up the post. Few wind players at any of the great American orchestras served as long.He played for the Philharmonic music directors Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, Zubin Mehta, Kurt Masur and Lorin Maazel, presenting a style and sound that typified the Philharmonic’s character — soloistic, technically and sonically brilliant, flamboyant and on the verge of brash.Mr. Drucker combined shapely phrasing with impeccable fingerwork. With his iron-gray hair and a slightly crooked front tooth, he was known for his youthful look and energy well into his 70s. His nickname in the orchestra was “Stanley Steamer,” a reflection of his swift marches offstage to make the commute to his home on Long Island, in Massapequa. “That’s my exercise,” he often said, “running for the train.”Such a long tenure naturally meant that he encountered the same pieces over and over again, and he greeted them like “old friends,” he said. The different perspectives that various conductors would bring to the music, he added, kept things fresh.“You absorb the personality and talent of whoever’s up on the podium,” he said.Just as much, those maestri would defer to Mr. Drucker’s interpretations of clarinet solos. Such was his influence that when a clarinet-playing New York Times reporter put in a request to perform with the orchestra for an article in 2004, the final say rested not with the music director, Mr. Maazel, not the orchestra president, Zarin Mehta, not even the powerful personnel manager, Carl Schiebler, but with Mr. Drucker.Mr. Drucker’s longevity with the Philharmonic gave rise to impressive statistics: 10,200 concerts with the orchestra, including 191 solo appearances, and performances of nearly every major clarinet concerto and soloist on more than a dozen recordings. He also recorded most of the standard clarinet chamber music works.Mr. Drucker with Leonard Bernstein in Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in about 1967. Mr. Bernstein was just one of the Philharmonic’s renowned music directors for whom Mr. Drucker played.Bert Bial/New York Philharmonic ArchivesHe was nominated twice for a Grammy — for recordings of the Aaron Copland Concerto for Clarinet, Strings, Harp and Piano, with Leonard Bernstein conducting, and of John Corigliano’s Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra, with Zubin Mehta conducting. The Philharmonic commissioned the Corigliano for Mr. Drucker.The publication Musical America named him instrumentalist of the year in 1998, and he was one of the few living orchestral musicians with an entry in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.A measure for any clarinetist is the great Mozart concerto, one of the composer’s last works. Of a 2001 performance, Allan Kozinn wrote in The Times that Mr. Drucker gave a “lively, thoughtfully shaped reading” of the opening movement and “tapped all the aching beauty in the Andante.”“But it was in the finale that he really let loose,” Mr. Kozinn added, “both with phrasing turns that pushed against the constraints of the line and by conveying a sense of heightened dialogue between his instrument and the rest of the orchestra.”Mr. Drucker’s conceived of an orchestral wind section as one organism.“You give and take; you don’t only take,” he said in a 2004 interview with The Times. “It’s a chamber music situation. You play to enhance.” He urged orchestral players to become deeply familiar with an entire work and express “what you have inside, what your sensitivity is.”Stanley Drucker was born on Feb. 4, 1929, in Brooklyn to immigrants from Galicia, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when they had left it 20 years earlier. He grew up in the Brownsville and Park Slope neighborhoods. His father, Joseph, had a custom tailor shop. His mother, Rose (Oberlander) Drucker, was a homemaker.Like so many clarinetists of the era, Mr. Drucker was inspired by Benny Goodman. His parents, seized by the Goodman craze of the time, bought him a clarinet for his 10th birthday. “They figured it was better than being a tailor,” Mr. Drucker said.His main teacher was Leon Russianoff, a leading clarinet pedagogue of the latter half of the 20th century, after whom Mr. Drucker would name his son. Mr. Drucker attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.Astonishingly, he entered the Indianapolis Symphony at age 16. “The object was to play, and get out into the real world,” he said. “I thought I knew everything, but found out quickly I didn’t.” During the summers he would return to New York for lessons with Russianoff.Mr. Drucker’s first formal photo with the New York Philharmonic, in about 1948. New York Philharmonic ArchivesMr. Drucker spent a year touring with the Adolf Busch Chamber Players, a conductor-less ensemble led by Mr. Busch, a violinist, and then joined the Buffalo Philharmonic. By 19 he had joined the New York Philharmonic as assistant principal, after Mr. Busch suggested that the Philharmonic invite him to audition. His getting the post, in 1948, was front page news in The Brooklyn Eagle. “My parents thought I was Joe Louis,” he said.Despite his youth, Mr. Drucker caught up quickly, learning on the job. “It was a master class every day,” he said.Bernstein, the Philharmonic’s music director, appointed him to the principal clarinet position in 1960.In 1998, the Philharmonic commemorated Mr. Drucker’s 50th anniversary during the final subscription program of the season by featuring him playing the Copland concerto. At the time, he pointed out that he was not the oldest player there.“I’ve been there the longest, because I started so young,” he told The Times. “But time compresses, you know? Fifty years doesn’t really seem so long.”Mr. Drucker married Naomi Lewis, a clarinetist who has had a fruitful career in her own right, in 1956. Their son, Leon, who goes by Lee, is a bassist with the rockabilly band Stray Cats, performing under the name Lee Rocker. Their daughter, Rosanne, is an alt-country singer-songwriter.In addition to his wife and children, Ms. Drucker is survived by two grandchildren. He lived for most of his adult life in Massapequa.Mr. Drucker, right, with his son, Lee, a bassist with the rockabilly band Stray Cats, and Mr. Drucker’s wife, the clarinetist Naomi Lewis, in 2006.Richard Perry/The New York TimesAlong with the clarinet, Mr. Drucker and his wife had a passion for their 30-foot-long fly bridge cabin cruiser, which they christened the Noni, for Ms. Drucker’s childhood nickname. They would take it for a monthlong cruise every summer.Mr. Drucker edited numerous volumes of studies, solo works and orchestral excerpts for clarinet for the International Music Co. He taught at the Juilliard School from 1968-98.But he was not given to high-flown pronouncements about artistry or musicianship.“You learn all of this stuff,” he once said. “And after a point, somebody has to tell you, ‘Forget it all, just go out and play.’”Alex Traub More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Quinta Brunson, Jack Harlow and More Breakout Stars of 2022

      by

      Here are the actors, pop stars, dancers and artists who broke away from the pack this year, delighting us and making us think.For many of us, 2022 was the year we emerged more fully from our pandemic cocoons, venturing out to movie theaters, museums, concerts — exploring our entertainment with eager, if weary, hearts and eyes before returning home to our TVs. Along the way, artists and performers across the world of the arts had, for the first time in years, the chance to connect more closely and fully with audiences, and deliver big. Here are seven stars who captured our attention in this moment and gave us a fresh perspective.TelevisionQuinta BrunsonIn 2014, Quinta Brunson had a viral Instagram hit on her hands: a series of videos called “The Girl Who’s Never Been on a Nice Date.” At BuzzFeed, where she was first paid for taste-testing Doritos, she made popular comedic videos for the site and then sold the streaming series “Broke” to YouTube Red. In 2019, she starred in and wrote for the debut season of HBO’s “A Black Lady Sketch Show.”That trajectory set her up to deliver a rare feat: a warmhearted but not saccharine network sitcom with a pitch-perfect ensemble cast that has managed to delight critics and audiences — all while illuminating the problems of underfunded public schools. The mockumentary-style comedy, “Abbott Elementary,” which she created and stars in, debuted on ABC in December 2021 and was nominated for seven Emmy Awards this year, of which it won three.“I think a lot of people are enjoying having something that is light and nuanced,” Brunson, 32, told The New York Times Magazine earlier this year. “‘Abbott’ came at the right time.”MoviesStephanie HsuIn “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” Stephanie Hsu plays a despairing daughter named Joy and the chaos-inducing villain Jobu Tupaki.A24When Stephanie Hsu was a child, she told her mother that she wanted to be an actor. Her mother “pointed at a TV screen and said, ‘There’s nobody that looks like you — that seems impossible,’” Hsu, 32, told Variety this year. Turns out, her presence onscreen was both possible and unforgettable, particularly her jaw-dropping performance in this year’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a mind-twisting acid trip through the multiverse (and the human condition) that was a box-office hit and had critics raving.In “Everything,” her first feature film, Hsu nailed the complex role of both a depressed, despairing daughter (opposite Michelle Yeoh as her mother) and the maniacally evil, chaos-inducing villain Jobu Tupaki.“I think it’s so rare that you get to experience the scope of range within one character in one movie,” Hsu told The Times.Next up for the actress is a role in the Disney+ action-comedy series “American Born Chinese”; in Rian Johnson’s Peacock series, “Poker Face,” alongside Natasha Lyonne; and in “The Fall Guy,” an action movie starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt.Pop MusicJack HarlowThe rapper Jack Harlow, who released the album “Come Home the Kids Miss You” in May, earned three Grammy nominations in November.Eduardo Munoz/ReutersThose on TikTok probably first caught wind of the rapper Jack Harlow in 2020 with his viral track “Whats Poppin.” But it wasn’t until his verse on Lil Nas X’s “Industry Baby” last year — the song topped the Billboard Hot 100 — that his star really began its ascent.The Highlights of 2022, According to Our CriticsCard 1 of 3Salamishah Tillet. More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Gail Samuel Leaves Boston Symphony Less Than 2 Years Into Tenure

      by

      Gail Samuel took the helm of one of America’s most storied orchestras in 2021, and was the first woman to lead the institution.Gail Samuel, who took the helm of the storied Boston Symphony Orchestra last year as its first female president and chief executive, has resigned from her post just 18 months into her tenure, the orchestra said on Friday.The orchestra announced that its board of trustees had accepted Samuel’s resignation, effective Jan. 3, and that Jeffrey D. Dunn — a member of its advisory board — would step in as the interim leader once she departs. Neither the institution nor Samuel immediately offered a reason.Samuel took over in June 2021, following the 23-year tenure of Mark Volpe — a leader in the classical music field who maintained a robust endowment and preserved the orchestra’s reputation as one of the most important in the United States. She came from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where she worked for nearly three decades, most recently as its chief operating officer.She joined the Boston Symphony at a time when its health was battered by the pandemic — its wealth wounded by lost revenues and its recovery uncertain as audiences timidly and slowly return to live performances.“This is a difficult time for everyone, and I think every organization is going to be thinking about how to come out of this,” Samuel told The New York Times last year. “It’s a long path, but there’s also an opportunity to think about things differently.”In a statement, Barbara Hostetter, the chair of the Boston Symphony’s board of trustees, said: “At a time when stabilizing the institution was of paramount priority, Gail was a steadying force. She also led the B.S.O. through a vital turning point of generational change, setting in motion a creative vision that reflects the B.S.O.’s commitment to diversity.”The Boston Symphony declined to comment further on Samuel’s departure. In a statement, Samuel said: “It was an honor to lead the Boston Symphony Orchestra, one of the world’s most celebrated orchestras, particularly during such a significant time in history.“When I arrived at the B.S.O., I was dedicated to reopening Tanglewood and Symphony Hall, and to increasing creativity at the B.S.O. by welcoming artists to our stages more broadly representing the rich diversity that exists in our city,” she continued. “After navigating the profoundly complicated reopening matters and having successfully laid the groundwork for continued evolution at the B.S.O., I have decided to step down. The end of the season and Holiday Pops performances offer a natural time with limited disruption.”Dunn was, until his retirement in 2021, the executive chairman, president and chief executive of Sesame Workshop, which produces “Sesame Street.” He said in a statement, “I am honored to lend my executive experience to this incredible organization and look forward to collaborating with music director Andris Nelsons as the organization continues on its important path of cultural progress and financial stability.” More

    • 63 Shares129 Views

      in Theater

      The Breakout Stars of 2022

      by

      Here are the actors, pop stars, dancers and artists who broke away from the pack this year, delighting us and making us think.For many of us, 2022 was the year we emerged more fully from our pandemic cocoons, venturing out to movie theaters, museums, concerts — exploring our entertainment with eager, if weary, hearts and eyes before returning home to our TVs. Along the way, artists and performers across the world of the arts had, for the first time in years, the chance to connect more closely and fully with audiences, and deliver big. Here are seven stars who captured our attention in this moment and gave us a fresh perspective.TelevisionQuinta BrunsonIn 2014, Quinta Brunson had a viral Instagram hit on her hands: a series of videos called “The Girl Who’s Never Been on a Nice Date.” At Buzzfeed, where she was first paid for taste-testing Doritos, she made popular comedic videos for the site and then sold the streaming series “Broke” to YouTube Red. In 2019, she starred in and wrote for the debut season of HBO’s “A Black Lady Sketch Show.”That trajectory set her up to deliver a rare feat: a warmhearted but not saccharine network sitcom with a pitch-perfect ensemble cast that has managed to delight critics and audiences — all while illuminating the problems of underfunded public schools. The mockumentary-style comedy, “Abbott Elementary,” which she created and stars in, debuted on ABC in December 2021 and was nominated for seven Emmy Awards this year, of which it won three.“I think a lot of people are enjoying having something that is light and nuanced,” Brunson, 32, told The New York Times Magazine earlier this year. “‘Abbott’ came at the right time.”MoviesStephanie HsuIn “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” Stephanie Hsu plays a despairing daughter named Joy and the chaos-inducing villain Jobu Tupaki.A24When Stephanie Hsu was a child, she told her mother that she wanted to be an actor. Her mother “pointed at a TV screen and said, ‘There’s nobody that looks like you — that seems impossible,’” Hsu, 32, told Variety this year. Turns out, her presence onscreen was both possible and unforgettable, particularly her jaw-dropping performance in this year’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a mind-twisting acid trip through the multiverse (and the human condition) that was a box-office hit and had critics raving.In “Everything,” her first feature film, Hsu nailed the complex role of both a depressed, despairing daughter (opposite Michelle Yeoh as her mother) and the maniacally evil, chaos-inducing villain Jobu Tupaki.“I think it’s so rare that you get to experience the scope of range within one character in one movie,” Hsu told The Times.Next up for the actress is a role in the Disney+ action-comedy series “American Born Chinese”; in Rian Johnson’s Peacock series, “Poker Face,” alongside Natasha Lyonne; and in “The Fall Guy,” an action movie starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt.Pop MusicJack HarlowThe rapper Jack Harlow, who released the album “Come Home the Kids Miss You” in May, earned three Grammy nominations in November.Eduardo Munoz/ReutersThose on TikTok probably first caught wind of the rapper Jack Harlow in 2020 with his viral track “Whats Poppin.” But it wasn’t until his verse on Lil Nas X’s “Industry Baby” last year — the song topped the Billboard Hot 100 — that his star really began its ascent.Now, the laid-back Harlow, 24 and a Kentucky native, had his first solo No. 1 hit, the Fergie-sampling “First Class,” from his second major-label album, “Come Home the Kids Miss You,” which dropped in May. In November, he earned three Grammy nominations, including for best rap album. And in October, he served as both host and musical guest on “Saturday Night Live.”“I’m looking to get away from rapping in a way where people can marvel at it and more something we can all enjoy together,” he told The Times this year.Soon, Harlow will star in a remake of the 1992 film “White Men Can’t Jump.”ArtTiona Nekkia McCloddenThe artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden in her studio; she had three major presentations of her work in New York this year.Hannah Price for The New York TimesOver the last few years, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, 41, “has emerged as one of the most singular artists of our aesthetically rich, free-range time,” Roberta Smith, co-chief art critic of The Times, wrote in her review of McClodden’s exhibition “Mask/Conceal/Carry,” a meditation on guns shown at 52 Walker in TriBeCa this year. Smith called it a “brooding beast of an exhibition, bathed in blue light.”And that was only one of three major presentations of McClodden’s work in New York in 2022. At the Museum of Modern Art, she presented a room-size fetish-themed tribute to Brad Johnson, a Black gay poet who died in 2011. At the Shed, she celebrated the groundbreaking 1983 festival Dance Black America with a program that included custom dance floors and video portraits of dancers.McClodden, who was a star of the 2019 Whitney Biennial (she won the Bucksbaum Award), emerged as a filmmaker before expanding to boundary-pushing art installations.Amid the pandemic and the George Floyd protests and counter protests, she decided to learn how to shoot guns, an activity that bore “Mask/Conceal/Carry.” “The statement is that I’m in the world, I didn’t try to run away from my position in this world, and I wanted to be able to defend myself,” she told The Times this summer.TheaterJulie BenkoA scene from the Broadway musical “Funny Girl” with Jared Grimes, left, as Eddie Ryan and Julie Benko as Fanny Brice.Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade, 2022Few can say they’ve seized an opportunity like Julie Benko, whose monthlong summer run as Fanny Brice in the Broadway revival of “Funny Girl” changed a lot for the actress-soprano who stepped into the role full-time between Beanie Feldstein and Lea Michele in the highly talked-about production. But even that degree of pressure didn’t weigh her down.“When you get the chance to play such an amazing role, there’s no need to take it too seriously,” Benko told the Times. “You just have to enjoy it.” Now, Benko has the title of “alternate” in “Funny Girl,” not “understudy,” performing the lead in most Thursday night shows (with an extra performance on Monday, Dec. 26, and for a full week in late February).Benko, 33, had understudied several roles before “Funny Girl,” including in the national “Spring Awakening” tour in 2008, and later in the “Les Misérables” tour, where she worked her way up to Cosette, the protagonist, from roles like “innkeeper’s wife.”In December, she will be performing at 54 Below in New York alongside her husband, the pianist Jason Yeager.Classical MusicDavóne TinesThe bass-baritone Davóne Tines performs a scene in “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)” by Tyshawn Sorey at the Park Avenue Armory.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“No one could accuse Davóne Tines of lacking ambition,” Oussama Zahr, a classical music critic, wrote recently in The Times when reviewing “Recital No. 1: MASS,” the bass-baritone’s personal and thoughtfully arranged Carnegie Hall debut“I really like structures,” Tines, who is in his mid-30s, told The New Yorker of “MASS” last year. “The ritualistic template of the Mass is a proven structure — centuries of culture have upheld it. Anything that I put into it will assume a certain shape. And what I put into it is my own lived experience.”Accolades for Tines have been mounting, including for, this fall, his performance in a staged version of Tyshawn Sorey’s “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife),” at the Park Avenue Armory; and for “Everything Rises,” his collaboration with the violinist Jennifer Koh, which opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.In the work, Tines and Koh recount their complicated relationships with classical music as people of color. “I was the moth, lured by your flame,” Tines sings. “I hated myself for needing you, dear white people: money, access and fame.”DanceCatherine HurlinThe ballerina Catherine Hurlin, who was recently promoted to principal dancer at American Ballet Theater, in “Of Love and Rage,” by Alexei Ratmansky at the Metropolitan Opera House.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesShe may only be 26, but the ballerina Catherine Hurlin has been ascending for more than half of her life. As a girl, she secured a full scholarship to the American Ballet Theater’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School. Not long after, she became an apprentice with the A.B.T., then a member of the corps de ballet and eventually a soloist in 2018.Then this summer, she was one of three dancers promoted to the role of principal.“The simple serenity of Hurlin’s face, framed by cascading curls, is riveting, as is the daring amplitude of her expressive, singular dancing,” Gia Kourlas, the dance critic of The Times, wrote in June of Hurlin’s performance in Alexei Ratmansky’s “Of Love and Rage.”And in July, when Hurlin made her debut in the double role of Odette-Odile in “Swan Lake,” Kourlas called her “the future of Ballet Theater, the kind of dancer who has a fresh take on story ballets.”Her nickname? Hurricane. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Notable Boxed Sets of 2022: Pop, Rap, Soul, Jazz and More

      by

      Anniversary editions (from Norah Jones and Neil Young), a dive into the hip-hop underground (via C.V.E.) and rediscovered live jazz (from Elvin Jones and Charles Mingus) arrived in 2022.In the archives of recorded music — and now video — there’s always more to discover (or exploit). This year’s boxed sets revisit blockbuster albums and go nationwide with local scene stars. The New York Times has already featured some major archival collections from bands like the Beatles, Blondie and Wilco. Here are more deep dives.Albert Ayler, ‘Revelations’(Elemental Music; four CDs or download, $58)Albert Ayler’s mid-60s work, once controversial, is now jazz canon. But the later phase of the saxophone radical’s brief career, when he experimented with funk and blues, and incorporated vocals from his partner Mary Maria Parks, is still overlooked. This set, the first complete issue of two July 1970 concerts at the French modern-art center the Fondation Maeght, expands prior versions by more than two hours — and makes a strong case that Ayler was in peak form here, just months before his death at age 34. On the ballad-like “Spiritual Reunion,” he caresses and adorns a prayerful melody atop gorgeous accompaniment from the pianist Call Cobbs, making even his quavering shrieks on the horn sound loving, while on “Desert Blood,” Ayler, the bassist Steve Tintweiss and the drummer Allen Blairman artfully frame a Parks song before embarking on an improvisation that suggests a softer yet still-incandescent version of the flame the saxophonist lit on his early classics. HANK SHTEAMERThe Beach Boys, ‘Sail On Sailor — 1972’(Capitol; six CDs, $150; five LPs and 7-inch EP, $179.98)1972 was a year of upheaval for the Beach Boys. Brian Wilson, the group’s mastermind, had grown withdrawn, leaving most of the songwriting to the other band members while Carl Wilson largely took over production. Two South African musicians, Blondie Chaplin and Ricky Fataar, officially joined the band. The two Beach Boys albums that were completed in 1972, “Carl and the Passions — ‘So Tough’” and “Holland” — still got their singles (“Marcella” and “Sail On, Sailor”) from Brian Wilson. But the other members’ broad and sometimes confused ambitions were clear in songs with elaborate structures and lyrics about topics like spirituality and colonial genocide — determinedly grown-up songs, not would-be hits. The much expanded boxed set includes an exhilarating full-length 1972 Carnegie Hall concert, songs in progress, a cappella mixdowns and a worthy, much-bootlegged “Holland” outtake, “Carry Me Home,” that laments mortality with lush harmonies. JON PARELESC.V.E., ‘Chillin Villains: We Represent Billions’(Nyege Nyege Tapes; LP, $20)The unrelenting weirdness of the Los Angeles hip-hop underground in the mid-1990s gave birth to an almost unending variety of techniques and characters. Among the most signature was C.V.E. — Chillin Villains Empire — a relatively unheralded crew affiliated with the fertile scene at the Good Life Café. This anthology collects songs from 1993 to 2003, some released and some not, that show off just how experimental C.V.E.’s primary members Riddlore?, NgaFsh and Tray-Loc were. With their bizarre cadences, unusual word pairings and unexpectedly punchy storytelling, they sound like close cousins to the freaky styles of Freestyle Fellowship, the scene’s pre-eminent eccentrics. JON CARAMANICAGuns N’ Roses, ‘Guns N’ Roses — Use Your Illusion I & II Super Deluxe’(UME/Geffen; 12 LPs, one Blu-ray and a book $499.98; seven CDs, one Blu-ray and a book $259.98)In 1991, no band was bigger than Guns N’ Roses, and on the two albums it released that year, “Use Your Illusion I” and “II,” it showed. Here was a group grappling with ambition using several different, sometimes competing tactics — songs that had the feverish intensity of metal, songs that touched on politics, songs that ran nine minutes long. These multiplatinum albums are epically unkempt, for better and worse — it doesn’t get much blowzier, and it doesn’t get much more rollicking, or arrestingly melodramatic. This doorstopper release is a sprawling boxed set for a sprawling pair of albums (remastered for the first time from the original stereo masters). There’s a book rich with ephemera, oodles of trinkets, recordings of two live shows, and a Blu-ray of one of those: from a bruising, chaotic jam at the Ritz in New York in 1991, a warm-up show for the Use Your Illusion Tour (even though the group hadn’t yet finished recording the albums). For capturing this era of this band, this excess is appropriate, but also telling. Implosion was around the corner — these albums would be the last full-length releases of original music it would put out for 17 years. CARAMANICAElvin Jones, ‘Revival: Live at Pookie’s Pub’(Blue Note; digital album, $12.99 to $17.98; two CDs, $29.98; three LPs, $54,98; three LPs and test pressing, $224.98)Elvin Jones’s elemental brand of swing, bashing yet balletic, propelled John Coltrane’s band for five magical years in the early to mid-60s. As Coltrane’s music grew more abstract, and, according to Jones, “hectic,” the drummer took his leave in 1966. The New York club gigs documented on “Revival” — recorded the following year, less than two weeks after Coltrane’s death — play like a manifesto of the bandleading philosophy that would define the rest of Jones’s lengthy career: Assemble a sturdy group — here featuring the saxophonist and flutist Joe Farrell; the obscure pianist Billy Greene, with Larry Young subbing on one tune; and the bassist Wilbur Little — put together a well-balanced set list of standards and originals and get down to business. Jones’s turbulent drive on Farrell’s “13 Avenue B” and way-behind-the-beat lope during “On the Trail” demonstrate why many consider him jazz percussion’s all-time heavyweight champ. SHTEAMERNorah Jones, ‘Come Away With Me (20th Anniversary)’(Blue Note; three CDs, $39.98; four LPs, $179.98)The hushed jazz-country-folk-pop amalgam of “Come Away With Me,” the debut album that became a blockbuster for Norah Jones, didn’t come out of nowhere. She had to home in on it along a winding path that led through music school, New York City jazz-brunch gigs that people talked through, homesickness for country music from her childhood in Texas, demos she made with songwriter friends in New York City and all-star recording sessions in a mountainside mansion near Woodstock, N.Y. Those sessions, rejected by Blue Note Records before Jones tried again with her friends and made her hit album, are unveiled on the expanded reissue of “Come Away,” and they reveal an artist quietly finding her own voice: one of elegant modesty. The rejected sessions, newly released, offer a lesson in musical chemistry. With musicians who were skillful but not her regular collaborators, Jones both deferred too much to her better-known accompanists and pushed her voice a little too hard. Although there are luminous moments, like her versions of Horace Silver’s “Peace” and Tom Waits’s “Picture in a Frame,” the results were capable but not quite right. PARELESPeggy Lee, ‘Norma Deloris Egstrom From Jamestown, North Dakota (Expanded Edition)’(Capitol; CD, $13.98)Peggy Lee aficionados know that one of the hidden gems in her vast discography is her 40th record, and her last for her longtime label Capitol, “Norma Deloris Egstrom From Jamestown, North Dakota.” (Yes, that’s Lee’s civilian name and her place of birth.) “Norma” is a mature work, born of the same lived-in ennui that had made “Is That All There Is?” an unexpected hit in 1969, when Lee was almost 50. “Norma” flew under the radar and remained out of print for decades, but half a century after its initial release, it can at last be properly appreciated. It is a stirring and remarkably melancholic album that gives voice to grief and isolation through Lee’s wrenching performances of “It Takes Too Long to Learn to Live Alone” and “Superstar,” at the time a recent hit for the Carpenters. Artie Butler’s arrangements are sublime, giving Lee’s anguish plenty of dramatic flourish. The seven bonus tracks are illuminating if not revelatory, largely alternate vocal takes, though Lee’s poignant song from the 1972 movie “Snoopy Come Home” is included. The rerelease’s main aim, though, is not to excavate old material but to introduce new listeners to “Norma Deloris Egstrom,” and one of her great works. LINDSAY ZOLADZGalcher Lustwerk, ‘100% Galcher’(Ghostly International; CD, $14; two LPs, $27)The most rewarding aspect of “100% Galcher,” the breakout mix by the house music producer Galcher Lustwerk, is its utter patience. On tracks like “I Neva Seen” and “Enterprise,” it’s clear the body is in motion, but there’s an overlay of deep soothing and pensiveness, an almost new age energy. This decade-old mix, which had its premiere in the Blowing Up the Workshop series in 2013 and is completely made up of his original productions, is being properly reissued as individual tracks for the first time now. It’s womb-like and astral, and Lustwerk’s talk-raps, which he casually ladles throughout, are like reassuring commands. CARAMANICACharles Mingus, ‘The Lost Album From Ronnie Scott’s’(Resonance Records; three CDs, $29.99; three LPs, $74.99)The Charles Mingus sextet featured on these two beautifully captured 1972 live sets from the venerable London club Ronnie Scott’s, intended for official release but shelved because of label limbo, was only intact for a brief stretch. But its chemistry rivals that of the bassist’s greatest groups. On a stunning 35-minute version of the “Mingus Ah Um” classic “Fables of Faubus,” the drummer Roy Brooks and the under-documented pianist John Foster skillfully steer the band between playful abstraction and crackling swing, while on the then-new “Mind-Readers’ Convention in Milano (AKA Number 29),” the saxophonists Charles McPherson and Bobby Jones and the trumpeter Jon Faddis show how fully they’d internalized Mingus’s signature blend of ornate writing and joyous collective improv. SHTEAMERNeu!, ‘50!’(Groenland; four CDs, $54.99; five LPs, $129.99)Among the creators of kosmiche, a.k.a. krautrock, Neu! was probably the most anti-pop of all. Alongside Can, Faust and Kraftwerk — which included the founders of Neu!, Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger, in an early lineup — Neu! embraced repetition, drones, found-sound noise and studio collaging, creating music in the early 1970s that would influence punk and industrial rock very soon afterward: sometimes raucous, sometimes meditative. The vinyl box collects the three Neu! studio albums from the 1970s; the CD collection also includes “Neu! 86,” which sounded less radical and more jovial, but still contentious. Both sets add a group of newly recorded tributes and remixes from fans including the National and Mogwai — who, try as they might, can’t quite sound as austere or cantankerous as Neu! in its prime, though Idles and Man Man come close. PARELESNancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood, ‘Nancy & Lee’(Light in the Attic; CD, $14; LP, $27; cassette, $12; 8-track, $35)After last year’s excellent Nancy Sinatra compilation “Start Walkin’ 1965-1976” comes the first official reissue of what is perhaps the highlight of her discography: the beloved 1968 duet album she made with her frequent collaborator Lee Hazlewood. Lush, cinematic and alluringly strange, “Nancy & Lee” still possesses every bit of its oddball charm; more than 50 years on, it makes the argument not only for Hazlewood’s boundless imagination as a producer, but for Sinatra’s open-mindedness and risk-taking, as she followed Hazlewood down avenues — the trippy “Some Velvet Morning,” for one — less adventurous pop stars would have avoided. The bonus material is scant, but fun: a lounge-y, sultry take on the Kinks’ “Tired of Waiting for You” and a hammy rendition of the Mickey & Sylvia hit “Love Is Strange.” Of their enduring, opposites-attract sonic chemistry, Sinatra quips in a lively new interview included in the liner notes, “We used to call it beauty and the beast!” ZOLADZ‘John Sinclair Presents Detroit Artists Workshop’(Strut; download, $9.99; CD, $13.99; two LPs, $26)The MC5 manager and White Panther co-founder John Sinclair steps into the role of smooth-voiced jazz D.J. on the intro track to this compilation, the first sampling of live recordings from the archives of the Detroit Artists Workshop, a collective he helped start in 1964 to present local concerts and poetry events. The set, which encompasses 1965 through 1981, features nationally recognized names (including the trumpeter Donald Byrd and the saxophonist Bennie Maupin, both heard in righteously funky settings), but it’s the local luminaries who make this an essential document of a regional scene. The pianist and longtime Supremes musical director Teddy Harris combines big-band-style horns and a hard-grooving R&B rhythm section on “Passion Dance”; the Detroit Contemporary 4 serves up elegant, impassioned post-bop on “Three Flowers”; and the organist Lyman Woodard’s Organization digs into fierce jazz-funk in 5/4 time on “Help Me Get Away.” SHTEAMER‘The Skippy White Story: Boston Soul 1961-1967’(Yep Roc; CD, $15.99; LP, $24.99)Beginning in the early 1960s, Skippy White was — and still remains — an all-purpose cheerleader for Boston’s soul and gospel music scenes: record store proprietor, radio D.J., and when necessary, record label owner and producer. This anthology of long-lost sides captures just a little bit of the music he helped usher into the world, and is accompanied by an extensive historical essay on White’s life and career by Noah Schaffer and Eli (Paperboy) Reed. White’s sonic interests were wide-ranging — there’s dizzying doo-wop from Sammy and the Del-Lards, and also a stretch of intriguing gospel singles including Crayton Singers’s desperate, almost unsteady “Master on High.” That rawness is there, too, on “Do the Thing” by Earl Lett Quartet, an instruction song for the dance floor, or maybe somewhere else. CARAMANICAHorace Tapscott, ‘The Quintet’(Mr. Bongo; download, $5; CD, $10.99; LP, $25.99)Horace Tapscott was a movement unto himself, a pianist and composer who spent decades advocating for Black artists in Los Angeles and mentoring up-and-coming musicians through his Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. Documents of his early work are scarce, making this previously unreleased set — recorded at the same session as Tapscott’s thrilling 1969 debut, “The Giant Is Awakened” — especially noteworthy. The music sometimes recalls earlier work by East Coast piano progressives like Mal Waldron or Cecil Taylor (both heard on fine archival releases this year), but Tapscott presents his own unique agenda. On “Your Child,” one of three lengthy, equally excellent tracks here, he plays dramatic, knobby lines that sometimes spiral off into jagged shards, ‌while the alto saxophonist Arthur Blythe‌ shows off the swooping agility and strong emotional charge that would earn him wide acclaim upon his move to New York in the mid-1970s‌. SHTEAMERMarvin Tate’s D-Settlement, ‘Marvin Tate’s D-Settlement’(American Dreams; three CDs, $30; four LPs, $75; four clear vinyl LPs, $85)Marvin Tate, who got his start as a slam-poetry champion, channeled his storytelling skills and multifarious voice — singing, preaching, narrating, taunting, shouting — into D-Settlement, a far-reaching band whose reputation should have extended well beyond its Chicago hometown during the 1990s and early 2000s. This boxed set collects the three albums D-Settlement made before breaking up in 2003, revealing a musical collective that easily vamped its way toward funk, rock, jazz, blues, gospel, reggae, punk, cabaret and more. Tate’s lyrics and delivery could be ferociously direct or sardonically barbed, as D-Settlement’s songs confronted poverty, racism and violence even as they summoned the joys of family and community — echoed in the communal improvisations of an ever exploratory band. PARELESNeil Young, ‘Harvest (50th Anniversary Edition)’(Reprise; deluxe CD boxed set, $49.98; deluxe LP boxed set, $149.98)The mythos of Neil Young’s fourth solo album still looms large in the popular imagination. “Harvest” is the record he made in retreat from fame at his newly acquired rustic Northern California ranch; thanks to its blockbuster success and its No. 1 hit “Heart of Gold,” it subsequently made Young even more uncomfortable with fame than ever before. Fans looking for a trove of demos or unreleased recordings may be slightly disappointed with this 50th anniversary edition, as it contains only three studio outtakes (“Bad Fog of Loneliness,” “Journey Through the Past” and “Dance Dance Dance”) all of which have been floating around in some variation for years. What makes the set worth it, though, are the DVDs, especially “Harvest Time,” a two-hour documentary (directed by Young’s alter ego, Bernard Shakey) that serves as an indelible time capsule of the record’s creation. Also fantastic is the 1971 BBC television recording, included in audio and video versions, of a solo Young, in especially fine voice, debuting some of his works in progress — and a stunned studio audience hearing “Old Man” and “Heart of Gold” for the first time. ZOLADZ More