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      Bonnie Raitt Heads to the Grammys, Recognized as a Songwriter at Last

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      Bonnie Raitt is no stranger to the Grammys, which will be awarded Sunday in Los Angeles. She has won 10 of them since 1979, and she has also been a frequent presenter and performer on the show, befitting a musician who has long been the model of a sustainable, self-guided rock career.Raitt has never depended on hit singles or spectacle; instead, she relies on the quiet power of a voice that draws on blues, country, soul and rock to speak plainly about complicated emotions. Modestly but tenaciously, Raitt has cycled through decades of recording albums and touring, selling out 3,000-seat theaters and playing regularly at festivals. Musicians like Adele and Bon Iver have drawn on her repertoire, and younger musicians, particularly women, have cited her example as a bandleader and producer.Raitt, 73, has long been renowned as a finder and interpreter of songs, but most of her albums have also included a few of her own. Her four Grammy nominations this year include her first ones for her songwriting. The title track of her 2022 album, “Just Like That…,” has been nominated as song of the year and best American roots song. It’s a quiet, folky track about a heart transplant; a mother whose son was killed in an accident meets the recipient, and she gets to hear her child’s heart beating again.“Just Like That” and “Down the Hall,” a song narrated by a prisoner serving a life sentence and working in the prison hospice, show the influence of John Prine, a master of folky, laconic character studies, who died of Covid in 2020. He wrote “Angel From Montgomery,” a song Raitt always sings in concert.In a video interview from her living room in Marin County, Calif., Raitt wore a rainbow-hued outfit and spoke about songwriting, autonomy and awards-show serendipity. The following are edited excerpts from the conversation.“I don’t write all the time,” Raitt said. “So it’s almost like having a whole body, spiritual, emotional, physical feeling when you get shaken like that.”Peter Fisher for The New York TimesYou have a lot of Grammy Awards already, but “Just Like That” is your first nomination as a songwriter. It seems a little belated for someone who has written dozens of songs.I was never expecting this song of the year nomination. But I was very proud of the song, especially since it was so inspired by John Prine, and we lost him. I put my heart and soul into every record, and I never know which ones are going to resonate. But I can tell people are really moved, looking out there in the audience.Tell me about writing the song. You’ve said that it began with fingerpicking guitar.I usually write my ballads on the keyboard. Probably because I took lessons, it just seems to be freer, more flexible. The guitar style that I have is really homegrown, primitive folk guitar chords and those old blues licks.This particular time, I wanted to write, but not about my personal life, because I really had covered that. I didn’t have anything else to say. So I was looking for a story.And completely out of the blue, I saw this news program. They followed this woman with a film crew to the guy’s house who received her son’s heart. There was a lump in my throat — it was very emotional. And then when he asked her to sit down next to him and asked if she’d like to put her head on his chest and listen to his heart — I can’t even tell the story to this day without choking up, because it was so moving to me.I wrote it for awhile without the music. I worked on the lyrics for both “Down the Hall” and this one. It was like there was a higher purpose for both of those songs. It was a really different process for me to have those lines that are crucial in each song just appear in my head.I don’t write all the time. So it’s almost like having a whole body, spiritual, emotional, physical feeling when you get shaken like that. And the music — after the vaccines were available, I decided to make the record six months early, in the summer, and tour again. That put the pressure on to actually finish the song. So I just sat and played my acoustic guitar. And at that point, we had just lost John, and I just had him in my heart. I just started fingerpicking, and I had the lyrics in front of me, and the song poured through me without any thinking about it.You’ve been an example for a lot of younger performers as a woman who is indisputably the bandleader.Maria Muldaur told me that years ago. She decided that she could actually be a solo act after watching me with my band in the studio in Woodstock, making “Give It Up.” And in the last 10 years of Americana events, I meet all these other women like Brandi Carlile, and they’ll tell me that they were growing up on my music and what an influence I’ve been.But it’s hard for me to think about that because I know my foibles and my failings. I still hold myself up to a standard I probably can’t live up to. But I’m really grateful when people say those kind things about me.It’s a very challenging position to be in when you’re very young. But I’ve been my own boss since I was 20. I walked into Warner Bros. and said, “You can’t tell me what to wear, when to put my work out, who to work with and what to record. But I’ll work my ass off if you put out my records.” And they went for it. Now, I can’t even imagine somebody telling me what to do.And I could not live with somebody overriding my musical taste. I always picked someone that was not going to produce me and decide the arrangements, but work with me as a partner in the studio. So sometimes, when I needed to tell somebody that they just weren’t cutting it, I would use my producer partner to go in and say something instead of me. As a live bandleader, I have sometimes been on thin ice, when I’ve tried to find the words to explain something that I wanted when I couldn’t play it myself.The tricky part is that I know what I want. I know what doesn’t work. I know what direction I like. I can say, “Play something more like this.” But it’s how to say that in a way that doesn’t deflate someone’s joy or their ability to feel.At your concerts, it seems that you’re totally relaxed and casual, but you’re onstage in front of thousands of people. Do you think about pacing, timing, theatricality?Somehow I just learned to put a show together. There’s nothing like performing live. It’s just something I was born to do. And when I put together a show, I leave room for some wild cards. It’s a joy every night — to know that you have the aces on each of those instruments, and that we’ve rehearsed enough where we can have some fun with it. And I think the audiences are not there to see a jukebox show. They’re going with me wherever I want to go. I’m more comfortable onstage than any other place in my life. I wish I was as comfortable offstage as I am onstage.“I’ve been my own boss since I was 20,” Raitt said.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesIt seems awards shows and festivals are rare chances for a lot of performers to meet.I think all of us are like a kid in a candy store backstage. My favorite story about the Grammys was going through the metal detector at the Staples Center, at the afternoon ceremony. I was in the line between two guys in Slipknot, and the guy behind me is like in a Hannibal Lecter kind of a mask, and he goes, “I really dig your music!” I wouldn’t have expected Slipknot guys to know me. You know, maybe a “My mom loves you” kind of thing, but he was clearly a fan.And I just never expected the number of people that come up and tell each other that. I got to tell Dave Grohl what a fan I am of the Foo Fighters, and he was so surprised on the red carpet. Pharrell Williams, when he was in N.E.R.D., he grabbed me as I was walking back to my seat at the Grammys, and he said, “Any time you want to do something together …”“Nick of Time,” which was your title song for the 1989 LP that won album of the year, was about the fact of mortality, and now so are “Down the Hall” and “Just Like That.”Yeah, and I dedicated this record to friends that I lost in just two years. It’s just been an unbearable amount of loss. Suicides, drug overdoses, cancer, Covid. It’s unbelievable, what’s going on with the climate and with Ukraine and the Somali famine, which isn’t even getting any coverage, and the migrant situation on the border, and Syrian refugees. I mean, I’ve never been as discouraged and heartbroken as I have been. I soldier on.People say, “Well, how come you don’t do political music?” Most of it is just so insufferable. And I try to be really careful about not preaching my politics onstage because I know there’s a lot of people out there that may not agree with me, and they’re there to hear the music. So we have a table out there in the hall, and we tithe a dollar of every ticket.I do have a couple of songs that are political, like “Hell to Pay” and “The Comin’ Round Is Going Through” — I couldn’t wait anymore. But the politics between people, and love relationships, are just as thorny and important to lift up and write from interesting points of view. More

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      Anita Pointer, Frequent Lead Singer of Famed Sister Act, Dies at 74

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      She was the lead vocalist on all three of the Pointer Sisters’ Top 40 hits in the group’s early years, and she helped define its pop sound in the 1980s.Anita Pointer, the sweet and occasionally sultry lead vocalist on many hits of her family band the Pointer Sisters in the 1970s and ’80s, died on Saturday at home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 74.The cause was cancer, her publicist, Roger Neal, said.The Pointer Sisters occupied a middle point in pop history between the doo-wop innocence of the Ronettes and the stilettoed girl power of Destiny’s Child.Anita’s voice had a lot to do with that. She sang with the speed and flavor of molasses. Though she commanded the virtuosity to trill prettily, she tended to sing too softly to sound overpowering. In “Slow Hand,” a love song with a soft-focus music video that reached No. 2 on the pop charts in 1981, Anita cooed.When she sang lead vocals, on that song and others, her sisters provided a melodic line on backup, and the women frequently harmonized, structuring their groovy ’70s sound along similar lines to a barbershop quartet.The group started with four Pointer Sisters — Anita, Ruth, Bonnie and June — and became a trio when Bonnie left to pursue a solo career in 1977. Anita sang lead on all three of the group’s Top 40 hits in its original incarnation, including the breakout hit, “Yes We Can Can,” from its debut album, “The Pointer Sisters” (1973). It reached No. 11 on the charts that year.The Pointer Sisters performing in 1973. From left, they are Ruth, Anita, Bonnie and June. Associated PressPerforming the song live, Anita sang through a toothy smile, with an earnest, imploring tone that might have been learned from hearing her father, a minister, preach.Some of the Pointer Sisters’ early music, such as “How Long (Betcha’ Got A Chick On The Side)” (1975), could be fast-paced and funky, but the antique aspect of the group’s sound was deliberate. The Pointer women performed wearing secondhand clothes that could have been worn to church in the 1940s — and they sometimes even sourced their wardrobe from their mother’s church friends.They won their first Grammy, unusually for a Black group of the time, in the best country vocal performance by a duo or group category, for the 1974 song “Fairytale,” written by Anita and Bonnie.Working outside her family band in 1986, Anita achieved a rare crossover hit in a duet with the country singer Earl Thomas Conley, “Too Many Times.” The two performed the song at an improbable venue for Mr. Conley: the R&B television show “Soul Train.”The Pointer Sisters charted a new course when Bonnie left the group. Its 1978 rendition of Bruce Springsteen’s song “Fire,” which reached No. 2 on the charts, was transitional: old-fashioned honky-tonk piano lines, but with Anita as lead vocalist leaning into a huskier, sexier side of her low voice.By 1982, the group had arrived at a largely new style with “I’m So Excited.” On lead vocals, Anita sounded joyous belting out come-hither lyrics about “those pleasures in the night,” and the group came out with a racy music video to match. The song spent 40 weeks on the Hot 100 chart.Anita sang backup on other Pointer Sisters hits, with June in lead for “Jump (For My Love),” which won the duo or group pop performance Grammy in 1985, and Ruth led on “Automatic,” which won the vocal arrangement for two or more voices award at that year’s ceremony.“That’s something I would always hate to see — somebody trying to out-sing the other person,” Anita said in a discussion of her career posted on YouTube in 2015. “Everybody did their best. I never felt like we were competing onstage.”Anita Marie Pointer was born on Jan. 23, 1948, in Oakland, Calif. Her father, the Rev. Elton Pointer, and her mother, Sarah Elizabeth Silas Pointer, both ministered to a small congregation. The six Pointer children sang in choir throughout their childhoods, gaining vocal training that would help the girls harmonize when they formed their own group.Elton and Sarah came from Arkansas, and Anita fell in love with her grandparents’ home in the town of Prescott, where she attended fifth, seventh and 10th grades. She attended a racially segregated school, was forced to sit in the balcony of the movie theater and once picked cotton for money.She graduated from Oakland Technical High School in 1965 and was hired as a legal secretary. In 1968, she saw Bonnie and June sing to a crowd in San Francisco. “I just lost it,” she told Collector’s Weekly in 2015. “I sat in that audience, and I cried, and I sang along. The next day, I quit my job. I said, ‘I’ve got to sing!’”The sisters soon became a backup group for musicians in the San Francisco area like Taj Mahal. Once, they were warned about upstaging a musical act they were supposed to be supporting. They began recording their own music.In addition to music, Anita amassed a notable collection of objects charting Black American history, including artifacts of slavery, segregation and racist caricature.“This reminds me that everybody don’t love you and that you have to prove them wrong,” Ms. Pointer told Collector’s Weekly. “You’re not a buffoon. The artists tried to depict Black people in an insulting way, but I think big lips and big booties are beautiful.”Ms. Pointer’s two marriages ended in divorce. Her daughter, Jada, from her first marriage, died of cancer in 2003. June died in 2006, and Bonnie died in 2020. Ms. Pointer is survived by her sister Ruth; her brothers, Aaron and Fritz; and a granddaughter.As she aged, Ms. Pointer never fell out of love with her old music, blasting it in her car and singing along. The band kept performing well into the 21st century.“It’s not a vulgar show, so you can bring your grandma and you can bring the kids,” Ms. Pointer told the French outlet Metro News in 2007. “They’re not going to get a corset in their face.” More

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      These Young Musicians Made an Album. Now It’s Nominated for a Grammy.

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      The debut album of the New York Youth Symphony, featuring some players who were in middle school, is up against recordings by some of the world’s top orchestras.When the Grammy nominations for best orchestral performance were announced last month, several of the usual suspects made the cut. There was the august Berlin Philharmonic, for an album conducted by the composer John Williams, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the baton of its maestro, Gustavo Dudamel.But a newcomer also got a nod: the debut album of the New York Youth Symphony, a prestigious musical program for musicians between the ages of 12 and 22.The news that the ensemble’s album had earned a Grammy nomination astonished some of its young players.“I jumped in the air and I screamed, like I have never screamed before,” said Isabella Marquez, 18, who played violin on the album and watched a livestream of the Grammy nominations announcement in the kitchen of her Manhattan apartment with her mother and grandmother.“I never thought that I would be on an album, much less a Grammy-nominated album,” said Marquez.Clockwise from top left: Kennedy Plains, 22, a bassoonist, Joshua Choi, 18, a clarinetist and Iris Sung, 17, a violinist, who all played on the album, and Dmytro Tishyn, a 16-year-old bassoonist from Ukraine who played with the ensemble last month at a concert at Carnegie Hall.The recording might never have happened had it not been for the pandemic. When live performance was halted in 2020, and a Carnegie Hall concert was canceled, the ensemble decided to try to make an album instead.After the police murder of George Floyd and the social justice protests that spread throughout the nation that summer, the orchestra decided to rehearse and record works by Black composers, and selected pieces by Florence Price, Jessie Montgomery and Valerie Coleman. “We need to promote music that deals with these issues,” the orchestra’s music director, Michael Repper, said in an interview.The album, which is untitled, came together after six weeks of remote instruction followed by in person socially distant rehearsals and four days of recording sessions in which the musicians recorded the sections of the orchestra separately — all without a single Covid-19 infection, Repper noted. It was produced by Judith Sherman, a 13-time Grammy winner, who is nominated as classical producer of the year.Many of the young players were proud to have simply recorded an album during the pandemic. They were stunned when it was recognized by the Grammys, amid such illustrious competition — orchestras many of them have long revered.Joshua Choi, an 18-year-old principal clarinetist in the youth program, said he listened to the Berlin Philharmonic’s principal clarinetist, Andreas Ottensamer, whenever he needed motivation.After learning of the Grammy nomination, he couldn’t find the words to tell his parents, and stared in shock at his roommate, who plays oboe in the youth symphony, Choi said.“That’s pretty mind blowing,” Choi said. “I still can’t process that.”Michael Repper, the orchestra’s music director, during a rehearsal at Carnegie Hall.Todd Midler for The New York TimesIris Sung, the orchestra’s 17-year-old concertmaster, said she was in class at Tenafly High School in New Jersey when the nomination was announced. After her mother broke the news on her way home from school, she shared the nomination on Instagram, and as her phone flooded with congratulatory messages she thought back to recording it “in such a strange time.”“Just knowing that all that had paid off, I think was just something so special to me,” Sung said.The album features music by Price, including “Ethiopia’s Shadow in America” and her Piano Concerto in One Movement, featuring the pianist Michelle Cann; “Umoja: Anthem of Unity” by Coleman; and “Soul Force,” by Montgomery.Montgomery, 40, a composer whose works have been performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and the Minnesota Orchestra, and who is now the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s composer in residence, played violin with the New York Youth Symphony as a teenager.“It was the first time I had ever played youth symphonies, really, and it was a really important moment in my education,” Montgomery said. “That was my gateway into orchestral music.”For this recording, she held a video call with the young players, where she answered their questions on articulation and dynamics.When she was young, Montgomery said, orchestras rarely played music by Black composers. She said it was comforting to see that change.When the orchestra was unable to play one of its regular concerts at Carnegie Hall during the pandemic, it decided to make a recording. Todd Midler for The New York Times“Young people in the world right now are coming up in music at a time where Black art is centralized, and I think that is a very positive thing from the perspective of a young person,” Montgomery said.Kennedy Plains, a 22-year-old bassoonist and former member of the Youth Symphony, said that she was glad that ensembles were playing music by a more diverse roster of composers, and that she had appreciated the chance to work with Montgomery on a video call.“I hadn’t really got to play works by a lot of composers of color before,” Plains said, who learned to play the bassoon in middle school.Jessica Jeon, 14, a violinist, said that after learning of Price through the youth program, she gave a presentation about her to her seventh grade civil and human rights class.Price, who became the first Black woman to have her music played by a major American orchestra in 1933 when the Chicago Symphony performed her Symphony in E Minor, has been enjoying a renaissance in recent years, along with other composers of color.“They didn’t have the chance to become super well known such as Mozart or Beethoven because of their race or their gender or their sexuality,” said Jeon, who was 12 when the album was recorded. “Because of that, I felt inspired to try to introduce more people to them.”When the youth symphony returned to Carnegie Hall last month, it played with Dmytro Tishyn, a 16-year-old bassoonist from Ukraine who had fled after the Russian invasion.Repper, who will pass his music director role to Andrew Jinhong Kim in the 2023-2024 season, said that he hopes the album inspires more orchestras to play and record music by Black composers.“Orchestras don’t deserve any extra credit at this point for performing works by Black composers,” he said. “They don’t deserve any extra credit for performing works by women. It’s something that should have been done for decades.”The Grammy Awards will be presented on Feb. 5 in Los Angeles. More

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      Samara Joy’s Voice (and Social Media) Is Helping Jazz Find Fresh Ears

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      The 23-year-old singer had something rare in the genre — a viral moment — and will compete for best new artist at the Grammys in February.Samara Joy was kicking off an encore engagement at New York’s storied Blue Note club in November, just days before her 23rd birthday, when sparks began to fly.“It was my first set, and I was in the middle of telling a story,” she recounted a few weeks later. “I was building up this whole scenario that was going to get me into the song, and then I closed my eyes — and when I opened them, five seconds later, there was all this smoke coming up.” (A woman seated by the stage got a bit too close to a flickering candle; the fire was swiftly extinguished.)“Nothing like that had ever happened to me before,” Joy said, giggling softly. Just a week later, she had another, more traditional first, picking up two Grammy nominations for “Linger Awhile,” her second album and Verve Records debut. The album teams her with noted musicians — the guitarist Pasquale Grasso, the pianist Ben Paterson, the bassist David Wong and the drummer Kenny Washington — on standards including Monk’s “‘Round Midnight” and Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me.”Joy, a Bronx native who’s currently based in Washington Heights, goes by her first and middle name (her surname is McLendon). She will compete in February for best jazz vocal album and best new artist — a field in which recent winners have included ubiquitous stars such as Olivia Rodrigo, Megan Thee Stallion and Billie Eilish.When she got the news, Joy was on a train heading home after a gig in Washington, D.C. “I felt like screaming,” she said, “but I was in the quiet car, so I couldn’t freak out.”Joy has grown accustomed to reaping honors. In 2019, as a student at the State University of New York at Purchase, she won the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition; she became an Ella Fitzgerald Memorial Scholar the following year. Joy’s singing, with its precocious depth, creamy tone and fluttery vibrato, continued to inspire comparisons to both of those legends after the release of several videos that went viral, something of a rarity in jazz — in one, she performed Duke Ellington’s “Take Love Easy,” a song recorded by Fitzgerald in the 1970s — and a self-titled album in 2021.While Joy said she wasn’t especially active on social media at first, it has grown into a natural tool for expression. Jamie Krents, the president of Verve Records, said Joy’s presence there “was one of the things that attracted us to her — seeing how genuine and intriguing she was, and how that could shine through on those channels. She’s a normal 23-year-old person who happens to be a world-class singer.”Regina King, Anita Baker, Chaka Khan and Don Cheadle have also expressed admiration. The celebrated bassist and composer Christian McBride, who judged Joy in the Sarah Vaughan competition, finds her vocals “full of wisdom.”“It’s spooky; she sounds and tells a story like an elder,” he said in a phone interview. “But I think what I love most about her — and I pray that the challenges in life don’t change this — is she’s always positive. She’s got such a fun, positive spirit.”That spirit was palpable during a conversation at a food court in her neighborhood, where Joy admitted her fast success has left her head spinning a bit. “Sometimes I honestly don’t believe this is happening,” she said. “I see pictures of this glammed-up girl, but I’m just me” — on that afternoon, a young woman wearing sensible glasses and no perceptible makeup, clad in sneakers and a down jacket she picked up at Marshalls.The singer, who is currently touring with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in “Big Band Holidays” — the show will arrive at the Rose Theater Wednesday through Sunday — has spent little time at home over the past six or seven months, juggling dates throughout the United States and Europe. “When there are people my age in the crowd, it’s mostly students,” she said. “Or you have younger audience members who have seen me on Instagram or TikTok” — Joy has more than 200,000 followers on the video platform — and tend to be less familiar with jazz.Joy can empathize: She sang with a jazz band in high school that tended toward “a lot of contemporary, fusion-y stuff,” and was largely unfamiliar with the repertoire until arriving at Purchase. And while she’s the paternal granddaughter of the noted gospel singers and preachers Elder Goldwire and Ruth McLendon, who performed with the Savettes of Philadelphia, that genre also held little appeal initially.Joy will compete for two Grammys in February, including one in an all-genre category: best new artist.Scott Rossi for The New York TimesInstead, Joy listened to the old-school R&B beloved by both her parents, “Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin and Stevie and Chaka,” she said, and sang in middle and high school musicals, making her theatrical debut as Erzulie (the goddess of love) in a sixth-grade production of “Once on This Island.” “I was scared about the acting part, because I was very shy — I still get that way sometimes,” she said. “But I wanted to sing, so I was like, ‘We’re going to learn these lines and try as best we can to get inside this character.’”Eventually, Joy did begin singing in church, where her father also performed frequently. (Antonio McLendon is a singer, songwriter and bassist who has toured with the gospel star Andraé Crouch.) “I started in the choir when I was 16, and then I started to sing lead, which was nerve-racking,” she said. “The church live-streamed the services, and I had all these eyes on me.” She nonetheless became “more serious about it, because I was there all the time. We had rehearsal, we had Bible study, we had services on Saturday and Sunday. That was my priority — whereas jazz band was just an after school thing, a couple of songs here and there.”When Joy won the Sarah Vaughan competition, “My grandfather was disappointed, I think” — Ruth McLendon had died in 2014 — “because he thought singing belonged in the church, that it should serve as worship to God,” she explained. “I don’t think he would ever come into a jazz club, because of his beliefs, which I respect and understand. I know that he still loves me, regardless of how he feels about the career decisions I’m making.”Joy’s ambitions include writing; she penned rhapsodic lyrics for “Nostalgia (The Day I Knew),” a sweetly breezy number on “Linger Awhile.” “Now I’m paying more attention to the melodies and harmonics of all these songs I’m singing,” she said. “I’m telling this composer’s story and this lyricist’s story, and it’s beautiful, but I hope I can be influenced enough to write content for myself.”Studying giants like Vaughan and Fitzgerald — Carmen McRae and Betty Carter are also favorites — has also made Joy eager to explore a range of styles: “Sarah Vaughan could sing anything; she could go incredibly deep and then she could sing operatically, and neither seemed like a struggle. I look at her, and at some opera singers, and I want that ease.”When Joy speaks specifically of jazz, of course, there is a particular sense of devotion. “I look at all these influences — like Charlie Parker, like Duke Ellington, like Betty Carter and Sarah Vaughan — and I think, these people were here,” she said, a measure of awe creeping into her quiet voice. “This is a young music, and they did so much in their lives to draw people to this type of music; it deserves to be talked about and shared. And as long as I’m passionate about it, that’s my goal — to share it.” More