Knowles, Solange

Subterms

    Latest story

    88 Shares149 Views

    9 Inspiring Songs for the New Year

    by

    Get inspiration in songs from the Zombies, Solange, Jenny Hval and more.The Zombies always know how to kick off a fresh year.Stanley Bielecki/ASP and Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesDear listeners,Happy New Year! I’m going to keep things relatively brief today, because I’m kicking off 2024 with the head cold that every other person in New York seems to have right now. But isn’t that always how it goes when we’ve set high expectations and lofty resolutions for the new year? Life promptly steps in to throw some annoyingly timed obstacles our way.That’s kind of what the playlist I’ve created for today is about: Welcoming these next 12 months with optimism, grace and even a little humility.First, though, here’s a story about 2023.Each year, most of the goals I set for myself — the word “resolution” makes me clam up — have to do with cultural consumption. For the past few years, I’ve intended to read my age in books (a number that stubbornly keeps rising!), and last year I also attempted to watch 200 movies. Though certain social media sites were probably distractions, logging my books on Goodreads and the films I watched on Letterboxd helped keep me on track as the months went on.But December got frantically busy, as it always seems to, and I found myself obsessively planning my holiday downtime in service of hitting those noble but ultimately meaningless numbers: If I spend all of the 26th reading a novella and watch a movie every evening between now and New Year’s Eve …During that last week of the year, though, something clicked, and I loosened my grip. I started the longer and more challenging book I actually wanted to read instead of the more easy-to-finish novel that felt like an obligation. On one of the nights I’d planned to watch a movie, I accepted a spontaneous invitation to catch up with some old friends instead. My year was that much richer for both of these small decisions.What I’m saying is this: Set your objectives high, and also be kind to yourself. I am weirdly proud to report that I fell just short of my 2023 goals: In the end, I logged 198 movies and read one fewer book than I’d intended. So what? My decision not to kick it into overdrive at the end of the year does not negate all the films I discovered in 2023, nor the 30-*ahem* books I finished. It just meant that I’d added a smidgen of perspective to my annual acquisitions, too.Plus, ironically, it looks like I’m about to spend a few days on the couch with ample opportunity to catch up on some movies. Be careful what you wish for.I hope today’s playlist — which features tracks by the Zombies, Solange and Fiona Apple, among others — inspires you to ring in the new year with the appropriate amount of optimism, rumination and self-forgiveness. Who knows? Maybe it will even give you your own personal theme song for 2024.Listen along on Spotify while you read.1. The Zombies: “This Will Be Our Year”A perennial classic, for good reason. (Listen on YouTube)2. Fiona Apple: “Better Version of Me”Fiona Apple approaches self-improvement with gusto — and a bit of a wink — on this spirited, piano-pounding track from her 2005 album “Extraordinary Machine”: “I’ve got a plan, a demand, and it just began/And if you’re right, you’ll agree/Here’s coming a better version of me.” (Listen on YouTube)3. A Sunny Day in Glasgow: “Failure”“Ashes Grammar,” the ambitious dream-pop opus by the Philadelphia band A Sunny Day in Glasgow, is an album I first fell in love with when it was released in 2009, and ever since then, I’ve carried around the comforting wisdom of this song’s refrain: “Fall forward, feel failure.” (Listen on YouTube)4. Kathleen Edwards: “Change the Sheets”“Change this feeling under my feet,” a restless Kathleen Edwards sings on this standout from the Canadian singer-songwriter’s great 2011 album, “Voyageur.” “Change the sheets and then change me.” Who among us hasn’t been there? (Listen on YouTube)5. Solange: “Cranes in the Sky”I’ve recently been revisiting Solange’s 2016 triumph “A Seat at the Table,” and this song — about getting to the deep root of why we’re so hungry for superficial changes — sounds as profound as ever. Also, if you ever need four and a half minutes of Zen, you know you can always watch the music video. (Listen on YouTube)6. Paul Simon: “Run That Body Down”The new year is often a time for taking a hard look at mortality, reassessing bad habits and perhaps addressing ourselves in the voice of Paul Simon’s doctor as she appears in this 1972 tune: “How many nights you think that you can do what you’ve been doing?” (Listen on YouTube)7. Nico: “Sixty Forty”“Will there be another time? Another year, another wish to stay?” Nico drones on this moody dirge, sounding as omniscient and steady as the march of the seasons. Though it first appeared on her 1981 solo album “Drama of Exile,” “Sixty Forty” was also used to memorable effect in Joanna Hogg’s 2021 movie “The Souvenir, Part II.” (Listen on YouTube)8. Jenny Hval: “That Battle Is Over”On this candid, freewheeling reflection from her 2015 album “Apocalypse, Girl,” the Norwegian musician Jenny Hval considers the passage of time, the nebulous definition of “self care” and the pressures of personal improvement, ultimately arriving at her own wry conclusions. (Listen on YouTube)9. John Lennon: “(Just Like) Starting Over”Though it’s easy to roll one’s eyes at all the “new year, new me” exhortations that surround us in early January, there’s also something to be said for earnestly embraced fresh starts — as John Lennon enthused on the buoyant leadoff track from “Double Fantasy.” (Listen on YouTube)Here it comes — a better version of me,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“This Will Be Our Year” track listTrack 1: The Zombies, “This Will Be Our Year”Track 2: Fiona Apple, “Better Version of Me”Track 3: A Sunny Day in Glasgow, “Failure”Track 4: Kathleen Edwards, “Change the Sheets”Track 5: Solange, “Cranes in the Sky”Track 6: Paul Simon, “Run That Body Down”Track 7: Nico, “Sixty Forty”Track 8: Jenny Hval, “That Battle Is Over”Track 9: John Lennon, “(Just Like) Starting Over” More

    More stories

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      The Thrill of Watching a Film That Isn’t Online Anywhere

      by

      They are a reminder of the countless histories that don’t exist there — and the work demanded to sustain them.When I was growing up in California, my mother would often describe a film that it was impossible for me to see: the great Carmen de Lavallade dancing to Odetta, dressed all in white like a priestess. She’d seen the footage a long time ago — 1974? — at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts by Lincoln Center in Manhattan, where she was researching the history of modern dance in America. De Lavallade was one of the first Black dancers to enjoy a long career in the theaters of high culture. But it wasn’t her reputation that secured her place in my mother’s memory; it was the spiritual elegance of her gestures. “She was attempting to embrace everything,” my mother told me. Even though we couldn’t watch the film together, she could share it in words — how de Lavallade seemed to gather, in her arms, everything lovely and lost. He’s got the whole world in his hands, Odetta sang, and de Lavallade’s dance made us both believe it — that we wouldn’t be dropped. Her grace was powerful enough to pierce me across the distance and the decades, to make me feel what I had never seen.It was partly this vision of de Lavallade that tempted me, in April, to attend a screening of rare dance films curated by Solange Knowles and her studio, Saint Heron, for a performance series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Knowles called the series the Eldorado Ballroom, after a legendary music venue in Houston, her hometown. The memory of that other space consecrated her own roving tabernacle of Black performance. There was no program listed online, but given de Lavallade’s pride of place among 20th-century dancers, I suspected I might find her there — if not as my mother described her, then perhaps from some other angle that would help explain her lasting hold on our imaginations. In the dark theater, I was anxious and alert: If she was there, would I recognize her?Most dancers age off camera, leaving us with the iconic image of the body at its athletic apex.The silver screen went black. The title card announced: “A Thin Frost.” Suddenly, there she was — much older than I’d expected to find her, but unmistakable nonetheless, her high cheekbones and supple neck. De Lavallade and two men were facing one another in metal chairs. They stuttered through cryptic gestures and sidelong glances to a soundtrack of unmusical human noises, as if searching for something to say without recourse to the familiar phrases of port-de-bras and arabesque. I looked for signs of the grace my mother had described, but this was not a hymn, and the dancers did not seem willing or able to repair the world. Instead, the world was smashed and scattered, and they were sifting through the pieces.This was the first work performed by Paradigm, a company of dancers over 50 that de Lavallade founded in 1998 alongside her pioneering peers Dudley Williams and Gus Solomons Jr. — both gone now, Solomons just a few weeks ago. They were, as this paper reported, free to be “as idiosyncratic as they wish,” having matured beyond “sheer youthfulness.” Most dancers age off camera, leaving us with the iconic image of the body at its athletic apex, but de Lavallade had refused to stay still. And why should she have? Dance is about movement, not stasis — dramatizing how one moment transforms to become another. I could feel my frozen image of de Lavallade in her so-called prime melt on contact with this film, time’s “thin frost” warming to release the smell of living earth. Somehow my own body loosened in response, so that I became a reflection of the dancers onscreen, each of us seated on either side of a magic mirror.As de Lavallade faded out and the remaining films unspooled, I remained vividly aware of the dancers as real people whose lives go on beyond the final cut. I kept grasping for them as the dissonant scenes swirled past: flashes of silver dunes blown through someone’s saxophone; a slender silhouette writhing inside an amniotic sac of silk. When I went home, I pored over the brochure I’d picked up by the door, eager to pin those shifting shapes to names, dates, material details that would stay in place. Four of the films were available on streaming platforms — Vimeo, YouTube, the Criterion Channel — and I watched them on repeat. But I couldn’t find the footage of de Lavallade anywhere: She had disappeared, again, into the archive.We often let ourselves believe that everything, now, is available to us — that nothing is lost and every experience can be accessed and repeated with the right subscription. But this blinds us to all the material that has not been translated to the new media, that no one is clamoring to see in part because we don’t even know it exists. With dance in particular, film is the only medium capable of “capturing” the form, but dance films that aren’t narrative musicals rarely receive wide circulation or preservation. This is doubly true for dance films created by Black artists who aspire to something more than commercial success. The problem, however, is becoming more universal: Many of us know the feeling of trying to summon an old season of a favorite TV show and coming up empty-handed, as companies unceremoniously disappear beloved works of art and avoid paying royalties to the people who produced the “content.” I fear for a future in which our primary experience of visual culture is a fire hose of viral video clips — GIFs, reels, TikToks — endlessly replicable but utterly forgettable.With the Eldorado Ballroom series, Knowles modeled another form of circulation, directing our attention to the moments that survive not because they’re easy to share, but in spite of great difficulty, because they mattered to someone that much. As I followed de Lavallade’s shadow down a rabbit hole of research, I thought of something Knowles said in a recent interview with Vulture: “That’s our mission, to just create that kind of studying around artists” like her. Some films might escape my grasp, but I’ve been rewarded by discovering, slowly, a dense network of relations among the dancers I’d seen onscreen: They had studied under one another, danced the same roles, passed through the same institutions, crossing conventional boundaries between genres and eras. The lines extend in all directions — how de Lavallade saw her friend Alvin Ailey on their high school gymnastics team and dragged him to her dance class with Lester Horton, who directed the first racially integrated company in the country; how Josephine Baker brought the young de Lavallade to Paris for her European debut. Especially before film, this is how movement was propagated from generation to generation: by hand. I wasn’t dancing — I was digging around online — but I felt as if I’d been handed something I had to sustain, and I liked feeling that my efforts reciprocated the physical intensity I’d seen reproduced in the movie theater.Since I watched “A Thin Frost,” I’ve worried and wondered over how I might hold on to an experience I may never relive. I’ve tried to describe the film by phone to my mother, returning, without repeating, the gift she gave me in childhood. I’ve tried to fill in the world around the film by seeking out interviews de Lavallade recorded later in life. At 83, she told a reporter at The Boston Globe that the structure for her one-woman show, “As I Remember It,” would have to be “Beckett-like.” As with a dancing body, the past has a bewildering vitality, “it jumps around” and makes us sweat through endless rehearsals. No technology can substitute for the human labor — effortful, embodied, attentive — to really make something last. No new god is coming to the rescue. It’s up to us to take the whole world in our hands, and pass it on.Opening illustration: Source photographs by Jack Mitchell/Getty Images; Reg Innell/Toronto Star, via Getty Images. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Solange Curates Powerful Performances of Black Joy and Pain at BAM

      by

      Through Saint Heron, the musician brought Angélla Christie and the Clark Sisters for a night exploring Black religious music, and Linda Sharrock and Archie Shepp for a show that felt anything but safe.When the alto saxophonist Angélla Christie strode onstage on Friday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, she was joined only by a piano player. But Christie, one of the more prominent instrumentalists in contemporary gospel, was at full throttle from the very first note — playing in high-gloss, reverb-drenched ostinatos — and within moments, the crowd had become her rhythm section, clapping along on every off-beat.An usher got swept up while walking a couple to their seats, and on her way back up the aisle she shimmied a bit, her right hand flying into the air in a testifying motion. A woman sitting at the end of Row H reached out for a high five, and their palms gripped each other for a moment.It was just a few minutes into “Glory to Glory (A Revival for Devotional Art)” — part of BAM’s multidimensional “Eldorado Ballroom” series, brilliantly curated by Solange via her Saint Heron agency — and already something was hitting different.After Christie, the concert continued with two more sets: selections from Mary Lou Williams’s religious suites, delivered by the 14-person Voices of Harlem choir and a pair of virtuoso pianists, Artina McCain and Cyrus Chestnut; and a roof-raising show from the indomitable Clark Sisters, the best-selling band in gospel history and a fixture of Black radio since the 1980s.The Clark Sisters onstage at BAM on Friday, as part of a bill celebrating Black American religious music.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThat’s a lot already: a stylistic tour of Black American religious music, mostly in the hands of women, going back more than 50 years. But “Eldorado Ballroom” was aiming for even more. Rarely does a single series pull together so many strands — not just of Black music, but of Black creativity writ large — into an open-ended statement, speaking to what might be possible as well as making a comment on how Black creative histories ought to be remembered.“Eldorado Ballroom” is an extension of the work Solange has been doing for the past 10 years under the auspices of Saint Heron. As she told New York magazine’s Craig Jenkins recently, her aim with Saint Heron — whether you call it an agency, a studio, a brand or simply a creative clearinghouse — is “to centralize and build a really strong archive that in 20 years or 30 years can be accessible by future generations to be a guiding light in the same way that so many of my blueprints guided me.”Thanks to Saint Heron, Solange has managed to put her cultural capital to use while keeping her own celebrity mostly out of view. On Friday, the singer and songwriter sat beaming from an opera box near the stage while the Clark Sisters motored through a 40-plus-year catalog of danceable gospel hits, but she never took a bow.Saint Heron surfaced in 2013 with the release of a mixtape that helped set the standard for a new wave of outsider R&B. Some of its contributors, like Kelela and Sampha, became stars. Since then, Saint Heron has served as a flexible play space for Solange and her creative community, crossing lines between fashion and design, visual art, publishing, music and dance. Mid-pandemic, Saint Heron released a free digital library of books by Black writers and artists.Solange, middle, attends “Glory to Glory (A Revival for Devotional Art)” at BAM on Friday night. The singer and her Saint Heron agency curated the series, “Eldorado Ballroom.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAnd clearly, Solange has gained the attention of a broad, young, literary community of color. The capacity crowd at “Glory to Glory” on Friday was — unlike at most events in such spaces — about 90 percent Black, and as diverse in age and attire as Flatbush Avenue on any spring afternoon. Twenty-somethings in custom streetwear stood cheering next to older women in their Sunday finest.On Saturday, the crowd again skewed under 50 and majority Black for “The Cry of My People,” a night devoted to poetry and experimental jazz. If “Glory to Glory” was a celebration of how “triumphant and safe” gospel music can make a person feel, as Solange put it to Jenkins — a night devoted to joy, basically — then “The Cry of My People” was a confrontation of pain.The show began with a reading from the poet Claudia Rankine, who stood at center stage as the curtain came up, then read two poems: “Quotidian (1),” about inner turmoil, and “What If,” about a kind of exhausted rage. The second included the line: “in the clarity of consciousness, what if nothing changes?”Rankine had put words to something that the next performer, the vocalist Linda Sharrock, would express without them. Sharrock has been heavily respected in jazz circles since the 1960s for her raw and riveting use of extended vocal techniques: Moans, breaths and cries have been her musical units. But like so many women in jazz, she spent the peak years of her career in the shadow of a more famous husband, the guitarist Sonny Sharrock, and ultimately quit the scene. Before Saturday, her last show in New York City had been in 1979. In more recent years she has suffered health setbacks including a stroke that left her aphasic, and has performed only rarely.Linda Sharrock sang as part of “The Cry of My People” on Saturday night at BAM. Her last show in New York City before this past weekend was in 1979; she has suffered health setbacks including a stroke.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAt BAM, backed by a signal-scrambling, free-improvising, eight-piece band, Sharrock sat in a wheelchair beside an upright piano (that she often touched but hardly played) and sang in big, open vowel sounds. They felt confounding, yet clear. Most of the time, the sounds came in wide, billowing arcs; when she held a single, steady note — sometimes spiked with a growl — it brought the urgency to an almost unbearable level. Often there were hints at a secondary feeling (surprise? anger? wonder? all possible) but the main message was consistent: pain.The backstage crew seemed to have difficulty following the band’s cues, and after the curtain had been down for a solid three minutes following Sharrock’s set, it came back up. The band was still playing. Sharrock performed another mini-set before an awkwardly long wait for the curtain to come down once again. Maybe a clean ending wouldn’t have fit. The crowd — dazed, moved — gave Sharrock a warm response, but there was little that felt “triumphant and safe” about this night.It concluded with a set from Archie Shepp, the luminary tenor saxophonist, composer, vocalist and writer. A disciple of John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor, Shepp became a leading advocate for Black musicians’ right to self-determination in the 1960s and has hardly quieted his voice ever since. At 85, his saxophone chops have faded, and he needed help from other band members to bring the instrument into playing position, but the whispered notes he did get out of the horn carried fabulous amounts of weight.Archie Shepp, center, performs at “The Cry of My People,” backed by a nine-piece ensemble.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBacked by a nine-piece ensemble featuring three excellent vocalists (Amina Claudine Myers, Sarah Elizabeth Charles and Pyeng Threadgill) and a pithy, three-man horn section, Shepp pulled from across his broad repertoire. He revisited his classic cover of Calvin Massey’s stout, dirgelike “Cry of My People,” and the swiveling rock beat of “Blues for Brother George Jackson” from the “Attica Blues” LP. On Duke Ellington’s gospel standard “Come Sunday,” Shepp sang in an earnest baritone while Myers, who briefly took over the piano chair from Jason Moran, splashed him with generous harmonies. As Shepp sang the line, “God of love, please look down and see my people through,” the house erupted in a wave of support.His set, like his six-decade-long career, was a reminder that the walls that divide spiritual music, popular music and art music can often be arbitrary. “Where did they come from, anyway?” he seemed to ask. This, you could say, was the message of “Eldorado Ballroom” writ large.The series takes its name from a once-legendary venue in Houston’s Third Ward neighborhood, where Solange grew up. At the ’Rado, as it was known, jazz, gospel and soul — art, spiritual and popular — all appeared on the same stage, until an economic downturn and a pattern of police repression forced the venue to close in 1972.The night that Solange’s series kicked off — March 30, with a show featuring the outsider-R&B trifecta of Kelela, keiyaA and Res — the actual Eldorado Ballroom was celebrating its grand reopening in Houston, after a nearly $10 million restoration project. With a little luck, Houston may have its own “Eldorado Ballroom” soon, too. More

    • 75 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Solange Enters New Territory: Ballet Composer

      by

      The multihyphenate pop star will compose her first ballet score for the Fall Fashion Gala at New York City Ballet in September.Solange, the pop star whose artistic tendrils have reached into the worlds of music, choreography, fashion, film, visual art and more, will soon add a new genre to her repertoire: ballet composer.New York City Ballet announced on Monday that Solange would write an original score for a work (as yet untitled) by Gianna Reisen that will premiere at the company’s annual Fall Fashion Gala, on Sept. 28. The score is composed for a chamber ensemble that will be made up of some of Solange’s musical collaborators and members of the City Ballet orchestra.This step into ballet is the latest in a series of adventurous turns by Solange, 36, who began her career young as a singer and dancer — including with her sister, Beyoncé, in Destiny’s Child. Solange’s work later blossomed into multihyphenate and more independent territory, with her music — starting with the 2012 album “True” and continuing with “A Seat at the Table” (2016) and “When I Get Home” (2019) — often doubling as a gathering place for genre-crossing, interdisciplinary artists. In her art and in the streets, she has also been an activist for Black Lives Matter and other causes.Solange has long had a theatrical edge that brought her into contact with Lincoln Center regulars and collaborators beyond the musical sphere. She has worked with the designer Carlos Soto, a regular partner of the auteurist director Robert Wilson, and organized programming — as well as brought her own performances — to spaces like the Guggenheim and Getty museums, as well as the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, and the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany.Her music for Reisen will be her debut in ballet, which was formative for her as a child in Houston. She saw Lauren Anderson, a pioneering Black principal dancer at Houston Ballet, and once told the writer Ayana Mathis, “My dream was to go to Juilliard.”The new dance is Reisen’s third for City Ballet, and will feature costumes by Alejandro Gómez Palomo of Palomo Spain. The Fall Fashion Gala, which pairs choreographers with designers, will also feature a premiere by Kyle Abraham, with costumes by Giles Deacon; and the first live performance of Justin Peck’s “Solo,” which premiered virtually in 2021 in a film directed by Sofia Coppola, and now features costume design by Raf Simons. Rounding out the gala evening is a George Balanchine masterpiece, “Symphony in C” from 1947. More