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.cls-1 { fill: url(#linear-gradient); } .cls-2 { mask: url(#mask); } The Town With a Song in Its Heart Jamming on the porch of the Wildflower Bed & Breakfast in Mountain View, Ark. Houston Cofield The Town With a Song in Its Heart Follow the winding roads to Mountain View, Ark., home of the Ozark Folk […] More
After a 1962 visit, a mutual love affair began between the composer and the country’s musicians. A new series at the Japan Society explores this relationship.About 30 miles south of Tokyo is the city of Kamakura, where the American composer John Cage was taken soon after arriving on his first visit to Japan, in 1962.There, D.T. Suzuki, the Zen authority from whom Cage had learned about Buddhism a decade earlier, greeted him and his close collaborator David Tudor at Tokei-ji, an ancient temple. Cage was given special permission to ring the temple bell; a photograph captures him inside the bell, slightly bent over and smiling a little as he listens to the reverberations.As Serena Yang writes in a recent dissertation on Cage and Japan, the discussion at Tokei-ji turned to the music of a Zen ceremony at another temple, near Kyoto. Cage exclaimed “this ceremony must be dominated by silence” — in other words, it must be similar to the works that had, by then, made him one of the world’s most important experimental composers.The similarity was, indeed, profound. The overlap between Cage and Japan went deep; for us today, suspicious of appropriation, it is a precious example of a truly mutual cultural exchange. And it has inspired a four-part series at the Japan Society in New York that begins on Sept. 28 and continues into December.Cage’s vision of life and music — his embrace of indeterminacy and chance; his use of and trust in silence — was shaped by Japanese philosophy, religion and aesthetics. And the influence of his 1962 visit on Japanese composers was such that it came to be referred to as “Jon Keji shokku”: John Cage Shock.His liberating example helped those composers — who had largely been in thrall to European modernism in the years after World War II — broaden their style, including to use traditional music as source material.John Cage conducting Toshi Ichiyanagi’s “Sapporo” at Hokkaido Broadcasting Company in 1962. From left: Yoko Ono, Yuji Takahashi (behind her), Kenji Kobayashi, Ryu Noguchi, Toshinari Ohashi, Toru Konishi, John Cage (with his back to camera), David Tudor and Ichiyanagi at the piano.Yasuhiro Yoshioka, via Sogetsu Foundation“I think that what we played for them gave them the chance to discover a music that was their own, rather than a 12-tone music,” Cage said, referring to the radical path away from traditional tonality that Arnold Schoenberg had charted a few decades earlier. “Before our arrival, they had no alternative other than dodecaphony.”Toru Takemitsu, the eminent composer who became close with Cage, later recalled: “In my own life, in my own development, for a long period I struggled to avoid being ‘Japanese,’ to avoid ‘Japanese’ qualities. It was largely through my contact with John Cage that I came to recognize the value of my own tradition.”As Yang emphasizes, the meeting of Cage and Japan did not begin with his arrival in 1962. Avant-garde Japanese musicians had been aware of Cage, who was born in 1912, from the late ’40s, through journalistic accounts of his work and, eventually, scores.“I felt an ‘Eastern’ sense from Cage’s music,” the composer Kejiro Sato wrote in the mid-’50s.In a 1952 letter to the critic Kuniharu Akiyama, Cage wrote, “I have always had the desire to come one day to Japan.” He later wrote to Akiyama that Japan “is the country of the whole world whose art and thought has most vitality for me.”After his early studies with Schoenberg, the prophet of 12-tone technique, Cage had undergone a transformation: a “great leap of the heart,” as the critic Kay Larson put it in “Where the Heart Beats,” her 2012 book on Cage and Zen. Starting in the mid-1940s, he delved into Indian music and philosophy; attended some of Suzuki’s American university lectures on Zen Buddhism; and discovered the “I Ching,” the Chinese text which he began to use as a stimulus for chance techniques in his music. His new course diverged from both tonality and dodecaphony.In 1952, this great leap culminated in a piece that asked a pianist merely to sit at his or her instrument for four minutes and 33 seconds. The music would be all the sound in the performance space that was not music; “4’33,” Cage’s most famous artistic statement, was more a philosophical inquiry into the passage of time, the nature of silence and the distinction between individual and collective experience than a standard concert event.As the ’50s went on, some of the fruits of his innovations began to filter into Japanese publications, which wrote about Cage’s embrace of Eastern art and ideas. Avant-garde critics observed that Cage’s musical choices (like his use of percussion rather than the traditional Western orchestra), his rhythms and his adoption of randomness as a compositional tool were influenced by Eastern examples, including the Japanese concept of “ma,” the notion of empty space or silence.Cage at Nanzenji Temple in Kyoto in 1962. He would return to Japan many times after ’62, including with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.Yasuhiro Yoshioka, via Sogetsu FoundationFor Cage, Zen was not only an aesthetic inspiration; it also spoke to his more general desire to re-energize a Western world he perceived as in serious crisis. At the 1954 Donaueschingen Festival in Germany, he told the critic Hidekazu Yoshida that “America is a mixed nation and has no unified spiritual basis. We rely on material culture and therefore have less and less spirituality. Yet I think the East is totally the opposite. My interest in Zen is based on my hope to recover Americans’ lost spirit.”Inspired by Cage and by European musicians making similar investigations, such as Stockhausen, composers like Takemitsu, Toshiro Mayuzumi and Yuji Takahashi had begun to work with chance; graphic scores, rather than traditional Western notation; and Cagean instruments like the “prepared” piano, adjusted with objects that affected the sounding of its strings. A contemporary music festival in Osaka in 1961, which included works by Cage, brought his brand of indeterminate, malleable music to Japanese audiences for the first time. (The response was decidedly mixed.)This all laid the groundwork for Takemitsu, Mayuzumi and Toshi Ichiyanagi, a composer who had studied with Cage in New York, to invite Cage to visit Japan, under the auspices of the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo, a nexus of experimental performance in the 1960s. He and Tudor spent six weeks there: In addition to their trip to Tokei-ji, they toured widely, including Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka and Sapporo; had the rare honor of viewing a geisha banquet; spent the night at a monastery; and even used a chance procedure to choose the color of a necktie to buy.In Kyoto, they were shown the Zen temple Ryoanji, renowned for a rock garden with 15 stones arranged in a geometric pattern. Cage’s drawings based on the stones, made 20 years after the trip, inspired his highly mutable ensemble piece “Ryoanji,” which will be performed at the Japan Society on Oct. 21 — with some of the performers streaming live from Japan.Cage and Tudor’s concerts during their visit had a galvanizing effect. Performing Cage’s “Music Walk” in Tokyo, Tudor lay under the piano; Yoko Ono, already an important artist and musician who was married to Ichiyanagi at the time, put her body on top on the piano strings. In “Theater Piece,” Tudor cooked rice and stir-fried, with contact microphones attached to objects around the stage: the cookware, a piano, toys.For the premiere of “0’00,” a follow-up silence exercise to “4’33,” Cage sat at a desk and wrote a sentence: “In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action.” Contact microphones had been attached to his pen and glasses, so, as the Cage scholar James Pritchett writes, his action “was both the creation of the score and its first performance.”“0’00,” dedicated to Ichiyanagi and Ono, will be among the works performed at the Japan Society on Dec. 7 in “Cage Shock,” a program meant to convey a sense of the 1962 visit. It was not until 1969 that Hidekazu Yoshida, the critic, used that phrase, and some have suggested it overstates the suddenness of what was actually a more gradual influence.But it is clear that experimental work in a Cagean spirit grew more common in Japan after the visit. Even a composer like Makoto Moroi, who was skeptical about the 1962 performances, took to working with indeterminacy and graphic notation — as well as traditional Japanese instruments — in the wake of Cage Shock.For Cage’s part, Yang writes that visiting the country “corrected his image of Japan. Where he had pictured a Zen-like, ancient Eastern country, he found a vibrant, modern society.” Both sides of the exchange had their ideas of the other refined and deepened.Cage and Tudor returned to Japan two years later on tour with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and again with Cunningham in 1976 — and then five times in the 1980s. His last visit, in 1989, was to receive the prestigious Kyoto Prize. The citation called him “a prophet who has foretold the spirit of the coming era” through “a new style of contemporary music by his new concept of chance music and non-western musical thought.”By then, Cage was mulling what he called a “Noh-opera,” possibly to be based on works by Marcel Duchamp. But Cage died, in 1992, before he could realize the project. On Nov. 16 at the Japan Society, a team led by the composer and performer Tomomi Adachi will offer a kind of completion of the idea — which, like so much of Cage’s work, transcends traditional boundaries of genre and culture.“It was Cage,” Takemitsu said, “who could ignore all restraints and do whatever he liked, who helped me make up my mind to get out of my own restraints.” More
A Briton with a rich baritone, he charmed audiences, mostly in Europe and America, with sentimental songs, like his signature hit, “The Last Farewell.”Roger Whittaker, a British singer whose easy-listening ballads and folk songs caught the sentiments of perfect summer days and last farewells, touching the hearts of mainly older fans across Europe and America for four decades, died on Sep. 12 in a hospital near Toulouse, in the south of France. He was 87.His longtime publicist Howard Elson said the cause was “complications following a long illness.” Mr. Whittaker had retired to the region.Born to British parents in Nairobi, Kenya, Mr. Whittaker grew up there with the infectious rhythms of East African music in his bloodstream. His grandfather had been a club singer in England, and his father, a Staffordshire grocer who played the violin, had been disabled in a motorcycle crash and moved his family to Kenya for the warm climate.Roger learned to play the guitar at 7 and developed a rich baritone in school choirs, where he sometimes sang in Swahili. At 18, he was drafted into the British colonial Kenya Regiment, and for two years he fought Mau Mau rebels in the struggle that led to Kenyan independence. He then studied medicine in South Africa and science in Wales, intending to become a teacher.But music intervened. He had played club dates to pay for college, and he also recorded songs on flexible discs distributed with the campus newspaper, The Bangor University Rag. A record company liked them and in 1962 released his first professional singles, including “Steel Men,” his cover of a Jimmy Dean hit about bridge builders.“Steel Men” leaped onto the British charts, the opening wedge in a career of international tours and record albums that celebrated ethnic and working-class pride, the passing seasons and family gatherings at Christmas. Over the years Mr. Whittaker recorded for various labels, including EMI, RCA Victor and his own Tembo (Swahili for elephant) Records.Tours took him repeatedly to Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia, Belgium, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States, a concert grind that often exceeded 100 gigs a year and outlasted the millennium. He learned to fly small planes and sometimes used them on his tours.He wrote much of the music he performed, made a documentary film about Kenya, wrote an autobiography, appeared frequently on television and radio and sold a reported 60 million albums worldwide. One of them, “‘The Last Farewell’ and Other Hits,” recorded in 1971 and forgotten, became a sensation later, reaching No. 1 on the pop charts in 11 countries and eventually selling 11 million copies.“‘The Last Farewell’ is an ersatz show tune about a British man-of-war, love, heartache and heroism,” Henry Edwards wrote in The New York Times in 1975. “Released four years ago, the tune was discovered by an Atlanta disc jockey while idly going through a pile of discarded LPs. He liked the song, played it on the air, and soon Atlanta was liking it too. That affection soon spread to Nashville, then to the entire country-music market, then to the pop audience at large.” It became Mr. Whittaker’s signature song.In 1980, Mr. Whittaker invited children to submit lyrics and poems about peace for a songwriting contest. It drew a million entries from 57 countries. He wrote and recorded music for the winning entry, written by Odina Batnag, 13, of Manila. She was flown to New York and introduced, with her song, “I Am But a Small Voice,” at Radio City Music Hall. Proceeds went to a UNESCO program for disabled children.By the 1980s Mr. Whittaker was performing in 50 to 70 American cities regularly. Boston was a stronghold.In addition to singing, he whistled, yodeled and had audiences sing along. Critics called it schmaltzy, but crowds loved it and joined in, especially on hits like “Durham Town (The Leavin’)” (1969) and covers of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” and Jethro Tull’s “Too Old to Rock ’n’ Roll, Too Young to Die.”Mr. Whittaker performing on television in about 1965 in Germany, where he had a big following.Gunter Zint/K & K Ulf Kruger OHG, via Redferns, via Getty Images“Whittaker’s audience is mostly white and middle-class, probably daytime TV watchers who enjoy the kind of plain, folksy charm he projects,” Thomas Sabulis wrote in The Boston Globe. “He’s no great singer or songwriter; he doesn’t have Neil Diamond’s talent, Tom Jones’s sex appeal or Barry Manilow’s knack for milking the obvious. What he does have is a steady, unspectacular baritone and an avuncular, almost evangelical tone as comforting as it is mediocre.”Tragedy struck in 1989. Mr. Whittaker’s parents, still living in Kenya, were victims of a brutal home invasion by four robbers. His mother was tortured for eight hours and his father murdered. The killers were never caught. His mother moved back to England.“It will affect me for the rest of my life,” Mr. Whittaker told reporters, “but I believe we should all live without hate if we can.”After a period of mourning, Mr. Whittaker resumed recording and touring. In 1995, he sang at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville at a 50th-anniversary party for former President George Bush and his wife, Barbara, who were fans. In 1997, despite a surgical knee replacement, he kept some 100 concert dates in Europe and America.He stopped touring in 2013, at 77, and retired to the south of France after years living in England and Ireland.Roger Henry Brough Whittaker was born in Nairobi on March 22, 1936, to Edward and Viola (Showan) Whittaker, who, after his motorcycle accident in 1930, had settled on a farm in Thika, outside Nairobi. His father recovered and became a successful builder and businessman in Kenya. His mother managed theaters.After graduating from the Prince of Wales School in Nairobi in 1954 and finishing military service in 1956, Roger began premedical studies at the University of Cape Town, but he dropped out after 18 months. He became an apprentice teacher but, needing more education, enrolled in 1959 at University College of North Wales (now Bangor University), and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 1962.Still uncertain about his future, he consulted a faculty adviser, who, he later recalled, told him, “Have a try in show business and if you haven’t made it in 10 years, come back here and teach.” Mr. Whittaker soon landed a singing job at a resort in Northern Ireland and began his career.In 1964, he married Natalie O’Brien, who became his manager and co-author of his 1986 memoir, “So Far, So Good.” She survives him, as do their five children, Emily Kennedy and Lauren, Jessica, Guy and Alexander Whittaker; 12 grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and an elder sister. A documentary film, “Roger Whittaker in Kenya: A Musical Safari,” which related a history of Kenya and revisited settings of the singer’s early life there, was released in 1982.Mr. Whittaker found his greatest European success in Germany. While he admitted he could not speak German at first, he sang and recorded in German “phonetically,” as he put it, until he became more fluent. He matured into one of Germany’s favorite singers, selling 10 million albums there.He also had a devoted following in the United States, where he was best known for “I Don’t Believe in ‘If’ Anymore” (1970); his version of “Wind Beneath My Wings” (1982); and “New World in the Morning” (1971), the title track of an album that also included “The Last Farewell” and “A Special Kind of Man.”“Women do not throw underclothes or room keys onstage at his concerts,” Diane White said in a sweet-and-sour appreciation in The Boston Globe. “No one gets high. No one gets hysterical with excitement. And yet Roger Whittaker is one of the most popular entertainers in the world.”Alex Marshall More
Build a real music collection. Reintroduce intimacy to the songs you care about.The only music-streaming account I’ve ever had lasted less than 72 hours in 2012. In 2023, I’m still building a non-streaming music collection, shelling out hard cash for what the streaming industry has convinced consumers should be free. As a very online millennial, that makes me somewhat of an anomaly among my peers. I know it’s a privilege for me to pooh-pooh streaming — after all, for those with less disposable income than I have, it offers access to enormous music libraries at little to no cost. But even for those who can afford to purchase music, the concept of paying for songs is a foreign one to many of us.People like me, who came of age in the decade after Apple introduced iTunes and before Spotify took over the market, belong to what is probably the last generation to remember what it was like to own a music collection that doesn’t live in the cloud. Maybe that’s why I never latched onto streaming services — I didn’t like depending on a third-party platform, or being part of a social experiment that feeds Spotify data that it then sells to advertisers. There’s also the matter of fair pay: Streams are the slowest way for musicians to earn money, at fractions of pennies per stream. Most important, though, I don’t like how streaming feels — like I’m only borrowing something for a while, rather than having a handpicked library of albums (digital or physical) that I’ve vetted and can keep forever.I was still using iTunes until 2019, when Apple decided to sunset the app and replace it with a new media player called Music (not to be confused with Apple Music, the streaming service). The appeal of the app remains the same: a media player where I can see my entire music library hosted on my local machine rather than in the cloud. In fact, I have several libraries across different devices and drives that — much to my dismay — all differ from one another slightly. What I lack in portability, I make up for in security. Once I add something to my iTunes library, I have it forever. I have no fear of platforms’ removing artists, or of artists’ removing themselves.When I started this journey in grade school, I, like many of my peers, got around the new order via dubious means. I started by importing CDs I found at the library (the “Juno” soundtrack, anyone?) to my hard drive. I graduated to downloading MP3s online in the heyday of music blogs (“Bitte Orca,” by the band Dirty Projectors, darlings of the hype machine) and searching Google for compressed files. I was a D.J. at my college’s radio station, where we shared files and browsed the station’s racks for CDs we could rip, all to fatten up our iTunes libraries.These days I’m paying for nearly all my music, and have become more selective when adding to my collection. I lean into Bandcamp for MP3s. The platform’s low barrier to entry allows nearly anyone to share and sell their music, whether they have a distributor or not — a limiting requirement for most major streaming platforms. Bandcamp is also possibly the best way to give the most money to small artists, aside from picking up a T-shirt from the merch table. If something isn’t available on Bandcamp, I’ll scope out used CDs to buy and rip. If I love something enough, I’ll try to get the record. If it’s out of print, I’ll throw it on my wish list and cross my fingers for a reissue. At the end of the day, the goal is to have something to hold onto: a digital file, a CD, a record, anything other than an ephemeral stream.This isn’t always convenient: Depriving myself of streaming means there’s no easy way for me to repeatedly listen to a song without a deeper monetary commitment; but for me, listening to music is not about convenience so much as engagement. Resisting Spotify pushes me to actively find new music, as opposed to sitting through Discover Weekly playlists generated by an algorithm. I tune into local college stations, or online stations like the London-based NTS Radio network, and go down rabbit holes on YouTube, whose algorithm can still surprise me as long as I give it the right seeds. YouTube can be the most reliable platform for obscure finds, like live sets or rips of small-production seven-inches lost to time (I’m still trying to find out more about Naming Mary, a not-so-S.E.O.-friendly ’90s shoegaze band with little to no internet presence that surfaced after several recommended videos).This process of discovery has created a stash of albums that is dwarfed by Spotify’s bloated world of curated playlists and anarchic algorithmic “radio stations.” I prefer it that way. When everyone has access to everything, nothing is stamped with the personal memories — the particulars that hold our experience of music together. I don’t need the entirety of recorded music at my fingertips. I just need the few curated albums that I cared enough about to collect. Having my own library means I can distinctly remember the context of every find, and that makes my intimacy with the songs I care about — the ones I can mentally fill in when one earbud falls out as I’m tying my shoes — feel especially rich.Denise Lu is a visual journalist at Bloomberg News. She has previously worked for The New York Times and The Washington Post. More
In story and song at the Café Carlyle in Manhattan, the star makes sense of a career that has included chaste nights with George Michael and drama with her mother.“Most of the time, I’m halfway content.”Those words are Bob Dylan’s, and they were delivered one night last week by Brooke Shields during her sold-out debut show at the Café Carlyle, the intimate Manhattan supper club where Bobby Short, Elaine Stritch and Debbie Harry have performed.It was five months after Ms. Shields had returned to the spotlight with “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields,” an acclaimed documentary that chronicled the ups and downs of a career that got its start in the 1970s, when she was a child model and actress marketed as a sex symbol.A number of celebrities came out to see her at the venue, which is blocks away from the Upper East Side apartment where she grew up. At a table close to the stage were the actors Naomi Watts, Billy Crudup and Laura Dern. Nearby sat Mariska Hargitay, with whom Ms. Shields has worked with on “Law & Order: SVU.” The crowd also included two men who had done cabaret at the Carlyle: Isaac Mizrahi, who designed the loosefitting orange dress Ms. Shields was wearing, and Alan Cumming.Whether by design or chance, Ms. Shields, 58, has reflected the mood of the times across her nearly five-decade career. In the louche, druggie ’70s, she starred (at age 11) in “Pretty Baby,” the Louis Malle film about a romantic relationship between an adult man and a child prostitute. In the striving, just-say-no ’80s, she graduated from Princeton and wrote a self-help book for teenagers in which she discussed her decision to remain a virgin.The celebrity guests at the show included, from left, Laura Dern, Billy Crudup and Naomi Watts.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesIn the next decade she starred on Broadway (in a revival of “Grease”), displayed a talent for pratfalls in a hit sitcom (“Suddenly Susan”), and married and divorced a tennis star (Andre Agassi). In 2001, she married the comedy writer and filmmaker Chris Henchy, with whom she has had two children, and returned to the Broadway stage in “Chicago.” She has also found time to write memoirs and host a podcast, “Now What.”And Ms. Shields pointed out during the show that somewhere along the course of her varied career: “I performed at Sea World. With Lucille Ball.”Her Café Carlyle residency is scheduled to run through Sept. 23. Every night is sold out. On Tuesday, she opened with “I Think We’re Alone Now,” making it into an ironic lament about how she has rarely felt alone since her mother decided she would be a star.“I practically came out of the womb famous,” she said, during a spoken-word interlude. “They tell me the doctor asked for a selfie.”She also went through periods when career seemed to be over: “The other day,” she said from the stage, “I was in the airport and the flight attendant came up to me and said, ‘Oh my God, you’re Caitlyn Jenner!’”In “Fame Is Weird,” a song written for the show by Matthew Sklar and Amanda Green, she moved from her encounters with the public to her experiences with fellow celebrities. In the intro, she said she had turned down Donald J. Trump when he asked her out on a date, but soon conceded that she had consented to Elizabeth Taylor’s request that she pre-chew her gum.“I chewed it first,” Ms. Shields said, “so I got the better end of the deal.”Mariska Hargitay, seen here speaking with the actor Beth Ostrosky Stern, worked with Ms. Shields on the show “Law & Order: SVU.” Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesShe also recounted being mean girl-ed by some of he world’s best-known women. When she met Bette Davis at the Oscars, she said, “Hi, I’m Brooke Shields,” to which the star replied, “Yes, you are.” A similar encounter occurred when Ben Stiller brought her to Madonna’s house, Ms. Shields said. The greeting she received from Madonna was curt: “Oh, you.”In many ways, the show seemed like an effort by Ms. Shields to work through her ambivalence about having fallen closer to earth after the years of childhood and teenage stardom. In the second half, she roasted and paid tribute to her mother, Teri Shields, who in the ’70s and ’80s became a focal point for the culture’s misgivings about stage parenting and the sexualization of children in Hollywood.“She has been in the press almost more than I have,” Ms. Shields said, “and, probably, you all have your opinions of her.”She went on to note that life with her mother, who died in 2012, wasn’t all bad.“There was a lot of laughter and so much fun,” she said. “She would do really crazy things. She would see a dog tied outside of a store, waiting for their owner to come back, and she would get right down in front of the dog to say, ‘They’re never coming back.’ It was just so sick. It’s dark. But really funny.”She also acknowledged her mother’s alcoholism. “We named a cocktail at the bar for her. Actually, we named several for her,” Ms. Shields said, before getting serious about how much she missed her. She added that one reason she wanted to play the Carlyle was that it was a place her mother had taken her when she was young. “She would be really proud,” she said.With that, she launched into Mr. Dylan’s melancholy “Most of the Time.”Ms. Shields donned a cowboy hat to sing the Dolly Parton hit “9 to 5.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesMs. Shields, who appeared to have a cold, sounded a bit like Bob Dylan as her throat began to give out. She then moved into material about the trials and tribulations of being a wife tot Mr. Henchy, who was seated in the audience, and the mother of two teenage daughters, Rowan and Grier. While delivering Tina Dico’s “Count to Ten,” she apologized to a man seated close to the stage, who was catching much of her spit.Toward the end, she sang “Faith,” a 1987 hit by someone she knew, George Michael. She delivered the lyrics with conviction while also using the song to make a cheeky reference to the nights when she stepped out before the paparazzi in the role of the public girlfriend to Mr. Michael and Michael Jackson.After the applause, the fashion designer Christian Siriano offered a quick review: “She was great, even though she clearly has Covid.”Moments later, Ms. Shields emerged from her dressing room and went through some quick hellos with friends and well-wishers. A waiter asked her what she would like to drink. “Tequila,” she said, before moving to a corner table for a chat with a reporter.Told of Mr. Siriano’s thoughts, she said, “I don’t have Covid!” But she said she did have a respiratory ailment that had landed her in the hospital a few days before the show.Her vocal coach brought her cough drops. Publicists hovered. Ms. Shields explained that her cabaret show began taking shape in the spring. Working with the writer and director Nate Patten, as well as with the musical director Charlie Alterman, she said she wanted to put together an evening that would involve telling her own story truthfully while making it a source of comedy.Alan Cumming in the company of Ms. Dern.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesShe was aware that this was a difficult moment to humanize the people who decided it was appropriate for her to appear in a movie at age 11 as someone whose virginity was auctioned off. Yet her mother was still her mother, and she loved her.“Ambivalence is where real life happens,” she said. “I mean, the point of it all is that we’re not one thing or the other. We’re human beings, and we’re fraught.”Ms. Shields was asked about her experience with Mr. Trump.“I was making some movie in the late-90s,” she said. “My phone rang and it was him. He said, ‘You and I should date. You’re America’s sweetheart, and I’m the world’s richest man. People will love it.’ At which point I stifled laughter and said, ‘Thank you, I’m very flattered, but I have a boyfriend and I don’t think he would appreciate me stepping out on him.’ And he said, ‘Well, I think you’re making a big mistake.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m going to have to take my chances.’”Did she not know that George Michael was gay? And did they really go on a date?“A few,” she said. “He was very respectful of my virginity.”“Read the book!” a publicist yelled, referring to “There Was a Little Girl,” the 2014 memoir in which she tells the tale.Ms. Shields added that, despite the appearance that her relationships with Mr. Michael and Mr. Jackson seemed merely for show, she had real bonds with both of them.“We had so much fun,” she said. “I wasn’t just a purpose, as a beard. It actually was more than that. The conversations, the fears, the discussions.”The talk turned to her podcast — in which she has spoken with Stacey Abrams, Rosie O’Donnell, Chelsea Handler and Kris Jenner — and the one person she has been itching to get: Britney Spears, who hasn’t given in an interview in years.“I tried very hard to find a way to be the first actual interview,” Ms. Shields said. “And I haven’t gotten it. But I am the only person who could do justice to the reality of the story. Whatever it is.” More
Global performers including Angelique Kidjo, Laurie Anderson and José Feliciano will inaugurate the theater at ground zero.The first public events at the new $500 million Perelman Performing Arts Center, the opulent new theater near the site of the World Trade Center, are deliberately laden with symbolism. The center is opening its doors with five shows on Sept. 19-23, collectively titled “Refuge: A Concert Series to Welcome the World.”Each concert offers a different kind of refuge as its theme: Home, Faith, School, Family and Memory. Home (Sept. 19) presents musicians who gravitated from around the world to New York City; Family (Sept. 22) has sibling and multigenerational groups. School (Sept. 21) features musicians who have made education an integral part of their work.The series affirms the city’s diversity with an international lineup that includes Grammy-winning stars — Angélique Kidjo on Sept. 19, Common on Sept. 21, José Feliciano on Sept. 23 — along with lesser-known musicians dedicated to preserving and extending deep-rooted traditions. The program for Devotion: Faith As Refuge, on Sept. 20, includes klezmer music from the Klezmatics, electronic transformations of Afro-Cuban Yoruba incantations by Ìfé and Moroccan Sufi trance music from Innov Gnawa.Two decades after the Sept. 11 attack, the center’s artistic director, Bill Rauch, describes the Perelman’s mission as “civic healing.”“We want to say that everyone is welcome,” Mr. Rauch said. “There’s a lot of trauma and resilience on our part of the island that we want to honor. You know, there were 93 countries represented in the people who lost their lives on 9/11. And so it’s important that we welcome as many different artists and audiences into our building as possible.”The Perelman joins a New York City arts landscape full of big-budget performing-arts institutions, from Lincoln Center to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to the Shed. Is the scene too crowded? “When every man, woman and child who lives in the five boroughs of New York City has a life that is saturated in performing arts, then we can begin to talk about whether there’s too much,” Mr. Rauch said.The center’s artistic director, Bill Rauch, describes the Perelman’s mission as “civic healing.”Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesAngélique Kidjo alongside the dancer Supaman on Sept. 14, opening night at the Perelman.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesAlthough the new arts center is a monumental marble cube with elaborate technological underpinnings — theaters that can be configured more than five dozen ways, sitting on foot-thick rubber supports to insulate them from subway noise — the tickets for the inaugural shows were priced pay-what-you-will from $15-120. Most of the concerts are sold out, but some will also feature free after-parties in the Perelman’s public lobby. Forró in the Dark, which plays upbeat music from Northeastern Brazil, follows the Sept. 19 show. The center plans frequent free lobby performances.Arturo O’Farrill, the pianist who leads the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, is performing on Sept. 20 in the “School as Refuge” concert. He founded the Afro Latin Jazz Alliance, which provides instruments and music lessons to public-school students in New York City. When the center was being built, Mr. O’Farrill was part of an advisory committee of artists; he urged the center to pay close attention to acoustics. “I found it incredibly welcoming to artists’ voices,” Mr. O’Farrill said. “That’s not always the case with institutions.”He added, “Bill’s a very forward-looking person. This programing is about community. He’s a very thoughtful man, and he’s looking to expand the conversation on what performing arts is, what elitism does to the arts. He’s not interested in perpetuating elitism.”Laurie Anderson, who is to perform on Sept. 19, is pragmatic but hopeful about the center’s future. “Sometimes a place opens and it never finds its audience,” she said. “I always like it when it’s opened up to the people who live in the neighborhood, but nobody lives in that neighborhood — it’s mostly abandoned offices now. So how do you make a community out of a bunch of empty offices? We’ll see. Maybe you make it by bringing music that’s just so incredible that everybody wants to get on the subway and go down there. That would be great.”Ms. Kidjo, the clarion-voiced singer and songwriter whose albums have connected West African music to the Americas and Europe, was enthusiastic about the center’s inaugural statement. “We are all refugees from somewhere,” she said. In 1983, she fled to Paris from the dictatorship in her homeland, Benin; she now lives in Brooklyn. “I think that each one of us, we have the responsibility and the duty to welcome somebody that is in a dire situation. For a performing arts center to support that speaks straight to my heart. Because everybody needs a place to put your load down and say, ‘I’ve found a place.’She added, “We have a special status after what happened on 9/11 — to prove our openness to the rest of the world. And we have the place called the Perelman Center right next to ground zero that is open to the whole world. It’s just the beginning. We have to live up to the promise.” More
The singer, who appeared on the hit track “Where My Girls At?,” took a “medical leave of absence” from the group late last year; a cause of death was not immediately available.Irish Grinstead, a member of the R&B trio 702, known for its 1999 hit “Where My Girls At?,” died on Saturday evening at the age of 43, according to her sister.A cause of death was not immediately available, but the group announced in December that Irish Grinstead was taking a “medical leave of absence due to serious medical issues.”LeMisha Grinstead, Irish Grinstead’s sister and bandmate, said in an Instagram post announcing her death that she had “had a long battle and is finally at peace.”“That girl was as bright as the stars! She was not only beautiful on the outside, but also within,” LeMisha Grinstead wrote. “Sharing the stage with her was a joy I will cherish for the rest of my life!”Members of 702 (from left): Kameelah Williams, LeMisha Grinstead and Irish Grinstead attending the Teen Choice Awards in 1999.Ron Galella Collection via Getty ImagesThe Grinstead sisters and Kameelah Williams comprised 702, which was named for the telephone area code in Las Vegas, where they were from.“Devastated & heartbroken,” Ms. Williams wrote in an Instagram post on Sunday. “There’s a lot I want to say, but there’s no way to say what your heart hasn’t fully accepted.”The group’s 1996 debut album, “No Doubt,” included a song called “Steelo,” featuring Missy Elliott. A version of the track was the theme song for the Nickelodeon show “Cousin Skeeter.” The song was also sampled in a 2019 dance music hit produced by Diplo.“Irish May your beautiful soul Rest Peacefully in the arms of the Lord,” Ms. Elliot wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Sunday. “Multitude of prayers for the entire Grinstead family.”702’s defining hit was “Where My Girls At?,” which peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1999, according to Billboard.As news of Irish Grinstead’s death circulated, fan tributes flooded social media in the form of music video clips featuring Irish Grinstead dancing alongside her sister and Ms. Williams in distinctive ’90s glam and choreography.The group released its last album, “Star,” 20 years ago but continued to perform shows, with several scheduled through the rest of this year.Irish Grinstead’s twin sister, Orish Grinstead, died in 2008, according to IMDb. More
The Rolling Stone co-founder’s exit comes a day after The New York Times published an interview in which he made widely criticized comments.Jann Wenner, the co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine, has been removed from the board of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, which he also helped found, one day after an interview with him was published in The New York Times in which he made comments that were widely criticized as sexist and racist.The foundation — which inducts artists into the hall of fame and was the organization behind the creation of its affiliated museum in Cleveland — made the announcement in a brief statement released Saturday.“Jann Wenner has been removed from the board of directors of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation,” the statement said. Joel Peresman, the president and chief executive of the foundation, declined to comment further when reached by phone.But the dismissal of Mr. Wenner comes after an interview with The Times, published Friday and timed to the publication of his new book, called “The Masters,” which collects his decades of interviews with rock legends like Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen and Bono — all of them white and male.In the interview, David Marchese of The Times asked Mr. Wenner, 77, why the book included no women or people of color.Regarding women, Mr. Wenner said, “Just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level,” and remarked that Joni Mitchell “was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ roll.”His answer about artists of color was less direct. “Of Black artists — you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right?” he said. “I suppose when you use a word as broad as ‘masters,’ the fault is using that word. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level.”Mr. Wenner’s comments drew an immediate reaction, with his quotes mocked on social media and past criticisms unearthed of Rolling Stone’s coverage of female artists under Mr. Wenner. Joe Hagan, who in 2017 wrote a harshly critical biography of Mr. Wenner, “Sticky Fingers,” cited a comment by the feminist critic Ellen Willis, who in 1970 called the magazine “viciously anti-woman.”Mr. Wenner did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday evening.Mr. Wenner founded Rolling Stone in 1967 with the music critic Ralph J. Gleason and made it the pre-eminent music magazine of its time, with deep coverage of rock music as well as politics and current events. Much of it was written by stars of the “new journalism” movement of the 1960s and ’70s like Hunter S. Thompson. Mr. Gleason died in 1975.Mr. Wenner sold the magazine over a series of transactions completed in 2020, and he officially left it in 2019. Last year, he published a memoir, “Like a Rolling Stone.”Mr. Wenner was also part of a group of music and media executives that founded the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation in 1983, and inducted its first class in 1986; its affiliated museum, in Cleveland, opened in 1995. Mr. Wenner himself was inducted in 2004 as a nonperformer.The Rock Hall has been criticized for the relative few women and minority artists who have been inducted over the years. According to one scholar, by 2019 just 7.7 percent of the individuals in the hall were women. But some critics have applauded recent changes, and the newest class of inductees includes Kate Bush, Sheryl Crow and Missy Elliott, along with George Michael, Willie Nelson, Rage Against the Machine and the Spinners. More
Taking over for his father in 1961, he transformed a former vaudeville house in Harlem into a pre-eminent R&B showcase.Bobby Schiffman, who guided the Apollo Theater in Harlem through the seismic cultural and musical changes of the 1960s and early ’70s, cementing its place as a world-renowned showcase for Black music and entertainment, died on Sept. 6 at his home in Boynton Beach, Fla. He was 94.His death was confirmed by his son, Howard.In 1961, Mr. Schiffman inherited the reins of the storied neoclassical Apollo Theater on West 125th Street in Manhattan from his father, Frank Schiffman. The elder Mr. Schiffman, along with a financial partner, Leo Brecher, had taken over the theater — a former burlesque house that opened in 1914 as a whites-only establishment — in 1935.Frank Schiffman transformed the theater from a vaudeville house hosting acts like Al Jolson and the Marx Brothers into an epicenter for Black artists performing for largely Black audiences in an era of de facto cultural segregation. During the 1930s and ’40s, the elder Mr. Schiffman provided early exposure to countless African American luminaries, including Count Basie, Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington.Frank Schiffman was respected and feared for his fierce competitiveness. “In Harlem show business circles he was God — a five-foot-nine-inch, white, Jewish, balding, bespectacled deity,” the music writer Ted Fox observed in his 1983 book, “Showtime at the Apollo.”Bobby, the younger of his two sons, was more affable and easygoing, but lacked none of his father’s drive or ambition.“I don’t think Bobby Schiffman gets enough credit for being a great impresario,” Mr. Fox said in a phone interview. “Through enormous changes in musical tastes, styles and culture in general, he kept the theater going, doing 31 shows a week, seven days a week, year after year for decades, in a way that no other theater has ever been able to do.”His father had run the theater along the old vaudeville model, as a venue for variety shows. “Frank was old school,” Howard Schiffman said of his grandfather in a phone interview. “He was like Ed Sullivan. He thought that there should be a juggler and an animal act on every show.”Mr. Schiffman, second from left, with his father, Frank Schiffman; the tap dancer Honi Coles, who worked for many years as the Apollo’s production manager; and, standing, Mercer Ellington, Duke Ellington’s son and later the leader of the Ellington orchestra. Mr. Schiffman took over the Apollo from his father in 1961.via Apollo Theater“My father,” he added, “turned the Apollo into the R&B showcase that it became.”Faced with keeping the lights on at a compact 1,500-seat theater with little financial cushion, Bobby Schiffman “made it his business to find out what the people in the streets were listening to,” Mr. Fox said.“He would go into the bars and see what was on the jukebox,” he added, “he would talk to local D.J.s and record store owners to find out what was coming out, and book them while they were still unknown.”Winners of the theater’s famous and long-running Wednesday Amateur Night during Mr. Schiffman’s tenure included Gladys Knight, Ronnie Spector, Jimi Hendrix and the Jackson 5.By providing support and exposure, he nurtured young stars “before they became superstars,” Mr. Fox said, “and would later appeal to them to appear, at great financial sacrifice, to come back and play for the people who made them.”During the years Mr. Schiffman managed the Apollo, it became a symbol of arrival to generations of performers. “It was the pinnacle,” the Motown star Smokey Robinson once said.Tyrone Dukes/The New York TimesDuring Mr. Schiffman’s tenure as manager, the Apollo served not only as a launching pad to fame but also, eventually, as a symbol of arrival to generations of performers. “It was the pinnacle,” the Motown star Smokey Robinson once said. “It was the most important theater in the world. Once you could say you had played the Apollo, you could get in any door anywhere.”The Apollo’s reputation went global, thanks in part to hit live recordings made there by stars like James Brown, an Apollo regular, who recorded the landmark album “‘Live’ at the Apollo” in October 1962. Widely regarded as one of the great live albums, it hit No. 6 on the Billboard chart in 1963 and remained in the Top 10 for 39 weeks.The Apollo’s reputation went global thanks in part to albums like James Brown’s “‘Live’ at the Apollo,” which spent 39 weeks in the Billboard Top 10 in 1963.King“For years,” Mr. Schiffman said in a 2014 interview with The Daily News in New York, “you could write ‘Apollo Theater’ on a postcard, drop it into a mailbox anywhere and it would be delivered. How many theaters can you say that about?”Robert Lee Schiffman was born on Feb. 12, 1929, in Manhattan, the youngest of Frank and Lee Schiffman’s three children.He grew up in Mount Vernon, N.Y., a suburb north of the city, where he attended A.B. Davis High School with Dick Clark, the future host of “American Bandstand.”After earning a bachelor’s degree in business from New York University, Mr. Schiffman spent the early 1950s working his way up the ladder at the Apollo. “He did every terrible job in the place, from cleaning bathrooms to taking tickets,” his son said.During Mr. Schiffman’s heyday at the Apollo in the 1960s, his office functioned as a nerve center for Black culture. Local politicians like Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and sports stars like Muhammad Ali would drop by for a chat.By the 1970s, however, Harlem was being increasingly buffeted by drugs, crime and economic decline, and the live-music business was changing. With color barriers in music breaking down, the Apollo was unable to maintain its lure for artists who had become arena-packing juggernauts.“The big stars would say, ‘We love you, Bobby, but we can play the Apollo and sell 1,500 tickets or play Madison Square Garden and sell 18,000,’” Howard Schiffman said.Mr. Schiffman finally shuttered the theater in 1976. The Apollo reopened under new management in 1978 but closed again the next year. In 1981, the media and technology executive Percy E. Sutton, a former Manhattan borough president, purchased the theater with a group of investors. It was declared a state and city landmark in 1983, and in 1991 it was taken over by the Apollo Theater Foundation, a nonprofit organization.Mr. Schiffman later oversaw the Westchester Premier Theater in Tarrytown, N.Y., before retiring to Florida.In addition to his son, from his marriage to Joan Landy, which ended in divorce in 1973, he is survived by his fourth wife, Betsy (Rothman) Schiffman; his stepsons from that marriage, Barry and Michael Rothman; six grandchildren; and two great-grandsons. His marriages to Renee Levy and Rusty Donner also ended in divorce.While the Apollo became famous for its stars and spectacle, Mr. Schiffman never forgot its unique role as a locus for Harlem life.“We were in the business of pleasing the Black community,” he said in an interview for the book “Showtime at the Apollo.” “If white folks came as an ancillary benefit, that was fine. But the basic motto was to bring the people of the community entertainment they wanted at a price they could afford to pay.”When he overstepped his bounds, the community let him know. “The highest price I ever charged was six dollars,” Mr. Schiffman added. “I tried seven for Redd Foxx once, and they stayed away in droves.” More
