music

Subterms

    Latest story

    150 Shares18 Views

    Joe DePugh, Pitcher Who Inspired Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Glory Days,’ Dead at 75

    by

    A gifted athlete, he gave a clumsy teenage Bruce Springsteen his first nickname, Saddie. Years later, the Boss returned the favor, memorializing him in a song.Joe DePugh, the Little League teammate of Bruce Springsteen who inspired the rocker’s hit song “Glory Days,” a rousing, bittersweet anthem to their hardscrabble childhoods in Freehold, N.J., where time passed by “in the wink of a young girl’s eye,” died on Friday in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 75.The cause of death, in a hospice facility, was metastatic prostate cancer, his brother Paul said.In the early 1960s, before Mr. Springsteen became the Boss, he was a clumsy baseball player whose athletic abilities were so sad that Joe, the team’s star pitcher, gave him the nickname Saddie.“Bruce lost this big game for us one year,” Mr. DePugh told The Palm Beach Post in 2011. “We stuck him out in right field all the time, where you think he’s out of harm’s way. But this important game, we had a bunch of guys missing, and we had to play him.”In the last inning, Saddie dropped an easy fly ball.“Actually, it hit him on the head,” Mr. DePugh said, “and we lost the game.”They remained friends in high school, bonding over their turbulent home lives and their distant, alcoholic fathers. After graduation, Saddie took off to play rock ’n’ roll in bars and nightclubs. Joe, who excelled at multiple sports, tried out for the Los Angeles Dodgers but wound up playing basketball at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.In 1973, when they had been out of touch for years, these two boyhood friends bumped into each other at the Headliner, a roadside bar in Neptune, near the Jersey Shore. Mr. Springsteen was walking in; Mr. DePugh was walking out.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 150 Shares39 Views

      in Music

      Johnny Mathis Is Retiring From Touring After Almost 70 Years of Crooning

      by

      Mr. Mathis, 89, a pioneer of romantic ballads, is leaving the stage because of his age and memory problems, his website said.Johnny Mathis, a pop music singer and one of the best-selling recording artists of the 20th century, said this week that he would perform only four more live concerts before retiring from touring after nearly 70 years.Known for his “velvet voice” on romantic ballads like “It’s Not for Me to Say” and “Wonderful! Wonderful!” Mr. Mathis has been singing standards and soft rock since his teenage years, but he started touring professionally after his debut album was released in 1956.Mr. Mathis, 89, will pick up the microphone for shows in April and May, but his concerts scheduled for the summer and fall have been canceled.“It’s with sincere regret that due to Mr. Mathis’s age and memory issues which have accelerated, we are announcing his retirement from touring and live concerts,” a statement posted on his website said.Mr. Mathis’s final concert is scheduled for May 18 at the Bergen Performing Arts Center in Englewood, N.J. The other concerts are April 10 in Shippensburg, Pa.; April 26 in Shipshewana, Ind.; and May 10 in Santa Rosa, Calif.Some tickets remain available for his final concerts, his website noted, and refunds will be issued for the ones that were canceled.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares62 Views

      in Music

      Sean Kingston and His Mother Are Convicted in $1 Million Fraud Scheme

      by

      Mr. Kingston, who is best known for his 2007 hit single “Beautiful Girls,” and his mother were charged with defrauding sellers of high-end vehicles, jewelry and other goods, prosecutors said.A jury in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., convicted the rapper Sean Kingston and his mother on Friday in a scheme involving more than $1 million worth of fraud, according to prosecutors.Mr. Kingston, 35, whose real name is Kisean Anderson, and his mother, Janice Turner, 62, both of Southwest Ranches, Fla., had been charged with five counts of wire fraud.They essentially took possession of high-end vehicles, jewelry and other goods by pretending to have paid for them through the use of fraudulent documents, according to the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of Florida.Each faces a maximum of 20 years in prison on each count, prosecutors said. The defendants are scheduled to be sentenced in July.Ms. Turner, who testified during the trial, was taken into federal custody on Friday. Her lawyer, Humberto Dominguez, said on Saturday morning that they will appeal the verdict.Mr. Kingston, who did not testify, was allowed to post bond of a home valued at $500,000 and $200,000 in cash, but will remain in home detention with electronic monitoring. His lawyer, Zeljka Bozanic, said on Saturday that she was thankful that Mr. Kingston was allowed to remain out on bond but added that they will also file an appeal.As a 17-year-old, Mr. Kingston became known for his debut single, “Beautiful Girls,” which used a sample from Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me.” It was ranked at No. 1 for four weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 2007.“He spent his childhood in Jamaica, which gave him his stage name and his command of patois,” the critic Kelefa Sanneh wrote in The New York Times in 2007, “but his version of thug love (‘Girl, I know it’s rough, but come with me/We can take a trip to the ’hood’) makes it sound as if he’s trying too hard, or not hard enough.”Mr. Kingston’s home in Southwest Ranches, Fla., west of Fort Lauderdale.Amy Beth Bennett/The South Florida Sun Sentinel, via Associated PressAccording to prosecutors, Mr. Kingston and Ms. Turner “unjustly enriched themselves” by falsely claiming that they had executed bank wire or other monetary transfers as payment for vehicles, jewelry and other high-end items when no such transfers had taken place.It added up to a property haul of more than $1 million, prosecutors said.Mr. Kingston and Ms. Turner were accused of an “organized scheme to defraud” establishments, including a car dealership and a jeweler, of more than $50,000, according to arrest warrants for them.Mr. Kingston and Ms. Turner were also accused of stealing a Cadillac Escalade from the dealership and $480,000 in jewelry from an individual, according to the warrants.Ms. Turner pleaded guilty in 2006 to charges of bank fraud and filing fraudulent loan applications and was sentenced to 16 months in prison, according to court records. She was released in March 2007. More

    • 163 Shares71 Views

      in Theater

      How ‘Buena Vista Social Club’ Brings a Beloved Song to Life on Broadway

      by

      One night in 1984, Compay Segundo, the Cuban singer and guitarist, heard in his dreams what would become his signature song.“I woke up hearing those four sensitive notes,” Segundo recalled later on. “I gave them a lyric inspired by a children’s tale from my childhood, ‘Juanica y Chan Chan.’”A hypnotic account of peasant life in Cuba, “Chan Chan” has a peculiar power, with four circular, mesmerizing opening chords that make it instantly recognizable. It gained a regional following when it was cut by the guitarist and singer Eliades Ochoa. But a recording of the song, in 1996, by a group of celebrated Cuban musicians who had been assembled for an album to be called “Buena Vista Social Club,” would become a phenomenon.Now more than 25 years after its release, the best-selling world music album of all time has made it to Broadway in a new musical also titled “Buena Vista Social Club.” “Chan Chan” is among eight of the album’s 10 songs featured in the show and, perhaps not surprising for such a dramatic and mysterious track, it plays a crucial role in a pivotal moment in the story.During the “Chan Chan” number, the young singer Omara (Isa Antonetti) is deciding whether to leave Cuba with her sister or remain in Havana and perform the traditional music that has a hold on her heart.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs the album of mostly older Cuban standards became a global sensation upon its release in 1997, Segundo’s song — about sifting sand by the sea and clearing a straw path along a journey to Cuban towns — became a standout all its own. “Chan Chan” was never released as a single, but the opening track has been streamed more than 250 million times on Spotify, almost three times more than anything else on the album. (That number is roughly the same as Toni Braxton’s “Un-Break My Heart” and Hanson’s “MMMBop,” both No. 1 hits in 1997.) More

    • 138 Shares105 Views

      in Movies

      The Brooklyn Academy of Music Is Fighting to Regain its Mojo

      by

      It is the sort of buzzy production that was once a staple of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire,” with its Oscar-nominated lead man, Paul Mescal, has people clamoring for tickets to BAM’s production this month.The excitement recalls a period when the performing arts center consistently drew crowds to see imports like the Royal Shakespeare Company or cutting-edge work by directors like Peter Brook, composers like Philip Glass or choreographers like Pina Bausch and Martha Graham.Over the past decade, though, critics say the academy’s pioneering triumphs have been scarcer, the schedule thinner and the productions more modest.BAM’s financial condition, while improving, is still fragile. In the five years ending in June 2024, the staff declined by more than a third, the endowment lost ground and its nearly $52 million operating budget is still smaller than it was 10 years ago.“Their inability to drive revenues and manage cost escalation makes it harder to pursue their artistic mission,” Declan Webb, a consultant to nonprofit arts organizations, said in a recent interview. “You have to do less and you’re much more risk-averse and that is not a recipe for artistic growth.”In 2016, Mikhail Baryshnikov appeared in “Letter to a Man,” based on the diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky, the dancer, and directed by Robert Wilson.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares79 Views

      in Music

      Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Environmental Music Is Enchanting a New Generation

      by

      The Japanese musician, who wasn’t widely known before his death in 2003, has become a beacon for listeners on YouTube and beyond.When listeners discover the Japanese musician and visual artist Hiroshi Yoshimura for the first time, the experience is often a revelation. “I noticed how it activated everything,” said Dustin Wong, the experimental guitarist. “It was extremely generous.”Patrick Shiroishi, the inventive Los Angeles-based instrumentalist, called Yoshimura a “god-level composer and musician who sits with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Christian Vander and John Coltrane and Bela Bartok for me. They are so themselves.”Yoshimura released most of his gentle and reflective albums of kankyō ongaku, or environmental music, during the 1980s and ’90s. A descendant of Erik Satie’s furniture music and a cousin to Brian Eno’s ambient explorations, Yoshimura’s work put more of an emphasis on melody and warmth than its Western contemporaries. His compositions are often grounded by a soothing, vibrating hum underscoring largely electronic notes that fall like a pleasant weekend rainstorm. The spaces he created in his minimal, synthesizer-laden compositions allowed sounds from the outside world to exist harmoniously within the pieces. It’s music that doesn’t demand too much of your attention, but rewards close listening.During his lifetime, Yoshimura remained a relatively obscure figure to those outside Japan. In recent years, his global audience has grown significantly, thanks in part to a series of reissues that have brought his music to streaming platforms for the first time. The latest, “Flora,” arrived on Thursday, the first day of spring, in a fitting tribute to how devotion to Yoshimura’s music and philosophy continues to bloom.As contemporary listeners seek relaxing or meditative sounds, YouTube’s algorithm has turned unofficial uploads of Yoshimura albums like “Wet Land” and “Green” into favorites.Nuvola Yoko YoshimuraMany of Yoshimura’s recordings were created to be played at specific sites, like the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, or inside a range of prefabricated homes. “Flora” is a bit of mystery within his catalog. It was released only on CD in 2006, three years after his death at 63, from skin cancer. The scant information Yoshimura left behind about it included only its title, the song names and that it was from 1987 — the year after he released two of his most beloved collections, “Surround” and “Green.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares118 Views

      in Music

      Touring Kennedy Center, Trump Mused on His Childhood ‘Aptitude for Music’

      by

      During his first visit to the Kennedy Center since making himself the chairman of its board, President Trump had a lot to say about Broadway shows, dancers in silk tights, the Potomac River and Elvis Presley.But in a private discussion at the start of a meeting of the center’s board on Monday, Mr. Trump offered something he usually steers away from in bigger settings: a personal anecdote about his childhood.He told the assembled board members that in his youth he had shown special abilities in music after taking aptitude tests ordered by his parents, according to three participants in the meeting.He could pick out notes on the piano, he told the board members, some of whom he’s known for years and others who are relatively new to him. But the president said that his father, Fred Trump, was not pleased by his musical abilities, according to the participants, and that he had never developed his talent. One person in the room said Mr. Trump appeared to be joking about his father. “I have a high aptitude for music,” he said at one point, according to people at the meeting. “Can you believe that?”“That’s why I love music,” he added. Mr. Trump’s remarks have not been previously reported. They were not part of an audio recording of the board meeting obtained by The New York Times earlier this week.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares73 Views

      in Music

      Yasuaki Shimizu, a Japanese Sax Master, Takes North America

      by

      The composer and saxophonist Yasuaki Shimizu is at home in free jazz, classical and art pop. Finally touring North America, he’s going big by staying small.Halfway through “Bye Bye Kipling,” Nam June Paik’s mash-up of music and video graphics from 1986, the camera pans to a tenor sax player as he leaps through “Tribute to N.J.P.” with its composer, Ryuichi Sakamoto, behind him on piano, conjuring a blend of Shostakovich and Keith Jarrett.The two musicians had joined Paik’s project, which was simultaneously broadcast from New York and Tokyo, to help rebut Rudyard Kipling’s line, “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”The twain meets again this week, when that saxophonist, Yasuaki Shimizu, embarks on his first North American tour, starting at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, Thursday and Friday, before going on to Chicago, Toronto, California and Seattle. And on Saturday, at the Metrograph theater on the Lower East Side, Shimizu will introduce four films that he scored, including “Bye Bye Kipling.”For a musician whose inventive arrangements of Bach and whose TV and movie scores have made him a minor celebrity in Japan, the tour is long overdue. (He last performed in the United States in the 1970s.)Shimizu at work in Kanagawa. Kentaro Takahashi for The New York TimesA career retrospective, it should give audiences a taste of Shimizu’s wide-ranging music. He has recorded some 40 albums in as many years — starting in the late 1970s with slick fusion boogie and progressive rock — and has been a prized sideman in the electronic and improvised scenes. With most of his recordings still out of print in the States, he has remained something of a cult figure here.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares146 Views

      in Music

      How Alison Krauss Found the Song That Rekindled Her Distinctive Band

      by

      After 14 years between albums, the singer and fiddler has regrouped Union Station to sing about darkness and light. The group is carrying on without a key member.Alison Krauss never stops searching for songs. But she only records them when she’s ready.“She does it 24/7/365,” said Barry Bales, the bassist in her band Union Station since 1990. “She’s on the lookout for songs, and she’s a song hoarder. She’ll hear a song she likes, and it may never see the light of day for 15, 20 years. But she’ll remember it.”A decade after Krauss’s last tour with Union Station, and 14 years after the band’s previous studio album, the singer and fiddler has reconvened the group for “Arcadia,” an album due Friday. “I’ve been gathering tunes for this since the last time we recorded,” Krauss, 53, said in a video interview from the Doghouse, a Nashville studio where she has recorded for decades. “I’m just waiting for the first song to show up, until ‘Ah, here it is — it’s time to record.’ It’s always been that way.”That first song was Jeremy Lister’s “Looks Like the End of the Road,” a bitterly mournful waltz about disillusionment and despair: “The lines that were drawn a long time ago / Are buried and gone in lies and ego,” she sings. It sets the dark tone for “Arcadia,” an album of 10 tracks, all but two of them in minor keys, with lyrics full of bleak tidings. At the end, the album offers a glimpse of redemption in another Lister song: “There’s a Light Up Ahead.”When Krauss heard “Looks Like the End of the Road,” during the peak of the Covid pandemic, her intuition told her it was the starting point of that long-awaited album. “It just has to be the right timing, for things to be the most truthful representation,” she said. “Had I not found that song when I did, who knows when we would have gone in?”“Arcadia” reconvenes and reconfigures a band that has transformed the sound of modern bluegrass by constantly drawing new subtleties from old-time roots. Union Station can easily muster the quick-fingered virtuosity required for upbeat, foot-stomping bluegrass tunes that punctuate its albums and live sets. But what makes the band so distinctive is its quietly incandescent restraint: the hushed concentration it summons behind Krauss’s pristinely melancholy soprano, which can sound haunted even when she sings about true love.Union Station, from left: Ron Block, Jerry Douglas, Krauss, Russell Moore and Barry Bales.Allister Ann for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More