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      The Grammys Pay Tribute to Taylor Hawkins and Stephen Sondheim

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      The Grammy Awards took an extended moment to honor Taylor Hawkins, the Foo Fighters drummer who died just over a week ago while on tour with the band in Colombia.The show featured a compilation of photos and video footage from Hawkins’s career as a charismatic drummer known for his wide smile. Hawkins, who joined Foo Fighters in the ’90s, died at age 50. The band was scheduled to perform at the awards ceremony but pulled out after Hawkins’s death.Earlier in the night, Billie Eilish paid tribute to Hawkins when she performed in a T-shirt with the drummer’s image on it while singing her song “Happier Than Ever.”After the tribute to Hawkins, a quartet of musical-theater performers honored other musical luminaries who have died over the past year, including Stephen Sondheim, the iconic Broadway composer and lyricist who died in November. Singing a compilation of Sondheim songs, including “Send In the Clowns” and “Somewhere” were Ben Platt, Cynthia Erivo, Leslie Odom Jr. and Rachel Zegler, who played Maria in the recent Steven Spielberg-directed film adaptation of “West Side Story.”Those honored included Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones drummer; Wanda Young, one of the lead singers of the Motown group the Marvelettes; DMX, the top-selling rapper; Meat Loaf, the “Bat Out of Hell” singer; and Biz Markie, the rapper and producer. More

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      Trevor Noah Returns to Host the Grammys After a Dust-Up With Kanye West

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      Trevor Noah, the comedian and face of “The Daily Show,” is returning to host the Grammy Awards for the second year in a row. For the 2021 show, Noah was front and center at an unconventional Grammys, with some performances pretaped and the bulk of the ceremony held outside the Staples Center (now known as the Crypto.com Arena) in Los Angeles. “On the whole, Noah made something that could have felt like several competing shows feel like one,” The New York Times pop music critic Jon Caramanica wrote.This year, for another pandemic-delayed show, the coronavirus is one of a few delicate topics Noah may broach in his monologue. In the weeks before the event, he had a highly publicized clash with Kanye West, who is up for five awards and until recently was slated to perform at Sunday night’s ceremony.Noah devoted a segment of his March 15 show to a nearly 10-minute long, reportedly unscripted monologue on what he characterized as West’s harassment of his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian. West had released a Claymation video in which he appeared to kidnap and bury a figure resembling Pete Davidson, the “Saturday Night Live” comedian who has been dating Kardashian.“What she’s going through is terrifying to watch, and it shines a spotlight on what so many women go through when they choose to leave,” Noah said in the segment, comparing West’s behavior to the abuse he witnessed as a child. (Noah said from when he was 9 to 16 he witnessed his stepfather mistreat his mother; he later shot her.)Days after Noah’s monologue, West posted an image of Noah on his Instagram alongside a racial slur. Meta, which owns Instagram, soon banned West — who had also been posting long videos criticizing Kardashian and others — for 24 hours. Then, just two weeks before West was set to perform at the awards, organizers informed his team that he would not be allowed to take the stage.Noah appeared to object to the ban. “I said counsel Kanye, not cancel Kanye,” he tweeted.Noah is a Grammy nominee himself. His standup special “Trevor Noah: Son of Patricia” was nominated for best comedy album at the 2020 Grammys. He lost to Dave Chappelle’s “Sticks and Stones.” More

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      Bill Fries, Singer Known for 1970s Trucking Ballad ‘Convoy,’ Dies at 93

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      Mr. Fries, who performed under the stage name C.W. McCall, was an ad executive before he scored a hit with “Convoy,” a CB radio-inspired ode to renegade truckers.Bill Fries, the deep-voiced country singer known as C.W. McCall, who turned an ad campaign for an Iowa bread company into the outlaw trucker anthem, “Convoy,” which reached No. 1 on the charts in 1976 and inspired a Sam Peckinpah movie, died on Friday at his home in Ouray, Colo. He was 93.His death was confirmed by his son, Bill Fries III, who said his father had been in hospice care for about six months.Mr. Fries was working as an ad executive at Bozell & Jacobs in Omaha in the 1970s, when he helped to create a series of television commercials for Metz Baking Company about a trucker named C.W. McCall hauling Old Home bread in an eighteen-wheeler and a gum-snapping waitress named Mavis at the Old Home Filler-Up an’ Keep On A-Truckin’ Cafe.The ads — including one that ended with the tagline “Old Home is good buns” — became wildly popular and helped pump up Old Home bread sales as they told the story of a diesel-scented romance between Mavis and C.W., who spoke in a formidable twang voiced by Mr. Fries.“It was just amazing,” Mr. Fries once told Bozell. “Fan clubs were springing up and people were calling into TV and radio stations wanting to know when the spots were going to air.”In 1974, the ads were recognized by the Clio Awards as the nation’s best overall television advertising campaign.“When I accepted the award, I could see the shock and horror on the faces of all those New York advertising executives,” Mr. Fries told The Omaha World-Herald in 2001. “I remember saying, ‘I’ll bet y’all never thought something this good could come out of Omaha.’”Mr. Fries helped to spin the ads into a promotional record for Metz Baking Company, called “Old Home Filler-Up an’ Keep On A-Truckin’ Cafe,” which sold about 30,000 copies, according to Bozell. Before long, MGM Records in Nashville was calling.With a record deal from MGM, Mr. Fries spawned a cultural phenomenon with “Convoy,” an ode to renegade truckers driving across the country, written with Chip Davis, who had also written the music for the Old Home bread ads and who went on to found the group Mannheim Steamroller, known for its Christmas music.Crackling with CB radio lingo, the song tells the story of the truckers Rubber Duck and Pig Pen who are “puttin’ the hammer down” as they thumb their noses at speed limits, industry rules and law enforcement officers — “bears” and “smokies” in CB parlance. Along the way, they end up leading 1,000 trucks and “11 longhaired friends of Jesus in a chartreuse microbus.”Originally recorded merely as an album filler, “Convoy” tapped into the surging popularity of trucker culture and CB radio, which truckers used to communicate during long, lonely hours on the open road. It was part of a boom in trucking-themed country songs like “Roll On Big Mama” by Joe Stampley and “Willin’” by Little Feat.“Convoy” spent six weeks at the top of the country charts and crossed into the top of the pop charts for a week, according to The World-Herald. More than 20 million copies of the single have been sold, according to Bozell. In 1978, Mr. Peckinpah turned the song into a movie, “Convoy,” starring Kris Kristofferson as Rubber Duck.“It went farther than I would have ever dreamed,” Mr. Fries told The World-Herald. “I’ve got a whole scrapbook full of articles people have written through the years about ‘Convoy’ and the ‘Old Home Filler-Up an’ Keep On A-Truckin’ Cafe.’”Billie Dale Fries was born on Nov. 15, 1928, in Audubon, Iowa, and later changed his name to William Dale Fries Jr. His father, Billie Fries, was a supervisor at a farm-equipment plant that manufactured hog pens. His mother, Margaret Fries, was a homemaker.After graduating from high school, Mr. Fries attended the University of Iowa for a year and then came back to Audubon and started a sign-painting business.In the late 1940s, he went to work for the NBC affiliate in Omaha as an art director, which led him into advertising and a job at Bozell & Jacobs.In addition to his son, Bill Fries III, he is survived by his wife of 70 years, Rena Fries, two other children, Mark Fries and Nancy Fries, four grandchildren, six great-grandchildren and a great-great-grandson.Mr. Fries said he got the idea for “Convoy” while sitting in his Jeep listening to CB radio chatter.“It sounds like a war going on out there,” he told Mr. Davis. “It might be an idea for the album.”Mr. Fries, who ultimately released nine albums, according to his son, retired to Ouray, a city about 300 miles southwest of Denver, in 1981. He was elected mayor in 1986 and served until 1992, his son said.Even after his country music career was over, Mr. Fries said the runaway success of “Convoy” remained an enduring source of pride.“It’s one of those things that can only happen in America,” he told The World-Herald. “CBs have all faded into the woodwork. Most young people won’t even know about CBs or truck convoys, but at the time it was the thing. That was pretty special.”Jack Begg More

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      Grammys 2022: How to Watch, Time and Streaming

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      A guide to everything you need to know for the 64th annual awards on Sunday night.It’s been a tumultuous few months for the Grammy Awards.First, at a meeting just 24 hours before the nominees were announced in November, the Recording Academy decided to expand the big four categories — album, record and song of the year, and best new artist — from eight to 10 slots, netting nominations for Taylor Swift and Kanye West. A few days later, Drake, without offering an explanation, dropped out of the two rap categories in which he was nominated.In mid-January, amid an uptick in coronavirus cases caused by the Omicron variant, the 64th annual Grammy Awards, originally scheduled for Jan. 31, were postponed and then moved to Las Vegas for the first time.Last month, Kanye West, who is up for five awards, was told he is no longer welcome to perform at the ceremony following troubling behavior on social media. Then, two of the seven members of the K-pop group BTS, which is up for best pop duo/group performance for the second straight year, tested positive for the coronavirus, leaving their performance status in limbo. And this week, Foo Fighters, who are up for three awards this year, also bowed out after their 50-year-old drummer, Taylor Hawkins, died on tour on March 25.While producers were juggling lineup changes, Covid protocols and the usual stresses of preparing three and a half hours of live network television, something else happened at the Oscars on Sunday night that likely got their attention.Obstacles aside, Sunday’s ceremony at the MGM Grand Garden Arena is a return to a large-scale production with a big audience following last year’s bare-bones, intimate, largely outdoor affair. The contenders include Tony Bennett, 95, who is nominated for his collaboration with Lady Gaga on the Cole Porter tribute album “Love for Sale,” and Olivia Rodrigo, 19, who is up for all four of the biggest trophies; Jon Batiste, perhaps best known as the bandleader for “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” leads all nominees with 11 nods.A Guide to the 2022 Grammy AwardsThe ceremony, originally scheduled for Jan. 31, was postponed for a second year in a row due to Covid and is now scheduled for April 3.Jon Batiste Leads the Way: The jazz pianist earned the most nominations with 11, including album and record of the year. Here’s his reaction.Performers: Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, BTS and Lil Nas X are among the first performers announced for the April 3 show, which will be available on CBS and Paramount+.Kanye West: The singer, who is nominated for five awards, was told he will not be allowed to perform during the ceremony due to his erratic public behavior. A Surprise Appearance: The Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, who suffered an aneurysm in 2015 and has spoken in public infrequently since, will present an award at the ceremony.Here’s how to watch — and what to expect at — Sunday’s ceremony.What time do the festivities start?The ceremony, which will air live on CBS and the streaming service Paramount+, will begin at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific. You can also watch on CBS.com or through the CBS app if you have a cable subscription.Cord cutters can watch the show on any live TV streaming service that offers CBS, including FuboTV, Hulu + Live TV, Paramount+, YouTube TV and DirecTV Stream, many of which are offering free trials. It will also be available on demand on Paramount+.If you want to pregame, you can check out the premiere ceremony, when about 76 of the 86 awards are handed out. That begins at 3:30 Eastern, 12:30 Pacific and will be available to watch on grammy.com and the Recording Academy’s YouTube channel. LeVar Burton will host, and Allison Russell, Jimmie Allen, Ledisi and Mon Laferte will perform.Is there a red carpet?Yes. E! will have red carpet coverage beginning at 4 p.m., and “Live From E!: Grammys” starts at 6 p.m. Arrivals will be streamed at grammy.com beginning at 6:30 p.m.Who will be hosting?Trevor Noah, of “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central, is back for a second year.How is the competition shaping up?Batiste leads the pack with 11 nominations, covering American roots music, classical, jazz and R&B. He’s followed by Doja Cat, H.E.R. and Justin Bieber, all with eight nods. Billie Eilish (“Happier Than Ever”) and Rodrigo (“Sour”) earned seven nominations apiece, including for record, album and song of the year. (Rodrigo is also up for best new artist.)Joining Rodrigo in the best new artist category are the Kid Laroi, whose ubiquitous pop radio single “Stay” features Bieber; Saweetie (“Best Friend” featuring Doja Cat); and Finneas, Eilish’s producer brother. (Learn about all the best new artist nominees here.)Can we talk about Bruno?We regret to inform you that once again, we cannot. The Grammys, which are voted on by more than 11,000 members of the Recording Academy, recognize music released from Sept. 1, 2020, to Sept. 30, 2021, meaning more recent smashes like Adele’s “30” or Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” will have to wait until next year.Who’s going to perform?The lineup includes J Balvin with Maria Becerra, Batiste, Brothers Osborne, Brandi Carlile, Eilish, Lady Gaga, H.E.R., John Legend, Lil Nas X with Jack Harlow, Rodrigo, Silk Sonic, Chris Stapleton and Carrie Underwood. As of now, whether BTS will take the stage is unclear. While Foo Fighters are no longer performing, producers have said they’re working on a way to honor Hawkins during the ceremony. Something else to look forward to, especially if you’re a musical theater fan: a tribute to the composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who died in November at 91, featuring Cynthia Erivo, Leslie Odom Jr., Ben Platt and Rachel Zegler.Who will be presenting?Joni Mitchell — who was honored at the MusiCares Person of the Year tribute show, an annual pre-Grammys event, Friday night in Las Vegas — is making a rare public appearance on the Grammys stage. Other presenters include Dua Lipa, Megan Thee Stallion, Questlove, Bonnie Raitt, Keith Urban, Kelsea Ballerini, Lenny Kravitz, Billy Porter, Avril Lavigne and Ludacris, as well as Jared Leto and Michaela Jaé Rodriguez and the actor Anthony Mackie.What else is new this year?The expansion to 10 nominees in the big four categories isn’t the only change. The Grammys dropped nominating committees — expert panels that determined the ballot in many categories — after complaints from prominent artists, including the Weeknd, that they were unfair. The Grammys also removed the requirement for album of the year that writers play a role in at least a third of an LP to be recognized as contributors. Now, anyone who contributed to a single album, whether as a featured artist, engineer, producer or songwriter, is eligible — so if Bieber’s “Justice” wins, for instance, dozens of people will earn Grammys. There are also two new categories being awarded this year: best global music performance and best música urbana album.Who could make history?Rodrigo could become just the third artist, after Christopher Cross and Billie Eilish, to win all of the top four awards at a single ceremony. Taylor Swift could become the first artist to win album of the year four times, and BTS could become the first K-pop group to win a Grammy. Eilish, who won an Oscar with her brother, Finneas, for “No Time to Die” last week, could become the first person to win record of the year three times in a row.Who do we think will win?Our critics and pop music editor debated the 10 nominees up for record of the year … and didn’t come to much consensus. Grammys are famously hard to predict.Remind me again, what’s the difference between the record and song of the year categories?Record of the year, essentially the equivalent of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ best picture award and regarded as the top prize, recognizes the recording of a single track, focusing on both the artist’s performance and the efforts of audio engineers, mixers and producers. Song of the year also recognizes a single track, but it’s awarded solely for writing. (Think of it as the equivalent of the academy’s screenplay award.) More

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      How Stephen Sondheim’s Work Did (and Didn’t) Translate to the Screen

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      A new series of adaptations, documentaries and more examines the different ways the composer-lyricist left his mark on movies.Stephen Sondheim, the unparalleled composer-lyricist who died in November, may have changed musical theater forever, but as a new program at the Museum of the Moving Image argues, he left his mark on film as well. Whether it’s Elaine Stritch’s screen-shattering performance of “The Ladies Who Lunch” in D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary “Original Cast Album: ‘Company’” or Madonna’s slinking around and cooing “Sooner or Later” in “Dick Tracy,” Sondheim’s work has given film audiences memorable moments.The museum program, See It Big: Sondheim, assembled by the guest programmer Michael Koresky, the film curator Eric Hynes and the assistant curator, Edo Choi, offers a survey of adaptations of Sondheim’s work and other examples of his contributions to film, including a murder-mystery screenplay and the score to a French new wave film. I spoke with Koresky about Sondheim’s gifts to cinema and why it’s so hard to adapt his work. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Sondheim let people adapt his work freely, which your program shows.He said in many interviews that he is OK with someone massaging and changing and doing things for their own sake, and I think that just shows his generosity and his experimentation ability to allow others to be experimental. You can see that all the way through to 2021. With the Spielberg version of “West Side Story,” you could tell that he was sort of delighted to find that it had this new life.I think it’s up to us, as Sondheim lovers, to [say] when something isn’t working. But because of that, it takes something really different and experimental and strange to be a truly successful adaptation, which is why I think that “Original Cast Album: ‘Company’” is probably the best “adaptation” of a Sondheim musical.What about that film is able to articulate the skill and artistry of Sondheim in ways that some other attempts do not?Remembering Stephen SondheimThe revered and influential composer-lyricist died Nov. 26, 2021. He was 91. Obituary: A titan of the American musical, Sondheim was the driving force behind some of Broadway’s most beloved shows. Final Interview: Days before he died, he sat down with The Times for his final major interview. His Legacy: As a mentor, a letter writer and an audience regular, Sondheim nurtured generations of theater makers. ‘West Side Story’: Does the musical, which features some of the artist’s best-known lyrics, deserve a new hearing? ‘Company’: The revival of his 1970 musical features a gender swap.I think with Sondheim, witnessing the artistic process is part of the whole experience, creation is baked into the actual production. When you’re really attuned to the lyrics and the melodies, you’re thinking about how this possibly could have come about. So you’re constantly aware of the richness of the text and the complexity. For a documentary to just be about that literally: You’re seeing people do things over and over again, you’re getting a glimpse into an aspect of musical production that you probably never would have the chance to see. Pulling the strings and looking becomes part of the text. His musicals are so much about their own construction, so I can’t think of a better film based on Sondheim.Was there a particular piece that you wanted to start this series as a kind of guiding ethos for what you wanted the program to say about his legacy?For me, it was the 1966 television program “Evening Primrose,” which didn’t end up in the program, only because it was impossible to find. I grew to love “Take Me to the World,” which is a song I discovered in a piano book. That show typifies everything that I love about Sondheim: the melodies, the strange subject matter, the weird sources of adaptation, the really idiosyncratic, disturbing, bizarre and beautiful. I wanted that to be the discovery for people.We started with the 2021 “West Side Story” because we want to give people the chance to see it on the big screen, since so many people missed seeing it last December.What is it that makes it so difficult to adapt Sondheim to the screen? There aren’t, with very few exceptions, great screen interpretations of his work that aren’t filmed theater productions.He gives you something that you think you understand. Even with “Into the Woods” (the 2014 film), it’s like, “Oh, it’s a deconstruction of fairy tales.” But that’s really not enough to go on. There’s something really profound going on there about sadness and loneliness that is probably really hard to square with the genre trappings. They’re tricky because he’s always doing two things at once. And when you make a film, filmmakers often focus on the spectacle, not realizing that the spectacle has to be elided. That’s really hard to do in film.I was thinking today about which Sondheim works I wish there were movies of. I never want “Sunday in the Park With George” to be a movie, just by virtue of what it is, how it’s produced, what it’s about. What it’s doing feels so New York stage, it would be so strange.Could you talk about Sondheim and Madonna’s cinematic work in “Dick Tracy”?For me, as a little gay boy with his Madonna “I’m Breathless” cassette tape in 1990, it was the essential thing. Period. “Dick Tracy,” the gruff lantern-jawed masculine comic book detective, just does not interest me. But I remember those songs. It’s one of those things that’s a queering agent. “Dick Tracy” really feels like a hybrid of a lot of different sensibilities. I like the way that Sondheim and Madonna’s contributions help to negate the uber-masculinity of the text.And we have to talk about “The Last of Sheila” (1973), which he co-wrote with Anthony Perkins.That’s a tricky one. It’s interesting that they chose an intricate, whodunit murder mystery plot, because how else would you intelligently funnel this Sondheim complexity and idea of overlapping narratives, characters, themes into a genre film? I think that’s what makes it delightful. With Sondheim you see the gears working without it taking you out of the film. It’s a movie about game playing, in which you’re constantly being asked to size up the people involved. It’s very mechanical in a fun way.And in a nasty way that I love, too.One of the game cards in the film reads, “You are a homosexual.” And the way they talk about it is surprisingly casual and sort of progressive. There’s the idea that this is an accusation. But when it’s revealed, there’s a real casualness about it. It’s surprising for “closeted” — at the time — gay men to write.See It Big: Sondheim runs through May 1 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. For more information, go to movingimage.us. More

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      Review: In ‘Oratorio for Living Things,’ the Song Is You

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      Heather Christian’s rapturous new music-theater work turns a tiny amphitheater into a vast cathedral of sound.At the Academy of Music, where the Philadelphia Orchestra used to play, longtime subscribers were sometimes rewarded with a chance to move from floor-level seats to raised gilded boxes at the back of the horseshoe. After my parents took that step, my mother soon regretted the change. It’s true she saw the players better from above, but she’d felt them better from below, where the buzz of bassoons and the blast of tubas came through the wood directly to her feet, turning symphonies into seismic events.I thought of her vibrating metatarsals — and so much else about the rapture of intimate art — while sitting in the wooden amphitheater housing “Oratorio for Living Things,” Heather Christian’s profoundly strange and overwhelmingly beautiful new music-theater piece at Ars Nova’s Greenwich House theater. Tightly packed in the small, steep, egg-shaped bowl designed for the space by Kristen Robinson, six instrumentalists and 12 singers make music there that shakes the 100 audience members like a 90-minute earthquake.That seems appropriate for a work about profound human issues: our place in history, our place in the universe. At least that’s what I think it’s about, judging from lyrics I snatched from the sweep of sound and from reading the libretto later. Even then, I was not always sure I could pass a test on its content; though an author’s note in the program explains that the subject is time at three scales — quantum, human and cosmic — much of what was billed as quantum or cosmic felt distinctly human to me.Foreground from left: Divya Maus, Quentin Oliver Lee and Barrie Lobo McLain. Much of the text in Christian’s work is sung in Latin.Gabby Jones for The New York TimesNo matter. If the text is sometimes baffling and hermetic, it is confident enough in its oddness that you do not worry about crashing when it flies close to the twee line. Though I apparently didn’t recognize the “ballet of Chloroplasts and Mitochondria” that forms a part of an early section called “Oxygen + Photosynthesis,” I enjoyed it anyway. For Christian, ideas are fuel; it’s not that “these words mean nothing,” as one lyric coyly suggests, but that their meaning is not apprehensible through our usual interpretive circuitry. Unknowability, being part of the message, is necessarily part of the medium.As if to emphasize that, and draw parallels to traditional oratorios, much of the text is sung in Latin — but in this case translated backward, by Greg Taubman, from Christian’s English originals. Even when the words are contemporary, they are often drawn from unusual sources, including an accounting of how we spend our lives (13 days sneezing, 10 minutes giving bad directions to strangers) and a phone line Christian set up to solicit “memory mail”:“I was like 5 years old and both my parents were working late all the time,” one starts.“It’s 1964 or 1965, Beatles time, and I’m carrying a plate of spaghetti,” starts another.Kirstyn Cae Ballard, foreground, in the music-theater piece, which consists of several centuries of musical styles.Gabby Jones for The New York TimesWhat’s haunting is how the oratorio form and Christian’s private cosmology elevate such banal statements to an almost sacred plane. Alternating in the classical manner between massed choral singing and solo arias — all exquisitely performed under the music direction of Ben Moss — she throws several centuries of musical styles into the pot and swirls them around. The ear passes through currents of plainchant and gospel, blues and electronica; you may catch wisps of Orff and Reich, Holst and Massenet, in much the way you spot faces in a crowd scene.Yet this is not concert music. The production, directed by Lee Sunday Evans, highlights thematic cohesion and theatricality even without a traditional story. Both the set and the performers are draped in varieties of deep-space blue, as if to suggest a shared chemistry between people and their environment. (The beautiful costumes are by Márion Talán de la Rosa.) The sound (by Nick Kourtides) and lighting design (by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew) are likewise saturated, picking out voices and faces — great ones to begin with — to emphasize the shifting dynamic of individuals and groups.Even better, Evans has found a way of working with the singers so that every syllable sung, even the seemingly meaningless ones, feels as if it were informed by specific emotion.From left, Ballard, Ben Moss and Carla Duren in the 90-minute production.Gabby Jones for The New York TimesBut what is that emotion? Traditional theater often tries to bind audiences by pushing them toward a shared response, whether horror or hilarity. Christian is not working in that vein. As in earlier pieces like the requiem “Animal Wisdom” and the Mother Teresa cantata “I Am Sending You the Sacred Face,” she focuses on personal expression instead of story, content to let the formal elements shape the larger experience and leaving listeners free to make their own connections.In less skilled hands this could result in chaos or camp, but even her Mother Teresa, played by a man in drag with a ring light for a halo, avoided that trap. “Oratorio for Living Things,” which was shut down by the pandemic after two preview performances in March 2020, takes similar risks to get as close to spirituality as a contemporary theater piece dares. Near the end, after some sort of cataclysm brings the music to a halt, we are asked to stand in silence for a while, “feeling where we are on this New Year’s Eve of the cosmic year.” The performers admit that we may find this embarrassing: “We’re all embarrassed,” they say.But I — who usually slide under my seat when dragooned into acts of audience participation — was not embarrassed at all. I felt instead the kind of awe I feel in cathedrals, where the architecture itself forces one’s thoughts upward and outward. Or perhaps I felt more as my mother did when beautiful music came through her soles. Just so, in “Oratorio for Living Things,” Christian provides the notes but your body is the song.Oratorio for Living ThingsThrough April 17 at Greenwich House, Manhattan; arsnovanyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Who Will Win the Top Grammy Award? Let’s Discuss.

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      Watch how your favorite pop hits get made. Meet the artists, songwriters and producers as Joe Coscarelli investigates the modern music industry.Watch how your favorite pop hits get made. Meet the artists, songwriters and producers as Joe Coscarelli investigates the modern music industry. More

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      Molly Tuttle Is a Top Bluegrass Guitarist. She’s Also a Lot More.

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      After two albums of roots pop, the musician returns to her own roots for “Crooked Tree,” an album that takes inspiration from her lifelong journey living with alopecia areata.The singer, songwriter and guitarist Molly Tuttle’s fingers move so quickly, she could pick your pocket without breaking stride. Though she’s only been releasing albums for three years, the sharpest ears in Americana music have taken notice.“I’ve never heard Molly Tuttle strike a single note that wasn’t completely self-assured,” said the roots music guitar master David Rawlings, half of Gillian Welch’s duo. “Molly plays with a confidence and command that only the very best guitarists ever achieve. If that could be bottled, I’d take two.”Best known as a top bluegrass guitarist, Tuttle, 29, is emerging as strikingly label-resistant. The first woman to win the International Bluegrass Music Association’s guitar player of the year award (two years in a row, 2017 and 2018), she considers herself as much a singer as a player, whose light soprano packs a surprising wallop. Nor is she, strictly speaking, a bluegrass musician.“I think of bluegrass as part of what I do,” Tuttle said, settling into a chair in her publicist’s office in Manhattan. “I can switch on my bluegrass self, but it doesn’t feel like my core identity, it feels more like an outlet for something I do and that I’ve done since I was a kid.”Tuttle set about defining her own brand of roots pop in two critically acclaimed albums, “When You’re Ready” from 2019 and its 2020 follow-up, “… But I’d Rather Be With You.” While the second LP consists entirely of covers, Tuttle co-wrote every song on “Crooked Tree,” an album out Friday that is very much bluegrass. Several of its songs are written from not merely a woman’s perspective, but a feminist’s, making Tuttle an outlier in what remains a male-dominated genre.“I’d always felt a block writing bluegrass songs,” she said. “I just don’t relate to a lot of the old themes. But something clicked where I was able to write songs that felt true to who I am but still fit into bluegrass.”Tuttle grew up in Palo Alto, Calif., in a musical family. Her father taught guitar for a living, and counted his daughter and her two younger brothers as prized students. Gravitating to the guitar at 8, Tuttle soon had herself on a strict regimen (for a 10-year-old): an hour of practice after school, an hour before bedtime.A musical omnivore, Tuttle helped herself to rock, punk and rap, including the National, Neko Case and the Bay Area punk bands Operation Ivy and Rancid. (Don’t miss her irresistibly propulsive punkgrass cover of Rancid’s “Olympia WA,” her solo a machine-gun spray of 16th notes.) Tuttle played acoustic guitar and banjo in the family’s bluegrass band, but she plugged in with pickup rock groups. Her middle-school music teacher had a big CD collection, much of which found its way onto Tuttle’s iPod.“I remember taking a Rage Against the Machine album home,” she said, “and going, ‘Whoa! This is amazing!’”By her midteens, Tuttle was driving with her father to California bluegrass festivals, reveling in the camaraderie. “It was so cool,” she said, “because nobody at my school knew what bluegrass was.” “People who don’t have alopecia think, ‘Well, it’s just hair,’ or ‘You can wear a wig,’” Tuttle said. “It is a traumatic thing. It’s like losing a part of your body.”Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThe fellowship extended only so far. At one festival, Tuttle joined an impromptu jam in which the only musician she didn’t know was the fellow calling the tunes. When it came her turn to solo, she recalled, “He leaned right in front of me and pointed to the guy next to me, like, ‘You solo.’ He just completely skipped over me.’”Sexism’s sting empowered her: “Today I have my own band, so there’s no one who’s going to make me feel like that guy did, except me,” she said. “But there’s always times,” she added, “when you’re the only woman, so they do the song in a guy key and you can’t sing on it. Stuff like that happens a lot.”Tuttle has spent her life overcoming another hurdle: alopecia areata, an incurable autoimmune disease she contracted when she was 3 years old that results in partial, or, as in Tuttle’s case, total body hair loss.“People thought I had cancer, which made me really self-conscious,” Tuttle recalled. “First my parents got me hats” — you can see her on a YouTube video, peering out from under a sort of oversized cloche. She switched to wigs at 15, and “it was finally, like, ‘I can relax.’”Tuttle said those unaffected by alopecia rarely grasp its gravity. “People who don’t have alopecia think, ‘Well, it’s just hair,’ or ‘You can wear a wig,’” she said. “It is a traumatic thing. It’s like losing a part of your body.” While today Tuttle said she’s comfortable going without a wig, she prefers to wear one onstage. “What feels truest to myself is embracing the fluidity of ‘I can wear a wig one day and not wear a wig the next,’” she said.Learning to live with the disease remains a challenge that inspired the new album’s title song, where Tuttle tells the world, “I’d rather be a crooked tree!” Writing and performing “Crooked Tree” — giving it pride of place as the album’s title — is, for Tuttle, an act of self-acceptance and affirmation.“Growing up with it, and getting comfortable talking about it, has helped me overcome a lot of social anxiety — I’m naturally shy; everyone in my family is,” she said and laughed. “It’s helped me realize that it doesn’t matter what other people think, you can be yourself.”After majoring in guitar performance at Berklee College of Music in Boston — although she said her real tutelage was years of close listening to the singer-songwriter Hazel Dickens (“She stood up for marginalized people”), the guitarists Clarence White and David Grier, and Joni Mitchell — Tuttle arrived in Nashville.She worked with the mainstream pop producers Ryan Hewitt on her first album and Tony Berg on her second. Both surrounded Tuttle’s voice and guitar with multitextured, sometimes overly lush, soundscapes.In February, 2021, Tuttle was writing songs for what was to be a third pop album when bluegrass songs began pouring out of her, a return to her comfort zone in anxious times. Shelving the pop project for the time being, she invited some of Nashville’s top bluegrass players into the studio and asked the dobro master Jerry Douglas, a major force in contemporary bluegrass, to co-produce with her what became “Crooked Tree.”“It’s become such a loose term, anyway,” Tuttle said of bluegrass. “Today, everyone’s listening to everything and blurring things together.”Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThe album’s first single, “She’ll Change,” co-written with Tuttle’s frequent collaborator, Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show, is a paean to strong women (“Just snaps her little fingers/And they all stand in line”) sprinkled with Tuttle’s jaw-dropping bluegrass runs.On other tracks, Tuttle doesn’t hesitate to subvert old themes. “I’ve always loved murder ballads,” she said, “I have a natural love of horror movies, and gore, and creepy stories. But some of the old ballads are really misogynist. There’s a lot of violence towards women. So I flipped the perspective to a woman’s.” In “The River Knows,” co-written with Melody Walker, it’s the guy who gets hacked to death, for a change (“Washed the proof out of my hair/Crimson streaming down my skin so fair”).“I’ll always want to come back to bluegrass,” Tuttle said, though she does play with musical convention on the new album. “It’s become such a loose term, anyway. Today, everyone’s listening to everything and blurring things together.”The genre today is indeed quite different from that of its founder, Bill Monroe. “If Bill came to a bluegrass festival today,” said the fiddler-turned-violinist and composer Mark O’Connor, another lifelong border crosser, “he would hardly recognize the genre he helped create.“Having said that,” O’Connor added, “if Bill Monroe were here today, he would hire Molly Tuttle for his Blue Grass Boys. Because she can sing the high lonesome and drive that rhythm on the flattop guitar. But then, Bill would have to consider a name change for the band.”Sitting in Manhattan, Tuttle considered the options: “The Blue Grass Persons?” she suggested. More