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      Dan Einstein, Champion of Singer-Songwriters, Is Dead at 61

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      He operated independent record labels for John Prine and Steve Goodman that took a critically praised (and award-winning) artist-driven approach.NASHVILLE — Dan Einstein, a Grammy-winning independent record producer who championed the careers of John Prine and Steve Goodman, died here on Jan. 15. He was 61.His death, in a hospice facility, was confirmed by his wife of 27 years, Ellen Krause Einstein, who did not cite a cause.Most people in Nashville knew Mr. Einstein as the proprietor, with his wife, of Sweet 16th, the award-winning bakery they opened in 2004. But he had previously made his mark, in the 1980s and ’90s, as an independent record label operator who forsook corporate wisdom about economies of scale in favor of a smaller, more artist-driven approach to making records that proved feasible as well as garnering critical acclaim.Having dropped out of U.C.L.A. in the early ’80s after his studies were eclipsed by his work with the campus concerts committee, Mr. Einstein became a partner with the Los Angeles-based company Al Bunetta Management, where he helped launch and run two successful musician-owned record labels.The first of them, Oh Boy Records, was the brainchild of the singer-songwriter John Prine, who, after parting ways with Asylum Records in 1980, had grown disenchanted with the commodification and excesses of major-label culture. The other imprint, Red Pajamas Records, was started by the singer-songwriter Steve Goodman, who died of leukemia in 1984. (Mr. Prine died of Covid-19 in 2020, Mr. Bunetta of cancer in 2015.)The two labels promptly won Grammy Awards. Red Pajamas won in 1987 for “A Tribute to Steve Goodman,” a multi-artist anthology co-produced by Mr. Einstein, and in 1988 for “Unfinished Business,” a posthumously released collection of Mr. Goodman’s music, also produced by Mr. Einstein. In 1992 Mr. Prine won the first of his four Grammys with Oh Boy for “The Missing Years.” (He also won a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2020.) All three were honored in the best contemporary folk album category.Oh Boy and Red Pajamas were of course not the only successful independent labels at the time. What was different was the resolutely antediluvian way Mr. Einstein, who by 1993 was based in Nashville, approached things before the advent of the modern internet.Employing a boutique model without the benefit of major-label distribution, he and Mr. Bunetta relied on mail-order sales, grass-roots marketing and innovative consumer engagement. They included comment cards with the orders they filled, inviting buyers to rate albums and offer feedback on packaging and artwork.They also worked with artists who had left major labels for small independents, disregarding the usual trajectory in which performers are incubated at niche labels before graduating to big conglomerates and the money and prestige they promise (but only sometimes deliver).“In the middle ’80s, the idea of running a label for an artist with actual traction seemed crazy,” the music journalist Holly Gleason, who worked as a publicist for Mr. Prine in the ’90s, wrote in a eulogy for Mr. Einstein.“John Prine — or Steve Goodman — were nationally known,” she continued. “Major accounts weren’t going to deal with a handful of titles here, a new release with maybe 100 copies there. And yet, with the customer cards and mail-order business, Oh Boy and Red Pajamas were making it work.”In the process, the two labels became precursors of the human-scale, do-it-yourself entrepreneurship embraced by the Americana and alternative country movements of the late 1980s and beyond.Mr. Einstein in 2021. Most people in Nashville knew him as the proprietor, with his wife, of an award-winning bakery, but he first made his mark in the record business.Ellen EinsteinDaniel LeVine Einstein was born on Dec. 11, 1960, in New Haven, Conn., and grew up in New London, some 50 miles to the east. His father, Lloyd Theodore Einstein, known as Ted, was a physicist who helped invent the Sonar systems for nuclear submarines for the Navy. His mother, Nedra LeVine Einstein, was a schoolteacher.The family moved to Los Angeles in 1978, two years after Mr. Einstein’s mother’s death from cancer.While at U.C.L.A., Mr. Einstein became immersed in Los Angeles’s vibrant punk-rock scene. He frequented clubs like Madame Wong’s and the Masque and soon began promoting shows, which opened doors to his partnerships with Mr. Bunetta, Mr. Goodman and Mr. Prine.Besides his wife, Mr. Einstein is survived by his stepmother, Beverly Kaplan Einstein, and two sisters, Susan Richman and Loryn van den Berg.When Mr. Einstein left Oh Boy to open Sweet 16th, his entrepreneurship and affability translated seamlessly to his new venture.Referring to themselves, tongue in cheek, as “your East Nashville sugar dealer,” the Einsteins earned accolades for their baked goods from the likes of Southern Living and Glamour. And in 2021 they were named East Nashvillians of the Year by the magazine The East Nashvillian for their community-mindedness and generosity: Their hospitality extended both to hungry neighbors unable to afford the price of their award-winning breakfast sandwich and to those who had lost homes when tornadoes ravaged Nashville in 2020. More

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      Badal Roy, Who Fused Indian Rhythms With Jazz, Is Dead at 82

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      He collaborated across cultures, playing tabla with Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, John McLaughlin and others in the jazz world and beyond, including Yoko Ono.Badal Roy, an Indian tabla player whose drumming propelled East-West fusions for some of the most prominent musicians in and out of jazz, died on Tuesday in Wilmington, Del. He was 82.His son, Amitav Roy Chowdhury, said the cause was Covid-19.Mr. Roy was largely self-taught. He was not trained in the Indian classical apprentice tradition of gurus and disciples. Where classical tabla players use a pair of differently tuned drums, Mr. Roy sometimes used three or four. His improvisational flexibility and his skill at sharing a groove made him a prized collaborator for jazz, funk, rock and global musicians.He first became widely known for his work in the early 1970s with the English guitarist John McLaughlin and Miles Davis, appearing on Davis’s pivotal jazz-funk album “On the Corner” and its successors. He went on to many other collaborations,— recording with Pharoah Sanders, Herbie Mann, Yoko Ono, Bill Laswell and Richie Havens — and spent more than a decade as a member of Ornette Coleman’s electric band, Prime Time.Amarendra Roy Chowdhury was born on Oct. 16, 1939, in the Comilla District of what was then British India. (The area was later part of East Pakistan and is now in Bangladesh.) His father, Satyenda Nath Roy Chowdhury, was a government official in Pakistan; his mother, Sova Rani Roy Chowdhury, was a homemaker. “Badal,” which means “rain” in Bengali, was a childhood nickname.An uncle introduced him to the tabla and taught him its rudiments: the vocal syllables that denote specific drum sounds. Later, in New York, he took some lessons from Alla Rakha, Ravi Shankar’s longtime tabla player. While growing up, he was also a fan of Elvis Presley and Pat Boone. His introduction to jazz was hearing Duke Ellington perform in Pakistan in 1963.Mr. Roy wasn’t planning a career in music when he came to New York in 1968. He intended to earn a Ph.D. in statistics.To support himself, he worked as a waiter at the Pak India Curry House and found a weekend gig playing tabla with a sitarist at A Taste of India, a restaurant in Greenwich Village. Mr. McLaughlin was a regular there, and he sometimes sat in with the duo. After a few months of jamming, he asked Mr. Roy to join a recording session. The resulting album, “My Goals Beyond,” released in 1971, was an early landmark in Indian-influenced jazz.Mr. McLaughlin was also working with Miles Davis at the time, and he brought Mr. Roy to Davis’s attention; when Davis was appearing at the Village Gate in 1971, Mr. Roy’s duo auditioned for him during a break between sets at A Taste of India, carrying their instruments a few blocks down Bleecker Street. Davis called on Mr. Roy for a 1972 session that also included Mr. McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock on keyboards and Jack DeJohnette on drums.In an interview with an Indian newspaper, The Telegraph, Mr. Roy recalled: “All of a sudden, Miles tells me: ‘You start’ — no music, no nothing, just like that. Realizing I have to set the groove, I just start playing a ta-ka-na-ta-n-ka-tin rhythm. Herbie nods his head to the beat and, with a ‘Yeah!,’ starts playing. For a while, it’s just the two of us, and then John and Jack join in. Then all the others start and, to me at least, it’s pure chaos. I’m completely drowned out by the sound. I continue playing, but for the next half-hour, I can’t hear a single beat I play.”Those sessions yielded Davis’s “On the Corner.” Mr. Roy joined Davis for other 1972 sessions that contributed material for Davis’s “Big Fun” and “Get Up With It,” both released in 1974, and performed with him at Philharmonic Hall (now David Geffen Hall) at Lincoln Center for what became Davis’s 1973 album “In Concert.”Mr. Roy received a copy of “On the Corner” when it was released in 1972. But after his frustration at the sessions, he didn’t listen to it until the 1990s, when his son, then a graduate student, told him, “All the hip-hop guys are sampling it.”In 1974, Mr. Roy married Geeta Vashi. She survives him, along with their son and Mr. Roy’s sisters, Kalpana Chakraborty and Shibani Ray Chaudhury, and his brother, Samarendra Roy Chowdhury. He lived in Wilmington.Mr. Roy backed the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders on the albums “Wisdom Through Music” (1972), “Village of the Pharoahs” (1973) and “Love in Us All” (1974), and in later years performed with Mr. Sanders onstage. With the saxophonist Dave Liebman, who had been in Davis’s group, Mr. Roy appeared on “Lookout Farm” (1974), “Drum Ode” (1975) and “Sweet Hands” (1975). (“Sweet hands” is the translation of a Bengali term praising a virtuoso tabla player.)He released two albums as a leader in the mid-1970s, both featuring Mr. Liebman: “Ashirbad” (1975) and “Passing Dreams” (1976), which also included the Indian classical musician Sultan Khan on sarangi, a bowed string instrument.Mr. Roy performed and recorded widely, often as part of cross-cultural fusions. He had a longtime duo with the bansuri (wooden flute) player Steve Gorn, which appeared regularly at the Manhattan restaurant Raga. He shared the 1978 album “Kundalini” with the American jazz clarinetist Perry Robinson and the Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos. In the early 1980s, he was a member of the flutist Herbie Mann’s group and appeared on the 1981 Mann album “All Blues/Forest Rain.” He also recorded with the composer and trumpeter Jon Hassell; with the trombonist and conch-shell player Steve Turre; with Yoko Ono on her 1982 album, “It’s Alright (I See Rainbows)”; and with the Brazilian guitar duo Duofel, the Japanese bassist Stomu Takeishi, the bassist and producer Bill Laswell and the Swiss harpist Andreas Vollenweider.In 1988, he joined Ornette Coleman’s band Prime Time, and though the group rarely released studio albums, he appeared on its final one, “Tone Dialing,” in 1995. In the early 2000s he was a member of Impure Thoughts, a group led by the keyboardist Michael Wolff. Mr. Roy also recorded often as a leader, collaborating across idioms and styles.In an interview for All About Jazz, Mr. Roy emphasized that his solos were about “telling a story.” “I go with the groove,” he said, “and then go free.” More

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      No, We Didn’t Call Him ‘Mr. Loaf.’ (Mostly.)

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      No, We Didn’t Call Him ‘Mr. Loaf.’ (Mostly.)Matt StevensReporting from Brooklyn 🦇The headline of that Times review, written presumably with the lead in mind, was: “Is He Called Just Plain Meat Or Should It Be Mr. Loaf?”But that headline was tongue-in-cheek — a joke, a one-off, Merrill Perlman, a top editor on what was then our copy desks, wrote in 2007.“In other words,” she wrote, “we didn’t mean it.”Ask the Editors: Merrill Perlman More

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      A ‘High Priestess of Satanic Art’? This Organist Can Only Laugh.

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      For more than a decade, Anna von Hausswolff has been bringing the sound of pipe organs to rock fans. But Roman Catholic extremists have tried to stop her playing shows in churches.When Anna von Hausswolff, an acclaimed Swedish songwriter and organist, first heard that a conservative Roman Catholic website was calling her a satanist and demanding a concert boycott, she and her team laughed it off.“We thought it was hilarious,” von Hausswolff, 35, recalled in a recent interview. “The whole day we were laughing,”The site, Riposte Catholique, was firing its readers up ahead of a concert of von Hausswolff’s epic pipe organ music at a church in Nantes, a city in the west of France. Some of her fans were goths, the site said, and her songs were “more a black Mass than music for a church.” A music blogger had called her “the high priestess” of “satanic harmonies,” the site noted, and conservative Roman Catholic groups noticed that, on the track “Pills,” she sings, “I made love with the devil.”“We said, ‘This is such a great P.R. campaign,’” Von Hausswolff said. “I mean, ‘the High Priestess of satanic art.’ Wow!”But as soon as she arrived at the church in Nantes, the joking stopped. Outside were about 30 young men, most wearing black jackets and hoodies, protesting the show, Von Hausswolff said. The concert’s promoter told her that some men had just broken into the venue, trying to find her.Soon, there were 100 people blocking the church’s entrance. Von Hausswolff sat in the richly painted church, staring up at the organ that she’d hoped to play, listening to protesters chanting and banging on the doors outside as her fans shouted back at them.“There was a primal part of me that told me I was not safe,” she said. “I wanted to get out.” She canceled the show.In recent years, disagreements between conservatives and liberals over issues like gay marriage and abortion have become increasingly heated in parts of Europe. Von Hausswolff’s experience is an example of another tension point in the continent’s culture wars: In some countries, a small minority of Roman Catholics regularly protests art it considers blasphemous.Initially, when the campaign against her was just online, Anna von Hausswolff laughed off the accusations of Satanism. Ines Sebalj for The New York TimesCéline Béraud, an academic who studies the sociology of catholicism in France, said in a telephone interview that extremists had staged protests against artworks and plays in the country for the past 20 years. “It comes from a well organized minority who’re very good at getting attention in the media,” Béraud said.One of their regular targets is Hellfest, a rock music festival held every year close to Nantes. In 2015, a group of protesters broke into the site and set fire to some of the festival’s stage sets. Since then, protesters have regularly doused the festival site’s fields with holy water. Hellfest’s communications manager, Eric Perrin, said in an email that staff members recently found 50 gold pendants depicting the Virgin Mary scattered around the site. Since playing a real pipe organ in concert almost always means playing in church, von Hausswolff’s tour problems didn’t end when she left Nantes — even though some French bishops had issued statements of support. In Paris, she was scheduled to play the grand organ at St.-Eustache, a church widely considered a jewel of the French Renaissance, but after its priest was deluged with complaints, she instead performed a secret show at a Protestant church near the Arc de Triomphe.In December, protestors gathered outside a von Hausswolff concert in Brussels. “That was fine,” Von Hausswolff said. “They weren’t screaming or banging on doors.”Laurie Dieffembacq/Belga, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLater, in Brussels, about 100 people protested outside her show at a Dominican church, taking a more peaceful approach than their French counterparts and moving away from its doors when asked by police. At Nijmegen, the Netherlands, just two protesters appeared, standing quietly outside while holding signs with the message “Satan is not welcome.”Von Hausswolff is not someone you would expect to cause such a stir. She grew up in Gothenburg, Sweden, and said her childhood was “very creative.” (Her father, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, is a composer and performance artist.)As a teenager, she sang in a church choir, and dreamed of becoming a musician, but ended up training as an architect. Her music career only took off in 2009 when, age 23, she released a demo of piano songs called “Singing from the Grave” that quickly found a fan base in Sweden thanks to her soaring vocals. She was frequently compared to the English pop star Kate Bush.After an organ builder told her she could make beautiful pipe organ music, she gave it a go, she recalled, trying out the organ in Gothenburg’s vast Annedal Church. “When I reached the lowest note, I couldn’t believe my ears,” Von Hausswolff said. “I felt it through my whole body.”She’s since explored what the instrument can do across five albums, sometimes pairing it with a rock band and at other times performing solo. Her most recent, released this month, is a live album recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.Hans Davidsson, an organist who helps von Hausswolff probe the instrument’s capabilities, said that she “explores the organ with open ears, eyes and senses,” and had developed her “own musical language.” Her music was inspiring to many classical organists like him, he added. “It’s fortunate for us that she chose the organ,” he said.In the interview, von Hausswolff, who was wearing Christmas leggings covered in cartoon reindeer in Santa hats, denied she was a satanist. Von Hausswolff declined to say what her 2009 track “Pills” — in which she sings of satanic lovemaking — was about, since songs should be left open to interpretation, she said. But, she added, “If you’re asking me if I literally had sex with the devil, the answer is, ‘No.’”“I’m there to present my pipe organ art so that it hopefully can invoke deeper thought in people,” Von Hausswolff said of her work.Ines Sebalj for The New York TimesAs much as she was happy to joke about the accusations, the incidents last month had left a mark. She still felt scared by the French and Belgian protests, she said, and was also worried that churches might think twice about letting her play their organs, so as to avoid complaints.“I’m not a good Christian and never will be,” said von Hausswolff, adding that she saw herself as agnostic. “But I’m there to present my pipe organ art, so that it hopefully can invoke deeper thought in people.”She was already planning more church tours, she said. As long as she was welcome, she added, “I will go there, and I will play my music.” More

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      Meat Loaf, ‘Bat Out of Hell’ Singer and Actor, Dies

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      In his six-decade career, the singer, born Marvin Lee Aday, sold millions of albums and acted in films including “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Fight Club.”Meat Loaf, the larger-than-life rocker whose 1977 debut album, “Bat Out of Hell,” was one of the best-selling albums of all time, died on Thursday. He had given conflicting information about his age over the years, but was widely reported to have been 74.His death was confirmed by his manager, Michael Greene. A statement on the musician’s Facebook page said his wife was by his side and that his friends had been with him in his final 24 hours. A cause of death was not given.Meat Loaf, who was born Marvin Lee Aday and took his stage name from a childhood nickname, had a career that few could match. In six decades, he sold more than 100 million albums worldwide, the statement said, and appeared in several movies, including “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Fight Club.”“We know how much he meant to so many of you and we truly appreciate all of the love and support as we move through this time of grief in losing such an inspiring artist and beautiful man,” the statement said. “From his heart to your souls … don’t ever stop rocking!”Meat Loaf’s death came just a year after that of Jim Steinman, the songwriter who wrote “Bat Out of Hell,” a record that brought operatic rock to audiences at a time when, in the face of disco and punk, it couldn’t have been more unfashionable. The pair met when Mr. Steinman was commissioned to co-write a musical called “More Than You Deserve,” which ran at the Public Theater in New York in 1973 and 1974. Meat Loaf auditioned and later joined the cast.Jim Steinman, left, with Meat Loaf in 1978. Mr. Steinman wrote all the songs on Meat Loaf’s debut album, “Bat Out of Hell,” which became one of the best-selling albums of all time.Michael Putland/Getty ImagesLater, Mr. Steinman was trying to write a post-apocalyptic musical based on “Peter Pan,” but, unable to secure the rights for the tale, he turned the work into “Bat Out of Hell,” bringing in Meat Loaf to give the songs the style and energy that made them hits. The title track alone is a mini-opera in itself, clocking in at nearly 10 minutes and featuring numerous musical breakdowns. The album’s seven tracks also included the songs “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” and “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”Meat Loaf and Mr. Steinman went on to have legal disagreements, but still worked together, writing a sequel to “Bat Out of Hell” in 1993 — “Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell” — which included “I’d Do Anything for Love (but I Won’t Do That),” Meat Loaf’s only track to top the Billboard 100 singles chart. The song also won him the 1994 Grammy Award for best rock vocal solo performance.“Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose,” released in 2006, also included some songs by Mr. Steinman, who created a musical based on “Bat Out of Hell” that premiered in England in 2017. Mr. Steinman died in April 2021 at age 73. Meat Loaf told Rolling Stone shortly afterward that Mr. Steinman had been the “centerpiece” of his life.Some critics could be sniffy about Meat Loaf’s music and spectacle. John Rockwell, reviewing a 1977 live show for The New York Times, started by remarking that “Meat Loaf is the rather graceless name that a large rock performer has chosen for both himself and for the band built around his singing.” Despite that, Mr. Rockwell was soon convinced that Meat Loaf was worthy of being the center of attention. “He has fine, fervent low rock tenor, and enough stage presence to do without spotlights altogether,” he wrote, adding that, “one had to admire the unabashed intensity with which he was willing to wallow in such soap‐opera silliness.”Meat Loaf ultimately released 12 studio albums, the last being “Braver Than We Are” in 2016.In addition to his music, Meat Loaf also appeared in dozens of television shows and movies, according to IMDb. His first major role came in 1975 in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” where he played Eddie. He also appeared in “Wayne’s World” (1992), “Spice World” (1997) and “Fight Club” (1999). More recently, he had a role in several episodes of the TV series “Ghost Wars” from 2017-18.Marvin Lee Aday was born and grew up in Dallas, the son of Orvis Wesley Aday, a former policeman, and Wilma Artie Hukel, an English teacher. “I stayed at my grandmother’s house a lot,” Meat Loaf wrote in “To Hell and Back,” his 1999 autobiography, adding that he did not know if those stays were because his mother was busy working or because she did not want him to see his father “on a bender.”According to his autobiography, Meat Loaf was born on Sep. 27, 1947, but news reports of his age varied over the years. In 2003, he showed a reporter from The Guardian newspaper a passport featuring a birth date of 1951 and later said about the discrepancy, “I just continually lie.”Meat Loaf at a news conference promoting his album “Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose” in 2006.Bobby Yip/ReutersAs an adult, Meat Loaf said he changed his first name to Michael from Marvin because of childhood taunts about his weight and, he said, the emotional impact of a Levi’s jeans commercial that had the slogan, “Poor fat Marvin can’t wear Levi’s.”He later cited the commercial when petitioning to change his name, which the judge granted it within 30 seconds, Meat Loaf wrote in his autobiography.Meat Loaf also told numerous stories about how he got his stage name, including one about a high school stunt in which he let a Volkswagen run over his head. Afterward, a child shouted, “You’re as dumb as a hunk of meat loaf.” But Meat Loaf wrote in his autobiography that the name came from his father: “He called me Meat Loaf almost from the time my mother brought me home.”Meat Loaf had health problems throughout his career. He had heart surgery in 2003 after collapsing onstage at Wembley Arena in London and told an audience in Newcastle, England, in 2007 that the concert was “probably the last show I’ll ever do” after another health scare.Meat Loaf performing in the Netherlands in 2013.Ferdy Damman/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn 2013, he told The Guardian that he was definitely retiring from music after another farewell tour. “I’ve had 18 concussions,” he said. “My balance is off. I’ve had a knee replacement. I’ve got to have the other one replaced.” He wanted to “concentrate more on acting,” he added, since “that’s where I started and that’s where I’ll finish.”A full list of survivors was not immediately available. More

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      One Opera Opening Would Make Any Composer Happy. He Has Two.

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      Ricky Ian Gordon’s “Intimate Apparel” and “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” are premiering in New York almost simultaneously.When the composer Ricky Ian Gordon saw Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies” on Broadway in the early 1970s, it was unlike anything he’d watched on a stage.“He was creating this musical theater that felt like foreign film to me,” Gordon said in a recent interview. “And I wanted to make something in the theater that felt like foreign movies.”“That’s what ‘Follies’ was: a musical about broken lives and disappointment,” he continued, adding an expletive for emphasis. “I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do.’”Gordon, now 65, did go on to create art inspired by those subjects — in the process becoming considerably better known in the world of opera than theater.In a coincidence caused by pandemic delays, not one but two of his operas are opening nearly simultaneously before this month is out, and both involve the darkness Gordon adored in “Follies.” “Intimate Apparel,” at Lincoln Center Theater, for which Lynn Nottage adapted her own play, deals with lies, deceptions and thwarted dreams in the story of a Black seamstress in 1905 New York. And “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” presented by New York City Opera, is based on a semi-autobiographical Giorgio Bassani novel about the fate of privileged members of the Jewish community in Ferrara, Italy, who were tragically blind to what awaited them during World War II.It’s a highly unusual situation for a living composer: To have two of your operas playing at once in New York, your name usually has to be something like Puccini, whose “Tosca” and “La Bohème” are both running this January at the Metropolitan Opera.“One new opera demands an enormous amount of attention, but two is downright invasive,” Gordon said. “It is incredibly stressful, no matter how often I meditate, but it is also enormously fulfilling, and thankfully, pride-building. It is also strange to be going back and forth between the Lower East Side in 1905 and Ferrara in 1945, but thank God for the IRT.”From left: Krysty Swann, Kearstin Piper Brown and Naomi Louisa O’Connell in “Intimate Apparel,” for which Lynn Nottage has adapted her play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesTo fully grasp Gordon’s career, it is important to travel back a little less far than that, to the years that bridged the turn of the 21st century, when it appeared as if he would be among a new generation of composers rejuvenating the American musical. Drawing inspiration from Ned Rorem and Alban Berg, Dmitri Shostakovich and Scott Joplin, he was often lumped in a similarly arty cohort that included fellow composers Adam Guettel, Michael John LaChiusa and Jason Robert Brown.Songs by all four were included on Audra McDonald’s debut solo album, “Way Back to Paradise,” a hybrid of musical theater, avant-pop and art song that came out in 1998 — and, in hindsight, announced a changing of the guard that ended up not happening, as more mainstream rock and pop styles conquered Broadway.Gordon’s subtly lyrical harmonies slowly worked their way into your subconscious, and he suggested emotion rather than hitting the listener with it. That was not what musical theater wanted.“They always called us ‘children of Sondheim,’ ” Gordon said. “He opened a door, but it wasn’t an open door — it was just the door for Sondheim to walk through.”“People started saying that we didn’t write melodies and beats,” he added, then shot out a joking expletive, as if responding to the charge. “Every one of us writes melodies and writes rhythm, but in the language we grew up on and that we evolved out of.”Born in 1956, Gordon was raised on Long Island; he was — as Donald Katz documented in “Home Fires,” a much-praised 1992 book about the Gordon family’s middle-class aspirations and frustrations — once in line to inherit his father’s electrical business. But he discovered opera when he was eight, stumbling onto The Victor Book of the Opera at a friend’s house.“My memory of it is like a Harry Potter moment, like there was smoke and light behind this book,” he said.He was also open to pop, and in his early teens became “transfixed, mesmerized, completely and overwhelmingly obsessed with Joni Mitchell,” as he put it in a story he wrote about her last year for Spin magazine. The story is drawn from a forthcoming memoir that grew out of a writing group Gordon started with some poets and novelists during the pandemic; self-examination is not new to him, and he is candid about his past struggles with alcoholism, drug addiction and eating disorders.He initially enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University as a pianist, but ended up a composer, obsessed with bringing words to musical life. “If I’m setting a poem to music, I memorize it and I let it marinate and live inside of me,” he said. “I love singers, so I want to give them something to act. Even if it’s a song, it should be like a little mini opera.”By the 1990s and early 2000s, he was straddling various forms and genres. He wrote the song cycle “Genius Child” for the soprano Harolyn Blackwell, and his first opera, “The Tibetan Book of the Dead,” a meditation informed by the AIDS epidemic, premiered at Houston Grand Opera in 1996. But his work also appeared Off Broadway, including such musical-theater projects as “Dream True,” a collaboration with the writer and director Tina Landau, and the Proust-inspired show “My Life With Albertine,” which opened at Playwrights Horizons in 2003 with a then-unknown Kelli O’Hara in the title role.After being touted as part of a new generation of musical theater composers, Gordon found more of a home in the opera world.Sarah ShatzThat show, alas, did not go over well, even if Ben Brantley praised the score’s “lovely, intricately layered melodies” in his review for The New York Times.Gordon was proud of “My Life With Albertine” and its failure hurt him deeply. “I thought I needed to face facts: The musical theater right now is not where I am going to flower,” he said. “I had written to all these opera companies that I wanted to do opera, so the next thing I did was ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ with Minnesota Opera. Suddenly, I felt this was where I could do what I do. Now I’m at Lincoln Center, where musicals are usually done, but I’m doing my opera here.”Gordon was, indeed, happily chatting away in an empty room at Lincoln Center Theater, where “Intimate Apparel” — which was well into previews when the first pandemic lockdown came, and now opens Jan. 31 — had just wrapped up a rehearsal in the Mitzi E. Newhouse space.Suddenly, voices piped in from a monitor: A matinee of the musical “Flying Over Sunset” had begun at the Vivian Beaumont Theater above. Coincidentally, that show’s lyrics were written by Michael Korie, Gordon’s librettist on “The Grapes of Wrath” and now “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” which City Opera is presenting with the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, starting Jan. 27.Doing “Intimate Apparel” at Lincoln Center Theater was not a given. It is part of the company’s joint commissioning program with the Met, and the other works from that program that have reached the stage, like Nico Muhly’s “Two Boys” and the recent “Eurydice” by Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl, have been produced at the opera house.“It was really time for Lincoln Center Theater to get the benefit of one of these shows,” Paul Cremo, the Met’s dramaturg, said in an interview. “We thought that with the intimacy of the play, it would really benefit from that space, where some audience members are just six feet away from the characters. And Ricky wrote a beautiful orchestration for two pianos.”Gordon “was a really lovely guide through this process,” said Nottage, left, and the two are at work on other opera.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesWhile Gordon was working on a small scale, for just a couple of instruments, Nottage was tasked with expanding her play, which consists mostly of two-person interactions, into a libretto that would bring together larger groups of characters and make use of a chorus. (Bartlett Sher directs.)“I shared with Ricky what I was listening to and we spoke a lot about what the texture and the feel of the piece should be,” Nottage said. “He’s very deeply invested in Americana music and, in particular, ragtime. What he does really beautifully is weave all of these traditional forms together without it feeling like pastiche. He was a really lovely guide through this process.” (The pair got along so well that they are now at work on a commission from Opera Theater of St. Louis with Nottage’s daughter, Ruby Aiyo Gerber.)The musical style of “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” draws from a different well. “It’s my Italian opera,” Gordon said. “I just thought of putting myself in the head of Puccini, Verdi, Bellini. It’s very different from ‘Intimate Apparel,’ which is very American.”Anthony Ciaramitaro and Rachel Blaustein in rehearsal for “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” about Jewish Italians on the cusp of World War II.Sarah ShatzOne major difference is size: The “Finzi-Continis” score has been arranged for a 15-piece orchestra for the City Opera run and can be expanded for larger ensembles, especially as there are tentative plans to produce it in Italy.“It’s absolutely, unabashedly melodic, just beautiful sweeping melodies,” said Michael Capasso, the general director of City Opera, who is staging the production with Richard Stafford.The two Gordon projects illustrate both the composer’s ecumenical tastes and his versatility. “Ricky sounds like Ricky,” Korie said in an interview, “but he’s not afraid to do what classical opera composers did, or what Rodgers and Hammerstein did for years, and what composers in theater still do, which is they allow themselves to immerse themselves in the sounds of other characters, other times, other places.”From left: Gordon with Michael Korie, the librettist of “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” and Richard Stafford, who is staging the production with Michael Capasso.Sarah Shatz“Finzi-Continis” keeps with his early desire to make something in the theater that felt like foreign movies: Gordon has long been a fan of Vittorio De Sica’s Academy Award-winning film version, from 1970. But rewatching it a few years ago hit him especially hard.“I think there was something about the juxtaposition of personal pain and universal pain — I suddenly saw what made that story so tragic,” he said. “I couldn’t even endure it.”So he called Korie to suggest they adapt Bassani’s book.It’s not a coincidence that both “Intimate Apparel” and “Finzi-Continis” are set in the past, because most of Gordon’s work is. “In some way I’m a memorialist,” he said. “I very often write from a place of grief.”Yet, asked by email what she thought was his signature style, Kelli O’Hara unexpectedly answered: “Joy. I don’t think the subject matters are always joyous, but the music-making is the healer. So yes. Joy.”And, indeed, Gordon chuckled when he said: “I’m lucky that I’m activated by my unhappiness rather than paralyzed. I’ve never been able to sit still because I never felt like I had done enough, I never felt important enough. It has caused me enormous pain but it made me never stop writing. And I’m glad I didn’t shut up.” More

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      Fred Parris, Creator of a Doo-Wop Classic, Is Dead at 85

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      His “In the Still of the Night” (originally “Nite”), recorded with his group the Five Satins, came to define a sort of dreamy 1950s nostalgia.Fred Parris, who was a love-struck 19-year-old missing his fiancée while serving in the Army when he wrote one of pop music’s most enduring songs, the wistful doo-wop ballad commonly known as “In the Still of the Night,” and recorded it with his group the Five Satins in 1956, died on Jan. 13 in New Haven, Conn. He was 85.His current group, Fred Parris and the Five Satins, posted news of his death on its Facebook page, saying only that he had died after a short illness.Over the years Mr. Parris varied the story of his signature song a bit, but this was the gist of it: He had met the “girl of my dreams,” as he put it, at the Savin Rock amusement park in West Haven, Conn., in 1954, and by the next year they were engaged. On the train ride back to his Army base in Philadelphia after a particularly nice visit with her, he reminisced about their first night together and began thinking about lyrics and tunes.“When I arrived at camp, I went straight to the day room,” he told Smithsonian magazine in 2004. “There was a piano there, and I started playing the chord in my head and the words in my heart.”But soon he had to report for his shift. That’s when the song really came together.“Before I realized it,” he said, “it was time to go to guard duty. It was a cold, black night, and the stars were twinkling.”The result was a song that was originally titled “(I’ll Remember) In the Still of the Nite,” to distinguish it from Cole Porter’s “In the Still of the Night,” said Ralph M. Newman, an R&B historian who filled in some of the details of Mr. Parris’s life. In February 1956, again on leave from the Army, Mr. Parris and three pals, backed by some local musicians, recorded the song on a relatively primitive two-track system in an echoey, frigid basement room at St. Bernadette’s Church in New Haven.Somehow they captured acoustical magic.“Because we did it at the church,” Mr. Parris said in a 2013 interview with the Florida radio show “Doo Wop Revival,” “I think the song was blessed. And so was I.”Though it was originally only a minor hit, “In the Still of the Night” (as the title is now commonly rendered) achieved doo-wop immortality, thanks to cover versions by Boyz II Men, the Beach Boys and others; its use in “Dirty Dancing,” “The Irishman” and other movies; and its tuneful timelessness. Mr. Newman, a former editor of the R&B history magazine Bim Bam Boom and a former executive with Broadcast Music Inc., traced the record’s slow ascent in an email:“After this icon of vocal group harmony was recorded and first released by the local Standord record label in New Haven, the master was leased to the larger Ember label, which in 1956 landed it on Alan Freed’s nightly radio show on WINS in New York. There it became, for years, the No. 1 listener-requested song of the period, with which Freed often closed the show with a long list of dedications, and went on to become the perennial No. 1 song on oldies stations around the country.”Mr. Parris later in his career. In 1982 he and the Five Satins returned to the charts for the first time in more than 20 years with “Memories of Days Gone By.”Debra ReedMr. Parris kept writing, performing and recording for more than a half century with an ever-changing lineup, mostly under the Five Satins name. When the oldies boom hit, the song came to define the doo-wop era. The critic Greil Marcus included it in his 2014 book, “The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs.”“Though he continued to record new songs well into the 1980s,” Mr. Marcus wrote, “Parris and different versions of the Five Satins never played a show, whether in clubs around New Haven, for rock ’n’ roll revival concerts in New York, on PBS doo-wop fund-raisers, without ‘In the Still of the Nite’ being the reason the audience was there at all.”Mr. Newman said he once produced a show featuring the Five Satins on the excursion ship Bay Belle.“At that time I asked Fred whether he ever tired of singing that song, night after night, year after year,” Mr. Newman said, “to which he replied: ‘No way; I never stop loving doing that song for people who tell me that it occupies a special place in their lives. I consider it a privilege.’”The 1972 version of the Five Satins at Madison Square Garden. Mr. Parris once said of the group’s signature song: “I never stop loving doing that song for people who tell me that it occupies a special place in their lives. I consider it a privilege.”Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesFrederick Lee Parris was born on March 26, 1936, in Milford, Conn., to Ferdinand and Edna Parris, Mr. Newman said. He grew up in the New Haven area and attended Hillhouse High School. He was a decent baseball player; an entry on the Five Satins in Jay Warner’s “The Billboard Book of American Singing Groups: A History, 1940-1990” says he once had a tryout with the Boston Braves.Apparently he was a better singer than ballplayer, and he was in several groups before forming the Five Satins. One, which he formed with other Hillhouse students, was called the Scarlets, and in 1954 the group recorded “Dear One,” a song Mr. Parris had written, for the Red Robin label; it received some airplay in the New York market.The Scarlets cut several other records, but in 1955 military service split up the group. Mr. Parris ended up in Philadelphia and, during trips home to Connecticut, formed a new group. He had admired a doo-wop act called the Velvets and “liked the idea of something soft and red,” as the Billboard book put it; he chose the name the Five Satins.But despite that name, Mr. Newman said, there were only four Satins at the 1956 recording session: Mr. Parris, who sang lead on “In the Still of the Night,” Al Denby (low tenor), Eddie Martin (baritone) and Jim Freeman (bass). The group, usually with five members, continued on, even recording a minor 1957 success, “To the Aisle,” with Bill Baker singing lead because Mr. Parris, still in the service, was stationed in Japan. Two other records made the Billboard charts in those early years, with Mr. Parris as the lead singer: “Shadows” (1959) and “I’ll Be Seeing You” (1960).Mr. Parris, when telling the story of “In the Still of the Night,” usually didn’t identify the young woman who inspired the song, though in the Smithsonian article he said her name was Marla. In any case, there was no marriage; shortly after he wrote the song, he told The Hartford Courant in 1982, “she went to California to visit her mother.”“She never came back,” he said.Mr. Parris was married several times, most recently to Emma Parris, who survives him. Other survivors include three children, Shawn Parris, Rene Parris Alexandre and Freddy Parris, and eight grandchildren.“In the Still of the Night” endured, and for a time Mr. Parris and various versions of the Satins toured on the strength of it, but in the mid-1960s the British Invasion shoved the doo-wop era aside. He told The Courant that over the years he worked at the Olin and High Standard gun-making plants in Connecticut and delivered food at Southern Connecticut State University.“You do a lot of stuff to eat,” he said.But beginning in the 1970s he tapped into the rock ’n’ roll revival market, performing at oldies shows, and in 1982, for the first time in more than 20 years, he and the Satins landed briefly on the charts again with “Memories of Days Gone By,” a medley made up of snatches of “Sixteen Candles,” “Earth Angel” and other classics, including, of course, “In the Still of the Night.” More

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      A New Coalition Amplifies Disability Culture in the Music Industry

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      RAMPD, an organization of professional disabled musicians, will push for accessibility in the music industry, including adding visible ramps to awards show stages.For the singer, songwriter and producer Lachi, the acronym was everything.She helped start the organization that would become RAMPD — Recording Artists and Music Professionals with Disabilities — in July 2021, but it was a few months earlier, after moderating a panel for the Recording Academy about disability inclusion, that she came up with the name.“After that aired, musicians with disabilities were coming out of the woodwork and following me on Instagram, DMing me going, ‘What are we going to do? Are you going to lead this charge? What’s next?’” Lachi said in an interview. “Everyone was energized. And that’s when the spark came, of the acronym.”RAMPD, which Lachi co-founded with the singer-songwriter and violinist Gaelynn Lea, alongside a dozen or so founding members, works to amplify disability culture and advocate for accessibility in the music business. One of its main goals, fittingly, is to make accessibility ramps visible on TV during awards shows to help normalize disability in the entertainment industry.The coalition’s kickoff will be a virtual event at 5 p.m. on Friday, with opening and closing remarks live from the Grammy Museum Experience at the Prudential Center in Newark, N.J. (The Grammy Awards, originally scheduled for Jan. 31, have been pushed back to April 3.) Adrian Anantawan, a classical violinist; Eliza Hull, an indie rock singer-songwriter; and Molly Joyce, an organist and songwriter, will perform, alongside other disabled musicians, and professional membership applications for the group will open.“Our professional membership have awards, have toured, have worked with big names, are big names themselves,” said Lachi, who is based in New York. “And we’re not here to make folks feel warm and gushy. We’re not here to get handouts. We’re here to get gigs. We’re here to get on stages, we’re here to get paid.”“Disability isn’t ‘despite this, they did this,’” said the singer-songwriter and violinist Gaelynn Lea, a RAMPD co-founder. “It’s more like, ‘because of their identity as a disabled artist, you are enjoying this art in this form.’” Paul VienneauIn October, RAMPD partnered with the inaugural Wavy Awards for an event celebrating women, L.G.B.T.Q. artists, nonbinary musicians, artists of color, performers who identify as having a disability and allies. The organization advised the show on American Sign Language interpretation, captioning, audio description and ensuring the inclusion of people with disabilities on-camera and behind the scenes.Perhaps Lachi’s favorite part, though, was promoting the use of what she calls “self description,” known widely as visual description, which is added as audio to television programs and movies to help people with low vision and people who are blind, like herself.“My name is Lachi, she/her, Black girl, cornrows,” she said as an example. “So that’s what I go by. And that’s all it is.”She underscored how racism, sexism and homophobia compound the discrimination disabled people face. “It’s paramount for folks to recognize that disability has color, that disability has gender, that disability has sexual preference and that disability is not straight, white, middle-America male,” she said.Lea, who was born with osteogenesis imperfecta and is based in Minnesota, pointed out that she wouldn’t make the same music — which won NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Contest in 2016 — if not for her life experience.“Disability isn’t ‘despite this, they did this,’” she said in an interview. “It’s more like, ‘because of their identity as a disabled artist, you are enjoying this art in this form.’”She added, “Disability culture and the movement that we’re starting I think really is actually up there in terms of cultural shifts with all the other diversity movements we’re talking about.”Through the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council in Duluth, Minn., Lea received the Arts Ecosystem Grant, which will allow RAMPD to build a membership database of professional disabled artists — something that never existed until now. RAMPD also recently secured a fiscal sponsor, Accessible Festivals, a nonprofit organization that will help manage RAMPD’s grants and donations, and allow for the group to grow beyond Lachi and Lea.“We want to see more leaders emerge out of this and people recognize them in the community, because sometimes it feels like I get asked to do so many events, and it’s partly because I feel like people don’t know anyone else to ask,” Lea said. “That’s something that we have to fix.” More