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      A Celebrated Afghan School Fears the Taliban Will Stop the Music

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      The Afghanistan National Institute of Music became a symbol of the country’s changing identity.For more than a decade, the Afghanistan National Institute of Music has stood as a symbol of the country’s changing identity. The school trained hundreds of young artists, many of them orphans and street hawkers, in artistic traditions that were once forbidden by the Taliban. It formed an all-female orchestra that performed widely in Afghanistan and abroad.But in recent days, as the Taliban have been consolidating control over Afghanistan again, the school’s future has come into doubt.In interviews, several students and teachers said they feared the Taliban, who have a history of attacking the school’s leaders, would seek to punish people affiliated with the school as well as their families. Some said they worried the school will be shut down and they will not be allowed to play again. Several female students said they had been staying inside their homes since the capital was seized on Sunday“It’s a nightmare,” Ahmad Naser Sarmast, the head of the school, said in a telephone interview from Melbourne, Australia, where he arrived last month for medical treatment.The Taliban banned most forms of music when they previously ruled Afghanistan, from 1996 to 2001. This time, they have promised a more tolerant approach, vowing not to carry out reprisals against their former enemies and saying that women will be allowed to work and study “within the bounds of Islamic law.”But the Taliban’s history of violence toward artists and its general intolerance for music without religious meaning has sowed doubts among many performers.“My concern is that the people of Afghanistan will be deprived of their music,” Mr. Sarmast said. “There will be an attempt to silence the nation.”In 2010, Mr. Sarmast, an Afghan music scholar who was trained in Australia and plays trumpet and piano, opened the school, which has more than 400 students and staff members, with the support of the American-backed government. It was a rarity: a coeducational institution devoted to teaching music from both Afghanistan and the West.The school’s musicians were invited to perform on many of the world’s most renowned stages, including Carnegie Hall. They played Western classical music as well as traditional Afghan music and instruments, like the rubab, which resembles the lute and is one of the national instruments of Afghanistan.The school placed special emphasis on supporting young women, who make up a third of the student body. The school’s all-female orchestra, Zohra, founded in 2015, earned wide acclaim. Many were the first women in their families to receive formal training. In a symbol of its modern ways, head scarves for girls at the school’s campus in Kabul were optional.The school’s habit of challenging tradition made it a target. In 2014, Mr. Sarmast was injured by a Taliban suicide bomber who infiltrated a school play. The Taliban tried to attack the school again in the years that followed, but their attempts were thwarted, Mr. Sarmast said.Now, female students say they are concerned about a return to a repressive past, when the Taliban eliminated schooling for girls and barred women from leaving home without male guardians.Several female students — who were granted anonymity because they feared retaliation — said that it felt like their dreams to become professional musicians could disintegrate. They worried they might not be able to play music again in their lives, even as a hobby.In recent weeks, as the Taliban swept through the country, the school’s network of overseas supporters tried to help by raising money to improve security on campus, including by installing an armed gate and walls.But it’s now unclear if the school will even be permitted to operate under the Taliban. It is also increasingly difficult for citizens of Afghanistan to leave the country. Airport entrances have been chaotic and often impassable scenes for days, even for people with travel documentation. The Taliban control the streets, and though they say they are breaking up crowds at the airport to keep order, there are widespread reports that they are turning people away by force if they try to leave the country.The State Department said in a statement that it was working to get American citizens, as well as locally employed staff and vulnerable Afghans, out of the country, though crowding at the airport had made it more difficult. The department said it was prioritizing Afghan women and girls, human rights defenders and journalists, among others.“This effort is of utmost importance to the U.S. government,” the statement said.In the 1990s, the Taliban permitted religious singing but banned other forms of music because they were seen as distractions to Islamic studies and could encourage impure behavior. Taliban officials destroyed instruments and smashed cassette tapes.Understand the Taliban Takeover in AfghanistanCard 1 of 5Who are the Taliban? More

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      Peter Rehberg, a Force in Underground Music, Dies at 53

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      He released his own experiments with sound under the name Pita, and also ran the influential label Editions Mego.It was 1997, and Peter Rehberg and two collaborators had booked a tour of jazz and rock clubs, places that had probably seen their share of experimentation. The people who came to the shows, though, weren’t prepared for what the trio unveiled.“There were some very interesting, sort of disturbed looks on their faces, because we set up with just three laptops in a row and just jammed out,” Mr. Rehberg recalled on a 2019 episode of the podcast “Noisextra.” “And everyone is going: ‘You can’t do that. That’s not music.’ And we’re going: ‘Yeah, fair enough; that’s not music. Did we say it was music?’”Synthesizers and other bedrocks of electronic music had been around forever, but at the time not many people viewed the laptop as a performance instrument.“We never thought of it as being a radical statement,” Mr. Rehberg said. “It was just like, ‘Oh, yeah; let’s do it this way.’”That was just one moment in Mr. Rehberg’s decades-long exploration of sound, both as an artist who often recorded under the name Pita and as head of Editions Mego, a label he founded after being a central part of an earlier label, Mego. He was an important figure in the world of experimental music, though his work — some early recordings were made from sounds emitted by a refrigerator — often defied even that label.Mr. Rehberg died on July 22 in Berlin. He was 53.His former partner, Isabelle Piechaczyk, said the cause was a heart attack.In addition to his solo work, Mr. Rehberg collaborated constantly, both with other sound experimentalists and with choreographers and makers of theater. And his label provided a platform for a wide range of artists who in the digital age have been pushing sound composition in all sorts of directions.“I followed Pita’s work as a musician and label owner for more than three decades, and he always defied expectations,” Peter Margasak, a music journalist and programmer, said by email. “He was the first person who made the laptop seem like a genuine tool for musical improvisation for me, manipulating a computer in real time with precision and voluminous possibility. His stewardship of Editions Mego revealed his eternal curiosity and openness, evolving aesthetically and geographically without surrendering an identity rooted in experimentation and innovation.”Mr. Rehberg was born on June 29, 1968, in London to Alexander and Barbara (Allen) Rehberg. As a youth he accumulated a vast record collection and was interested in new sounds of all sorts. In a tribute on the music and cultural website The Quietus, John Eden, who was a year behind him at Verulam, a secondary school for boys, and became a friend, recalled a moment when they both worked at a Tesco grocery.He drew a scolding, Mr. Eden wrote, “when it emerged that he had spent about an hour dropping Marmite jars on the concrete floor of the storeroom.”“He liked how they sounded,” Mr. Eden explained.Mr. Rehberg performing as part of the duo KTL, with Stephen O’Malley, at the Knockdown Center in Queens in 2013.Brian Harkin for The New York TimesBy his early 20s he was living in Vienna, working as a D.J. and immersed in the experimental scene there. Ramon Bauer, Andreas Pieper and Peter Meininger had created the Mego label, and its first release, in 1995, was “Fridge Trax,” a Bauer/Pieper/Rehberg collaboration built on refrigerator noise. In 1996 Mego issued Pita’s first release, “Seven Tons for Free.”Mego’s founders made him part of the label’s management team at a vibrant time for the label, and for experimentalism.“Electronic music is being flocked to by young composers who are doing to it something like what punk bands did to rock ’n’ roll in the mid-70s,” Ben Ratliff wrote in The New York Times in 2000, when Mr. Rehberg performed at the Beer and Sausage Festival in Brooklyn, “and Mego is the equivalent of an aesthetic-structuring punk label like Stiff,” the label that released early recordings by Elvis Costello, Devo and others.Mr. Rehberg continued to make solo recordings as Pita, releasing three more albums in the late 1990s and early 2000s, “Get Out,” “Get Down” and “Get Off.” Writing in The Chicago Reader in 2003, Mr. Margasak, who now lives in Berlin, described “Get Down” this way:“Sound files collide, flow and overlap, as disfigured melodic shapes, tangled-up beats and penetrating tones explode in a furious barrage. The music is often amorphous, but both the changes the synthetic patterns undergo and the order in which the sounds follow one another create some carefully considered surprises.”Mego went out of business in 2005, but Mr. Rehberg revived it soon after as Editions Mego. He went on to release work by scores of artists, sometimes forming sublabels devoted to particular strains or interests.“A Mego record will necessarily be adventurous,” Ben Beaumont-Thomas wrote in The Guardian in 2015, “whether it’s showcasing the glitch aesthetic of Fennesz, droning noise from Stephen O’Malley and others, or outsider guitar work from Bill Orcutt or Jim O’Rourke.”Mr. Rehberg, who for the past year had lived in both Berlin and Vienna, is survived by his father; a brother, Michael; his partner, Laura Siegmund; and a daughter from his relationship with Ms. Piechaczyk, Natasha Rehberg. More

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      Saving Pop Punk? That’s Just Their Warm-Up Act.

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      Depending on where you’re from and where you’ve been, you may be able to imagine a place like Davenport, Fla., which vibrates with the sleepy malaise of suburban sameness. Beige strip-mall storefronts unfurl along the streets. Some have no real names, just signs reading BARBER, TATTOOS, GUNS, TACOS. Davenport is about 35 miles from the center of Orlando, and on the drive the freeway starts to loosen and flow more easily. The atmosphere quiets. The signs of chain restaurants push into the dimming sky.Outside a cluster of resort homes was a security guard, skeptical but joyfully talkative. I told him I was there to see a band. He asked if I was sure I was in the right place. Based on the landscape beyond the gate, I didn’t feel entirely sure that I was. The place had a Pleasantville eeriness; I could imagine everyone stepping out at the exact same moment to pick up the morning papers. There were rules here, the guard told me, tentatively handing over a visitor’s pass. I had to be out by 10 p.m., no exceptions. I couldn’t park on the street or on the grass. And — he leaned close to my ​window — no loud music.Wandering down the dimly lit corridor of homes, it was hard to find addresses, or any distinctive traits at all, until I noticed something that had fallen off a door and was now sitting on a doorstep: a metal sign reading “ROCK-N-ROLL AVE.” This house was the unimaginative container for the brightness and enthusiasm of one of the most talked-about young bands of the past year: the guitarist Téa (pronounced TAY-Uh) Campbell, the lead singer Edith Johnson and the drummer Ada (pronounced ADD-Uh) Juarez, who make up the group Meet Me @ the Altar.I’d been summoned to see the would-be future of pop-punk, the new queens of noise, the band supposedly destined to drag a whole genre back to its heyday of big choruses and bigger feelings. Pop-punk has a circuitous history, full of sonic shifts and different regional scenes, but it found a peak of influence back in the early and mid-aughts, when bands like Paramore, Fall Out Boy and New Found Glory gave it a glossy sheen and a huge commercial reach, driving untold sales of studded belts and hair dye and getting their best lyrics quoted on untold MySpace profiles. What made that era special, to someone like me, was the way all of pop-punk’s scenes were rising at once — on the radio, on the music-video channels, even on the charts. But then things stalled; the mainstream moment faded; bands broke up or pivoted to different sounds. Soon enough people were looking backward at that moment, sometimes with mild amusement.The three young women who were expected to change that were sitting in one corner of a sprawling, corporate-looking leather couch on the house’s main floor. The home was one of those prefurnished affairs, with a coffee table that looked too precious to touch and a glass dining table that looked too precious to sit at. The walls were stark white and barren, save for some sparse bacon-themed art. (“We did a thing with Wendy’s, and they sent it to us,” Campbell said, shrugging.) But then, up the stairs, taped onto the walls, were rows and rows of fan letters and fan art — depictions of the band spanning from the cartoonish to the alarmingly realistic.The Meet Me @ the Altar house in Davenport, Fla.Jasmine Clarke for The New York TimesFan art in their house.Jasmine Clarke for The New York TimesBefore this house, the trio was scattered up and down the East Coast. Campbell is from Davenport, and the band played early shows in Orlando, but Juarez is from North Plainfield, N.J., and Johnson was in Peachtree City, Ga. Their recordings were initially made in separate places and stitched together. Then came a rise that, from the outside, seemed impossibly rapid. First the video for one of their songs, “Garden,” circulated online, catching the attention of pop-punk stalwarts. Then, in the midst of a pandemic, came a deal with the iconic label Fueled by Ramen, and a simmering campaign of hype. They gathered here because they needed to focus on making songs but also on learning how to be a band, in granular ways — ways it can take a band years of playing and touring together to pick up. The house was meant as a type of incubator, a vessel for emotional and creative acceleration.The members of M.M.A.T.A. have a magnetism that goes far beyond their music making. But the band is still relatively new, and facing high expectations. Watching them on that couch, talking over one another and exploding into laughter, I realized that what some might read as their youthful unawareness of the stakes was really something else. M.M.A.T.A. are a confident band — one that knows exactly where it stands, but hasn’t yet considered the possibility of failure.At a pizza shop, a few blocks away from the Orlando venue where the band cut its teeth, the 20-year-old Campbell and 22-year-old Juarez gave me the short version of their story.In the summer of 2015, bored at her grandmother’s house, Campbell went on YouTube, looking for videos of drummers covering songs by TwentyOne Pilots. That search brought her to Juarez, who had built a vast catalog of drum covers on her YouTube channel. “I had no idea where Ada was,” Campbell told me. “To me, she was just on the internet.” Still, Campbell reached out, and they exchanged contacts on the app Kik. They began by covering songs together remotely, sporadically posting the results, until they eventually decided they needed a singer.Edith Johnson was 14, living in Peachtree City and poking around online — “the beginning of my emo phase,” she says now — when she, too, saw a video posted to Juarez’s YouTube channel. The title was “I’m in a Band, and We Need a Singer.” At the time, Johnson was sinking into the music scene at an Atlanta venue called the Masquerade, whose logo she has since had tattooed on her forearm. She sent in a video of herself singing Paramore’s “All I Wanted.”Juarez and Campbell, sorting through submissions, narrowed their choices to two. It was 2016, and they posed one question to help them decide: They wanted to know their potential future singer’s preferred political candidate. “At the time,” Juarez told me, “if someone said Hillary and not Bernie, that was a red flag.” Johnson said Hillary, and so — whether or not you think it’s prudent for teenagers who can’t yet vote to make personnel decisions this way — she was rejected.“I was really angry, actually really mad,” Johnson said. “And I was like, ‘This is wrong, but it doesn’t matter, because I’m going to be in the band anyway.’ And literally that’s all I thought about, every single day, every single hour, for like two years.”The issue wasn’t just being in a band, something Johnson could have done easily. It was being in this band, with two girls she saw as at least somewhat like her — the kinds of Black and brown kids sometimes pushed to the margins of punk scenes. For Johnson, joining the band was an obsession, a mission, a destiny. “I texted her literally almost every day,” she said, nodding at Campbell. It was two years later, when things hadn’t worked out with the other singer, that Campbell relented, and the trio was complete.There is something specifically miraculous about this band’s emergence, something most easily recognized if you are of a certain age — say, a teenager in the early 2000s, when your time around any capital-S Scene would intersect with the rapid expansion of the World Wide Web. An era spent spiraling into message boards and chat rooms, lonely or bored and reaching out into a thrumming wilderness of faceless personas, hoping to brush up against another set of hands that matched enough of your desires to form something that felt like a bond. Someone “like you,” even if all that really meant was someone who loved some of the same songs, or who also felt lousy in her own scene sometimes and wanted to rage and shout. And of course, there were those of us who dreamed of starting our own bands, kicking around names on Instant Messenger with strangers we’d never meet, a thin veil of fantasy laid over the realities of our circumstances.Meet Me @ the Altar is a thrilling result of a generation beyond all that: kids who grew up communicating on the internet, with one another and with the world, and who could eventually say, “Let’s start a band,” and do it. The internet may seem to become less innocent with each passing hour, but there is still much to be said for what a young person can find on it. Here is a trio of young people who used the internet to its highest exploratory potential, and found one another — and then flourished, reveling in an unfinished but fluorescent version of themselves.First they posted covers on YouTube. Then they took to the road on small tours. It helped that they had the support of their parents, with each member coming from a musical family. Campbell’s parents met, she says, when her father, a producer, heard a recording of her mother, a singer, and fell in love. Johnson’s family has roots in gospel singing, and Juarez’s father is a drummer from El Salvador; when she was young and learning to play, he was the one to post videos on YouTube. “He just wanted to send them to my family back home,” she says. “He didn’t realize the rest of the internet could see them.”The girls began gathering in Florida, playing shows at Soundbar in Orlando, where there was enough of a scene for the group to get its bearings, and begin to create a hum of excitement. That hum became a loud buzz in June 2020, when Dan Campbell of the band the Wonder Years tweeted about the song “Garden,” starting a domino effect. Alex Gaskarth from All Time Low also endorsed the band, as did the singer Halsey. At the time, this version of the band’s lineup had just two self-released EPs to its name. But more and more people were getting a first taste of M.M.A.T.A.’s signature experience — the soaring and infectious chorus — and by the end of the month, labels were sending offers.There was only one label the group had its eye on: Fueled by Ramen, the home of bands, like Paramore, that M.M.A.T.A. idolized. “That was always the goal, the end goal,” Campbell said. “That is what we would have been working toward, to be on Fueled by Ramen. And everything happened so fast that I feel like we didn’t even truly have time to realize, ‘Damn, we’ve been thinking about this since we were 14 years old, and it’s actually happening right now.’”When news of the band’s signing hit, in October 2020, there was palpable excitement. But much of the talk was about the band’s racial makeup’s being different from that of almost every other act previously pursued by the label. Pop-punk has an image that doesn’t always align with its fan base: The fans, often enough, are young Black people or people of color, or are not male, and yet the face of the genre remains largely white, largely male. This opens the door to a lot of less-than-desirable outcomes, from small things (exhausting repetition of the same lyrical themes) to large ones (men taking advantage of their influence over young fans). Of the many reasons people were excited about M.M.A.T.A., there was also the idea that they could signal a change, a corrective.M.M.A.T.A. are a band of young women of color who have their horror stories about the ways they’ve occasionally been treated — by peers, by fans, by men working the door. Now these young women of color were being labeled their genre’s saviors, and the predictability of the American imagination was on full display. There are those who are most at ease, most in awe, when the problems in a subsection of American culture are battled by those already most affected by them. It feeds a mythology that marginalized people are acting out of charity, not necessity. M.M.A.T.A. were suddenly expected to save a scene — as opposed to building a newer, more generous one.“White guilt is something, isn’t it?” Johnson said, grinning slyly, a crescent of pizza crust clasped by her iridescent nails. “If I’m being completely honest, that’s what it was. People were like, ‘Oh, here are all these bands of color!’ And we got to be at the forefront of that. And then, also being women —” She stopped for a split second, just long enough to snap back to a needed clarity. “And,” she said, “we’re also good.”At the Mill Hill in Trenton, N.J., in February.Leigh Ann RodgersWhen I met with M.M.A.T.A., they were riding high off performing a sold-out D.J. set at an emo night in Brooklyn, and were perhaps a little energized about arguing over the fates of their favorite genres. Emo was a commercial force 15 years ago; what did it mean now? Was the pop-punk scene in decline or ripe for resurrection? What parts of it were most worth saving? The need for some kind of pop-punk reconstruction was laid bare outside Soundbar, where one of the band’s friends showed off a new belt from the store Hot Topic, a mecca for generations of the pop-punk/emo set. Campbell tapped the belt’s metallic studs and then turned, incredulous, toward the rest of the band: “Plastic!” she exclaimed. “Hot Topic is using plastic these days!”“I feel like normies have changed the meaning,” she theorized, back at home, “because they don’t know what it is. Pop-punk didn’t go away. I think the mainstream just stopped paying attention.” Johnson agreed. “There is still a scene,” she said. “There will always be a scene.”Amid all the talk of M.M.A.T.A. as the saviors of pop-punk, there was significantly less discussion of them as purists of the form. They have a very specific goal, which became clearer as our conversation continued: They want to bring 2008 back. Someone my age might wince at this, but Campbell and Johnson stressed the simplicity of this aim. There were more guitars on the radio back then. M.M.A.T.A. want pop-punk to have another mainstream moment.They also know that to make that happen, they’ll need to pull from all their creative influences: Johnson’s soaring gospel impulses, Juarez’s affection for bands like Linkin Park and Korn, Campbell’s impeccable ear for pop. Johnson’s melodies, in particular, make you reach for the repeat button; the choruses arrive like sugar and sit long enough before dissolving that you develop a craving for the next one. Earlier in life, she could have sung anything — gospel, R.&B., folk — but she chose to sing pop-punk and infuse every other influence into the way she did it.At the house, Campbell was talking about “Model Citizen,” the EP the band was preparing to release on its new label. At the time, the record was in a place many artists know well: finished but not yet headed to the public. This left time for the band to get existential about the EP’s thematic concerns. “I think it tells the story,” Campbell said, “of realizing that, like, you’re not really OK.”The music finds the band expanding but keeping its sonic impulses close, growing new branches from a familiar tree. But there is something viscerally interior about the songs — a kind of curiosity, a surgical and sometimes comical analysis of what can and cannot be felt. So many of this genre’s songs insist on turning up the volume at the edges of feeling, but M.M.A.T.A. seem obsessed with analyzing the absence of feeling, or the awareness that feeling something important might require not feeling good. The record’s first single, “Feel a Thing,” is resigned but playful, a smirking tune about floating between youth and something that is no longer youth, aimless but with big aims. The second, “Brighter Days (Are Before Us),” has an almost evangelical groove, with the band members promising that they have seen the future and it ain’t all bad — they just need to get there, together.What fascinates most about “Model Citizen” is the way the band seems happy to examine inner terrors and turmoils for its own sake, with anyone listening just along for the ride. As much as coverage of M.M.A.T.A focuses on the members’ youth, they aren’t exactly kids anymore, and they’re not in a position most people who think of themselves as kids are in. They dreamed the impossible and then stepped into it as the world around them was falling into social, political and medical upheaval. It makes sense that “Model Citizen” is taking a magnifying glass to the question of what it means to grow older, and then what it means to grow up.The members of M.M.A.T.A. may not have time to be as in awe of themselves as others are. The band’s tour schedule, starting in late August, is a sprawling sprint, with 45 shows in less than three months, supporting Coheed and Cambria and the Used’s tour together and then All Time Low’s U.S. and U.K. tour dates.I soon noticed the clock pushing well past 10 p.m., the time I was told I would be exiled from the neighborhood. On my way out, though, I found myself compelled to ask the broad and boring question: What comes after all the hype? The band members are young, with seemingly endless potential and cultural good will at their disposal. What can be made of it?At Local 506 in Chapel Hill, N.C.Leigh Ann RodgersThey all chimed in. “I want us to be a household name,” Juarez said.“Like Green Day type [stuff],” Johnson added.“I want people’s kids to know that they have someone like us to look up to,” Juarez said.Campbell, who had been nodding along, paused before adding a finer point.“We want to be the biggest band in the world,” she began. “Not for the fame or the money or any other [expletive], because that doesn’t matter. But for the sole purpose of being able to have a bigger platform so more people can discover us and realize, ‘I have someone who looks like me in this band that I have never seen before.’ That’s all we can ask for at the end of the day, because I’m not getting existential, we’re all going to die one day and what we leave behind is what matters, and if our music and just our existence as a band can change someone’s life … we just want to pave the way for other bands, so that this is normal.”With any other band, I might have been cynical about this idea of selfless success that echoes outward. But everything else this band has manifested for itself, and for the world around it, has come true. It makes them easy to believe, and to believe in.Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, an essayist and a cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He last wrote about the band the Black Keys. More

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      Chucky Thompson, Hitmaking Producer, Is Dead at 53

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      He brought a range of musical influences to bear on the tracks he helped create for Mary J. Blige, the Notorious B.I.G. and many others.“My mind is always on ‘Record,’” the producer Chucky Thompson once told an interviewer, explaining how he was able to bring such a wide range of musical influences to the hits he helped create for Mary J. Blige, the Notorious B.I.G., Nas and other stars.For any particular track, he might draw on the soul records his parents used to play, or his time as a conga player in Chuck Brown’s go-go band, or some other style in his mental archive, as he sought to realize the vision the performer was after, or perhaps take him or her in a whole different direction.Mr. Thompson helped forge the hip-hop and R&B sound of the 1990s while in his mid-20s. He showed his versatility with his work on Ms. Blige’s second album, “My Life,” and the Notorious B.I.G.’s debut, “Ready to Die,” both released in 1994. The next year he was a producer on almost all the tracks on Faith Evans’s debut, “Faith,” another hit.In this period he was working for Bad Boy Entertainment, the influential label Sean “Diddy” Combs founded in 1993, as part of the producing team known as the Hitmen. But he continued to produce for a range of artists after the Hitmen dissolved later in the 1990s. If he — unlike some other producers in those years — defied categorization, that was deliberate.“In my brain, as a producer, I never wanted a sound,” he said in a 2013 video interview with Rahaman Kilpatrick. “That’s why you hear me on so many different records.”Mr. Thompson died on Aug. 9 in a hospital in the Los Angeles area. He was 53.His publicist, Tamar Juda, said the cause was Covid-19.Mr. Thompson was different from many of his contemporaries in that he was a multi-instrumentalist, often contributing guitar, piano, trombone or other flourishes to the tracks he produced. To get a particular effect for the 2002 Nas track “One Mic,” he flipped a guitar over and banged on the back of it.“He’s a true musician and doesn’t like to program heavily — just like me,” Mr. Combs told Billboard in 1995, when that publication included Mr. Thompson in an article on “the next crop of hotshot producers.” “Chucky has so many melodies in his head and produces from the heart.”Carl Edward Thompson Jr. was born on July 12, 1968, in Washington to Carl and Charlotte Thompson. In the 2013 interview, he said that his mother recognized his innate musical ability early.“She used to sit me in the kitchen and — you know how kids would just be banging and making noise? I was actually on beat with it,” he said. “She knew from there that something was different.”At 16 he was touring with Mr. Brown and his band, the Soul Searchers, playing the funk variant known as go-go, which was popular in and around Washington. It was a time when traditional live performances by bands were losing ground to D.J.s, who could keep the music constant rather than breaking between songs and thus keep people on the dance floor. Mr. Brown had his young conga player try to compensate.“He decided, ‘I’ll put a percussion break in between songs,’” Mr. Thompson told Rolling Stone in June. “So we would finish a song, then I’d do a percussion break, and I’d do a call and response — ask the crowd, ‘Y’all tired yet?’”The year 1994 was a big one for Mr. Thompson. Among the albums he worked on that year was the Notorious B.I.G.’s debut, “Ready to Die.”Bad Boy AristaThat same year, he co-produced much of Mary J. Blige’s “My Life,” the Grammy-nominated follow-up to her successful debut, “What’s the 4-1-1?,” with Ms. Blige and Sean Combs.Uptown RecordsBy the early 1990s he was in New York trying to market himself as a producer, and Mr. Combs and Ms. Blige were looking for material for the follow-up to her successful first album, “What’s the 4-1-1?” (1992).“She picked my song out of a ton of tracks from new and previous producers,” Mr. Thompson said in an interview with the website StupidDope.com in June. “I was truly honored. That track was ‘Be With You,’ and at that time it was very different for her and her sound. I felt at that moment we were onto something that would be special.”He ended up co-producing much of the album with Ms. Blige and Mr. Combs. Ms. Blige had a tough hip-hop image that defied female-singer stereotypes, and some people didn’t care for it. Mr. Thompson took that reaction into account as he helped her create the songs for her second album.“I didn’t like people throwing stones at something they didn’t understand,” he told Rolling Stone. “So I was like, on this record, people are gonna know you’re a singer. You’re the real deal.”“My Life,” full of confessional songs exploring Ms. Blige’s personal struggles, received a Grammy nomination for best R&B album and helped establish her as a star. In June, Amazon Prime unveiled a documentary about her career and the record, “Mary J. Blige’s My Life.”Over the years Mr. Thompson also produced for Usher, Raheem DeVaughn, Total and many others. He produced some of the final tracks for his early mentor, Mr. Brown, who died in 2012 at 75.Mr. Thompson’s survivors include five children, Ashley, Emille, Myles, Quincey and Trey Thompson. More

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      Los Angeles to Require Masks at Large Outdoor Concerts and Events

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      The order comes as the spread of the Delta variant has driven up caseloads.Facing a continuing increase in coronavirus cases, Los Angeles County said Tuesday that it would require masks be worn at large outdoor concerts and sporting events that attract more than 10,000 people.The new regulation, which takes effect at 11:59 p.m. on Thursday, means that people attending the Hollywood Bowl and Dodger Stadium, as well as outdoor music festivals and what the county describes as “mega events,” will now have to wear masks. The rule will apply to people regardless of their vaccination status.People will be allowed to slip off their masks when eating and drinking, but only briefly.The order came as cities around the nation have taken steps to try to curb the spread of the coronavirus. Chicago joined Los Angeles County, Washington, D.C., San Francisco and other areas to require masks in public indoor places. New York City is requiring proof of vaccination for dining and entertainment activities indoors; Broadway is requiring proof of vaccination and masks as it reopens.The new rules requiring masks at large outdoor events in Los Angeles came as the county reported that cases, hospitalizations and positivity rates have increased markedly. Los Angeles County has been averaging 3,361 new cases a day, an 18 percent increase over its average two weeks ago, according to data collected by The New York Times.Los Angeles County has been aggressive in instituting masks requirements in the face of evidence that the Delta variant of the virus has been spreading. It required people to wear masks in indoor public spaces last month, again regardless of vaccination status.Covid policies at the Hollywood Bowl have shifted repeatedly during the year as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which runs the Bowl, has sought to follow changing county regulations. It has drawn big crowds over the past six weeks. With few exceptions, people in the audience have been maskless, as had been permitted under county rules. But they have tended to put on their masks as they join the crush of people moving down the crowded walkways after the show. More

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      in Theater

      Review: Revisiting Four Nobodies in ‘[title of show]’

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      For an outdoor residency at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the Bridge Production Group breathes fresh life into a 2004 musical.The charm of the early internet era — before the web became an all-consuming necessity and was a seemingly innocent tool for promoting your work — survives in a new revival of “[title of show],” Jeff Bowen and Hunter Bell’s autobiographical one-act musical from 2004.And charm is what this Bridge Production Group show, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, has in spades. Documenting its own creation, from inception through the self-hyping vlogs that would eventually lead to its 2008 Broadway run, “[title of show]” is an appropriately low-stakes affair that knows exactly where it stands as a short-and-sweet entertainment. Bolstered by committed performances from its cast of four and an Olympian of a music director, this production of the meta-musical transcends its bare-bones staging by focusing on the simple joys of a shared theatrical space.If playing a character based on a real person presents a unique challenge, playing a character based on the person who originally wrote and performed the role — as Bowen and Bell did — is an unenviable task. As Jeff, Max Hunter (who also directs) more than acquits himself as the goal-oriented book writer, imbuing the character’s snappy dialogue and constant grammar corrections with a simmering self-doubt.He finds an ideal match in the skilled Josh Daniel, who plays the composer-lyricist Hunter Bell, and their alluring chemistry renews itself in every scene. A malfunctioning mic pack at the performance I attended forced Daniel to use a hand microphone, which only helped him further play up his zestful showboating.The two men decide to enter the New York Musical Theater Festival with only three weeks to complete an original work, and enlist their friends Heidi (based on, and originally played by, Heidi Blickenstaff) and Susan (Susan Blackwell, ditto) to round out their small cast. Those very particular real-life women are perhaps the show’s toughest roles, but Keri René Fuller as Heidi and Jennifer Apple as Susan ground themselves in the characters’ earnest love for their friends and their creative process.Apple, having to play an un-actorly personality, is somewhat too mannered for the part, at first forcing Blackwell’s deadpan humor into the ensemble’s peppier cadence. It doesn’t help that she is given the bulk of the book’s most dated jokes (remember “random” humor?). Regardless, she delivers the encouraging “Die Vampire, Die!” song, about banishing creative doubts, with the same tenderness that Fuller lends to her 11-o’clock number, “A Way Back to Then.”Performed outdoors, on the steps of one of the industrial complex’s street-side courtyards, this production relies on Victoria Bain’s lighting design to do most of the technical heavy lifting. As director, Hunter does not employ much of the space’s plain, yet potentially rich, surroundings. This is most felt in the show’s later scenes, when a sudden need for more dynamic choreography kicks in.Still, seeing these artists (and the actors playing them) delve deep into their own creative misgivings, at a time when the theater industry itself is at a crossroads, is a rejuvenating balm. And witnessing the music director, Jason Weisinger (“Larry,” in the meta-narrative), play the keyboard with one hand, while scrambling to fix a variety of technical issues with the other, was a lesson in assertive scrappiness.Outdoors, barely-staged and, on the night I saw it, plagued by acts of god, this production of “[title of show]” became a paean to the uneasy but hopeful footing upon which we all find ourselves. Not to mention that at least two droning ambulance sirens provided the cast a meal of ad-libbed material. I’d be hard-pressed to find a more honest theatrical experience right now.[title of show]Through Aug. 21 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard; bridgeproductiongroup.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      in Music

      It’s Never Too Late to Record Your First Album

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      “It’s Never Too Late” is a new series that tells the stories of people who decide to pursue their dreams on their own terms.One day a couple years back, the woman who has long cleaned Russ Ellis’s house in Berkeley, Calif., showed up with a new helper. Mr. Ellis did not think to ask her name.Perhaps he forgot. Or maybe the recovering academic — a celebrated architecture professor at the University of California, Berkeley, later a vice chancellor — had other things on his mind. Whatever the case, the lapse rattled him.“Russell Ellis, your father’s mother was born into slavery,” he said to himself. “You have the right to invisibilize no one.”He not only learned the woman’s name then and there — Eliza — but pledged to sing it next time she came by. With that pledge, something strange shook loose in him.“A song walked right in. Eliiiiiza. Eliiiiiiiiiza. And then the urge kept coming.”Calling on experienced musician friends to help, Mr. Ellis spent the following year recording “Songs from My Garden,” his first-ever album. He was 85. (He turned 86 in June.) It consists of 11 original songs, released online with an extremely local label, in a variety of genres.The experience delighted him at a new level — he got to explore all new terrain, with a creative abandon he’d never known. Then, with that, he was delighted to conclude his brief recording career. (The following interview has been edited and condensed.)Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesQ: Tell me about your life before the “Eliza” moment.A: I never bit down on any one thing. Over the years I’ve been an athlete, a parent, a friend, a lover. “In the golden sandbox” — that’s how I think of my life in California. As a kid growing up in the working-class Black world, you wanted a secure job at the post office or teaching school. But doing new things has always been part of my life.After retiring, I got into stone carving, then modeling clay, then steel work and painting. Sometimes I’d see former colleagues from Berkeley and they were still kind of wearing the clothes of the old office. I couldn’t have been happier to let go of all that.How hard was it to start writing music for the first time?Not hard at all. The songs just started coming, easily and naturally. I have always been a laborer, but I suddenly had the experience of a muse saying, “I gotcha, I’m taking over.”What did it feel like, doing this entirely new thing?Having that muse — it’s like I was accompanied by another self, more sophisticated and supple than I was. I’m an empiricist. But if I had to romanticize, I’d say it was a spirit that came to visit. It was one of the best experiences of my life. What a joy to have stuff flow like that.One side effect: You know how you get a song in your head sometimes? I now get whole orchestrated movements. New doors still open as you age. Along with creaky limbs, interesting things happen, too.Mr. Ellis at his home in Berkeley, Calif. “I think doing the album made me a kinder person,” he said. Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesHow did you learn about recording and songwriting?I’m kind of connected to the musical world through my children and their friends. I exploited any contacts I had: Would you mind helping me with this for free? Everyone was very generous.Were you nervous, taking the first steps into this new world?There are benefits to age. Not a lot, but some. I’m too old to get nervous. And nothing was riding on this.What kinds of challenges did you encounter at the beginning?The hardest thing was the blues. Recording my song “Night Driver (The Next-to-Last Old-Ass Black Man’s Bragging Blues)” was intimidating. Singing the blues ain’t just something you stand up and do. You have to be in it, you have to mean it, you have to deliver it in a way that people get into it themselves.How did this album change you?A big surprise to me about aging is that you do keep changing. I think doing the album made me a kinder person. Having my kids’ clear respect and support with it — it helped me feel better about myself, and when you feel better about yourself, you feel better about other people.In one of his many pursuits, Russ Ellis was a U.C.L.A. track star. In 1956, Mr. Ellis, second from left, ran in the 400-meter heats of the U.S. Olympic trials in Los Angeles.Hy Peskin, via Getty ImagesAlso, I was onstage for a living, teaching classes for 150 students, then representing the university in my administrative role. Before that I was a track star at U.C.L.A., from ’54 to ’58. If I ran a good race, my stroll across campus was an act of celebrity.All that stage time was not good for me. I felt somewhat unreal. I realized, when I finished this album, that was my last expression of my desire for it. I have been happy to get offstage.What’s next for you?My wife is suffering some significant health problems. It’s normal trouble, as they say — but it’s not trivial. Right now my life is about caregiving.What would you tell someone who’s feeling stuck in their life?Do something that involves other people. Even one other person. Getting out of a groove — sometimes you just need company.There’s this fantasy that creativity is something you do alone, by candlelight. No! Do something with other people who are as genuinely interested as you are.Was Mr. Ellis nervous about his album? “There are benefits to age. Not a lot, but some,” he said. “I’m too old to get nervous.”Aubrey Trinnaman for The New York TimesWhat do you wish you’d known about life when you were younger?That doesn’t involve sex?Life is shorter than you think and longer than you think. My two best friends are also Black men in their 80s. We marvel about our actuarial improbability. I’m happy to have used my time in so many different ways — ways that connected me to the world, to people.Were there experiences before the album that helped prepare you for it?Over the last 10 years I’ve actually had a bit of an art career. In the process I discovered that I wasn’t as vulnerable as I thought. At one point I had a piece in a group show, at a gallery. I walked by it just as a guy was saying, “this painting sucks.” And I didn’t die! I actually went over and, without telling him I was the artist, asked why he said that. Turned out he was a painter, and he told me his reasons. I learned a whole bunch.Any other lessons you can pass on?Take note of what’s interesting in your life. Don’t keep every little scrap of paper. But take note.We’re looking for people who decide that it’s never too late to switch gears, change their life and pursue dreams. Should we talk to you or someone you know? Share your story here. More

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      in Music

      A Reliably Varied Music Festival Returns to New York

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      Time Spans, a wide-ranging immersion in contemporary work, balances good taste and risk-taking.The Time Spans festival has carved out a unique place for itself in New York’s musical life over the past decade — and not just because it occupies an otherwise barren stretch of the calendar in late August.This contemporary-music event, now a multiweek affair, is that perfect paradox: reliably varied. On successive evenings you might find electroacoustic experiments, meditative string quartets and barreling pieces for chamber orchestra.There is no stylistic tribalism on offer, just a sagacious balance of good taste and calculated risk-taking. That’s thanks in part to the curatorial hand of the festival’s executive and artistic director, Thomas Fichter, a veteran bassist.And it’s also because of the quality of the performers. Ensembles like the JACK Quartet and Alarm Will Sound may well be familiar to music lovers. But they’re rarely presented in such concentrated helpings. Each Time Spans show generally lasts about an hour, while managing to feel like a full meal.After the pandemic led to the cancellation of last year’s festival, Time Spans restarts live performances on Tuesday, and runs through Aug. 29. Presented by the Earle Brown Music Foundation Charitable Trust, and held once again at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in Manhattan, it’s an early sign of concert life springing back to action in the city this fall.Here is a closer look at four of this edition’s presentations. (Details about the festival’s Covid-19 safety protocols are available at timespans.org.)‘Or we don’t need light’The cellist Mariel Roberts’s debut album, “Nonextraneous Sounds,” announced her as a talent to watch back in 2012. Since then, she has commissioned music by George Lewis and joined the Wet Ink Ensemble, a respected collection of composers and instrumentalists. Her first composition for the full group will be heard at the ensemble’s Time Spans slot on Friday, and draws its inspiration from a narrative embedded within “Seiobo There Below,” a novel by the Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai.“The story is about this man who’s going to the Acropolis,” she said in a recent interview, “and he’s trying to climb up on the Acropolis. But the light is so intense and unyielding that he can’t even see his surroundings. I thought that was an interesting concept in music, as well.”She added that the piece shares some traits with “Armament” — her recent, often ferocious solo album of her own works that closes with some earnest (if still aggressive) passages of lament.

      Armament by Mariel RobertsBoth “Or we don’t need light” and “Armament” make use of electronics, she said, adding that among the two works, “there’s a relation in that I’m interested in exploring beautiful harmonies, but with really kind of gruff and intense textures layered on top of them, almost obscuring them a lot of the time.”‘La Arqueología del Neón’The composer Oscar Bettison’s gutsy, peripatetic “Livre des Sauvages” was a notable highlight of the 2018 Time Spans festival, when it was played by the Talea Ensemble. (It has since been recorded for the Wergo label by Ensemble Musikfabrik.)Oscar Bettison’s “Livre des Sauvages”Ensemble Musikfabrik (Wergo 68692)On Aug. 23, Bettison and Talea reunite for a new work that channels similar energies. “I’ve got a little obsession about artificiality,” he said. “You know, distortion. There’s a lot of preparation on instruments. Those are the two things that are sort of themes that I keep coming back to in things I do.”“This piece is very up,” he added. “It’s always trying to move; it’s very frenetic.”This opus, though, is more intimate in forces than “Livre des Sauvages”; it’s written for just seven players. “I think of this piece as really being a chamber concerto for Talea,” Bettison said. “They really like to work, you know? They like to get into it. I wanted to write something that would push them a bit.”‘Neumond’The percussion and piano quartet Yarn/Wire is playing the premiere of a piece by Wolfgang Heiniger.Bobby FisherTo get a preview of Yarn/Wire’s next album, which will be released on the Wergo imprint on Sept. 10, you can hear its Time Spans set on Aug. 24. In addition to pieces by Andrew McIntosh and Zosha Di Castri, this percussion and piano quartet will give the premiere of this work by Wolfgang Heiniger.This is truly a premiere, said Russell Greenberg, one of the group’s percussionists, since the album version was recorded in multitrack fashion — with percussion and keyboard parts (and even some vocals) recorded individually.“So this will be the first time we’ve played it live,” Greenberg said.“The surface melodies and the harmonies, they’re so unique and dramatic; they kind of hit you immediately,” he said, adding, of Heiniger: “He thinks of it as a passacaglia. It’s pretty short, and just these motives just keep coming along. When I sent him the record, he said, ‘Yes you got it; it’s so goth.’”‘For George Lewis’The composer and instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey has formed a productive collaboration in recent years with the ensemble Alarm Will Sound. The group’s players have immersed themselves in his ongoing work “Autoschediasms” — which blends Sorey’s conducting skills, improvisational responsiveness and ventures into notated composition — with sterling results.They’ve also been preparing his meditative, fully notated tribute to the composer George Lewis, a mentor of Sorey’s. In an interview, Alarm Will Sound’s conductor, Alan Pierson, spoke of “a deliberateness with which Tyshawn places each of the sounds in this environment” as the work’s defining characteristic. (A recording will be released on the Cantaloupe label on Aug. 27.)“This is not a piece that belongs on a concert with other music,” he added. “So we’re really carefully and thoughtfully designing an experience of the piece for the DiMenna Center.” The ensemble will appear in the round, with specially planned lighting.“He spends all this time creating this landscape,” Pierson said, “and then once you’re there, there’s a kind of magical thing that happens — about 40 minutes into the piece — where Tyshawn suddenly takes you back to where the piece started. But takes a subtly different path, and makes the space for this really unexpectedly beautiful melodic thing to happen.”Time SpansThrough Aug. 29 at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in Manhattan; timespans.org. More