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      The Music Scene in This Brooklyn Neighborhood Is Here to Stay

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      During the city’s lockdown, porch concerts in Ditmas Park began as a way to unite artists. These events, along with new series and festivals, have transformed this quiet area into an arts hub.One July Sunday, just off Newkirk Plaza in Brooklyn — between the yellow facade of a laundromat and the red awning of a bodega — the mellow strains of a saxophone floated over a crowd of about 150. The Haitian jazz guitarist Eddy Bourjolly introduced the song “Complainte Paysanne,” and the band serenaded the street.This was a kickoff event for Open Streets, a series of Sunday concerts that will run through the end of August in the Flatbush area of Brooklyn. It is hosted by 5 p.m. Porch Concerts, one of a handful of groups that have taken root around the Ditmas Park neighborhood since the pandemic began. Operation Gig, which connects local musicians to paying gigs, began last July. Artmageddon, an art and music festival on the porches and in the gardens there, saw its first installment this June.As to-go cocktails — and (hopefully) outdoor birthday parties in frigid January — become a thing of the past, some rituals that have developed during the pandemic are here to stay in the city. The nascent arts and music scene around Ditmas Park — a neighborhood nestled in Flatbush, below Prospect Park — appears to be one of them.Robert Elstein, an artist and public-school teacher who organized Artmageddon, plans to hold its next installment in October. Last time, paintings and sculptures from groups like Flatbush Artists and Oye Studios were on display in yards and in the Newkirk Community Garden. The neighborhood has always counted artists and musicians among its residents, but because of the pandemic they were suddenly staying put, Elstein said.“Our world went from being the entire world to just our local community, no matter where we were,” he said. “And because of the neighborly spirit and creativity of the residents of Ditmas Park, we saw what we saw.”A crowd on Newkirk Avenue watching the Playing for the Light Big Band in July.Natalie Keyssar for The New York TimesThe quiet, leafy area of Ditmas Park is known better for its Victorian houses than concert venues (in fact, there’s a dearth of them), but it became a musical destination in the city in 2020 thanks in part to the wiry 70-year-old saxophonist Roy Nathanson.Beginning in April of last year, he played “Amazing Grace” from his second-floor balcony in Ditmas Park every evening at 5 sharp — a soothing change from the constant wail of sirens then. Soon a motley crew of local musicians — including the pianist and composer Albert Marquès — took shape, and they joined him in playing that hopeful hymn for 82 days straight.Last May, when George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, and New Yorkers took to the streets to protest police brutality, Marquès did too.“I was playing for the community, we were doing all those things,” he said in a video interview from Spain this month. “And I was going to the protests. So in my mind, both things had to connect somehow.” That connection took shape as Freedom First, a series of jazz concerts around New York he organized around a cause, raising funds to support Keith LaMar, a death-row inmate in Ohio who is fighting to be exonerated for a crime he says he did not commit.Last summer, 5 p.m. Porch Concerts pivoted to hosting mostly jazz performances, and began offering outdoor lessons to young musicians in middle and high school in June of 2020. After going mostly dormant over the winter, they started “porch jams” in April; this series, held on Sundays at 5 p.m. on East 17th Street, will resume in mid-August.A member of a punk duo that performed. This Sunday concert series will run through the end of August.Natalie Keyssar for The New York TimesRhonasha George singing a song she wrote at the event in July.Natalie Keyssar for The New York TimesAnother group, Operation Gig, founded by Aaron Lisman in July 2020, has been bringing live music to Ditmas Park, and paying local professional musicians for their work, for a full year now. Especially during a pandemic, he said, musicians should not be expected to play for free.There’s no overhead for shows like these, and no booking agent or venue. Each concert averages between $300 and $500 in crowd funding (think Venmo), by Lisman’s estimate. The record collected for a performance was around $1,000 — more than some music clubs in the city pay. At a recent event, they announced a suggested donation of $10 per person, $20 per family. Many young families attend, as do older people.“They’re not going to be going to Manhattan, period, let alone to clubs,” Lisman said. “So they are sort of an untapped market, and it turns out that doing music on porches — which turns out to be really beautiful and special — is a perfect way to tap that market.”On the same Sunday in July, music, folksy and bright, could be heard down Buckingham Road, an area lined with beautiful old Victorians. A stroller brigade was parked on the grass. Through the trees emerged a Japanese-style, bright red stucco-covered box of a house, trimmed in forest green and built at the beginning of the 20th century. Below the porch, a white-haired couple held hands. Toward the fence, Amy Bramhall of Copper Spoon Bakery presided over a table of free cupcakes, macarons and cookies.Gloria Fischer, the homeowner for 40 years, listened to the four songwriters in-the-round at the Operation Gig event — Scott Stein, Andi Rae Healy, Jeff Litman and Bryan Dunn — from her porch. Sporting teashade sunglasses with purple-swirled frames, Fischer said that over the past year alone, she estimates she has hosted around 50 Operation Gig shows.“I think that it actually gave me an emotional lift,” she said. “Because it was obviously such a dent” during the pandemic.A concert at Gloria Fischer’s home on Buckingham Road in Brooklyn this month.Natalie Keyssar for The New York TimesOperation Gig has sprouted offshoots: The fiddle player and singer Melody Allegra Berger has taken charge of a weekly Operation Gig Bluegrass Sesh on Sundays at various locations. On Saturdays, she runs her own Stoop Sesh nearby in Park Slope.“When you’re a hustling creative type in New York, you just get used to having to adapt and having many things going on at once,” she said. “So it was like, ‘Oh, well that whole revenue stream is gone.’ And we made this happen instead.”These neighborhood concerts are popular with crowds of all ages.Natalie Keyssar for The New York TimesThe suggested donation, often sent via Venmo, is $10 for individuals and $20 for families.Natalie Keyssar for The New York TimesLast summer, 5 p.m. Porch Concerts started a program of outdoor lessons, pairing professional musicians from the neighborhood with kids aged 10 to 18. At the Open Streets event, which will make Newkirk Avenue a car-free zone on Sundays through the end of the summer, the Multigenerational Playing for the Light Big Band performed, featuring teachers alongside their students.Aaron Scrimgeour, a melodica player, said that inspiration for the lessons came from “knowing the amount of musicians doing different and interesting things that live in the neighborhood, and the amount of kids who could have access to what I think is really a cool opportunity.”Among Scrimgeour’s students is the pianist Rhonasha George, 15. At the Open Streets event, she sang a song she had written, “Outside My Window,” her fire engine red braids matching her dress. The song comes from a poem George wrote with the informal music school last summer. Over Zoom, teachers asked students to visualize what happened in the neighborhood around them during the pandemic.For George, that meant writing about an old man outside of her window caught in a summer storm, with no coat and no umbrella. But like the city itself, “he was OK. And he was actually stronger and healthier than anything,” George said. And like the city, she added, “He knows how to come back.” More

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      New York’s ‘Homecoming’ to Feature a Free Concert in Every Borough

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      The concerts, which are to run between Aug. 16 to Aug. 21, are being organized to celebrate the city’s reopening and promote tourism.In case the other boroughs were jealous of the star-studded concert announced for Central Park in August, the city is giving each one a show to call their own.Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Thursday that the lead-up to the reopening bash on the Great Lawn on Aug. 21 — featuring Bruce Springsteen, Jennifer Hudson, Paul Simon and others — will include free concerts in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island. The concert series, part of what the city is calling “homecoming week,” is being presented as a celebration of New York’s emergence out of the dark days of the pandemic and an enticement for tourists to return.If attendees are required to be vaccinated to attend the concerts, which is not yet clear, it will also be yet another carrot that the city government is waving in front of the unvaccinated.“Unless you want to spend the rest of your life saying, ‘Oh my God, I missed it,’” de Blasio said at the news conference, “you should get to New York City in the month of August where amazing things will be happening.”“I’ve talked to people who missed Woodstock,” he added. “Don’t let that F.O.M.O. thing happen to you.” (He was referring to the fear of missing out.)The outer-borough concerts are being produced by the Universal Hip Hop Museum in the Bronx. Rocky Bucano, the president of the museum, said at the news conference that the acts will include hip-hop, Latin, freestyle, dance, R&B, techno and funk.He said he imagined that the concerts would be “reminiscent of the days when the Bronx park jams brought people, young and old, together to have a good time in the spirit of peace, love and unity.”New York’s weeklong celebration will also feature movie screenings, public art, cultural activities and the city’s Restaurant Week, according to the city’s website advertising the programming.A spokesman for the mayor, Bill Neidhardt, said the city planned to announce concert lineups and information about tickets next week. The concerts and the additional police presence they will require will no doubt be expensive; Neidhardt said there are sponsorships that will help support the cost but the office is not yet ready to release those details.The concerts will take place on Aug. 16 at Orchard Beach in the Bronx, Aug. 17 at Richmond County Bank Ballpark in Staten Island, Aug. 19 at Brooklyn Army Terminal and Aug. 20 at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens.The concert on Central Park’s Great Lawn is being produced by the veteran music producer Clive Davis. He has long been associated with headliners at that event, including Springsteen, who is expected to perform a duet with Patti Smith, according to a person briefed on the plans. (Our bet: a rendition of “Because the Night.”)Ben Sisario contributed reporting. More

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      A Rap Song Lays Bare Israel’s Jewish-Arab Fracture — and Goes Viral

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      A Jew and a Palestinian sling slurs at each other, giving voice to hidden prejudice with the aim of overcoming it.BEIT YEHOSHUA, Israel — Uriya Rosenman grew up on Israeli military bases and served as an officer in an elite unit of the army. His father was a combat pilot. His grandfather led the paratroopers who captured the Western Wall from Jordan in 1967.Sameh Zakout, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, grew up in the mixed Arab-Jewish town of Ramla. His family was driven out of its home in the 1948 war of Israeli independence, known to Palestinians as the “Nakba,” or catastrophe. Many of his relatives fled to Gaza.Facing each other in a garage over a small plastic table, the two hurl ethnic insults and clichés at each other, tearing away the veneer of civility overlaying the seething resentments between the Jewish state and its Palestinian minority in a rap video that has gone viral in Israel.The video, “Let’s Talk Straight,” which has garnered more than four million views on social media since May, couldn’t have landed at a more apt time, after the eruption two months ago of Jewish-Arab violence that turned many mixed Israeli cities like Lod and Ramla into Jewish-Arab battlegrounds.By shouting each side’s prejudices at each other, at times seemingly on the verge of violence, Mr. Rosenman and Mr. Zakout have produced a work that dares listeners to move past stereotypes and discover their shared humanity.Mr. Rosenman, 31, says he wants to change Israel from within by challenging its most basic reflexes. “I think that we are scared and are controlled by fear,” he says.Mr. Zakout, 37, wants to change Israel by overcoming their forebears’ traumas. “I am not emphasizing my Palestinian identity,” he says. “I am a human being. Period. We are human beings first.”At first viewing, the video seems like anything but a humanistic enterprise.Mr. Rosenman, the first to speak, launches into a relentless three-minute anti-Palestinian tirade.“Don’t cry racism. Stop the whining. You live in clans, fire rifles at weddings,” he taunts, his body tensed. “Abuse your animals, steal cars, beat your own women. All you care about is Allah and the Nakba and jihad and the honor that controls your urges.”The camera circles them. A guitar screeches.Mr. Zakout tugs at his beard, looks away with disdain. He’s heard it all before, including that oft-repeated line: “I am not a racist, my gardener is Arab.”The duo recorded the song in March and the video in mid-April. Arab-Jewish riots broke out in Israeli cities soon after.Dan Balilty for The New York TimesThen Mr. Zakout, his voice rising, delivers the other side of the most intractable of Middle Eastern stories.“Enough,” he says. “I am a Palestinian and that’s it, so shut up. I don’t support terror, I’m against violence, but 70 years of occupation — of course there’ll be resistance. When you do a barbecue and celebrate independence, the Nakba is my grandmother’s reality. In 1948 you kicked out my family, the food was still warm on the table when you broke into our homes, occupying and then denying. You can’t speak Arabic, you know nothing of your neighbor, you don’t want us to live next to you, but we build your homes.”Mr. Rosenman fidgets. His assertive confidence drains away as he’s whisked through the looking-glass of Arab-Jewish incomprehension.The video pays homage to Joyner Lucas’s “I’m Not Racist,” a similar exploration of the stereotypes and blindness that lock in the Black-white fracture in the United States.Mr. Rosenman, an educator whose job was to explain the conflict to young Israeli soldiers, had grown increasingly frustrated with “how things, with the justification of past traumas for the Jews, were built on rotten foundations.”“Some things about my country are amazing and pure,” he said in an interview. “Some are very rotten. They are not discussed. We are motivated by trauma. We are a post-traumatic society. The Holocaust gives us some sort of back-way legitimacy to not plan for the future, not understand the full picture of the situation here, and to justify action we portray as defending ourselves.”For example, Israel, he believes, should stop building settlements “on what could potentially be a Palestinian state” in the West Bank, because that state is needed for peace.Looking for a way to hold a mirror to society and reveal its hypocrisies, Mr. Rosenman contacted a friend in the music industry, who suggested he meet Mr. Zakout, an actor and rapper.They started talking in June last year, meeting for hours on a dozen occasions, building trust. They recorded the song in Hebrew and Arabic in March and the video in mid-April.Their timing was impeccable. A few weeks later, the latest Gaza war broke out. Jews and Arabs clashed across Israel.Their early conversations were difficult.They argued over 1948. Mr. Zakout talked about his family in Gaza, how he missed them, how he wanted to get to know his relatives who lost their homes. He talked about the Jewish “arrogance that we feel as Arabs, the bigotry.”Mr. Zakout and Mr. Rosenman have become fast friends and are at work on a second project.Dan Balilty for The New York Times“My Israeli friends told me I put them in front of the mirror,” he said.Mr. Rosenman said he understood Mr. Zakout’s longing for a united family. That was natural. But why did Arab armies attack the Jews in 1948? “We were happy with what we got,” he said. “You know we had no other option.”The reaction to the video has been overwhelming, as if it bared something hidden in Israel. Invitations have poured in — to appear at conferences, to participate in documentaries, to host concerts, to record podcasts.“I’ve been waiting for someone to make this video for a long time,” said one commenter, Arik Carmi. “How can we fight each other when we are more like brothers than we will admit to ourselves? Change won’t come before we let go of the hate.”The two men, now friends, are at work on a second project, which will examine how self-criticism in a Jewish and Arab society might bring change. It will ask the question: How can you do better, rather than blaming the government?Mr. Zakout recently met Mr. Rosenman’s grandfather, Yoram Zamosh, who planted the Israeli flag at the Western Wall after Israeli paratroopers stormed into the Old City in Jerusalem during the 1967 war. Most of Mr. Zamosh’s family from Berlin was murdered by the Nazis at the Chelmno extermination camp.“He is a unique and special guy,” Mr. Zakout said of Mr. Zamosh. “He reminds me a little of my grandfather, Abdallah Zakout, his energy, his vibes. When we spoke about his history and pain, I understood his fear, and at the same time he understood my side.”The video aims to bring viewers to that same kind of understanding.“That’s the beginning,” Mr. Zakout said. “We are not going to solve this in a week. But at least it is something, the first step in a long journey.”Mr. Rosenman added: “What we do is meant to scream out loud that we are not scared anymore. We are letting go of our parents’ traumas and building a better future for everyone together.”The last words in the video, from Mr. Zakout, are: “We both have no other country, and this is where the change begins.”They turn to the table in front of them, and silently share a meal of pita and hummus. More

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      Kennedy Center Taps Joni Mitchell and Berry Gordy for Awards

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      Bette Midler, Lorne Michaels and Justino Díaz will also receive tributes at a ceremony that is expected to look much more like it did before the pandemic.The last Kennedy Center Honors aired on television less than two months ago, but on Wednesday, the institution announced a new batch of honorees, taking a step toward getting the program back on schedule after the upheaval of the pandemic.The recipients include the folk singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell; the stage and screen performer Bette Midler; Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown; Lorne Michaels, the creator of “Saturday Night Live”; and the opera singer Justino Díaz.Because of the pandemic, the 2020 honors were delayed until this year and the celebration did not at all resemble the event from prior years, when artists, politicians and other prominent figures packed into the opera house. Instead, the ceremony was split over several days, and television producers stitched together a combination of recorded at-home tributes and in-person performances that aired in June.This time, the ceremony, scheduled for Dec. 5, promises to look more like the Kennedy Center Honors of old, with the house at capacity and, if all goes well, President Biden in attendance. (President Trump was a no-show at the three ceremonies held during his time in office.)Throughout her career, Bette Midler released more than a dozen studio albums. Her starring role in the Broadway revival of “Hello, Dolly!” earned her a Tony Award for best lead actress in a musical in 2017.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“It’s going to be the party to end all parties because we haven’t had one in so long,” said Deborah Rutter, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.The ceremony will air on CBS, but the date has not been set.The honorees, selected on the recommendation of an advisory committee that includes Kennedy Center officials and past award recipients, include two singer-songwriters, Mitchell and Midler, whose careers started to soar in the early 1970s, when they were in their 20s.Fifty years ago, Mitchell, 77, released “Blue,” her fourth album, which went on to have an enduring influence on singer-songwriters for decades to come. Mitchell, who helped shape an era of protest music with songs like “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Woodstock,” said of the honor, “I wish my mother and father were alive to see this.”Midler’s debut album, “The Divine Miss M,” came out a year after “Blue,” and helped propel her into a career that spread to Broadway, television and film. Midler, 75, put out more than a dozen studio albums, and her run as Dolly Levi in the Broadway revival of “Hello, Dolly!” earned her a Tony Award for best lead actress in a musical in 2017.Berry Gordy, right, onstage in 1981 with Smokey Robinson, one of the many singers discovered by Gordy.Joan Adlen/Getty ImagesIn Gordy, the founder of Motown Records, the Kennedy Center is honoring the figure behind an entire generation of musical talent. Gordy, now 91, once borrowed $800 from his family to start the record company and then went on to discover and help ignite the careers of Diana Ross and the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye and more.After announcing his retirement two years ago, Gordy said in an interview, he spends much of his time playing golf, tennis and chess.“Here we are 60 years later and Diana Ross and the Temptations are both coming out with new albums,” he said. “Motown’s legacy continues without me having to do anything.”This year is the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy Center’s opening in 1971, more than a decade after President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed legislation creating a National Cultural Center. Shortly after the grand opening of the center, Díaz, then a 31-year-old opera singer, performed there as the male lead in Ginastera’s “Beatrix Cenci.” He played a villainous count and recalled handling two huge Mastiffs onstage during his first entrance.Now, at 81, Díaz, a bass-baritone who has performed for opera companies across the globe, will return to the opera house to see artists pay tribute to his career.Fifty years ago, Justino Díaz sang at one of the opening performances at the Kennedy Center. Now, he will return for a celebration of his career.Presley Ann/Patrick McMullan, via Getty Image“Little old me?” he said in an interview. He noted that despite his fame in the opera world, he is not a household name.“I say I’m an opera singer,” he said, “and immediately I have to follow with, ‘No, I’m not Plácido Domingo and I’m not Luciano Pavarotti.’”Rutter said that although the last ceremony was limited by social distancing requirements, there are aspects of it that she wishes to maintain. In particular, she said, there was a sense of intimacy in that celebration that had not been there before. At one point, she noted, as the artists mingled outside on a terrace, Rhiannon Giddens picked up her banjo, began playing, and Joan Baez started to dance.“It was spontaneous,” Rutter said. “The artists broke open their instruments and people started singing and dancing together.”(It is unclear whether the attendees this year will be required to wear masks, as they will be required to do for the Kennedy Center’s fall programming.)Michaels, 76, who created “S.N.L.” in 1975, was also forced by the pandemic to drastically rethink his show. In the spring of 2020, “S.N.L.” filmed sketches at its actors’ homes, allowing the audience to connect with the cast members in a new way. Now that they have returned to a live audience, they are thinking of ways to apply what they learned in quarantine.“Those shows had a strong homemade quality, which was part of their charm,” he said. “Once we went back to the audience, we kept pushing the limit of what we could do.” More

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      It’s Never Too Late to Play the Cello

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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.In 1940, at age 12, Vera Jiji found her first passion: the cello. She learned to love playing the orchestra instrument at the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan. “I didn’t pick the cello. They assigned it to me because I had a good ear and long fingers,” said the Bronx native, now 93. “I loved it. It’s a beautiful instrument that can sound like a human voice. It looked like a female body, with hips, breasts and a waist. Holding it and playing it was a very intimate experience.”As an adult, though, she stopped playing the instrument. She became a professor and a fixture at Brooklyn College teaching English classes. She married twice and had four children. Her beloved cello, her mother’s high school graduation present, sat tucked away in the back of her clothing closet. It remained untouched, almost forgotten, for about 40 years. She picked up her cello again only after retiring at 62.“I revived the passion I always felt when I started playing again,” she said. Since then, it has been like a second life.Today Dr. Jiji, who lives with her 93-year-old husband in an Upper East Side townhouse, can be found playing most Fridays with other amateurs and friends in two musical groups, a trio and a string quartet, at the 92nd Street Y. She’s also a part of the Y’s annual musical performance. In 2007 she self-published her first book, “Cello Playing for Music Lovers,” which is sold on Amazon in more than 20 countries. (The following interview has been edited and condensed.)What made you return to music after all these years?Brooklyn College gave me companions and socialization with other teachers and students. I felt important socially. When I retired, I lost that. I felt empty and needed to replace that loss and community. I wanted to meet people in the neighborhood.How did you feel about retiring?I thought my life was over; it wasn’t. I had to find a different road. I thought about the road I took when I was younger, and the one I didn’t take because I was a wife and a mother of four and had a career. I thought about the road I didn’t travel — one filled with music — and realized I should take that road now. I couldn’t take both at the same time. The one I took became my life. I went back to the fork and took the other road to see where it would take me.How did you know where to start?I’m a half a block away from the 92nd Street Y. I walked in and asked about classes; they had a creative music class for people over 60 and told me to just show up. I thought I would have to take a test, but I didn’t. I was at the piano, seated next to an instructor who said, “Let’s see how you play,” when someone walked in carrying a cello. I couldn’t believe it. I asked if I could play it and I fell in love with the instrument instantly.What did that feel like?Like coming home. It all came flooding back, and it was wonderful. I felt like I was reconnecting with a best friend. I needed the opportunity to play music and have these other musicians in my life. This was a return to a prized passion.What have you gained by returning to this passion?Music is a perfect language; it’s like a conversation between people who never misunderstand each other and never get bored. When you play music with people, it’s a kind of friendship. Music is a world of pleasure. It has given me a way to communicate without using words. It gave me a next step in life.What made you write your book, “Cello Playing for Music Lovers”?I looked for other books I could turn to, and didn’t find anything helpful. So I decided to write one. As an English professor, I knew how to do this. I’m good at articulating ideas, being able to put things down in a way people can follow, and I’m disciplined enough to sit down everyday and write. I made it a practice to stop at a specific point where I knew what I wanted to say going forward. I never stopped when I was at a loss. That way I could continue the next day knowing I had direction and wouldn’t get overwhelmed. And I wanted to help others.What did it feel like for Dr. Jiji to return to the cello? “Like coming home,” she said. “It all came flooding back, and it was wonderful.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesHow do you feel about this stage in your life?I’m 93. People view age incorrectly: Getting older doesn’t mean you can’t have something, you can. And getting older isn’t getting worse. I’m about enjoying the moment. You have to get up each morning and do something you love. That’s how you move forward.What is your best advice for people looking to make a change?Do not be afraid to go back to something you loved. People say no to things too quickly. We aren’t always our best friends. Your passion or skills are still there. You will remember more than you think. All the information about music I thought I’d lost was in a part of my brain that wasn’t talking to me until I tapped back into it.What have you learned during this new act in your life?Even though I was aging I learned I could still re-enter this wonderful world of creating music. And the community I lost I found again. Music gave me a new group of people. It gave me support. It gave me a new home.In this second act, what are you most proud of accomplishing?Writing and publishing “Cello Playing for Music Lovers.” I lived, I died; what did I give the world? This book, which will outlast me. When I’m gone, this will still be here, helping people learn the cello.What lesson can people learn from your experience?Don’t say no to yourself.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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      Esther Bejarano, 96, Dies; Auschwitz Survivor Fought Hate With Hip-Hop

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      She played the accordion in the camp’s orchestra. Decades later, she spoke out against fascism and racism, using music as well as words.When Esther Bejarano was 18, she played accordion in the women’s orchestra at Auschwitz, which played marches as prisoners left the concentration camp for hard labor and upbeat music as train loads of Jews and others arrived.“They must have thought, ‘Where music is playing, things can’t be that bad,’” she told The New York Times in 2014, recalling how some detainees smiled and waved at the musicians. “They didn’t know where they were going. But we knew. We played with tears in our eyes.”Mrs. Bejarano died on Saturday at a hospital in Hamburg, Germany. She was 96. With her death, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a cellist, is believed to be the only member of the orchestra still alive.Mrs. Bejarano’s death was announced by the International Auschwitz Committee, which was founded by survivors of the death camp and to which she belonged, serving as a powerful voice against intolerance in her later years.She would also form a band with her children to sing antiwar and Jewish resistance songs and, in her 80s, joined a hip-hop group that spread an antifascist message.Being in an orchestra at a concentration camp was often an escape from forced labor, and possibly from death. For Mrs. Bejarano, playing music for her captors relieved her of having to carry heavy rocks and earned her decent medical treatment during two illnesses.Women deemed fit for work at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, in a photograph taken in May 1944.Vashem Archives/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhen Mrs. Bejarano learned that a women’s orchestra was being formed at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp, she approached its conductor, Zofia Czajkowska, a Polish music teacher.She played the piano, but there wasn’t one at the camp at the time. When Ms. Czajkowska asked if she could play the accordion, she said she could, although she never had. Yet she passed her audition, playing a German song, “Du hast Glück bei den Frauen, Bel Ami” (“You’re Lucky With Women, Bel Ami”).“At the time it was a very well-known hit,” Mrs. Bejarano said in an interview cited in “Auschwitz Studies No. 27,” published in 2014 by the Auschwitz Memorial State Museum. “I didn’t have any problems with my right hand, because I knew how to play the piano and immediately found the keyboard, but the bass is on the left, and only thanks to the fact that I have a good ear could I find the right tones. I managed.”Orchestras were formed in many concentration camps — to entertain the Nazis, but also to serve other purposes.“They were for the benefit of the administration and staff,” said Bret Werb, the musicologist and recorded sound curator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. “They believed that quick march music would get the prisoners to march in time, and quickly, to hard labor.”Mrs. Bejarano, who arrived at Auschwitz in April 1943, performed at the camp for several months until being moved later that year to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in northern Germany. On a death march from the camp near the end of the war, she and several other prisoners escaped.She celebrated the Allied victory over the Nazis in a market square in Lubz, Germany. A picture of Hitler was set on fire by American soldiers. A G.I. handed her an accordion, which she played as soldiers and other camp survivors danced.“That was my liberation, an incredibly great liberation,” she told Der Spiegel last year. “The American and Russian soldiers embraced and shouted, ‘Hitler is dead.’”She found her way to a displaced persons camp at Bergen-Belsen, near a former concentration camp, where she learned that the Nazis had killed her parents in Riga, Latvia. Her sister Ruth, who had fled to Switzerland, was deported and sent to Auschwitz before Esther’s arrival.“That is so fateful,” Mrs. Bejarano told the British newspaper The Telegraph in an interview. “I came to Auschwitz in April 1943, and if she had lived, I would have met her there.”From Bergen-Belsen, Mrs. Bejarano hitchhiked to Frankfurt and took a train to Marseille, France, where in August 1945 she boarded a boat to what was then British Palestine and was reunited with her sister Tosca. Their brother, Gerhard, had immigrated to the United States some years earlier.Mrs. Bejarano in 2015, with Efim Kofman on accordion. She formed a band late in life to sing antiwar and Jewish resistance songs.Daniel Reinhardt/picture-alliance dpa, via Associated PressEsther Loewy was born on Dec. 15, 1924, in Saarlouis, in southwestern Germany, near the French border. Her father, Rudolf, was a teacher and cantor. He met her mother, Margarethe, in Berlin when they were teenagers; he was her piano teacher, and the two fell in love.Ms. Bejarano described her childhood as “lighthearted,” but that part of her life ended when she was sent at 16 to a Nazi work camp near Berlin, from which she would be sent to Auschwitz.After the war, she restarted her life in what would become Israel. She studied singing, joined a choir, gave music lessons and in 1950 married Nissim Bejarano, a truck driver, with whom she had two children, Joram, a son, and Edna, a daughter. In 1960, she returned to Germany, settling in Hamburg, and ran a laundry service with her husband.She is survived by her children, two grandsons and four great-grandchildren.She found it difficult to discuss the Holocaust with anyone until the 1970s, when she watched German police officers shield right-wing extremists against protesters. The incident turned her into an activist, and she joined the Association of the Persecutees of the Nazi Regime. She began to tell her story in schools, delivered protest speeches and sang with Coincidence, the band that she formed with her children in 1989.“I use music to act against fascism,” she told The Times. “Music is everything to me.”Around 2009, when she was in her 80s, Mrs. Bejarano’s musical career took an unexpected turn. She was asked to join Microphone Mafia, a German hip-hop group, with whom she continued to spread her message against fascism and intolerance to young audiences in Germany and abroad, from Istanbul to Vancouver.Onstage with the group’s Kutlu Yurtseven and Rossi Pennino, Mrs. Bejarano was an unusual figure: a tiny woman with a snow-white pixie haircut, singing in Yiddish, Hebrew and Italian.Hip-hop was not her preferred musical genre. She joked that she persuaded her bandmates to lower their volume and stop jumping around onstage so much. She believed that hip-hop’s influence on young people could help her counter a rise in intolerance.“Twelve years together and almost 900 concerts together, and all this thanks to your strength,” Microphone Mafia wrote on its website after Mrs. Bejarano’s death. “Your laughter, your courage, your determination, your loving manner, your understanding, your fighting heart.”Mrs. Bejarano, a recipient of Germany’s Order of Merit, issued a statement this year through the International Auschwitz Committee calling for Germany to declare May 8 a federal holiday to commemorate the end of World War II in Europe.“And if you are concerned about whether Germans should celebrate this day solemnly,” she wrote, “imagine: What would the world look like if the Nazis had won?” More

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      in Music

      'Aline': The Crazy Celine Dion Movie at Cannes

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      “Aline,” an unofficial biopic of the singer, boasts a singular casting choice that has all of Cannes buzzing.CANNES, France — The Cannes Film Festival is meant to be a holy temple of cinema, a place where sober works from the most respected directors have their first unveiling. But every so often, something completely off-kilter sneaks through, a film so unlike anything at Cannes that it feels out of place … that is, until it steers into its eccentricities so hard that it somehow boomerangs back into auteurism.These out-of-left-field movies often end up being my favorite experiences of the festival, and that’s why I’ve got to tell you about “Aline,” a wild Celine Dion biopic that screened at Cannes on Tuesday night and reduced the audience to giggles. Let me just get this out of the way: I’m still reeling from the instantly iconic decision of the film’s 57-year-old actress-director Valérie Lemercier to play Celine Dion at every age of her life, including as a 5-year-old child.You see a lot of nervy things at Cannes, but this surely takes the cake.“Aline” begins with a bit of a disclaimer, as the opening title card declares: “This film is inspired by the life of Celine Dion. It is, however, a work of fiction.” That’s why, even though the story follows nearly every element of Dion’s life beat for beat, the main character is instead named Aline Dieu and most of Dion’s best-known songs proved impossible to get the rights to. (Yes, “30 Rock” fans, we’re dealing with a Jackie Jormp-Jomp situation here.)Like Dion, Aline is born into a large Quebec family where she is the youngest of 14 children. Her public debut as a singer comes early: At 5, Aline takes the stage at her brother’s wedding and lets loose with an uncannily powerful singing voice. Dion did that, too, but I’m going to guess there was one crucial difference in real life: When 5-year-old Celine sang at that wedding, she wasn’t sporting the face of an AARP-eligible adult.Danielle Fichaud, left, Valérie Lemercier (yes, the director) and Sylvaine Marcel in “Aline.”Jean-Marie Leroy/Rectangle Productions/TF1 Films ProductionShrunk to Hobbit size and Facetuned into near-oblivion, Lemercier scampers, preens and unnerves. I’ve never seen anything quite like it: Not “PEN15,” not John C. Reilly at the beginning of “Walk Hard,” not even a fully grown Martin Short playing a psychotic 10-year-old in “Clifford.” As a cinematic presence, Preteen Aline looks less like our main character and more like she’s ready to terrorize Vera Farmiga in the next “Conjuring” movie.Why didn’t they just cast an actual kid? I’m told that as a French comedian, Lemercier has often played children, but “Aline” takes this shtick several steps too far: The movie is like “Bohemian Rhapsody” if they shrank Rami Malek and made him play his own teeth. Have you seen those Twitter prompts that ask you to reimagine a classic film with one character replaced by a Muppet? “Aline” reminded me of that, except the main character is the Muppet and instead of felt, she is made from your nightmares.You may be thinking, “Well, surely this insane 5-year-old portion of the movie doesn’t last very long.” You’re right, because the movie does eventually age Aline up … to 12. Here, Lemercier plays Aline as a gawky introvert thrust into fame after she signs with a manager, Guy-Claude Kamar (Sylvain Marcel). The character is based on Dion’s own producer-manager, René Angélil, whom she met as a preteen and eventually married, and Lemercier frames that problematic pairing as Aline’s greatest aspiration in life.Practically speaking, that means we’re watching a 57-year-old play a 12-year-old with a crush on her 40-year-old manager. I just don’t know what to do with any of that! Every time Aline’s mother tries to sever the union, declaring that Guy-Claude is far too old for Aline, I felt like my brain was short-circuiting.Jean-Marie Leroy/Rectangle Productions/TF1 Films ProductionIs Lemercier trying to sanction the romance by playing Aline herself, suggesting that the young woman was simply an old soul? I’m not sure that tracks, since by the time Aline has become an adult (which is when she and Guy-Claude finally consummate their relationship), Lemercier is still playing her as a sugar-loving, childlike diva.Eventually, you just have to surrender to the absurdity of “Aline,” and at least that sense of humor sometimes comes from a knowing place, like when Aline begins her residency in Las Vegas and gets lost in the giant mansion she just bought. After the film’s central romance is resolved in the first hour, “Aline” simply skims Dion’s adult life for stand-alone episodes: She’s picking a dress for the Oscars! She’s taking fertility treatments! Guy-Claude has a ponytail now!But even the film’s more straightforward dramatic scenes are still tinged with a bit of insanity. It almost can’t be helped: After you’ve sat through a half-hour of Preteen Aline, nothing feels normal anymore.And maybe that’s the way “Aline” ought to be. Cultural figures hardly get more mainstream than Celine Dion, but even her biggest fans would admit that the woman exudes pure camp. I can’t explain half of the directorial choices made in “Aline,” but at least they’re so goofy and distinctive that I’ll be thinking about them for years to come. Palme d’Or be damned: In an era where musical biopics are increasingly disposable, I know that “Aline” will go on and on. More

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      in Theater

      Ryuichi Sakamoto on Life, Nature and ‘Time’

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      The musician and artist, currently undergoing cancer treatment, unveils a music-theater work about dreams, reincarnation and humanity’s struggle.Ryuichi Sakamoto is in Tokyo for the summertime rainy season. A New York resident for over 30 years, the Oscar-winning composer has been in Japan since last November — not because of the pandemic, but because of a diagnosis of rectal cancer, discovered just after he went into remission after several years of treatment for throat cancer.Despite his health problems, Sakamoto has been as prolific as ever, participating in concerts, exhibitions and most recently an opera, “Time,” which premiered last month at the Holland Festival.“Time” is part of Sakamoto’s ongoing exploration of “asynchronism,” music arranged outside traditional time structures. Introduced on his 2017 album “async,” the concept was conceived as he recovered from his first bout with cancer — an experience that he has said newly honed his ear to the beauty of everyday sounds, both natural and man-made, sun showers and singing bowls.Without conductor or tempo markings, “Time” is a “Mugen Noh,” a subset of Noh theater based on dreams. Created in collaboration with the visual artist Shiro Takatani, this dreamscape unfolds on a stage filled with water and a screen displaying weather systems, cities and empty space.“Time” unfolds on a stage filled with water and a screen displaying weather systems, cities and empty space.Sanne PeperCrossing and recrossing the stage with her sho, an ancient Japanese wind instrument, Mayumi Miyata represents nature. The dancer and actor Min Tanaka is a frail symbol of humankind, struggling to build a road across the water. Summoning visions of rising sea levels, “Time” — like our new century — presents a premonition that also feels like a memory: At the end of time, we all return to the same sea.Sakamoto spoke about the piece on a recent video call. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.At what point in the production of “Time” did you find out your cancer had returned?I worked on “Time” for four years after “async,” and I was diagnosed with rectal cancer last year. It’s a long treatment. I’m in the middle right now, and will go back to the hospital for surgery in the fall. It’s been a year since I left New York; I don’t know when I can come back.Were you originally planning to perform in the opera?I was thinking of making an original instrument for it. I still have this idea for the future.I was using the word opera in the beginning, but I’ve stopped using it. It’s a combination of installation and performance — a theater piece.It seems quite deeply connected to “async.”The conceptual idea behind “async” was my doubt about synchronization, and that led me to think about time itself. If you know my work from the past, I zigzag. But the things I got from making “async” were so huge that I didn’t want to lose them. I really wanted to develop them. The album was so spatial, like music for an installation, so the development would be an installation of performers together. That was the original idea for “Time.”“Time” is a Mugen Noh — it has no tempo — so it does seem like the perfect landscape to explore these ideas.Time is so natural to our society that we don’t doubt it. But because I’m a musician, I deal with time all the time. When we compose, we have to think about how to manipulate sounds in time.Crossing and recrossing the stage with her sho, an ancient Japanese wind instrument, Mayumi Miyata represents nature.Sanne PeperThere are no instruments onstage, except the sho.Only the sho, which I have been fascinated by since I was a university student. I disliked all other Japanese traditional music, and even other traditions, like kado [flower arrangement] or sado [tea ceremony]. I hated it all, except gagaku [court music], which is like aliens’ music to me.Miyata, who represents nature, crosses the water so easily, while Tanaka — “mankind” — is so feeble.Woman and sho, they represent nature. Tanaka wants to create a straight road in the water — in time — to get the other side, but he fails. He goes insane and dies in the water at the end.What is humanity trying to reach at the end of the road?That’s mankind’s nature. A bit like Sisyphus: just a natural passion to make a road, to conquer nature.The road-building scenes interrupt a series of stories: a dream from the work of the writer Natsume Soseki; a traditional Noh play; the butterfly dream from the text Zhuangzi. How did you choose these?In our dreams, all properties of time are destroyed. In the Noh story “Kantan,” a man is looking for enlightenment and takes a nap. It just takes five minutes, but in his dream, 50 years has passed. Which is reality? The five minutes or the 50 years? And then in the butterfly dream, we have the philosopher Zhuang Zhou. Does the butterfly dream he is Zhuang Zhou, or does Zhuang Zhou dream he is a butterfly? We cannot tell.The dancer and actor Min Tanaka is a frail vision of humankind, struggling to build a road across the water.Sanne PeperBy freeing time musically, do you feel it slow down?The theme of “Time” is to insist that time doesn’t exist, not that it’s passing slowly. Watching the streaming premiere, I sensed that one hour ago was just a minute ago, or some moments were repeated. At least I could feel another kind of time.You’ve also been painting on ceramic pieces (“2020S”), using found objects, and making installations (“Is Your Time”), and you currently have a large retrospective in Beijing, with a lot of visual work. What provoked this turn toward the visual arts?Maybe the big moment was the opera I composed in 1999, “Life.” It included visual images, moving images and some texts — all those visual elements were the main characters of that opera.And that was your first collaboration with Takatani?Yes, and the next thing we did was to deconstruct “Life.” We deconstructed all the visual images, and the sound, too, to create an installation in 2007. That was a big moment.I guess you’ve always worked in the visual arts — you’ve worked so closely with filmmakers on soundtracks.Strange, you know, I didn’t think about films. Films are more narrative, more linear. Unfortunately, a linear structure is in time; it has a beginning, middle and end. I don’t want to go back to that. This is why I’m fascinated by installation. Installation doesn’t have to have a beginning or end. The best installation, I think, is just listening to rain.And you have a tremendous rainstorm at the end of “Time,” followed by the crashing of a wave in slow motion. What sea were you thinking of?Man wants to conquer nature — the water — but he must fail, so he must die by water. I needed a huge flood, maybe a tsunami, to represent the violent power of water. Also, almost all ethnic groups have some memories of a big flood. Maybe we all have some deep memory about surviving a flood.I think a lot of people will wonder if this opera is primarily about climate change.Climate change is the most vivid conflict between mankind and nature so of course it is included. But it’s not the main focus. I wanted to create a myth about mankind and nature.It’s very similar to Soseki’s dream, in which a woman returns as a flower growing from her own grave. I’ve read a few interpretations. To some it represents Soseki’s struggle with the modern world.It is my belief about reincarnation. Because she promises she will be back in 100 years, and she’s back as a flower. You know, I always wanted to be buried in the ground, so that my body would become the nutrition of other living things. And in Soseki’s story, the woman becomes a flower. It’s so beautiful.I love your interpretation.Very romantic, no? More