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    Beyoncé Makes History at a Star-Powered Grammy Ceremony

    LOS ANGELES — Beyoncé made Grammy history on Sunday night, setting a record at the awards’ 65th annual ceremony for the most career wins by any artist, after picking up a string of trophies for “Renaissance,” her hit album that mined decades of dance music.But she was once again shut out of the major categories, winning all four of her prizes for the night in down-ballot genre categories. Harry Styles took album of the year for “Harry’s House,” Lizzo won record of the year for her retro dance anthem “About Damn Time,” and song of the year went to Bonnie Raitt for “Just Like That.” It was Beyoncé’s fourth career loss for album of the year.Styles seemed at a loss for words as he accepted his Grammy, opening his remarks with a stunned profanity.Still, Beyoncé’s accomplishment resonated throughout the evening. Accepting her 32nd career award, Beyoncé thanked God and her family, and honored her “Uncle Jonny,” a gay relative whom she has described in the past as her “godmother” and as the person who exposed her to L.G.B.T.Q. culture.“I’d like thank the queer community for your love, and for inventing the genre,” she said to roars of applause from the crowd at the Crypto.com Arena as she won best dance/electronic music album for “Renaissance,” which was widely seen as a love letter to gay culture. (Even so, Beyoncé faced a backlash recently when she performed a private concert in Dubai, in United Arab Emirates, where homosexuality is illegal.)With her latest wins, Beyoncé surpassed Georg Solti, the Hungarian-born classical conductor who died in 1997 and had long held the title of the most career wins by any artist.Even Beyoncé’s competitors cheered her on. Accepting record of the year, Lizzo told a story of being inspired by seeing Beyoncé in concert (while skipping school).“You clearly are the artist of our lives!” she shouted. (In 2017, when Adele beat Beyoncé for album of the year, she said almost the same thing.)Beyoncé also won best dance/electronic recording (“Break My Soul”), traditional R&B performance (“Plastic Off the Sofa”) and best R&B song (“Cuff It”). She had been the most nominated artist of the evening, with nine nods.Gender freedom was a theme running through the night. Not long before Beyoncé’s win, Sam Smith, a nonbinary singer, and Kim Petras, a trans woman, won the award for pop/duo group performance for “Unholy,” and Petras drew cheers when she said she was “the first transgender woman to win this award.”“I hope that there’s a future where gender and identity and all these labels don’t matter that much,” Petras told reporters backstage. “Where people can just be themselves, and not get judged so hard and not be labeled so hard.”Gender freedom was a theme running through this year’s Grammys, as Kim Petras, a trans woman, and Sam Smith, a nonbinary singer, were among the night’s winners. Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for The Recording AcademyAfter two years of shows that were disrupted and delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic, the annual Grammy ceremony returned in full swing to its home court in Los Angeles (Crypto.com is the renamed Staples Center), bringing the music world together for glitz, competition and, behind the scenes, plenty of business schmoozing.“We made it!” exclaimed its host, Trevor Noah. “We’re back!”The power of stardom was another of the night’s major underlying themes. The show opened with a blast of brass and the hip-swaying rhythms of Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican superstar who represents the music industry’s hopes — he is a young celebrity with global appeal and massive numbers, both on streaming services and on the road.Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican superstar who opened the show on Sunday night, represents the music industry’s hopes: a young celebrity with global appeal and the numbers to match.Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated PressWalking through the aisles of the arena flanked by dancers in festive dress, he played two songs from his blockbuster album “Un Verano Sin Ti,” bringing both social commentary and party vibes, and getting stars like Taylor Swift dancing amid the bistro-style seating in front of the stage.Accepting the award for best música urbana album for “Un Verano,” Bad Bunny gave his speech in Spanish and English.“I just made this album with love and passion,” he said. “When you do things with love and passion, everything is easier.”Old-fashioned song craft remains a key touchstone for Grammy voters. Raitt, 73, was the surprise winner of song of the year — beating Adele, Beyoncé, Swift, Lizzo and Styles, whose songs were huge hits — for “Just Like That,” a tender meditation about an organ donation that had only modest commercial success. She accepted it as a recognition of the job of songwriting itself, and thanked other writers for providing her with material throughout her career.“I would not be up here tonight,” Raitt said, “if it wasn’t for the great soul-digging, hard-working people that put these songs and ideas to music.”Samara Joy, a singer who brought fresh interpretations to jazz classics, and began her career posting them online, won best new artist.In classic Grammy fashion, the ceremony also included some loving nods to the past.Stevie Wonder led a Motown revue that included Smokey Robinson and the country songwriter Chris Stapleton. One of the highlights of the night was a 12-minute celebration of the 50th anniversary of hip-hop — the genre’s origin is tied to a birthday party in the Bronx in 1973 — that featured LL Cool J, Busta Rhymes, Salt-N-Pepa, Method Man, Chuck D and Flavor Flav of Public Enemy, Missy Elliott, Future, Grandmaster Flash and many others.A somber, multipart “In Memoriam” segment included the country singer Kacey Musgraves singing Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” barefoot in a blood-red dress; a tribute to Takeoff of the Atlanta rap trio Migos led by his bandmate Quavo; and Raitt, Sheryl Crow and Mick Fleetwood singing “Songbird,” one of the signature compositions by Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie, with Fleetwood tapping a drum like it was a gently beating heart.Kacey Musgraves singing Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” as part of a somber “In Memoriam” segment.Mario Anzuoni/ReutersStyles performed his bubbly, pensive hit “As It Was” in a silvery sequined suit with tassels that shook as he danced. “Harry’s House” also won Styles the award for pop vocal album.Kendrick Lamar won three rap prizes: best performance and best song, for “The Heart Part 5,” and best album, for “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers.” Accepting the album award, he thanked his family “for giving me the courage and giving me the vulnerability to share my truth and share these stories.”Brandi Carlile, a Grammy darling in recent years, won best rock performance and best rock song for “Broken Horses,” as well as best Americana album for “In These Silent Days.”The 89-year-old Willie Nelson, who was not present, won for best country album for “A Beautiful Time,” and best country solo performance for the song “Live Forever.”Swift ended the night with one victory, best music video for “All Too Well: The Short Film,” but lost her three other nods — including her sixth career loss in song of the year for “All Too Well (10 Minute Version),” an extended remake of a song she first released in 2012.The first lady, Jill Biden, announced the winner of a new award, best song for social change, which went to the 25-year-old Iranian songwriter Shervin Hajipour, whose song “Baraye” became an anthem for the women’s rights protests there last year. The prize was chosen by what the academy described as a “blue-ribbon committee.”For an industry that has lately gotten worried about the difficulty minting stars amid the fire hose of content in the age of streaming and social media, this year’s list of nominations was about as good as it gets. It guaranteed plenty of star power and some drama over winners and losers. On Grammy night, drama is a good thing.As much as the Recording Academy, the nonprofit institution behind the Grammys, promotes its mission of celebrating artistic excellence and being a supportive home for creators year-round, the Grammys is also a television show that needs to attract a large audience.As they have for all major awards shows, ratings for the Grammys have been slipping for years. But the past two years have been brutal. In 2021, when the Grammys put on an outdoor show with no audience, its viewership fell to 8.8 million, the lowest ever; last year, when the show was delayed by the spread of the Omicron variant and held for the first time in Las Vegas, the number was only marginally better, at 8.9 million.This year’s awards recognized music released between Oct. 1, 2021, and Sept. 30, 2022, and were selected by the 11,000-member voting body of the Recording Academy, which includes artists, songwriters, producers and other music professionals.Of the 91 awards this year, all but a dozen were given out in a nontelevised ceremony on Sunday afternoon.Viola Davis’s Grammy win makes her the newest EGOT — the coveted acronym for the winner of an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony.Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images for The Recording AcademyThe actress Viola Davis won best audiobook, narration and storytelling recording for her memoir “Finding Me,” making her the newest EGOT — the coveted acronym for the winner of an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony.Among the new categories this year was songwriter of the year (non-classical), intended to recognize the writers who work behind the scenes. It was won by Tobias Jesso Jr., who has written songs for Adele, Styles and others. Stephanie Economou was the first winner for best score soundtrack for video games and other interactive media for her work on the game Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarok.Below the superstar level, the Grammys have the power to transform artists’ careers. The Tennessee State University Marching Band was the first college marching band ever nominated for best roots gospel album, and it won with “The Urban Hymnal.”Accepting that award, Sir the Baptist, one of the album’s producers, addressed the straitened finances of historically Black colleges and universities. “HBCUs are so grossly underfunded to where I had to put my last dime in order to get us across the line,” he said. “We’re here with our pockets empty but our hands aren’t.” More

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    Five Minutes That Will Make You Love 21st-Century Jazz

    We’ve done a lot of listening back. So where is jazz today? Writers and musicians including Sonny Rollins, Melanie Charles and Terri Lyne Carrington share their favorites from this millennium.Over the past few months, The New York Times has asked jazz musicians, critics and scholars to answer the question, What would you play a friend to make them fall in love with Duke Ellington? Or Alice Coltrane? We’ve also covered bebop, vocal jazz and the catalogs of Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra.That’s a lot of listening back. So this month, we decided to explore what’s happening now. Where is jazz today? It’s a good time to be asking. Just a dozen years ago, the music seemed to be having a crisis of self-worth. Where was its center? Could anything guarantee its relevance?But over the past five or 10 years, you could say that jazz has gone through a kind of ego death, and then a rebirth: Today there’s no particular sound or style that young players all want to preserve, but jazz as a general practice — a commitment to taking on musical adventures together, live and in real time; to treating musical instruments as the writing utensils for a narrative — hasn’t been this alive in decades. As a result, all across the jazz spectrum, artists are in comfortable contact with hip-hop, contemporary poetry, the Black Lives Matter movement and visual art.Below, we asked writers and jazz musicians of various generations to recommend their favorite recordings from the new millennium. Enjoy reading their commentary and listening to the excerpts, and find a playlist at the bottom of the article with full tracks. As always, be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Terri Lyne Carrington, drummerDuring the swing era, jazz was a leader in the trends of pop culture and even perceived as dance music, but then there was a seismic shift toward sitting down and listening. I’m encouraged by the emergence of artists today who have pursued “groove” in their jazz without compromising creativity, reminding us that this can be music that makes you want to move. Kassa Overall is such an artist. I love his song “Who’s on the Playlist” because it invites the question, “Is this jazz or is this hip-hop?” Kassa is a pre-eminent style bender and blender, successfully juxtaposing genres through his production expertise and use of melodic and harmonic forms that deftly integrate the new with the old. This track is authentic and unpretentious, blending acoustic instruments with electronic sounds, catchy hooks with improvisation and diverse musical sections, and jazz chords with polyrhythmic raps that express personal stories in hip-hop vernacular. It powerfully exhibits the consistent innovation in the continuum of Black music and encourages us not to draw lines in the sand.“Who’s on the Playlist”Kassa Overall feat. Judi Jackson◆ ◆ ◆Sonny Rollins, saxophonistJ.D. Allen’s got a nice, full sound: It really fills up the room when he’s playing. When I was living in Chicago many, many years ago, there used to be a player called Alec Johnson. Alec had one of these strong sounds that would really captivate you: “Wow, listen to that — to the music, to the volume!” So when I hear J.D., he reminds me of Alec in that way. He’s got a nice, big, fat sound, and he’s got a lot of ideas. He doesn’t sound like he’s ever wanting to find something to play. So I really am struck by that, and I really liked him when I heard him perform live. There’s so much music out here today, I’m glad that he’s keeping the flame.“Sonhouse”J.D. Allen◆ ◆ ◆Marcus J. Moore, jazz writerI’ve long admired Luke Stewart’s artistic versatility: You can see him plucking the upright bass as a member of the free jazz quintet Irreversible Entanglements, playing the electric as one-half of the psych-rock-leaning Blacks’ Myths, or engaging in traditional and free-form hybrids at the helm of his Silt Trio. While it’s tough to single out one Stewart song as my favorite, I always find myself coming back to “Awakening the Masters,” the propulsive opener of his 2020 “Exposure Quintet” album. The bass loop captivates, enticing the reedists Ken Vandermark and Edward Wilkerson Jr., the pianist Jim Baker and the drummer Avreeayl Ra to build upon it with ascendant saxophone wails, escalating cymbals and billowing piano chords suspended gently in the mix. Even as the harmony develops and mutates, Stewart saunters along, his bass keeping the song in a steady rhythmic pocket. I think that’s why I like it so much: It’s a microcosm of Stewart’s centered presence across the spectrum of experimental music. No matter the subgenre, he’s an immovable force guiding the music forward.“Awakening the Masters”Luke Stewart Exposure Quintet◆ ◆ ◆Theo Croker, trumpeterI was thinking about what would honestly bring people to this music, and it’s hearing something young. Because young people have always been the pioneers of this music. People become great masters as they age, but it’s something that they did when they were young that everybody caught onto and connected with. With Domi & JD Beck, they don’t sound jaded by jazz school; they sound like they’re doing their thing. They respect everything else that’s come before and they’re pushing forward with their own thing. It has a lot of integrity, but it’s also playful; it’s very technical, but it’s also fun. And with this track, they gave us a gem: another Herbie Hancock vocoder song! There were always those two classics — “I Thought It Was You” and “Come Running to Me” — but now we’ve got another.“Moon”Domi & JD Beck feat. Herbie Hancock◆ ◆ ◆Billy Hart, drummerImmanuel Wilkins is clearly spending a lot of time on the instrument, just like John Coltrane did. He’s obviously putting the horn in his mouth a lot. There are some other guys that have talent but their desire is to be popular. But Immanuel Wilkins’s music has really got some depth, and it’s going to influence the future, at least the way I see it. That first album of his, “Omega,” really broke some ground. It’s substantial. And it has to do with the tradition.“Grace and Mercy”Immanuel Wilkins◆ ◆ ◆Giovanni Russonello, Times jazz criticWhen you really tune into a piece of music, what are you usually paying attention to? The words? The beat? A line you can go off humming? Nicole Mitchell’s music with the Black Earth Ensemble rewards listening of about any kind, but it’s best received with a sense of surrender. Limit your expectations of what might be coming next. Put your body under the influence. On “Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds,” a 2017 LP influenced by Octavia Butler’s writings, the poet and vocalist Avery R. Young lends Pentecostal flair to lines of earnest recognition — “I want to pick up my blade/But then again there’s gotta be another way,” he hollers — while Mitchell’s flute whips and shivers around him, a well-contained force of nature. Playing a mix of Asian, European and Afro-diasporic instruments, the eight-piece ensemble raises the high-water mark gradually, in splashes, until you’re swept up. Mitchell is calling up the spirit-memories of this music, which are so often grounded in a particular place: Ornette Coleman at Prince Street, Fred Anderson on the South Side, Alice Coltrane in California, Archie Shepp in Algeria. But she’s also reaching toward somewhere unimaginably better — what Saidiya Hartman calls “the nowhere of utopia,” if you like.“Shiny Divider”Nicole Mitchell◆ ◆ ◆Melanie Charles, vocalist and flutistI remember graduating La Guardia High School, hearing this song and feeling liberated and excited about the possibilities of how my generation could interact with improvised music. Renée Neufville’s voice fits perfectly with Roy Hargrove’s playing and singing. Compositionally, the tune appears to be very simple. However, if you try to sing along, you find it may require a bit more out of you. And that’s the fun of it. The song evokes feelings of house parties and underground shows, and you feel like you are in the studio with the band. It’s a very honest and no-frills, in-and-out track that you can’t help but want to play on repeat.“Crazy Race”The RH Factor◆ ◆ ◆Ayana Contreras, criticTranslated as “Tribute to the Old Guard,” this cut is a slinky reimagining of Idris Muhammad’s 1974 jazz-funk classic “Loran’s Dance,” a record that was part of my own initiation as a jazz fan. The combo of Karriem Riggins and Madlib is behind this unit, two multihyphenate producers who’ve unwaveringly bridged the narrow trench between jazz and hip-hop in increasingly electrifying ways. With just the right mix of distortion and dusty synths, crisp boom-bap drum licks and sunshine, the record feels like what Raphael Saadiq classifies as “instant vintage,” and yet fresh as sun on bare shoulders on the first warm day of spring.“Hommage À La Vielle Garde (Pour Lafarge Et Rinaldi)”Jahari Massamba Unit◆ ◆ ◆David Renard, Times senior editorFive minutes, five hours, five days — once this album-length composition by Natural Information Society sucks you in, it feels like it could flow forever. Joshua Abrams, the group’s leader, was in an early version of the Roots before he moved to Chicago and became part of that city’s indie and jazz scene; he now plays the guimbri, a three-stringed African bass lute that is the most constant element anchoring the ever-shifting “descension (Out of Our Constrictions).” The guimbri’s interplay with Lisa Alvarado’s (vibrating, psychedelic) harmonium, Jason Stein’s bass clarinet and Mikel Patrick Avery’s drumming creates a bed of sound, like a woven pattern, that leaves space for the free-blowing saxophone of Evan Parker, a 20th-century improv veteran still going strong in the 21st, to soar over the top. When Natural Information (minus Parker) performed this piece live at the Woodsist Festival in upstate New York in 2021, slotted between sets by Angel Bat Dawid and Kurt Vile, it felt even more like a loose game of Minimalist musical Ping-Pong — a round robin with no winners, just each player hitting the right spot and falling back as the next stepped up to join the entrancing cascade.“descension (Out of Our Constrictions) I”Natural Information Society with Evan Parker◆ ◆ ◆Joshua Redman, saxophonistOut of an infinite sea of compelling options, stretching all across jazz’s stylistic map, I ended up selecting a track that some might call “straight ahead” (even though I’m not particularly fond of that term), just to try to help make the case that this particular mode of communal expression is still flourishing and forward-moving. It is no small thing to take a chestnut such as “Body and Soul” — one of the most-played standards in the history of recorded music — and make it feel fresh, relevant, interesting and beautiful. The pianist Gerald Clayton, the bassist Joe Sanders and the drummer Marcus Gilmore are, without question, three of the greats of their generation and some of the most active and emulated musicians on the scene today. They have thoroughly absorbed and internalized the evolved vocabularies and common practices of their art and made them wholly and unmistakably their own. Their connectedness — with each other, with their audience, and with this shared musical language — is nuanced, empathic, generous and unforced. They are not trying to prove anything. They are in it for the ride, and what a ride it is: dance music.“Body and Soul”Gerald Clayton◆ ◆ ◆Kris Davis, pianistIf you ever have a chance to see Craig Taborn play solo, go without delay, and you will be transfixed. On this track, “Gift Horse/Over the Water,” you can hear influences of electronic music, Minimalism, contemporary classical music and jazz, specifically from the pianists Geri Allen and Keith Jarrett. Craig has made significant contributions to jazz and solo piano in the 21st century through his unique touch on the piano and seamless synthesis of disparate influences. You can hear his influence among many improvising pianists over the last 20 years, including Vijay Iyer, Marta Sanchez, Matt Mitchell, Micah Thomas and myself.“Gift Horse/Over the Water”Craig Taborn◆ ◆ ◆Wadada Leo Smith, trumpeterI’ve always been under the impression that discovery is the best value of humankind, and when one is fortunate enough to discover something it’s never lost, because it becomes part of them. Whenever I’ve played onstage with Sylvie Courvoisier, I’ve never felt handicapped or abandoned or like I had to look for a way to continue. It’s always been a journey that has been mutual and creative. She’s got courage, and you can see it when she’s at the piano: When she is inspired to go toward something, she doesn’t just go near it, she advances as if she’s going there to save creation. That’s the kind of courage that she has. And she finds every way to express music with that attitude. This is the music of our times that is hidden, like a crown jewel — and only the ones that are really curious and have great fantasies and imagination will find it. Because in darkness everything is dark except the ones that’s got light.“Requiem d’un Songe”Sylvie Courvoisier, Ned Rothenberg and Julian Sartorius◆ ◆ ◆Tomeka Reid, cellistThis whole record, “Like-Coping,” from 2003, is beautiful: from the opening notes of “Miriam” to the last track. This is Parker’s first solo release on Delmark, a label based in our shared hometown, Chicago, with Chad Taylor on drums and Chris Lopes on bass. I can’t believe it is 20 years old this year! It still sounds so fresh. Each member contributes extremely well-crafted earworms that will get stuck in your head, in the best way. Even the way the record is sequenced is brilliant. “Pinecone,” written by Lopes, is the composition that most makes me want to dance.“Pinecone”Jeff Parker◆ ◆ ◆◆ ◆ ◆ More

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    ‘Schoolhouse Rock!’ at 50: Those Are Magic Numbers

    The educational snippets are the ultimate font of Gen X nostalgia. But what is it we’re nostalgic for?When I was in second grade, my teacher held a contest: The first students to memorize their multiplication tables would get dinner at McDonald’s. I was one of them. I’d like to credit hard work or the motivation of those golden fries, but in truth it was easy. I learned it from “Schoolhouse Rock.”It was not the last time that watching too much TV would pay off for me, but it was perhaps the sweetest.If you were an American kid around when I was (nineteen-seventy-cough), you probably have “Schoolhouse Rock” hard-wired into your brain too. The musical shorts, which began airing on ABC in 1973, taught Generation X multiplication, grammar, history and, eventually, nostalgia.That last lesson stuck best. Winona Ryder and company crooned “Conjunction Junction” and “I’m Just a Bill” in the 1994 generational-statement film “Reality Bites.” De La Soul borrowed “Three Is a Magic Number” as the backbone for their buoyant self-introduction, “The Magic Number,” in 1989. Nostalgia for “Schoolhouse Rock” is now itself old enough to be nostalgic for.On Wednesday, ABC will tap into that spirit with a prime time “50th Anniversary Singalong,” in which the Black Eyed Peas, the Muppets, Shaquille O’Neal and others will hook up the words, phrases and clauses of the Saturday-morning favorites.The Muppets are among the many guest stars who will appear in the ABC special “Schoolhouse Rock! 50th Anniversary Singalong.”Christopher Willard/ABCThe special promises wholesome family fun, and I can think of worse things to do on a weeknight than musically unpacking my adjectives in the judgment-free zone of my living room. But nostalgia is not just a fun emotion. Like some of the best “Schoolhouse Rock” songs, it carries a note of wistfulness.More on U.S. Schools and EducationHeavy Losses: A new global analysis suggests that children experienced learning deficits during the Covid-19 pandemic that amounted to about one-third of a school year’s worth of knowledge and skills.Police in Schools: Footage of a student’s violent arrest by a school resource officer has raised questions about the role of armed officers on campuses.Transgender Youth: Educators are facing new tensions over whether they should tell parents when students change their name, pronouns or gender expression at school.In Florida: The state will not allow a new Advanced Placement course on African American studies to be offered in its high schools, citing examples of what it calls “woke indoctrination.”In this case, it’s a reminder of a time when network TV gave us a common culture, language and lyrics, before we were sliced into subcultures and demographics. Pre-internet, pre-cable, pre-DVD — pre-VHS, even — “Schoolhouse Rock” convened a classroom of millions for three-minute servings of revolutionary art alongside installments of “The Great Grape Ape Show.”Like much classic kids’ TV, “Schoolhouse Rock” was brought to you by Madison Avenue. The ad executive David McCall, who noticed that his son could memorize pop songs but struggled with arithmetic, suggested to George Newall, a creative director, and Thomas Yohe, an art director, that they figure out how to set math to music.As Newell told the Times in 1994, they pitched the idea to Michael Eisner, then the director of children’s programming at ABC, who happened to be meeting with the legendary Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones. “I think you should buy it right away,” Jones said.Unlike the dutiful news interstitials that vitamin-fortified other Saturday-morning cartoon lineups, “Schoolhouse Rock” harnessed the power of comedy and ear worms. The facts and figures made it educational. But they weren’t what made it art.That was the animation, psychedelically colorful and chock-full of rapid-fire slapstick gags. Above all, there was the sophisticated music. The jazz composer Bob Dorough wrote the banger-filled first season, “Multiplication Rock,” surveying a range of styles from the duodecimal prog-rock of “Little Twelvetoes” to the spiraling lullaby of “Figure Eight.”The lyrics were sly and funny but could also detour, like a fidgety schoolkid sitting by the window, into daydreams. The blissful “Three Is a Magic Number” isn’t just a primer on multiples; it’s a rumination on the triad foundations of the universe, from geometry to love. (If your voice does not break singing, “A man and a woman had a little baby,” you’re doing something wrong.)The following seasons, about grammar, American history and science, added other contributors, including Lynn Ahrens, the future Broadway songwriter thanks to whom an entire generation cannot recite the preamble to the Constitution without breaking into song.The short “Conjunction Junction” was referenced in the 1994 film “Reality Bites,” a sign that nostalgia for “Schoolhouse Rock” is now itself old enough to be nostalgic for.ABC, via Everett CollectionThe words and numbers in “Schoolhouse Rock” were never just words and numbers. Like the early years of “Sesame Street,” the shorts had an anarchic spirit and a pluralistic sensibility. “I Got Six” is a funk explosion whose Afrocentric animation includes a dashiki-ed African prince with six rings on all 10 fingers. “Verb: That’s What’s Happening” — imagine if Curtis Mayfield taught your English class — depicts a Black superhero long before Black Panther made it to the movie screen.When my kids were school-aged, I got the full “Schoolhouse Rock” DVD set for them, which is to say, I got it for me. (You can now stream the ’70s seasons, plus a brief 1980s series about computers and a clunky 1990s revival, “Money Rock,” through Disney+.)Rewatching the series taught me about a new subject: Time.The songs are as catchy as ever. But to screen “Schoolhouse Rock” as an adult is to visit a different period in cultural history, and not just because of the bell-bottoms. The America of “Schoolhouse Rock” was divided by Vietnam and Watergate, but it could at least subscribe to basic common facts and civic principles.Consider Bill, the underdog paper hero of “I’m Just a Bill,” longing to become a law that would keep that cartoon school bus safe at railroad crossings. Now he’s a time traveler, from a pre-Reagan age when government activism, however imperfect, was considered a force for good.Today, with culture-warring politicians like the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, red-penciling school curriculums, weaponizing pronouns and hammering history teachers for “indoctrination,” the potential land mines add up. “The Great American Melting Pot” did not imagine a future president telling asylum seekers, “Our country is full.” When “Interjections” depicted a doctor giving a child a shot, it did not anticipate legislators denouncing Big Bird for advocating childhood vaccination.A scene from the anniversary special. Whatever its flaws, “Schoolhouse Rock” told children that they counted with the same numbers and were entitled to the same rights.Christopher Willard/ABC(Likewise, when “Elementary, My Dear” taught counting by twos with a gospel-style Noah’s Ark song, it didn’t fear repercussions for bringing religion into kids’ TV.)And that’s before you even get to “Science Rock.” “The Energy Blues” makes a matter-of-fact pitch for conservation that would cause smoke eruptions today. (In 2009, a climate-focused season, “Earth Rock” went straight to DVD.) When “Schoolhouse Rock” showed kids a three-minute video on how the body worked, there was no internet algorithm to suggest a rebuttal by someone who “did his own research.”That said, I wouldn’t romanticize the “Schoolhouse Rock” era as a paradise of educational consensus. In 1974, the year before the “America Rock” season began, protesters against desegregation in Boston threw rocks at buses carrying Black students. And the series had its own blind spots, which historians and educators have since pointed out.In particular, “America Rock,” an upbeat celebration of the bicentennial, covers the American Revolution and women’s suffrage but skips over the Civil War and slavery. (The Roots filled in this hole in a 2017 episode of “black-ish” with “I Am a Slave,” about Juneteenth.) “Elbow Room” is a jaunty story of westward expansion from the point of view of white settlers, with little note of who got elbowed out. (One scene shows a settler taking a toy arrow through his hat.) America’s unflattering history didn’t make the cut because mass broadcasting meant not alienating the masses.But whatever its limits, “Schoolhouse Rock” at least told us we were equal: We counted with the same numbers, our hearts pumped the same blood, we were entitled to the same inalienable rights.And it operated in a period when people saw the same media and accepted the same facts. Months after its premiere, the Watergate hearings also aired on national TV. They were able eventually to turn even many Republicans against President Nixon, in part because Americans watched the same story together, without a partisan cable and internet ecosystem to spin the investigation as a witch hunt.It’s tempting to say that you couldn’t make “Schoolhouse Rock” again today. But I’m sure you could, even if it would be slightly different. Current kids’ shows like Netflix’s “We the People” are in a way exactly that. What you couldn’t create again today is the mass audience, or the context in which we assembled, one nation, sitting cross-legged in front of our cathode-ray teacher.Instead, we have “Schoolhouse Rock” binge-watches and sing-alongs, which, like all exercises in nostalgia, offer the tantalizing pleasure of stretching to touch yesterday, though we know we can’t. The past is like infinity, a concept that “Schoolhouse Rock” also introduced to my generation. “No one ever gets there,” as “My Hero, Zero” taught us. “But you could try.” More

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    Review: Kronos Quartet Offers a Creative Snapshot of a Global Pandemic

    A diverse group of composers presented nine new and recent works at Carnegie Hall on Friday, ranging from exuberant joyfulness to existential questioning.No one is ever going to say that Kronos Quartet is satisfied with the string quartet status quo. This group, founded nearly 50 years ago by violinist David Harrington, has, in its malleable virtuosity, become a wellspring for hundreds of new music commissions. Some of those have become iconic pieces of repertoire; others have provided real-time snapshots of creative collaborations. True to form, this Kronos program at Zankel Hall featured nine new and recent works, nearly all written during the past three years. It offered a wide palette of sonic ideas and creative visions, though some were more fully formed than others.Many of the works on the Zankel program were brief but transporting. The Benin-born composer and singer Angélique Kidjo’s “YanYanKliYan Senamido #2,” arranged by Jacob Garchik, provided an easefully exuberant start to the evening, with interlocked melodies and rhythms playing call-and-response. The Iranian composer Aftab Darvishi’s “Daughters of Sol” was a profoundly meditative study on shade and color, with each layer unfolding slowly into another. The Armenian-American composer Mary Kouyoumdjian’s “I Haven’t the Words” was a restless, questioning susurration precipitated by the tumults of 2020, including the pandemic lockdowns and George Floyd’s murder.Many of the works on the Zankel program were brief but transporting. Jennifer TaylorThe movement-based interdisciplinary artist Eiko Otake entered Zankel for the world premiere of her “eyes closed” with the regality of a one-woman procession, carrying a clutch of large plastic sheets. She distributed them to Harrington, violinist John Sherba and violist Hank Dutt. They became her fellow dancers, twisting and fluttering the sheets into three-dimensional shapes. The conceit was spectacularly imaginative: the sheets had enough form to become both dynamic sculptures and, in their murmured crinkling, significant percussive accompaniment for occasional wails from Sunny Yang’s cello. (The elegiac visual effect was not unlike the plastic bag scene from the film “American Beauty.”)Some works didn’t cohere quite as completely. Mazz Swift’s “She Is a Story, Herself” included several exciting moments, such as flitting small melodic ideas that subsided into a graceful chorale, but the piece overall did not feel fully conceptualized. Canadian composer Nicole Lizée’s “Zonelyhearts,” a lengthy homage to “The Twilight Zone,” tacked wildly between willful wackiness — including using Pop Rocks (yes, the classic 1970s candy) as a form of percussion, amplified with the performers’ open mouths nestled up to microphones — and existential musings on censorship and surveillance.While the stage setup provided a real sense of intimacy and communal gathering, it was also, at times, hard to see what was going on.Jennifer TaylorThe quartet played in Zankel Hall’s temporarily reconfigured, in-the-round seating arrangement. While this setup provided a real sense of intimacy and communal gathering, it also meant that it was hard for a large portion of the audience, myself included, to see three composer/guest musicians who performed their own works alongside Kronos. Instead, we saw only their backs. I overheard nearby concertgoers lamenting that they couldn’t really view such instruments as Soo Yeon Lyuh’s haegeum, a hoarsely voiced, two-stringed and bowed Korean instrument used in her sweetly nostalgic piece “Yessori (Sound from the Past),” or the one-stringed dan bau, the Vietnamese zither played by the virtuoso Van-Anh Vo in her pandemic-era piece “Adrift,” in which the musicians circle around each other melodically, grounded by a walking bass line plucked out by the cello. Nor could we fully appreciate the facial expressions and hand gestures of Peni Candra Rini, the composer and singer from the East Java province of Indonesia who appeared with the quartet in her wistful piece “Maduswara,” also arranged by Garchik.With zero fanfare, this Kronos program included music by eight female composers and one who is nonbinary; many are people of color. (In 2023, such a program would still be lamentably rare at many venues. Carnegie Hall had pledged to give a particular limelight to female performers and composers this season.) What Harrington did note proudly from the stage is that Kidjo, Candra Rini, Darvishi and Lyuh’s pieces were works created for Kronos’s engaging and inspired 50 for the Future commissioning project, which has put 50 recent compositions in the hands of young and emerging ensembles without cost online.This concert also marked the final New York City Kronos Quartet appearance for the cellist Sunny Yang, who has been part of the ensemble for the past decade. (Next month, the group will welcome Paul Wiancko in that chair.) As an encore, the group played Laurie Anderson’s “Flow”; in this context, her short, tender work felt like a benediction.Kronos QuartetPerformed on Friday at Zankel Hall, Manhattan. More

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    A Decidedly French “Hamlet” Returns to Paris

    Starting in March, Ambroise Thomas’s version of the Shakespearean tragedy will be revived at the Opéra Bastille for the first time since 1938.Ambroise Thomas’s “Hamlet” had all the elements to become a blockbuster at the Paris Opera in the 19th century. With a gripping plot that unfolds over five acts, a leading baritone in the title role and innovative orchestration deploying newly invented instruments, the work had an enduring hold at the box office after its 1868 premiere.Like so many “grands opéras” that were born and bred for the company, “Hamlet” fell out of repertoire around the turn of the 20th century. Only since the 1980s has the work received a revival on stages worldwide. From March 11 to April 9, Thomas’s Shakespearean adaptation will return to the Paris Opera for the first time since 1938, in a new production directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski and starring Ludovic Tézier at the Opéra Bastille (a pre-opening for viewers under 28 takes place on March 8. Thomas Hengelbrock conducts).The company’s general director, Alexander Neef, has made it a goal to create a more specific identity for the Paris Opera by commissioning research and programming the French grand opera that once flourished there. Having experienced and admired a production of “Hamlet” at the Metropolitan Opera some 20 years ago, Mr. Neef said that the work “came up rather naturally” after his appointment.Mr. Tézier, whom he considers “not only the leading French baritone but maybe the leading baritone in his repertoire,” was also a natural choice. The singer, who is particularly coveted in the music of Verdi, in turn suggested Mr. Warlikowski as director following their collaboration on a 2017 production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos” at Opéra Bastille.For both lead performer and director, the production provides an opportunity to deepen their interpretation of a work that has played an important role in their respective careers. Mr. Tézier made debuts in both Toulouse, France, and Turin, Italy, in the title of role of Thomas’s “Hamlet” about two decades ago, while Mr. Warlikowski staged the original play by Shakespeare in Avignon, France in 2000 (he had first learned the drama as an apprentice of the late director Peter Brook in Paris).The director Krzysztof Warlikowski, who staged the original play by Shakespeare in 2000 in Avignon, France. “For me, the essential thing that clinches the drama is of course the apparition of the specter,” he said.Louisa Marie Summer for The New York TimesThis operatic version of “Hamlet” takes an unexpected turn before the curtain falls: The protagonist survives and is crowned king. The liberties taken by Thomas’s librettists, Michel Carré and Jules Barbier, met with criticism after the premiere; a Covent Garden version of the opera first mounted in 1869 restores the work’s original, more tragic ending.For Mr. Warlikowski, Thomas’s protagonist shares a great deal in common with the mythological figure of Orestes. “He also rebels against hypocrisy and the ills of this world,” he explained on a video call.The director will also hone in on the scenes in which the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears. “For me, the essential thing that clinches the drama is of course the apparition of the specter,” he said.Mr. Tézier noted that Thomas deployed some of his most dramatically effective music for the ghost by knowing how to pare down the orchestra. The baritone drew a parallel to another Shakespearean opera, Verdi’s “Macbeth,” and the title character’s hallucination of a dagger.“Thomas creates an atmosphere that is favorable to the text and the emotion of the moment,” he said by phone.The composer was exploring orchestral colors with new instruments by the musician and inventor Adolphe Sax at the same time as the composer Hector Berlioz, who held Thomas in great esteem. For example, the second-act banquet scene in which Hamlet accuses Claudius of murdering his father features a solo for alto saxophone. Thomas also wrote for bass saxhorn and six-keyed trombones.An ardent defender of French music against Germanic influence (specifically that of Wagner), Thomas in 1877 stated that every country “should stay faithful to its style and maintain its distinct character,” rather than submit “to the caprices of the time.” In a sign of his patriotism, he volunteered for the National Guard during the Franco-Prussian War before assuming the directorship of the Paris Conservatory in 1871.His “Hamlet” has been noted for its specifically French qualities. In addition to mitigating tragedy by allowing the protagonist to survive and avenge the death of his father, romantic intrigue and sensuous instrumentation often set the tone.Ludovic Tézier has a long history with Thomas’s “Hamlet,” having made debuts in Toulouse, France, and Turin, Italy in the title role. He noted that the work “allows the audience to spend a night in the opera in a state of suspense and meditation.”Jeff Pachoud/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesParis was at the time the center of classical musical life, not just in Europe but worldwide. “Hamlet” premiered at Salle Le Peletier, the same theater that mounted such works as Giacomo Meyerbeer’s “Robert le Diable” and Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” before Palais Garnier opened in 1875.The baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure, who was at the height of his fame, was captured in portrait as Hamlet by none other than Manet. The role of Ophélie, whose fourth-act mad scene helped ensure the work’s popularity, has also been an important role for sopranos from Christina Nilsson to Mary Garden (the new production stars Lisette Oropesa and, starting in April, Brenda Rae).But by 1891, Wagner’s “music of the future” became something of a game changer. “Lohengrin,” “Die Walküre” and “Tannhäuser” remained in repertoire at the Paris Opera through 1910, while of Meyerbeer’s four major operas, only “Les Huguenots” persisted.Mr. Warlikowski expressed his wish to champion “Hamlet” by “provoking questions and creating a spiritual journey through this timeless story.”Mr. Tézier emphasized that the work was not “second-rate.”“It most of all allows the audience to spend a night in the opera in a state of suspense and meditation,” he said.He compared the infrequent programming of such neglected classics to the unpredictable sightings of the Loch Ness monster: “There is no real explanation. But with each appearance of the monster, you have to see it because it’s a rarity. From the beginning to the end, something really happens in the music.” More

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    Ginny Redington Dawes, Composer of Memorable Ad Jingles, Dies at 77

    She collaborated on the melodies for signature commercials that sang the praises of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and other brands.Ginny Redington Dawes, a songwriter whose compositions included memorable advertising jingles like the chipper McDonald’s declaration “You, You’re the One” and Coca-Cola’s boast that “Coke Is It,” died on Dec. 31 in Manhattan. She was 77.Her companion and only immediate survivor, James McCullar, said the cause was complications of hepatic cirrhosis.Ms. Dawes never became well known herself, but she helped maintain or boost the popularity of the products she promoted. And she insinuated infectious tunes into the nation’s repertoire that Americans whistled and hummed as much as the songs played on Top 40 radio.She hooked listeners with melodically and rhythmically catchy jingles that accompanied slogans for everything from Tide detergent to Hartz’s tick and flea-fighting pet collars, Kit Kat candy bars and Johnson’s baby powder.“When I’ve got a really great lyric,” she told Charles Osgood of CBS in a 1977 television interview, “I put a very simple melody to it.”Ms. Dawes started writing the music and lyrics for commercials in 1975 after the firm of Sidney E. Woloshin — who composed the original McDonald’s “You Deserve a Break Today” jingle in 1971 — was commissioned to do one for the chain’s new “You, You’re the One” advertising campaign.Mr. Woloshin invited about 20 jingle writers to submit proposals. Ms. Dawes produced the winning tune. Adopted by the ad agency Needham, Harper & Steers, it was suddenly everywhere.In 1979, she married a jingle-writing competitor, Thomas W. Dawes, whose credits included Alka-Seltzer’s “Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz” and “7Up, the Uncola.”They later collaborated on the music for, among other campaigns, American Airlines’ “Something Special in the Air” and the familiar “Coke Is It.” Mr. Dawes died in 2007.The jingle that underscored Coke’s claim to be “It,” introduced in 1982, was described as a “piece of dynamite” by John F. Bergin, the worldwide director of the Coke account at the McCann-Erickson agency.While David Ogilvy, a founder of the Ogilvy & Mather agency, was credited with the credo “If you don’t have anything to say, sing it,” Mr. Bergin argued that the musical accompaniment to the Coke commercial was anything but an afterthought. If soda drinkers paused to parse the ambiguity of what “It” was, the tune was intended to define the term and embellish it.“It’s like a football fight song,” Mr. Bergin told The New York Times. “Usually you get a languid ballad. We were looking for a big, bold sound, and a big, bold statement. This isn’t an ipsy-pipsy drink, and the music says that loud and clear.”The song, composed by Ms. Dawes and arranged by her husband, was one of 18 jingles and 36 proposed slogans presented to Coca-Cola executives to succeed “Have a Coke and a Smile.”The music and copy were tested separately in consumer focus groups and individual interviews until the agency and company reached a consensus that “Coke is it” was, indeed, it.Ms. Dawes also wrote pop songs, including “Hurtin’ Song,” recorded by Eddy Arnold, and “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore” (written with Rose Marie McCoy), recorded by Sarah Vaughan.She began her musical career as a singer, to glowing reviews.When she appeared in 1975 at the Coriander, a restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, John S. Wilson of The Times called her a “startling performer” who sang “in a deep, strong, beautifully controlled voice that is filled with vivid colors, as she moves from low, sexy passages to an open, lusty shout.”Virginia Mary Redington was born on May 13, 1945, in Brooklyn and raised in the Bay Ridge section of the borough. Her father, Joseph, was a naval architect. Her mother, May (O’Brien) Redington, was a teacher.Virginia attended Fontbonne Hall Academy in Brooklyn and graduated from St. Josephs College, also in Brooklyn, with a degree in English in 1966.She and Mr. Dawes — a founder of the folk-pop group the Cyrkle, best known for its 1966 hit single “Red Rubber Ball,” written by Paul Simon and Bruce Woodley of the Seekers — married in 1979 and, merging their talents, formed TwinStar Music to produce jinglesThe couple also wrote the book, music and lyrics for “The Talk of the Town,” a show about the fabled literary round table at the Algonquin Hotel, whose members included Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and George S. Kaufman. First produced in 2004, it ran nearly two years at the Bank Street Theater before it moved as a cabaret show to the Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room.Reviewing the show for Bloomberg News, John Simon wrote that its music and wit matched “the infectious energy and sophistication of the real-life luminaries it is based on.”Ms. Dawes was also a collector of antique jewelry and the author, with her husband (who took the photographs) and others, of several books on the subject, including “The Bakelite Jewelry Book” (1988), with Corinne Davidov, and “Georgian Jewellery 1714-1830” (2007), with Ms. Dawes’s fellow collector Olivia Collings. More

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    David Crosby, Folk-Rock Voice of the 1960s, Dies at 81

    He was an original member of the Byrds and a founder of Crosby, Stills & Nash. But he was almost as well known for his troubled personal life as for his music.David Crosby, the outspoken and often troubled singer, songwriter and guitarist who helped create two of the most influential and beloved American bands of the classic-rock era of the 1960s and ’70s, the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, has died. He was 81.Patricia Dance, a sister of Mr. Crosby’s wife, Jan Dance, said in a text message on Thursday evening that Mr. Crosby died “last night.” She provided no other details.Mr. Crosby was inducted twice into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, as a founding member of the Byrds and as a founder of CSN&Y. He brought jazz influences to both groups, in the process broadening the possibilities of vocally driven folk-rock. And his reach extended to later generations: His alternate tunings became an inspiration for the innovative “freak folk” movement of the early 21st century while influencing scores of other musicians eager to give acoustic music a progressive spin.If Mr. Crosby’s music expanded boundaries, his persona fixed him in a specific era — and proudly so. In 1968, he wrote “Triad,” an ode to free love, recorded in distinct versions by the Byrds, Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. His song “Almost Cut My Hair,” which he recorded with CSN&Y for their acclaimed 1970 album, “Déjà Vu,” was a virtual loyalty oath to the counterculture.Mr. Crosby’s image as the twinkle-eyed stoner and sardonic hedonist of the cosmic age was said to have been a model for the obstinate free spirit played by Dennis Hopper in the 1969 movie “Easy Rider.”His impish indulgences turned potentially lethal many times. He became nearly as well known for his drug offenses, weapons charges and prison stints as for his music. By the mid-1970s, he was addicted to both cocaine and heroin.“You don’t sit down and say, ‘Gee, I think I’ll become a junkie,’” Mr. Crosby told People magazine in 1990. “When I started out doing drugs, it was marijuana and psychedelics, and it was fun. It was the ’60s, and we thought we were expanding our consciousnesses.”But later, he continued, “drugs became more for blurring pain.” He added: “You don’t realize you’re getting as strung out as you are. And I had the money to get more and more addicted.”Mr. Crosby’s drug abuse may have exacerbated his medical problems, including a long battle with hepatitis C, which necessitated a liver transplant in 1994. He also suffered from type 2 diabetes and, in 2014, had to cancel a tour to endure a cardiac catheterization and angiogram.Despite his health issues, his voice remained robust enough in those years for him to tour. And in his best moments while performing with Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, he could recreate some of the most famous harmonies of the rock era. His voice remained strong as well when touring with his solo band in later years.A Prominent LineageDavid Van Cortlandt Crosby was born on Aug. 14, 1941, in Los Angeles into families with deep roots in American history dating back to Dutch rule in New York in the 17th century. His mother, who was born Aliph Van Cortlandt Whitehead, descended from the prominent Van Cortlandt family. His father, Floyd Crosby, an Academy Award-winning cinematographer whose credits included the classic western “High Noon,” was a member of the Van Rensselaer clan.David attended Crane Country Day School in Montecito, Calif., where he starred in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta “H.M.S. Pinafore” and other musical productions, but he flunked out. He completed his high school studies by correspondence at the Cate School in nearby Carpinteria. He studied drama at Santa Barbara City College, but he dropped out before graduating to pursue a music career.He was 16 when he received his first guitar, from his older brother, Ethan, who had begun playing years earlier. David started out, like so many others in the early ’60s, performing folk music.“I would learn two chords and go back and forth between them,” Mr. Crosby told the British music magazine Mojo. “What took it to the next level was, my brother started listening to 1950s jazz: Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, people like that. Listening to jazz really widens your world.”Mr. Crosby also absorbed the music of the Everly Brothers, which taught him how to layer harmonies into diaphanous patterns. He first performed with his brother, but he soon went solo and drifted through coffee houses around the country until landing in New York, in the epicenter of the 1960s folk movement, Greenwich Village. In 1963, he cut his first demos, produced by Jim Dickson, who would later manage the Byrds.Mr. Crosby, front row left, as a member of the folk group Les Baxter’s Balladeers in the early 1960s. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesMr. Crosby, who briefly played with the folk group Les Baxter’s Balladeers in Los Angeles, got to know Jim McGuinn (who later changed his name to Roger) and Gene Clark while they were performing as a duo at the Troubadour. He soon began adding his harmonies to theirs onstage, fitting in so smoothly that they became a trio, known as the Jet Set.Mr. Crosby brought in Mr. Dickson to become the group’s manager. Mr. Dickson encouraged them to advance the new sound they had already been exploring, which combined their earlier folk influences with the electrified sound of the British Invasion bands, particularly the Beatles. To that end the band added a drummer, the inexperienced but handsome Michael Clarke, and Mr. Crosby took up the electric guitar. Together, the revolutionary style they honed became known as folk-rock.That hybrid found its first recorded expression after Mr. Dickson acquired an acetate of a new Bob Dylan song, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” in August 1964. The band’s own demo of the piece, with the new recruit Chris Hillman on bass, helped land them a contract with Columbia Records that November. Two weeks later, the Jet Set changed its name to the Byrds.Writing Songs, and HitsColumbia, however, felt that the group hadn’t yet jelled musically, so only Mr. McGuinn was allowed to play an instrument on the single, which came out in April 1965, with studio musicians accompanying him. Mr. Crosby and Mr. Clark did provide impeccable harmonies on the song, which helped it reach No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart. The song was the title track of their debut album, released in June 1965, and the full band played on the rest of the tracks.The Byrds performed at Yankee Stadium in 1966 on an all-star bill that also included Stevie Wonder, the Beach Boys and others. From left: Mike Clarke (partly hidden), Chris Hillman, Mr. Crosby and Roger (then known as Jim) McGuinn.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesMr. Crosby didn’t contribute compositions to the Byrds’ first two albums. But on their third, “Fifth Dimension” (1966), he and Mr. Hillman helped fill a writing void left by the departure of the band’s most prolific songwriter, Mr. Clark. Mr. Crosby contributed to the composition of several songs on the album and wrote one himself, “What’s Happening?!?!” Its lyric introduced a Crosbyesque motif: posing questions that had no answer. More famously, Mr. Crosby wrote the band’s smash hit “Eight Miles High” with Mr. McGuinn and Mr. Clark.For the Byrds’ next album, “Younger Than Yesterday,” Mr. Crosby contributed “Everybody’s Been Burned,” which idealized the key strategy of his emerging style: to contrast a dreamy melody with dazed lyrics.A more daring number helped seal Mr. Crosby’s fate with the band. He had written “Triad” for the fifth Byrds album, and the band recorded it. But the other members were reluctant to release it, preferring instead “Goin’ Back,” written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King. Mr. Crosby vigorously argued against using outside writers for a band that already had three, and tension in the band grew. There was anger, too, over political speeches he had made between songs when the band played the Monterey Pop Festival the summer before. All of it led to his firing.Mr. McGuinn and Mr. Hillman delivered the crushing news. They “said I was impossible to work with, and I wasn’t very good anyway, and they’d do better without me,” Mr. Crosby told the British music magazine Uncut. “It hurt like hell. I didn’t try to reason with them. I just said, ‘It’s a shameful waste. … Goodbye.’”By this time Mr. Crosby had already started casually jamming with Mr. Stills, the guitarist and singer whose group Buffalo Springfield had recently disbanded. Mr. Crosby wrote his first song with Mr. Stills (along with Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane) while sailing on a 74-foot boat he had acquired a year earlier. The song, “Wooden Ships,” also recorded by the Airplane, tested out the vocal blend that would become Crosby, Stills & Nash’s signature.Mr. Crosby and Mr. Stills connected with Mr. Nash in July 1968 at a party at Joni Mitchell’s house in the Laurel Canyon section of Los Angeles. Mr. Nash was eager to leave his slick British pop act, the Hollies, to join the hot folk-rock scene. The three began meeting on their own to perfect their sound, and when Ahmet Ertegun, president of Atlantic Records, heard their elegant three-way vocal braiding, he signed them to his label.A Grammy, Then a DeathThe group’s debut album, titled simply “Crosby, Stills & Nash,” was released in May 1969 and shot into the Top 10. It earned them a Grammy as best new artist. Besides “Wooden Ships,” the album included two other songs by Mr. Crosby, the shimmering “Guinevere” and the elegiac “Long Time Gone,” which he wrote after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.From left, Graham Nash, Stephen Stills and Mr. Crosby in a photo taken at the shoot for the cover of the album “Crosby, Stills & Nash,” their first as a group. Henry DiltzThat same year, his longtime girlfriend, Christine Hinton, was killed in a car accident while running a routine errand. Mr. Crosby later saw this as the tipping point that sent him into depression and serious drug use.“I was unable to handle it,” he told People magazine. “I was very much in love with her and she just never came back. That was when I got more into hard drugs.”His increasing recreational drug use made it harder for him to create music, he said, but he nevertheless managed to write two classic songs for the band’s follow-up album, “Déjà Vu,” released in 1970, which officially expanded the group’s lineup to include Neil Young: “Almost Cut My Hair” and the title track, a rhythmically daring number with complex harmonies.Fueled by drugs and egos, the group quickly began to fracture. Over the next year, all four members released solo albums. Mr. Crosby’s, “If I Could Only Remember My Name,” released in 1971, sold well, but it was the least well received in its day. Robert Christgau of The Village Voice called it a “disgraceful performance.” Mr. Crosby would not record another solo album for 18 years. But in later years it received a critical overhaul; in his 1994 book, “All Time Top 1,000 Albums,” Colin Larkin called it “miraculous.”Starting in 1972, Mr. Crosby released a series of successful albums with Mr. Nash, his closest ally in the band. All three of their first joint albums went gold, buoyed by Mr. Nash’s more commercial tunes.In 1973, Mr. Crosby reunited with the four other original Byrds for one album, but it was poorly received. For much of the ’70s, he also worked as a session singer, backing up star friends like Jackson Browne and James Taylor. In the ’80s and ’90s, he did similar work with Phil Collins.Mr. Crosby, Mr. Stills and Mr. Nash, and sometimes Mr. Young, reunited from time to time. But by the 1980s Mr. Crosby was increasingly running afoul of the law.Mr. Crosby was arrested by Dallas police in April 1982 and charged with drug and gun possession. He spent nine months in prison.Bureau of Prisons/Getty ImagesHe spent nine months in a Texas prison in 1982 on drug and weapons charges. In 1985, he was arrested on charges of drunken driving, hit and run, and possession of a concealed pistol and imprisoned for a year. By his account he quit hard drugs in 1986. But in March 2004, he was charged with criminal possession of a weapon in the third degree, as well as illegal possession of a hunting knife, ammunition and marijuana. He pleaded guilty and got off with a fine.Mr. Crosby detailed his travails in two harrowing autobiographies, “Long Time Gone” (1988) and “Since Then: How I Survived Everything and Lived to Tell About It” (2006), both written with Carl Gottlieb.Surging Late in LifeHe earned less fraught tabloid headlines in 2000, when he was revealed to be the biological father, via sperm donation, of the two children of the singer Melissa Etheridge and her partner at the time, Julie Cypher.Mr. Crosby had first become a father in 1962, with Celia Crawford Ferguson, but as young parents they put their son up for adoption. He had three other children: Erika, by his former girlfriend Jackie Gutherie; Donovan, by another partner, Debbie Donovan; and Django, with Ms. Dance, his wife of 35 years. His brother killed himself in the late 1990s. His survivors include his wife and four children.In 1997, Mr. Crosby reunited with the son he had put up for adoption, James Raymond, who had grown up to become an accomplished pianist. With the session guitarist Jeff Pevar, they formed a jazz-rock band, which they cheekily called CPR.Mr. Crosby in concert in Los Angeles in 2012. Two years later he released his first solo album in 21 years, ushering in one of the most prolific periods in his career.Mario Anzuoni/ReutersIn 2014, Mr. Crosby released his first solo album in 21 years, “Croz,” which debuted in the Billboard Top 40. It ushered in one of the most prolific periods in his career, in which he released five solo albums, most recently “For Free” in 2021.Mr. Crosby told The Orange County Register in 2019 that his late-in-life resurgence was sparked by his realization that “at this stage, you don’t know if you’ve got two weeks or 10 years,” adding, “Really what matters is what you do with whatever time you have.”Mr. Crosby announced in 2022 that although he planned to continue making records, he would no longer tour. “I’m too old to do it anymore,” he said. “I don’t have the stamina; I don’t have the strength.” (He recently said that he had reconsidered.)In 2019 he was the subject of an uncommonly frank documentary, “David Crosby: Remember My Name,” directed by A.J. Eaton and produced by Cameron Crowe. In the film, the famously cantankerous Mr. Crosby talks about how he had alienated nearly all of his old musical associates, even his longtime ally Mr. Nash. “All the guys I made music with won’t even talk to me,” he said. “I don’t know quite how to undo it.”Adapting a more appreciative tone, Mr. Crosby looked back at his life with wonder in his second memoir. “I was tremendously lucky, surviving injury, illness and stupidity,” he wrote. “As for the music, I was blessed early and often, from the Byrds to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, singing with Graham, meeting my son and creating CPR” and experiencing “the wonderful, exploratory forward motion of new music.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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    Ticketmaster Under the Magnifying Glass

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicLast year, Ticketmaster was the object of a significant amount of consumer discontent. There was the confusing rollout of tickets for the upcoming Taylor Swift stadium tour. In Mexico City, countless people with valid tickets were denied entry to a Bad Bunny concert. And the rising roots-rock singer-songwriter Zach Bryan made Ticketmaster a focus of his public ire.If all of this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Ticketmaster has long been the target of — or perhaps the cause of — widespread unhappiness. High prices and fees? Blame Ticketmaster. A resale/scalping market that’s even more financially taxing? Blame Ticketmaster. And so on, and so on. Artists as big as Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen have taken on the giant, and mostly been forced to stand down, owing to the company’s reach and power.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the recent spate of kerfuffles that have increased scrutiny of Ticketmaster, the artists who have pushed back against the ticketing giant and the seeming intractability of the issues plaguing the ticket marketplace.Guest:Ben Sisario, The New York Times’s music industry reporterConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More