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      How Stormzy Crafted His Latest Album, ‘This Is What I Mean’

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      The British rapper was inspired by a variety of artists, including his sister, in making his third album.LONDON — Early in 2020, Stormzy thought he knew what kind of album he wanted to make. He wanted it to be “proper hard,” the British rapper said in a recent video interview.But then the pandemic hit, and “This Is What I Mean,” Stormzy’s recently released third album, ended up being made in a period of stillness when there was nothing to do except “chill, look after my dogs and make an album, and hear my thoughts and listen to God,” he said.Making the record from this space was a change of pace for Stormzy, 29, born Michael Ebenezer Kwadjo Omari Owuo Jr. He is now Britain’s highest profile rapper, and has built an ever-growing portfolio of initiatives for Black Britons and other people of color.Musically, he’s credited with being instrumental in Britain’s revival of grime music, and he was the first solo Black British artist to headline Glastonbury Festival.But when it came to making “This Is What I Mean,” “I didn’t have my cape on, ” he said. “I was just Mike, just navigating life.” The pandemic meant he had psychic distance from his public persona, and physical distance from the trappings of fame; the resulting album takes the introspection present on his previous projects and digs deeper.On the video call, Stormzy discussed some of the artists that influenced his making the record. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.‘Marcy Me’ by Jay-ZRozette Rago for The New York Times“Marcy Me,” from Jay-Z’s 2017 album “4:44,” exemplifies what Stormzy respects most about the New York rapper: his seemingly effortless delivery of effortful penmanship.“That takes dedication to your craft, and that takes studying your craft,” Stormzy said, “where you are now able to come out and rap at the highest level, and make it look like you just rolled out of bed.”A line could be drawn between “4:44,” which is, in part, a sonic confessional, and “This is What I Mean,” which is also an exercise in vulnerability. “I feel like with any great art that you consume, I think that it consciously or subconsciously inspires you,” Stormzy said, adding that seeing Jay-Z be so vulnerable “made me feel like, OK, that’s what we’re doing.”‘All of the Lights’ by Kanye WestThe influence of Ye, the scandal-prone artist formerly known as Kanye West, is “unashamedly” present on the titular song on “This Is What I Mean,” Stormzy said.That track takes cues from “All of the Lights,” off West’s 2010 album “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.” One of Stormzy’s favorite songs by West, “All of the Lights” is ambitious and baroque, loaded with short interludes from other artists. Stormzy thinks of the song as a painting, and the musicians, producers and instrumentalists the artist’s tools.“This Is What I Mean” is a similar exercise in ambition. “I’ve made that song with three different producers; I’ve got, like, five or six of my favorite artists on it and we were just painting,” Stormzy said.Beyoncé’s Live PerformancesLarry Busacca/Getty ImagesStormzy has a rule: If someone discredits Beyoncé’s artistry, “I don’t trust them.”His performances are often high energy, and feature theatrical moments. At the 2018 Brit Awards, he performed under a rain machine as rows of balaclava-clad men sat behind him, reminiscent of Da Vinci’s “Last Supper.” (Similar imagery was also invoked on the cover of his debut record “Gang Signs and Prayer.”)“There’s no one who has inspired my live show like Beyoncé,” he said. After watching her 2018 Coachella performance ahead of his own headline performance at Wireless Festival, he called his creative director to say they needed to start over.“When people see my Glasto, they see my tour, I’m like, yeah, that’s me trying to be a fraction of Beyoncé’s live show,” he said.Rachael AnsonReferences to Rachael Anson, Stormzy’s older sister, are littered across his discography. A D.J., Anson has hosted a show on a female-led online radio station and crafted mixes for the likes of Apple Music.Growing up in South London, Anson not only encouraged his ambitions, but also lent a practical ear when he was starting out. “The only thing that used to irk her about my raps was my flow,” he said. “My sister is the queen of vibes, she is so at one with music.”Her opinion continues to loom large for him: “Even now when I write, I’m like, aah, Rachael’s going to hear that” and she’s going to love it, Stormzy said.Frank OceanVisionhaus#GP/Corbis, via Getty ImagesIn Stormzy’s opinion, the singer Frank Ocean is the “most gifted songwriter of my generation.”Stormzy is a rapper who often sings, and said he has taken cues from the way Ocean’s music shows that “melody doesn’t need to be complicated to be beautiful.”“He hits pockets of melody that are really sweet to my spirit,” Stormzy said. “I’ve learned that from him, I can use my voice — whatever remit I live in with my vocal ability — to find these sweet pockets of melody.” This is especially clear on two songs on his new album, “Firebabe” and “Holy Spirit,” which Stormzy sings throughout.‘Growing Over Life’ by Wretch 32Stormzy is equally likely to rap over a drill beat, spit on a gospel song or croon over a piano: “Excellent rap is not always rooted in the energy and the gangster,” he said. He shares this proclivity with one of his musical heroes, the British rapper Wretch 32, born Jermaine Sinclaire Scott.Wretch’s refusal to be bound by any of the thematic or sonic restraints that are often found in M.C. culture has informed Stormzy’s approach to music. This is especially true of Wretch’s 2016 album, “Growing Over Life,” which engages with the personal and political treatment of Black people in Britain.Listening to the record, “I just used to be so blown away,” Stormzy said. “The best rapper in our country is rapping over these beautiful melodies, these beautiful pieces of music.”Wretch’s influence can be heard on the track “Please,” from “This Is What I Mean.” Backed by a piano, Stormzy is candid about his relationship with his father: “Please Lord give me the strength to forgive my dad / For he is flawed and so am I.” More

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      Playing Neil Diamond: A Dream Role, and a ‘Crazy Privilege’

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      Will Swenson, the star of “A Beautiful Noise,” has come a long way from his days as an eighth grader wooing girls with his Diamond repertoire.Back in the era of the eight-track tape, the actor Will Swenson’s father played Neil Diamond albums practically on a loop. A poster of Diamond, the Brooklyn-born singer-songwriter most famous for the singalong behemoth “Sweet Caroline,” hung on a wall in the family’s garage.So when Swenson was in eighth grade, looking to “woo girls around the campfire” with his guitar, it was obvious to him that a few Diamond tunes belonged in his repertoire.“My go-to was ‘Play Me,’” he said, “which is the most sexual song ever, and I don’t think that it dawned on my innocent little Mormon brain that I was singing just lascivious lyrics to these innocent little Mormon girls.”In early November in his dressing room at the Broadhurst Theater, Swenson laughed at that memory in what he called his “post-show morning voice”: extra deep with a touch of sandpaper. Given the demands of his song-heavy current Broadway gig — playing the title character in “A Beautiful Noise, The Neil Diamond Musical,” which opens on Dec. 4 after a month of previews — it was probably not the kindest thing to ask him to tax his voice further by giving a 90-minute interview.“It’s all right,” he said, an hour in. “Necessary evils.”With a book by Anthony McCarten, whose Warhol-Basquiat play, “The Collaboration,” opens on Broadway later in December, “A Beautiful Noise” is both a conventional jukebox musical and a strange beast, structurally. Michael Mayer, its director, aptly described it this way: “The first act is a musical wrapped in a play, and the second act is a play wrapped in a concert.”Swenson, who portrays the Neil Diamond of the 1960s to the 1990s, in the musical, which opens Dec. 4 at the Broadhurst Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe conceit that makes it what Swenson considers a memory play involves the present-day Neil Diamond, played by Mark Jacoby, talking through his life and lyrics with his therapist, played by Linda Powell. The real Diamond, now 81, spent years in psychoanalysis.Swenson, who at 50 can easily look much younger, headlines as the Neil Diamond of the 1960s to the ’90s. (In the interest of vocal preservation, Swenson plays the role seven times a week instead of the usual eight. Nick Fradiani takes over on Wednesday nights.) An anxious Jewish songsmith from Flatbush whose family name actually is Diamond, he writes the Monkees hit “I’m a Believer,” finds his feet as a performer on the tiny club stage of the Bitter End in Greenwich Village, inadvertently signs a record deal with the Mafia that comes back to bite him hard and over the years walks away from one marriage and then another.And amid all that, evolves into a globe-trotting, sequin-wearing, arena-playing star.For Swenson, doing a Diamond impression long ago became a kind of party trick. At some concerts given by his wife, Audra McDonald, he has come on toward the end to sing a little Diamond with her, mischievously.“We would set up ‘You Don’t Bring Me Flowers’” — the Diamond-Streisand duet about a couple whose love has died of neglect — “by saying, ‘Well, this is kind of our song. It kind of represents our emotional relationship,’” he said.A Tony Award nominee for playing Berger in Diane Paulus’s 2009 Broadway revival of “Hair,” and an Obie Award winner for his 2018 performance as Satan in “Jerry Springer — The Opera,” he’s been dangerously sexy in “Murder Ballad,” unnervingly menacing in “Assassins” — and fortuitous offstage in “110 in the Shade.” That 2007 Broadway production is where he met McDonald, whom he married in 2012, and with whom he has a 6-year-old daughter.To hear Swenson tell it, though, Diamond is the role he’d been waiting for since well before “A Beautiful Noise” became “a twinkle in anybody’s eye.” Playing a series of eight guitars as he traces the arc of Diamond’s life, he’s aiming for something deeper than mere mimicry.“I have strong feelings,” he said, “about the blurry line — the tricky, tricky line — between honoring a sound and, well, impression and impersonation.”But how to craft a performance that captures Diamond for eagle-eyed fans while allowing himself interpretive latitude?“That is the question, isn’t it,” Swenson said, wryly borrowing a line from early in the show, when Diamond has yet to find a sound that is his own.Neil Diamond circa 1968. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesABOVE THE COUCH in Swenson’s dressing room, near a photo of him and McDonald with their older children on their wedding day, is a framed, poster-size image of Swenson with Diamond at Fenway Park in Boston, when the cast of “A Beautiful Noise” went there to sing “Sweet Caroline” last June.That appearance — at the ballpark where Diamond had sung the same song in 2013 to comfort a city stricken in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing — was a promotion for the show, which was in town for its pre-Broadway run. It was also a rare public performance by Diamond, who retired from touring in 2018 after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.“It was just beautiful,” Swenson said, “to sort of watch him step into that piece of himself that I’m sure he’s missed so much.”A note in the Playbill for “A Beautiful Noise” suggests the profundity of that longing. Titled “Letter From Neil,” and dated September 2022, it begins:“The idea of a Broadway musical about my life has always been a daunting one. It wasn’t until the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease prematurely ended my touring career that I started to seriously consider the prospect. I say ‘prematurely’ because my heart and soul would tour until the day I die if only my body would cooperate.”The symptoms of Parkinson’s manifest differently in different people, but voice, movement, balance and cognition can all be affected. There’s an ache, then, built into the show’s celebration of Diamond’s life and music. Someone else — someone whose body will cooperate — gets to be onstage, performing Diamond’s songs in front of his fans. I asked Swenson if he thinks about that poignancy.“Yeah,” he said, misting up. “It’s a crazy privilege. Especially because he does it better. Like, I’m the poor man’s version, and you’re screaming for me.”But such is the curious performer-audience dynamic of jukebox biomusicals, whose playlists so instantly unlock remembrance that they might as well be madeleines. And just as Michael Jackson fans react to Myles Frost in the title role of “MJ” as if Jackson himself were in the room, Diamond fans respond to Swenson as if they were at a Diamond concert back in the day.It’s quite a thing to behold. At the first preview of “A Beautiful Noise,” in early November, a sea of mostly older audience members needed merely the slightest cue not just to sing along (which, in the case of a few judiciously chosen songs, the show encourages) but also to perform the same movements in unison — air punches, raised arms. To an uncanny degree, they knew precisely what was expected of them, because Diamond had expected it.Steven Hoggett, 50, the show’s choreographer, finds this tapping of physical memory “professionally fascinating,” particularly when he watches the crowd from above. The son of Diamond fans, Hoggett grew up in Britain knowing the albums his parents played, like “The Jazz Singer” (1980), and singles that charted there, like “Beautiful Noise.” But he looks in wonder at the Diamond faithful, whose bodies have retained their kinetic history.“These people,” he said, “they’re responding to gigs they went to when I was 4.”Giving Diamond fans possibly the closest thing they can get now to the live concert experience of an artist they love, Swenson is the beneficiary of all that nostalgic affection, which he knows isn’t really for him.“I feel like I’m lying to them sometimes, because I’m like” — and here Swenson dropped his voice to a whisper — “‘I’m not Neil.’”BEFORE SWENSON MADE it big on the New York stage, he was a star of Mormon cinema.Born in Logan, Utah, the second of four siblings, Swenson spent his early childhood in Glendale, Calif., doing shows at his grandparents’ theater. His grandmother, the biological daughter of a Ziegfeld Follies girl who gave her up for adoption, was a playwright — “three-act, family-friendly comedies, mostly,” Swenson said.He was 12 when his parents moved the family to Salt Lake City to start their own theater, and about 16 when he met the girl who would become his first wife.Between high school and starting college at Brigham Young University, he went on a two-year mission to Ecuador. During that trip, which he remembers as “a beautiful time” in his life, he kept waiting in vain for confirmation from God that everything he had been taught about Mormonism was true.Swenson at Carmine Street Guitars. In the show, he plays a series of eight guitars as he traces the arc of Diamond’s life.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesThen in 1999, he joined the second national tour of “Miss Saigon.” As the show crisscrossed the country, he visited sites that figured in Mormon history, read books about the church, discovered unsettling things that he had not known about it.“Having to tell my mom that I was going to leave the church was maybe the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Swenson said. “From the time that I decided that I had to leave the church to the time that I legitimately was open and honest about it with everyone was probably a 12-year journey.”In the early 2000s, as he was starting out in New York, he returned to Utah to star in a movie called “The Singles Ward,” as a standup comic whose wife divorces him, which dumps him back into the Mormon dating pool. The film was a niche success, so he did some more, including a sequel to “The Singles Ward.”But the apex was “Sons of Provo,” which Swenson co-wrote, directed and starred in. A clever, very funny mockumentary about a Mormon boy band, it doesn’t come off as the slightest bit mean, even when you know that he eventually left the fold.Does it matter, by the way, that a former Mormon from Utah has been cast as a Jewish guy from New York? To Mayer, 62, who is Jewish — and whose other current Broadway show is the revival of “Funny Girl” — the answer is no.“The thing about Neil that is most compelling,” he said, “isn’t necessarily the fact that he’s Jewish or that he’s from Brooklyn as much as he is a bit of a victim of a generational anxiety and depression. And I feel like that is not unique to the Jews.”There is also an argument to be made from what Swenson recalls as Diamond’s response at the first reading the actor did of the show. Performing for him, as him, from just a couple of yards away, Swenson worried initially that Diamond was bored, because he listened with his eyes closed.“I think we got to ‘Solitary Man,’ and he started kind of rocking and tapping his thumb and sort of mouthing the words,” Swenson said. “And then we got to, I think, ‘Sweet Caroline.’ And he kind of raised his hand, singing along, and it was just like: Oh, my God.”Swenson isn’t Diamond; it’s true. But even for the man himself, he can play the part. More

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      After Covid, Playing Trumpet Taught Me How to Breathe Again

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      The benefits of group (music) therapy.Our director stepped onto the podium, and the auditorium stilled to an expectant silence. The black sequins on her conducting dress flared in the stage lights; the audience behind her was lost to the glare. With a glance and a whispered word, she gave us final instructions. As she raised her baton, we all breathed in time; on the downbeat, we exploded into sound. The song was “The Hounds of Spring,” by Alfred Reed, and I can still hear the opening bars. That concert, the entirety of which felt downright enchanted, propelled me into music college, where I studied music education, learning the basics of a dozen instruments so I could teach them someday. After a year, I turned in my loaner instruments, transferred to a new school and changed my major. At 18, I wanted to save the world, and I thought I could do it better some other way.Two decades later, in November 2020, worn out by lockdown, I longed to use my mind for something other than worry, to fill my living room with a sound that wasn’t the tinny, competing voices of my children’s virtual school. I played the trumpet for only a couple of months during college, after working with woodwinds and strings in high school, and I imagined studying fingering charts again and summoning a sense memory of correct embouchure. I messaged my middle-school band director, a brass player, and we swapped listings until I sent her the model number of a solid, beginner-level trumpet for $70. Two minutes later, her reply: “Oh, yes! Grab it!” Reconnecting with the trumpet was a delight, but playing alone in my living room was a discipline I didn’t keep for long.Covid caught up to me in May of this year. My symptoms were not dangerous, but they were persistent; I counted 12 days, 14, 16, and I still couldn’t eat normally or function for more than a few hours without exhaustion and physical pain. My mental-health symptoms, meanwhile, were devastating and worsened as the days passed. I couldn’t see the point of anything; I couldn’t stop crying; I couldn’t imagine a time when these things would change.I left the house, in those days, only to go to my daughter’s softball games, a five-minute drive from home, where I could prop myself in a camp chair yards from anyone else, sip Gatorade and feel the sun on my back. If life is pointless, I thought, thank God for softball. And then I thought, OK — if life is pointless, then why not do some things just because they’re fun?Seventy of us count and breathe and quite literally vibrate together.So I decided to relearn trumpet in a more committed way: by joining a community band. I found a no-audition ensemble near me and filled out the online interest form. I received a welcome text from my new section leader and a card in the mail, telling me how the band was sure to be better because I had joined. The first time I attended rehearsal, I played a single note, badly, then spent the rest of the 90 minutes listening. Throughout the following week, I practiced at home every day, switching on the metronome and playing long tones until my lips gave out. When the next Tuesday evening rolled around, I could play. Not well, but well enough. It felt astonishing, a revelation: Sometimes, things get better instead of worse.The trumpet only has three keys, called valves, which are played in seven combinations to make all of the possible notes. Depressing the first valve, for instance, can produce a low B-flat, an F, a higher B-flat, a D and several other notes I can’t reach. The difference between one and another depends on the frequency of the lips’ buzz. It is equal parts science and art. And it’s more difficult than I remembered.Nonetheless, on Tuesday nights, I grab my $70 trumpet and load my backpack with music, stand, mute, fingering chart, valve oil and slide grease, plus a towel to catch the mix of spit and condensation that brass players insist on calling “water.” I slip in the door, nodding to my fellow third trumpets as I set up and warm up. When the conductor — the volunteer director of this band for 42 years — raises his baton, I count like mad, leave out the notes I know full well I can’t hit and do my best on the others. I spend rehearsal listening, hard, to try to merge myself into the whole. Seventy of us — blue-collar workers and office administrators and retirees, woodwinds and brass and percussionists — count and breathe and quite literally vibrate together. We’re often out of tune or unpracticed. We sometimes dissolve into chaos, and then laughter. When time is up, I pack my bag, nod to my section mates again and slip back out the door into the night.In the months following my Covid infection, the most severe depression of my life gave way to the most severe anxiety. Normal days were rife with triggers: the car, the office, meetings, therapy, food, the doctor, social engagements. Community-band rehearsal was no exception, but I went anyway.I wasn’t always sure why. It was, as I had hoped, fun. But it was also more. Tracking the notes, counting the beats, linking the notes on the page to the correct fingering, frequency, breath and duration — it seems like a miracle that it ever works. Multiply that by 70 players, and it can feel like witnessing the impossible. Somehow community band did what I knew music could do when I enrolled in college, before I changed my mind about my future: It saved me. It drew me out — of my home, of my head. It taught me how to breathe again.Shea Tuttle is the author of “Exactly as You Are: The Life and Faith of Mister Rogers,” co-author with Michael G. Long of “Phyllis Frye and the Fight for Transgender Rights” and co-editor of two collections on faith and justice. More

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      Louise Tobin, Jazz Vocalist Who Put Her Career on Hold, Dies at 104

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      She stopped performing to raise children, at the request of her first husband, the bandleader Harry James. After remarrying, she resumed singing decades later.With the big band era in full swing in 1939, Louise Tobin, a jazz vocalist with Benny Goodman’s orchestra, was on the cusp of nationwide fame. But she soon put her career on hold at the request of her husband, the trumpeter and bandleader Harry James.Mr. James had begun touring with his own band, leaving Ms. Tobin to care for their two sons, Harry Jr. and Tim. And after the couple divorced in 1943, Ms. Tobin devoted herself to raising them for the next 20 years or so.Over time her melodic voice was largely forgotten — until she was invited onstage for an impromptu performance at a New Orleans nightclub in the late 1950s.A recording of that appearance helped jump-start her career, and she soon joined the band of Michael (Peanuts) Hucko, a clarinetist and bandleader. The two became an item, and married in 1967.Ms. Tobin, who spent the next decades traveling the world and making music with Mr. Hucko, died on Saturday at the home of a granddaughter in Carrollton, Texas, her son Harry said. She was 104.The newspapers of her day often compared Ms. Tobin’s warm voice to that of a young Ella Fitzgerald. She became a professional singer as a teenager, after winning a radio talent contest in Dallas in 1932. She was the fourth youngest of 11 siblings, and she eagerly left behind household chores to tour the state with different jazz ensembles.“I was thrilled,” she told The Dallas Morning News in 2010. “My fulfillment was not to have to wash dishes.”In 1934, she joined a local big band, where she met Mr. James, who played first trumpet. They eloped in 1935, shortly after the orchestra split up, and traveled around the country looking for work.By 1937, Mr. James had joined Benny Goodman and His Orchestra, and in 1939 he left to start his own band, which endured for four decades and was the first orchestra to employ Frank Sinatra.By Ms. Tobin’s account, she heard the young Sinatra sing on a local radio show and suggested that Mr. James visit him at the New Jersey restaurant where Sinatra worked as a singing waiter.Ms. Tobin was performing in New York at the time, and she joined Mr. Goodman’s band after a talent scout saw her perform in a Greenwich Village nightclub.She released hit records with Mr. Goodman’s orchestra, like a rendition of “There’ll Be Some Changes Made,” which became one of the most popular songs in the country. But as her career gained momentum, so did that of Mr. James, who became one of the most popular bandleaders of the swing era: In 1942, Columbia Records attributed a shortage of shellac to demand for his records.“We were more trying to establish Harry than we were trying to establish me,” Ms. Tobin said in 2010. “I didn’t juggle it very well.”Mr. James’s success kept him on the road, where he was surrounded by temptation. Shortly after he and Ms. Tobin divorced in 1943, he married the actress Betty Grable.Ms. Tobin was still popular when she quit Mr. Goodman’s band in the early 1940s and returned to Texas with her sons, but music became an afterthought as she raised them. She stayed out of the spotlight until after they had graduated from high school, when she went to see the Dixieland trumpeter Al Hirt play in New Orleans.Mr. Hirt recognized Ms. Tobin and asked her to sing with the band. A recording of the show made its way to the jazz critic and producer George Simon, who asked her to record more songs and sing at jazz festivals.Ms. Tobin was reluctant, but Mr. Simon persuaded her to sing at smaller venues in New York until she felt up to performing before a large audience. In time her confidence returned, and she gave a stirring performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1962.The jazz clarinetist Peanuts Hucko and Ms. Tobin at their wedding in 1967 in Littleton, Colo. He became her most enduring collaborator.Steve Larson/The Denver Post, via Getty ImagesWhile she rebuilt her career, Ms. Tobin began singing with Mr. Hucko’s ensemble. Mr. Hucko, who was best known for his stints alongside Louis Armstrong and Glenn Miller and his appearances on Lawrence Welk’s television show, became her most enduring collaborator.After their marriage, they owned and ran a jazz club in Colorado, recorded tribute albums to Mr. Goodman and Mr. Armstrong and toured in Europe, Japan and Australia, where they performed for Prince Charles and Princess Diana. They often sang duets onstage, including a version of “When You’re Smiling,” which was on the 1992 album “Swing That Music,” their final studio recording together.Mr. Hucko died in 2003, after which Ms. Tobin retired.Mary Louise Tobin was born on Nov. 11, 1918, in Aubrey, Texas, north of Dallas, and grew up nearby in Denton. Her father, Hugh, died in a fuel truck crash when she was young, and her oldest brother, Ray, opened a drugstore to help support the family. The children often sang together, but Ms. Tobin was the only one who became a professional singer.She went on the road before completing high school, first traveling with an older sister as a chaperone. Her family was initially shocked by her marriage to Mr. James, but in time they accepted him.After their divorce, Ms. Tobin lived on alimony and what she earned from the occasional show or recording. But she spent most of her time caring for her two sons, including during a worrisome time. Mr. James had received threats that his children could be kidnapped, prompting Ms. Tobin to stay on the move. She lived with her boys in California for a time and enrolled them in military school. She spent two years traveling with them to places like Hawaii, India and Egypt.In addition to her sons she is survived by many grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren.In interviews, Ms. Tobin expressed little regret about her interrupted career and often said that she felt grateful that she had a part in big band jazz at the height of its popularity.“I feel like that was a real era of contribution to the culture of the world,” she said.Jack Kadden contributed reporting. More

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      in Movies

      Irene Cara, ‘Fame’ and ‘Flashdance’ Singer, Dies at 63

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      Ms. Cara was a child star from the Bronx who gained international fame as the singer of major pop anthems from movies of the 1980s.Irene Cara, the Academy Award-winning singer who performed the electric title tracks in two aspirational self-expression movies of the 1980s, “Flashdance” and “Fame,” has died. She was 63.Her death at her Florida home was confirmed by her publicist, Judith A. Moose, on Twitter on Saturday. Ms. Moose, who did not specify when Ms. Cara died, said her cause of death was “currently unknown and will be released when information is available.”Ms. Cara, a child actor, dancer and singer, was the voice behind two of the biggest movie theme songs of the 1980s. She performed the title track from the movie “Fame” (1980), which followed a group of artsy high school students as they move through their first auditions to graduation.In 1984, she won the Oscar for best original song as one of the writers of “Flashdance … What a Feeling,” the title song from “Flashdance,” which she also sang. The buoyant song also earned Ms. Cara a Grammy Award in 1984 for best pop vocal performance, female, and a Golden Globe for best original song. The movie, like “Fame,” chronicled the aspirations of a young person seeking to express themselves through art, in this case, dance.Ms. Cara was born Irene Escalera on March 18, 1959, in the Bronx. She repeatedly disputed reports about her birth year, at times describing it as in 1964. Her official Twitter account says she was born in 1962. Her mother told The New York Times in 1970 that a young Ms. Cara, already a busy performer, was 11 years old.Her mother, Louise Escalera, was a cashier and her father, Gaspar Escalera, was a musician and worked at a steel factory. Details on Ms. Cara’s survivors were not immediately available.Ms. Cara grew up in New York City and attended music, acting and dance classes as a child and was said to be able to play the piano by ear at age five. She attended the Professional Children’s School in Manhattan, a school for child performers and children studying the arts.As a child, she sang and danced on Spanish-language television. At 13, she was a regular on “The Electric Company,” a children’s show from the 1970s. She was also a member of its band, the Short Circus.She stayed busy, taking roles in theater, television and film, including the title role in “Sparkle,” a 1976 film about a family of female singers in the 1960s that was remade in 2012.Her breakout role was in the movie musical “Fame,” where she played Coco Hernandez, a student at a school modeled after the high school now known as Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. On the film’s soundtrack, Ms. Cara sang the title track, “Fame,” and another single, the ballad “Out Here on My Own.”Both songs were nominated for an Oscar in 1981. The film was nominated for several awards and “Fame” won for both best original song and score.She continued to act and make music into the 1990s, when she was embroiled in a legal battle with her record company over her earnings. She was awarded $1.5 million by a California jury in 1993 but Ms. Cara said she was “virtually blacklisted” by the music industry because of the dispute, People magazine reported in 2001.In recent years, she shared songs from her catalog, including some that had not been released, on her podcast, “The Back Story.”In an episode from July 2019, she spoke about her ballad “As Long as it Lasts,” and said it had similar qualities to “Out Here on My Own,” and explained why she connected to both songs.“Very naked, just vocal and piano and a great lyric and a great story within the lyric, those are the kinds of songs I relate to as a songwriter,” Ms. Cara said. More

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      in Music

      ‘Gangnam Style’ Brought K-Pop to the World, but Haunted Its Creator

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      In 2012, the song took over the internet, and it helped pave the way for the global success of Korean pop. But Psy, the artist behind it, spent years trying and failing to replicate the phenomenon.SEOUL — He may not look it, in a spiffy double-breasted suit and a coiffure secured with enough hair gel to reflect the ceiling lights, but the 45-year-old music executive confides a secret as he rubs his temples: He’s hung over.But he doesn’t mind nursing this headache, at well past 2 p.m. on a Thursday in Seoul. Some of his best songwriting ideas come to him, he said, in the malaise that follows a night of hard drinking.The man doing the creative suffering is Psy, the onetime global internet sensation whose 2012 viral music video and earworm of a song, “Gangnam Style,” became the first-ever YouTube offering to surpass one billion views and had the world galloping along with him.The outlandish but irresistibly catchy song and accompanying video — which has Psy doing the tune’s signature horseback dance move in and around Gangnam, an upscale Seoul neighborhood — achieved the breakthrough, worldwide success that had mostly eluded Korean pop acts, or K-pop, before then.The video, which now has some 4.6 billion views, was so culturally pervasive in 2012 that Barack Obama was asked about it on Election Day. NASA astronauts recorded a parody, and a North Korean state propaganda site evoked the dance move to mock a South Korean politician. But for several years in the aftermath of all his viral fame, Psy said, the song’s success haunted him. Even as he was thrust overnight into a Hollywood existence, getting chased around New York City by paparazzi, signing with Justin Bieber’s manager and releasing a single with Snoop Dogg, internally he felt the pressure mounting for another hit.Psy performing “Gangnam Style” live on NBC’s “Today” show in New York, in 2012. At the time, the video for the song had more than 200 million YouTube views; it now has more than 4.6 billion.Jason Decrow/Invision, via Associated Press“Let’s make just one more,” he says he kept telling himself.He moved to Los Angeles in an effort to get a global career going in earnest, an ocean away from his native South Korea, where he was both a fixture of the music charts and a source of comic relief on silly television variety shows. But none of the attempts came close to replicating the formula that made “Gangnam Style” a global success.Psy wasn’t alone in trying to figure out how to reproduce the phenomenon. In South Korea, not only the music industry but government officials and economists, too, were studying just what it was about the tune, the lyrics, the video, the dancing or the man that had vaulted the song to such singular levels of ubiquity.And in the decade since the song and video first put South Korea’s pop music on the map for many around the world, K-pop has become a cultural juggernaut, expanding out from markets in East and Southeast Asia to permeate all corners of the world.Artists like BTS and Blackpink command devoted fans numbering in the tens of millions, and the bands wield an economic impact that rivals a small nation’s G.D.P. The fervor has spilled over beyond music into politics, education and even Broadway.Some say Psy deserves much of the credit.“Psy single-handedly placed K-pop on a different level,” said Kim Young-dae, a music critic who has written extensively about the industry. The song was a “game changer” for the Korean music scene and paved the way for the groundswell of interest and commercial success that the South Korean stars who came after him experienced, Mr. Kim said.Now, 10 years on from his lightning-in-a-bottle moment, Psy, whose real name is Park Jae-sang, is back home in South Korea, where he has started his own music label and management company and is trying to recreate the magic with the next generation of K-pop talent as one of the industry’s tastemakers.“Let’s make just one more,” Psy said he kept telling himself after “Gangnam Style” became a phenomenon.Chang W. Lee/The New York Times“One of the things I love most about this job is that it’s unpredictable. We say among ourselves we’re in the ‘lid business’ — because you don’t know what you’ve got until you open it,” Psy said in an interview at the offices of his music label headquartered in — where else? — the Gangnam neighborhood of Seoul. “You don’t know which cloud will bring the rain.” With 10 artists under his wing, including a newly minted six-member boy band, TNX, Psy says he feels immensely more pressure shaping and stewarding other people’s careers compared to when he was responsible for his alone.And while he can give his budding stars advice based on decades of industry experience, what he can’t do is offer them surefire instructions on making a hit record.For all the years he has spent thinking and talking about “Gangnam Style,” he remains just as mystified as anyone by its success.“The songs are written by the same person, the dance moves are by the same person and they’re performed by the same person. Everything’s the same, but what was so special about that one song?” Psy said. “I still don’t know, to this day.”Psy performing on the grounds of Korea University in Seoul in May.Anthony Wallace/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn global terms, Psy and his “Gangnam Style” are the epitome of a one-hit wonder. But in South Korea, he had been well-known as a rapper and musician for a decade before, carving out a path that differed from many of his fellow performers, in that he didn’t count on a boost from his physical appearance or shy away from courting controversy.He never had the chiseled look sought after in South Korea’s pop music industry, and from the release of his first album in 2001, he became notorious for his blunt, profane and at times ribald lyrics. “I Love Sex” was one of the tracks on his debut album, “Psy from the Psycho World!” which was slapped with a ban on sale to minors at the urging of the country’s Christian Ethics Movement.Despite — or perhaps because of — his unapologetic, iconoclastic ways, over the past two decades at home in South Korea, the college dropout has consistently logged chart toppers, best-selling albums and sold-out concerts.“It’s kinda sorta ironic he became so iconic — he went from being occasionally censored to widely celebrated,” said Bernie Cho, president of DFSB Kollective, a Seoul-based creative services agency that offers marketing and distribution solutions to Korean music artists and their labels. “He irreverently winked his way from being the bad boy of K-pop to the golden boy of K-pop.”For a pop song, “Gangnam Style” also unleashed an avalanche of deep think pieces and analyses on the various aspects of South Korea and Seoul it was said to be lampooning: the hypocrisy of the nouveau riche, the superficiality of its social standards and the inequality exemplified by the opulent Gangnam neighborhood.Psy insists the song never intended to deliver any profound social commentary — he was just looking to give people a few minutes of mindless hilarity and a reprieve from reality.If anything, he said, he was poking fun at himself, because he doesn’t aesthetically fit the bill of a posh Gangnam local.A decade on from his lightning-in-a-bottle moment, Psy has started a music label and talent management company. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times“It’s funny because someone who doesn’t look like he’s ‘Gangnam style’ says he is,” he said.Initially targeted for development in the 1970s to expand Seoul south of the Han River, Gangnam has became a coveted address where many of the capital’s wealthy congregate and the best schools are concentrated, an educational disparity likely to ensure that the inequalities symbolized by the neighborhood continue into the next generation.In the years since Psy made Gangnam a globally recognized, if oft-mispronounced, proper noun (“Gang” sounds closest to the latter half of Hong Kong; “nam” like Vietnam), the neighborhood has gotten ever more unattainable for the average South Korean. Nowhere have runaway real estate prices risen as steeply as in the Gangnam area.“If you say you live in Gangnam, people look at you differently,” said Jin Hee-seon, a former vice mayor of Seoul and professor of urban planning at Yonsei University. “It’s an object of desire and envy.”Psy, raised in the greater Gangnam area in a family running a semiconductor business, now lives north of the river with his wife and twin daughters and says he spends little time thinking about the place.A bronze sculpture in Gangnam by the artist Hwang Man-seok, modeled after the signature “Gangnam Style” horse-riding hand motion.Anthony Wallace/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhat he has recently returned to is his signature live performances.His concerts are legendary in South Korea for raucous good fun. His music — loud and energetic — is often accompanied by dance moves just as outrageous, requiring him to jump, kick and wave his arms wildly in the air. During his six-city tour this year, his first since the pandemic, he said he was surprised to find his joints and limbs as nimble as ever in middle age.In his latest album released this April, his ninth, he collaborated with the rapper Suga of BTS on a single titled “That That.” In the music video, Suga comically duels — and kills — the blue tuxedo-wearing Psy of the 2012 video. (That video has accrued 369 million views.)As for the chase of global fame that once drove him nearly mad, he says he’s made his peace with its absence.“If another good song comes along and if that thing happens again, great. If not, so be it,” he said. “For now, I’ll do what I do in my rightful place.” More