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    Liverpool Will Host 2023 Eurovision Song Contest

    The popular competition would have been held in Ukraine, which won this year’s event, but safety concerns sent it to Britain instead.Liverpool will host the Eurovision Song Contest in 2023, organizers of the musical competition announced on Friday, choosing the birthplace of the Beatles for one of Europe’s premier cultural events.The M&S Bank Arena, an 11,000-capacity arena, will stage the competition on May 13, 2023, organizers said.The announcement capped an unusual selection process, in which Ukraine, which earned the right to host next year’s event after winning this year’s contest, was ruled out by Eurovision organizers, who said the war-torn country could not provide the necessary “security and operational guarantees.”Instead, Britain, the runner-up in 2022, was named host. Liverpool was selected from a shortlist of seven cities that also included Glasgow, the runner-up, along with Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle and Sheffield.Hosting Eurovision “means everything” for Liverpool, the city’s director of culture, Claire McColgan, told the BBC on Friday.“We’re doing it for Ukraine first of all, for our brilliant city and for the people who come here,” Ms. McColgan said. “It’s going to be incredible.”Ukraine had offered three potential locations that it said were safe from the fighting: Lviv, in western Ukraine; the Zakarpattia region, which borders Hungary and Slovakia; and the capital, Kyiv.But the European Broadcasting Union, which organizes the competition, announced in July that Britain would host instead. At the time, Martin Österdahl, Eurovision’s executive supervisor, pledged that Ukraine would be “celebrated and represented throughout the event,” with representatives from a Ukrainian broadcaster working with the BBC.Tim Davie, the director general of the BBC, also said the network was “committed to making the event a true reflection of Ukrainian culture alongside showcasing the diversity of British music and creativity.”Eurovision began in 1956, gathering musical artists from countries across Europe, as well as some farther afield, including Australia and Israel.Britain has hosted the event eight times, most recently in 1998 in Birmingham.The selection will bring a major international spotlight to Liverpool. Over 160 million people watched in May as Kalush Orchestra, a Ukrainian rap act, was crowned the winner in Turin, Italy.Sixty-two years after the Beatles formed, Liverpool remains closely tied to the enormously influential rock band. The band is central to the city’s tourism, with Beatles-themed museums, tours and a statue along the waterfront.Though Liverpool has produced fewer star international acts recently, the local music scene is small-scale and “healthy,” said Karl Whitney, the author of “Hit Factories: A Journey Through the Industrial Cities of British Pop.” There are “lots of great bands from Liverpool,” he said, “but the Beatles, obviously, sort of overshadow everything.”The city plans collaborations with Ukrainian street artists, designers and musicians to bring the country’s culture to the city, The Liverpool Echo reported this week. Claire McColgan, the director of Culture Liverpool, told the newspaper that “this is their party, it just happens to be in our house,” referring to the Ukrainians.“If we are chosen as host city there’s no question Eurovision will take over Liverpool in a way no single event has ever done before,” she said this week. More

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    Suzan-Lori Parks Is on Broadway, Off Broadway and Everywhere Else

    The first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in drama has four shows this season. “If you can hear the world singing, it’s your job to write it down,” she said.Suzan-Lori Parks is drawn to archways. Early on in her New York life, long before she became one of the nation’s most acclaimed playwrights, she lived above a McDonald’s on Sixth Avenue — the Golden Arches. Then she moved out by Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza, with its triumphal Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch. Now she lives in an apartment overlooking the marble monument honoring the nation’s first president at the entrance to Washington Square Park.“It’s very symbolic,” Parks told me. “I’m always orienting myself to arches.”Arches, of course, are gateways, portals between one world and another, and Parks is endlessly thinking about other worlds.This season, audiences will have ample opportunity to join her.A starry 20th-anniversary revival of “Topdog/Underdog,” her Pulitzer Prize-winning fable about two brothers, three-card monte and one troubling inheritance, is in previews on Broadway. “Sally & Tom,” a new play about Parks’s two favorite subjects, history and theater, but also about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, has just begun performances at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. “Plays for the Plague Year,” Parks’s diaristic musings on the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic and a coincident string of deaths, including those of Black Americans killed by police officers, is to be presented next month at Joe’s Pub, with Parks onstage singing and starring. And “The Harder They Come,” her musical adaptation of the 1972 outlaw film with a reggae score, will be staged at the Public Theater early next year.“I’m like a bard,” she said. “I want to sing the songs for the people, and have them remember who they are.”At this point in her career, Parks, who in 2002 became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in drama, is a revered figure, regularly described as one of the greatest contemporary playwrights.“She occupies pretty hallowed air: She’s the one who walks among us,” said the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who teaches playwriting and performance studies at Yale.“She’s the reigning empress of the Black and weird in theater,” he said. “And she really is the most successful dramatist of the avant-garde working today.”PARKS HAS BEEN TELLING STORIES since she was a child. She wrote songs. She tried writing a novel. There was a period when she made her own newspaper, called The Daily Daily, reporting on what she saw through a Vermont attic window. (She was born in Kentucky, and moved frequently because her father was in the military.)While an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke, she had the good fortune to take a creative-writing class at nearby Hampshire College with James Baldwin, who suggested she try playwriting, and, even though she feared he was just trying to politely steer her away from prose, she did. “That’s what I’m doing still,” she said. “Trying theater.”Her apartment is filled with evidence of a furiously busy creative life: shelves heaving with plastic crates containing thoughts on pending and possible projects; elements of a second novel marinating on a wallboard cloaked by a blanket; index cards in Ziploc bags; a laptop perched on a crate atop the dining table; lyric revisions in notebooks on a music stand by an ever-at-the-ready guitar. (She is a songwriter who occasionally performs with a band; this season’s four productions all feature music she wrote.)“Writing, I think, is related to being kind of like a witch,” she said as she showed me around. “Writing is magical. I loved mythology, and folk tales, and I could hear them — old stories — not in a recording of something that somebody living in my presence had told me, but if you listen, you can hear organizational principles of nature, which includes the history of people, which is narrative.”So writing is listening? “Not in a passive way,” she said. “I’m on the hunt.” By this point, she was on her feet, pantomiming the stalking stance of a wild cat, preparing to pounce. “You’re being drawn toward it, and you’re reeling it in at the same time, like a fisher.”As she talked, she kept cutting herself off, reaching for ways to differentiate her craft. “There’s a lot of writers who have ideas, and they have an agenda, and that’s cool,” she said. “I think I’m something else.”Digging in to the question of why she writes, she became more and more expansive, reflecting on the songlines of Indigenous Australians, which connect geography and mythology.“We have our songlines too — we just forgot them a long time ago,” she said. “They’re encoded in all the religious texts. They’re in African folk tales. They’re in the stories that your mom or your grandmother taught you. They’re there, and I can’t get them out of my head.”“If you can hear the world singing,” she added, “it’s your job to write it down, because that’s the calling.”PARKS IS NOW 59, and her work has been in production for 35 years. In 1989, the first time The New York Times reviewed her work, the critic Mel Gussow declared her “the year’s most promising new playwright.” In 2018, my critic colleagues at The Times declared “Topdog/Underdog” the best American play of the previous quarter century; explaining the choice, Ben Brantley, who was then the paper’s co-chief theater critic, described Parks as “a specialist in the warping weight of American history,” and declared, “Suzan-Lori Parks has emerged as the most consistently inventive, and venturesome, American dramatist working today.”“She’s a national treasure for us,” said Corey Hawkins, left, who is starring opposite Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in a revival of Parks’s Pulitzer-winning “Topdog/Underdog” on Broadway.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“She is a genre in and of herself,” said the playwright James Ijames, who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize in drama for “Fat Ham.” And what is that genre? “It is formally really dazzling, in terms of how she structures the play; there is humor underpinned with horror and political satire; there’s this real thread of the blues and folkways and things that are just root Black American signifiers; it’s musical, it’s whimsical, it’s playful, and it’s dangerous — all of the stuff that’s so exciting to see onstage.”Her early plays were experimental (“opaque,” Brantley once wrote). The recent plays have been more accessible, for which Parks makes no apologies.“People — not you, but people — when they ask that question, they’re like, ‘Oh, so now you’re selling out! You’re getting more mainstream and you’re not being true to your roots!’” she said. “Oh, no. I’m becoming more and more and more true. Trust me on this one: I’m following the spirit, no doubt. So, yeah, ‘Plays for the Plague Year’ looks like real life, cause it is. So maybe we ought to think about what am I writing about, and if I’m true to what I’m writing about.”Reflecting her singular stature, Parks has an unusual perch from which to work: She is a writer in residence at the Public Theater, where she receives a full-time salary and benefits. At the Public, she also conducts one of her great ongoing experiments, “Watch Me Work,” a series of events, in-person before the pandemic and online now, at which anyone can work on their own writing while she works on hers, and then they talk about creativity. Early in the pandemic, Parks held such sessions online every day.“Her great subject,” said the Public’s artistic director, Oskar Eustis, “is freedom. It’s both what she writes about, and how she writes.”Parks is also an arts professor at N.Y.U., which is how she wound up across from Washington Square Park, where she lives in faculty housing with her husband, Christian Konopka, and their 11-year-old son. For years, they shared one bedroom; this summer, they finally scored an upgrade, just 70 steps down the hall (their son counted), but now with a bit more space and that archward view.She has surrounded herself with a striking number of good-luck charms: not only the pink unicorn balance board on which she stands while typing, but also a tray of unicorn plushies; James Baldwin and Frida Kahlo votive candles; a hamsa wall hanging she picked up at a flea market; milagro hearts from Mexico; Buddha, Ganesh, rabbit and turtle figurines; and a deck of tarot cards (yes, she did a basic reading for me; I drew the high priestess card). Also: she has tattooed into one arm, three times, a yoga sutra in Sanskrit that she translated as “submit your will to the will of God.” (She calls herself a “faith-based, spiritual-based person,” and is also a longtime practitioner of Ashtanga yoga, which she does every morning, after meditation and before writing.)“All the help I can get, baby,” she said.Parks, 59, has four productions this season: a revival, a new play, a collection of pandemic-prompted playlets and songs, and a jukebox musical.Erik Carter for The New York TimesTHE MANY ARTIFACTS on display in her apartment include a shelf set up as a shrine to Baldwin, a dollar bill Parks collected when, feeling the need to perform, she tried busking in a subway station, and a “Black Lives Matter” placard she held at protests during the summer of 2020, when she also signed the “We See You White American Theater” petition, written by an anonymous collective, calling for changes in the industry.“Hey, I’m angry as the next Black woman,” she said. “And yet, to get through this, we need to also listen — listen to the voice of anger, listen to the voice of love, listen to the voice of wisdom, listen to the voice of history.”She added, “Let’s not just stand around telling people that they suck. At least where I come from, that’s not a conversation, and, at least where I come from, that’s not good dialogue.”The tone of some of the conversation around diversity in theater is clearly a concern of hers — that’s obvious in “Plays for the Plague Year,” which, in the most recent draft, contains a playlet called “The Black Police,” in which three “Black Cops” approach a “writer,” played by Parks, and say, “We’re here to talk with you about your blackness/Why you work with who you work with.”In our interview, Parks said she was troubled by “the policing of Black people by Black people, and not just in the arts,” adding, “we have to wake up to the ways we are policing each other to our detriment.”“No more trauma-based writing!” she said. “These are rules. And Suzan-Lori Parks does not like to be policed. Any policing cuts me off from hearing the spirit. Sometimes the spirit sings a song of trauma. I’m not supposed to extend my hand to that spirit that is hurting because it’s no longer marketable, or because I should be only extending my hand to the spirits who are singing a song of joy? That’s not how I want to conduct my artistic life.”She also said she is troubled by how much anger, at the Public Theater and elsewhere, has been directed at white women. “Not to say that Karen doesn’t exist. Yes, yes, yes. But it’s interesting that on our mission to dismantle the patriarchy, we sure did go after a lot of white women. If you talk about it, it’s ‘You’re supporting white supremacy.’ No, I’m not. I’m supporting nuanced conversation. And I think a lot of that got lost, and lot of times we just stayed silent when the loudest voice in the room was talking, and the loudest voice in the room is not always the voice of wisdom.”THIS SEASON, SHE’S PIVOTING back toward the stage after a stretch of film work in which she wrote the screenplay for “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” and was a writer, showrunner and executive producer of “Genius: Aretha,” both of which were released last year.At the start of the pandemic, she assigned herself the project that became “Plays for the Plague Year,” writing one short play each day for 13 months. The discipline was a familiar one: In 2002, after winning the Pulitzer, she began “365 Days/365 Plays,” then she did another daily playwriting exercise during the first 100 days of the Trump presidency. The pandemic play is part personal history — how the coronavirus affected Parks and her family — and part requiem for those who died during that period, from George Floyd to Parks’s first husband. The play, like much of Parks’s work, features songs she wrote. “I was moved into other states, where I wasn’t just documenting what happened that day, but I wanted to sing,” she said.She’s got plenty still to come — she’s still polishing “The Harder They Come,” which will feature songs by Jimmy Cliff and others, including Parks, who said the story, set in Jamaica, “really captures a beautiful people in their struggle.” She’s then hoping to turn to that second novel (a first, “Getting Mother’s Body,” was published in 2003).She is planning a screen adaptation of “Topdog,” as well as a new segment of her Civil War drama “Father Comes Home From the Wars” (so far, three parts have been staged; she said she expects to write nine or 12). Also: she’s writing the book, music and lyrics for an Afrofuturist musical, “Jubilee,” that she’s developing with Bard College; “Jubilee,” inspired by “Treemonisha,” a Scott Joplin opera that was staged on Broadway in 1975, is about a woman who establishes a new society on the site of a former plantation.Parks’s latest play is “Sally & Tom,” starring Luke Robertson and Kristen Ariza. The first production is now underway at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis; it is expected to be staged next fall at the Public Theater in New York.Dan NormanOn a recent afternoon in Minneapolis, Parks settled in behind a folding table to watch a stumble-through of “Sally & Tom,” which is being developed in association with the Public, where it is expected to be staged next fall. The work, directed by Steve H. Broadnax III, is structured as a play-within-a-play — it depicts a contemporary New York theater company in the final days of rehearsing a new play about Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings, an enslaved woman. Parks has had a longtime interest in Jefferson and Hemings, and at one point had worked on a television project about the relationship that never got made; the play, she said, is not a straight historical drama, but “about how the world is made, and how we live in this country.”The protagonist is a playwright who, like Parks, is warm but exacting, and is rewriting and restructuring the show as opening night nears. When I asked Joseph Haj, the Guthrie’s artistic director, how much he thought the play was about Parks, he at first shrugged it off, saying artists are always present in their work. After the run-through, he grabbed me to amend his remarks. “I take back everything I said,” he said. “I see her all over this.”Kristen Ariza, who is playing the playwright as well as Hemings (the fictional playwright stars in her own play) said “the play is full of humor, until it’s not.”“It feels so meta, because we’re doing the play, within the play, and we’re doing all these things like within the play,” she said. “She’s constantly questioning, ‘Does this fit? Is it working? Is it flowing correctly? She’s hearing our voices and adding things and making things work better as we go.”A few days later, Parks was in Times Square, watching an invited dress rehearsal for “Topdog/Underdog.” The set is draped in a floor-to-ceiling gold-dipped American flag, meant, the director, Kenny Leon, told me, to reflect the way commerce infuses the culture.Two actors who have enjoyed success onscreen, Corey Hawkins (“In the Heights”) and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (“Watchmen,” “Aquaman”), play the story’s brothers, mischievously named Lincoln and Booth. They share a shabby apartment; Lincoln, fatefully, works as a Lincoln impersonator at an amusement park where patrons pretend to assassinate him, while Booth makes ends meet by shoplifting. Their relationship to each other, to truth-telling, and to their shared history is at the heart of the story.Both actors encountered the play as undergraduates; Hawkins was a stagehand on a production at Juilliard, and Abdul-Mateen read a few scenes as Booth while at Berkeley. “It’s the first piece of material that I ever performed on a stage that I felt like was written for someone like me,” Abdul-Mateen said.Like many people I spoke with, Abdul-Mateen was particularly struck by Parks’s ear for dialogue. “It’s as if she eavesdropped on these two characters,” he said, “and just wrote everything down as she heard it.”Hawkins called the play “an ode to young black men who don’t always get to live out loud.” And he is embracing that opportunity — one night, he called Parks at 2 a.m. to discuss a section of the play; she has also helped him learn the guitar, which he had not played before getting this role. “There’s something very grounding about that peace that she carries,” he said. “When she walks in the room, she carries the ancestors, the people we’re trying to honor, with her.”Shortly after we hung up, my phone rang: Hawkins again, this time with a reverential plea. “Make us proud, man,” he said. “She’s a national treasure for us.” More

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    He Inherited a New Orleans Jazz Institution. What Does He Owe?

    The Preservation Hall 60th Anniversary Celebration, held in the sold-out orpheum Theater in New Orleans this past May, began with a song of mourning. “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” is one of the most recorded gospel songs in history, perhaps best known for the rendition performed by New Orleans’s own Mahalia Jackson at Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral. Here, it was led by Ivan Neville, one of the night’s many guests, its solemn tone befitting a commemoration that had been so repeatedly deferred by various waves of Covid-19 that the anniversary it celebrated was in fact the 61st. Even then, the show barely went on. Nearly all of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, the hall’s elite touring ensemble, and several members of its staff had spent the week with bouts of Covid. This included Ben Jaffe, who is not only the band’s tuba player, bassist and leader but also Preservation Hall’s owner and creative director and the steward of nearly every other aspect of its present and future.Jaffe’s mother, Sandra, was among the musical figures lost in the year-plus since the concert was first scheduled. She died in December, at age 83. That morning, Jaffe visited the Jewish cemetery where she was buried beside her husband, Allan. The elder Jaffes built Preservation Hall into an internationally known institution that, as the legend goes, all but single-handedly saved New Orleans jazz from extinction. This story was invoked even before the Orpheum curtain rose to the opening chords of Neville’s keyboard, revealing the P.H.J.B. frozen onstage. Left to right: Revell Andrews, a drummer, with his cousin Revon Andrews, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band’s trombonist, and Jaffe.L. Kasimu Harris for The New York Times“We are all so grateful that your parents, Allan and Sandra, decided to honeymoon in New Orleans, following some musician friends of ‘Larry’s Gallery’ at 726 St. Peter Street,” said Mark Romig, a New Orleans tourism official better known for his first-down calls as the announcer at Saints games. “The rest,” he went on, “is history.” Indeed, what followed was a kind of primer on more than a century of New Orleans music, including the traditional jazz that made Preservation Hall famous, the call and response of the Mardi Gras Indians and the R.&B. soul of Irma Thomas, who, at 81, performed “You Can Have My Husband (But Please Don’t Mess With My Man),” a hit that predated the hall itself. Elvis Costello appeared, to pay tribute to Allen Toussaint; Big Freedia twerked. The Afro-Cuban hip-hop star Cimafunk rapped on top of a P.H.J.B. composition that grew out of the group’s exploration of New Orleans music’s Cuban roots. Despite his own recent recovery from Covid, the saxophonist Charlie Gabriel, who was 89 at the time and has become something of Preservation Hall’s presiding spirit, played and swayed throughout.In the manner of bassists since the beginning of time, Ben Jaffe spent most of the night simultaneously in the background and at the center of all this action. Guest stars notwithstanding, he may have been the most recognizable figure on the stage, with his trademark owl glasses, disarrangement of tight curls and stiff gait, a result of a rare form of arthritis he has endured since he was a teenager. So iconic has his look become that this year’s Super Bowl halftime show used a Jaffe look-alike named Devon Taylor when it wanted to signify “New Orleans tuba player.” Jaffe was trailed throughout the night by a camera crew gathering footage for a potential documentary about the anniversary. If there is one thing that Preservation Hall does better and with more commitment than playing music, it is telling its own story. I happened to be with Jaffe almost a year earlier when he was on the phone trying to secure funding for a different documentary. Projects like this seem to swirl around Jaffe, with money for them appearing to fall from the sky in chunks. “I learned from my father to always have 10 irons in the fire, and 10 balls in the air,” he told me that day, with a smile.That may be an undercount of balls and irons. Under Jaffe’s relentless prodding and promotion, the organization he took over in 1993 has found itself in a moment of remarkable creative diversity. It has come to present multiple, sometimes contradictory faces to the world: local institution and world-famous touring act, tourist attraction and philanthropic powerhouse, musical innovator and provider of background music that signals “New Orleans” as clearly as the Eiffel Tower does Paris. It is also a white-owned and white-run institution with a self-described mission to “preserve, protect and perpetuate” one of the nation’s greatest Black cultural legacies; a site of historic tolerance during the worst of the Civil Rights Era but also a place that critics, both inside and outside its walls, have long referred to as “Plantation Hall.” In short, a place where seemingly all the knotty questions of race and culture, creation and consumption, ownership and inclusion that face not only New Orleans but all of America are on blaring display. Last year, amid the continuing tumult following George Floyd’s murder, Ben Jaffe brought up some of these issues unbidden. In our conversations, he spoke about Black Lives Matter and the questions about privilege and representation in the arts being asked by institutions like his across the country. He said he had grown increasingly uncomfortable with his role as the face of Preservation Hall. After Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, he said, he stepped into the spotlight out of necessity. “I knew I had the ability to drive people’s attention and awareness,” he told me. But more recently, he went on, he “became very aware and self-conscious that the attention was being directed toward me and I was being asked to do more and more that required my opinion and my voice.” He even suggested that he planned to step back from performing with the band: “Preservation Hall doesn’t need me as a musician anymore,” he said. “The worst thing in the world would be to have Ben Jaffe’s picture on the cover of a magazine and it be like ‘Ben Jaffe’s Preservation Hall Band.’”Even so, 13 months later, it was indisputably still Ben Jaffe standing up on the Orpheum stage. And it was his rendition of Preservation Hall’s story, of its history and importance, being retold and celebrated. I had spent the intervening year talking to musicians, philanthropists, academics, community members and other observers in and out of the hall’s orbit and come to see that, for all there is worth celebrating, there is a more complicated version of its story: one in which six decades of white leadership have created a range of quiet but pointed divisions around issues of management, musician pay and even what kinds of music the band plays. Like jazz itself, Preservation Hall is a rich but thorny inheritance — for New Orleans, for Ben Jaffe and for the musicians who have been its lifeblood since the beginning.Ben Jaffe with his parents, Allan and Sandra Jaffe, about 1975From Ben JaffeAllan and Sandra Jaffe really did stop in New Orleans on their way back from Mexico City during their honeymoon — and, like quite a few visitors before and since, they never managed to leave. Allan, a graduate of Wharton, took a job at a local department store, but the couple soon fell in with a coterie of music lovers concerned about the waning presence of New Orleans jazz. A pair of them, Barbara Reid and Ken Mills, had for several years been putting on concerts featuring veteran musicians at a St. Peter Street gallery owned by an art dealer and entrepreneur named Larry Borenstein. In September 1961, glimpsing the potential for profit, or at least increased professionalism, Borenstein handed the keys to the more business-minded Jaffes. (It is to this date that the current hall, not quite historically, dates its anniversary.)Half a century earlier, jazz grew out of New Orleans’s brothels, bars and street parades — one of the few permissible modes of Black public expression, if not the only one, in a time of institutionalized white supremacy. Its foundations (polyphony, syncopation, call and response, improvisation) reached further back, to Congo Square, the marketplace outside the French Quarter where enslaved people were allowed to gather on Sundays. There, they fused what the historian Joel Dinerstein calls “a new musical hybrid,” combining rhythms and dancing from Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. By the time the Jaffes arrived, though, the creative and commercial heart of jazz had been elsewhere for many years. Epochal musicians like Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet had long since been heading north or overseas, in search of more modern ears and more hospitable racial climes. New postwar styles like bebop dominated jazz clubs in New York and Chicago, while “New Orleans music” had increasingly come to mean the revolutionary rhythm and blues of artists like Fats Domino and Dave Bartholomew. The older jazz style was more likely to be found as nostalgic background music at white uptown parties and restaurants or rebranded as “Dixieland” at clubs like Bourbon Street’s Famous Door, where a promotional postcard featured an enslaved person reclining on a bale of cotton. The Famous Door was the kind of place against which Preservation Hall, half a block away, defined itself. The Jaffes refused to sell alcohol and demanded attentive silence. Sandra was a legendary shusher, and a quick hook; if she judged that a visitor was drunk, rowdy or otherwise not inclined to properly appreciate the music, he was quickly redirected next door to Pat O’Brien’s bar, home of the hurricane cocktail. Onstage they put giants who had found themselves underemployed or out of music altogether: George Lewis, Punch Miller, Sweet Emma Barrett. Some had been present to hear jazz in its very earliest incarnations, like the bassist Papa John Joseph, who had played with Buddy Bolden himself. Joseph had spent the last several decades as a barber.Both the Famous Door and Preservation Hall were, in their own ways, selling a notional New Orleans. The first evoked a familiar antebellum idyll; the other, a more modern fantasy of a place where a Creolized history, relative tolerance and shared passion for a sui generis Black culture provided safe harbor from the storm of racial strife swirling outside: a kind of South outside the South. The business of New Orleans has always been, to some extent, the business of fulfilling a fantasy of New Orleans. This dynamic had reached a new level of urgency by the 1960s, just in time for the birth of Preservation Hall. The historian J. Mark Souther has argued that as the other industries that had built New Orleans — shipping, banking, petroleum — declined, what was left was “culture”: food, architecture, music and so on, nearly all of it indebted to the city’s Black and Creole population. “The resurrection of Dixieland jazz reveals the advance in the postwar years of the notion that responding to tourists’ expectations served New Orleans’ economic interests,” Souther writes in “New Orleans on Parade: Tourism and the Transformation of the Crescent City.” “What had started as a reinvigoration of a Black music genre by jazz enthusiasts gradually became a cash cow for tourism promoters.”This is not to say that it couldn’t be both. By all accounts the bond between Allan Jaffe and the musicians he employed was genuine and deep. He played tuba in Harold Dejan’s Olympia Brass Band, one of the few white musicians to be granted that level of inclusion in the Black world of street parades, and he spent his days driving around town on his orange Vespa, seeking out old musicians. To these men (then, as now, they were all but exclusively male) he offered not only a stage and respectful audience but also, once he started the touring Preservation Hall Jazz Band, access to the most rarefied corners of white high culture: Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall. And he formed close friendships with them, often helping out with medical bills and other emergencies. If in 2022 this reads as an inescapable example of what we now call white saviorship, it had clear benefits for both audiences and musicians. “You could say it was paternalistic, but Jaffe genuinely cared about these musicians, and in a way really loved them,” says Tom Sancton, whose memoir, “Song for My Fathers,” chronicles his teenage years learning clarinet at the Hall. “They were part of a broader family he had become a part of, and I think most of them felt that way about him — that it was not simply an employer-employee relationship. And I also think they were genuinely happy to have the work.”And, of course, the reality of the times dictated the structure. It fell to a white man to create a place like Preservation Hall, Ben Jaffe says, for the obvious reason that, in 1961, “a Black man couldn’t do it.”The Preservation Hall Jazz Band, about 1970Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesIt was true, too, that Preservation Hall served as an unusual oasis of tolerance, even in the French Quarter, which was notoriously unfriendly to Black visitors. Dodie Smith-Simmons, who at 18 was among the Freedom Riders who traveled across the South challenging segregation, found a sort of second home at the hall, eventually working the door, selling merchandise and later becoming the touring band’s road manager. Once, she says, a passing drunk hurled a racial slur at her through the doorway, and Sandra Jaffe grabbed him by the tie and punched him. For all that, the Jaffes preferred to operate on the premise that race didn’t exist. “My parents knew the consequences” of openly discussing the topic, Jaffe says. “They knew the potential repercussions for the musicians and for themselves. They were very much like: ‘We don’t exist. I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s just happening.’ They wanted to be invisible.” Still, complications had a way of poking through. What, for instance, to do about Pork Chops and Kidney Stew? Those were the stage names of two Black dancers, Oliver Anderson and Isaac Mason, who performed in loud plaid suits and wide grins at the Famous Door and other clubs on Bourbon Street. They were, by all accounts, pyrotechnically talented. “When I talk to guys who remember them, they’re like, ‘Oh, my God, they were the greatest of all time!’” Jaffe says. “It was athletic. It was amazing. But it was also a lot of the things we consider to be minstrelsy. Someone had to make that call: ‘This is where we draw the line.’” Whatever their gifts, Pork Chops and Kidney Stew were not welcome at Preservation Hall.If, sometime in the past 61 years, you have been among the tens of thousands of visitors to line up on St. Peter Street and make it through Preservation Hall’s creaky iron gate, you know how much genuine power still resides there. Inside the gate is a narrow brick passageway, lined with old posters. At its end, you glimpse a courtyard walled by worn brick and shaded by banana trees. To the left, you are ushered into the simple room where music is played: wood floors, backless wood benches, a classic tableau of standup piano, drum kit and music stands. On the wall are moody Noel Rockmore portraits of long-gone musicians, hung perfectly askew. The light is amber, bordering on sepia. If it’s true that we eat with our eyes, Preservation Hall is proof that we listen with them too.The elements at play in that room can almost seem too volatile. “Sometimes you see people and their tears just start flowing,” says the Preservation Hall Jazz Band drummer Walter Harris. He chokes up himself thinking about it. “They come over and ask you: ‘I’m feeling something. What am I feeling?’” To hear the trumpeter Wendell Brunious, a member of a century-old New Orleans musical family tree, close his first set back in the hall after its Covid shutdown with the Mardi Gras Indian anthem “Big Chief” was to feel that you were tapped into the deepest parts of America’s racial and musical history, awash in a wave of joy and mourning that stretched from the birth of the country straight through the lost Mardi Gras days of the pandemic. Never mind that Brunious has played that number for decades. Or that the room had been left by the Jaffes in its state of immaculate decay to create, or at least not dispel, the illusion that it was itself a birthplace of jazz. (Those sites, if New Orleans could summon the will and resources to preserve them, would be located outside the French Quarter.) Or that the gate is said to be intentionally left unoiled, the better to ensure its atmospheric creak.Ben Jaffe and a hall patron, about 1995.From Ben JaffeBen Jaffe grew up between the small village of the Quarter and the world stage, surrounded by musicians both legendary and journeyman. The Quarter may have still held traces of its bohemian past, but the Jaffes were anything but hip. “My father had two pairs of pants: a tan pair which was his day pair and a dark blue pair which were his dress-up, performance pants,” Jaffe says. “Once a year we would go to Sears to replace them.” They avoided gatherings outside the hall and built almost no social circle outside of its musicians. Though they began accumulating French Quarter real estate, they were mortally wary of any ostentation. The family did not own a car. Their apartment featured two televisions stacked atop each other, one with sound, the other with picture, both controlled by pliers.Jaffe’s first love was football, which he played until the onset of a condition called ankylosing spondylitis, which, among other miseries, leads to the fusion of your vertebrae. Since he was 14, Jaffe has nearly always been in some level of pain. Nevertheless, Ben and his older brother each took up the physically demanding tuba. (Technically, it is a sousaphone, in the same way that technically a crawfish is a crayfish; neither is a word you are likely to hear on the streets of New Orleans.) Of course, the tuba was also Allan Jaffe’s instrument. It is hard to have a conversation of more than five minutes with Ben without the subject of his father coming up. His stewardship of Preservation Hall is defined by a push-and-pull with his father’s legacy, reflecting a relationship that was both reverent and strained. The two clashed over Ben’s more flamboyant sense of style as well as his interest in more modern jazz, which might as well have been punk rock in the Jaffe household. “He was hard on the boys,” says Ben’s childhood best friend, Aaron Wolfson, who now sits on the board of the Preservation Hall Foundation. Allan once praised Wolfson’s drum-playing, calling him a natural musician. “I never got a compliment like that,” Ben later told him. Ben was 16 when Allan died in 1987, at 51, of melanoma. Ben soon left for Oberlin College, where he studied bass. The plan was to move to New York after graduation, to pursue a music career there. Instead, as graduation approached, he found himself drawn home, alarmed by the state of Preservation Hall, which had been run by his mother and aunt since Allan’s death. Lines still formed nightly on St. Peter Street. The touring band had chugged along for decades, building an audience in every corner of the globe; there were actually now three lineups, traveling the world simultaneously. If New Orleans jazz once risked being forgotten, it was now, thanks in great part to the Jaffes, a venerated piece of high culture. But the cure also proved to be a kind of poison, or at least formaldehyde.“I just knew, energetically, that something was wrong,” Jaffe says. “It was like, there was music going on everywhere in the city, and then we were this other thing. I blinked and the perception had changed to, ‘Oh, it’s a museum.’” So Jaffe took over the family business. (Russell Jaffe, Ben’s older brother, took a different path, becoming a speech and language pathologist who now practices in St. Louis.) The day after graduation, he flew to Paris to play bass with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and begin assuming leadership of the hall. If Preservation Hall’s own success had cut it off from the living stream of New Orleans culture, his aim was to bring it back.It didn’t happen overnight. Clint Maedgen described the scene when he joined the band in 2004: “There would literally be people carried out by paramedics during our performances. We would stop a song and there would be loud squealing noises in the audience, and it would be the cranked-up hearing aids. And these people weren’t necessarily bringing their grandkids.”Jaffe says his first 10 years at the helm were spent figuring out the basics of how to run a business. At the same time, he was beginning to address what he saw as the hall’s spiritual and artistic problems. These could be summed up by one title: “When the Saints Go Marching In.” New Orleans’s most famous song probably began as a 19th-century hymn. It became an iconic anthem after Louis Armstrong recorded it in 1938, and it has been inextricably linked to Preservation Hall ever since Allan Jaffe hung a sign over the stage: Traditional Request — $1 Others — $2 The Saints — $5It was something of a gag, a way to point out the cliché “Saints” had become and to spare the band from having to play it five times a night. But audiences either missed the joke or took it as a challenge. Each night, they filled the tip jar — even when Jaffe raised the price to $10 and then $20.Naturally the musicians appreciated that. But to Jaffe, “Saints” was emblematic of every “Nawlins” cliché that Preservation Hall risked becoming. As his parents did with Pork Chops and Kidney Stew, he considers it part of his job to protect performers from their own worst instincts. “There are certain things you do where you realize, ‘Oh, this is going to get a reaction.’ And one of those things is when you pull out the white handkerchief and start doing the Louis voice,” he says. The band stopped playing “Saints” to close its shows. At the hall, the sign came down.There were other changes. The Ben Jaffe era at Preservation Hall took hold in earnest when he hired Maedgen to be the touring band’s saxophonist. Maedgen, whose persona suggests a melding of John Waters and Tom Waits, had been making a living as a deliveryman at a French Quarter restaurant while also hosting a free-for-all variety burlesque show called “The New Orleans Bingo! Show.” Jaffe decided to take the Bingo show on tour with Preservation Hall Jazz Band. The new direction was a step too far for some, with several longtime band members quitting, including Wendell Brunious, who told Vanity Fair: “They got clowns running out in the audience. What the hell is that all about? It’s almost a violation.” (Brunious has since returned.) After Katrina, the hall emerged as a kind of house band for mainstream acts in search of New Orleans flavor. The band became a fixture at festivals like Bonnaroo and toured with My Morning Jacket, whose frontman, Jim James, went on to help produce “That’s It!,” the hall’s first-ever album of original music. With members of Arcade Fire, Jaffe organized a street parade through the French Quarter to commemorate David Bowie’s death; the band wore red shirts in what was a shocking departure from their customary white shirt and ties. To those who expressed outrage over these developments, Jaffe would retort that traditional jazz, and Preservation Hall in particular, had always intermingled with mainstream music. Over the stage at the hall itself, not far from where the “Saints” sign once hung, he placed a 1968 poster from the Fillmore in San Francisco, advertising the Preservation Hall Jazz Band opening for the Grateful Dead.Trumpter Branden Lewis (center) with trombonist Revon Andrews (right) of the PHJB touring band.L. Kasimu Harris for The New York TimesThere’s a popular T-shirt slogan in New Orleans, coined by an artist who goes by the name Phlegm: “Everything You Love About New Orleans Is Because of Black People.” It’s a truism that implies another: that Black people have rarely reaped the appropriate reward for their contribution to the city’s culture. When you speak to musicians and other people in the hall’s orbit, it is not long before you begin to hear pointed grumbling about the institution under Ben Jaffe. Some is about his creative direction; it is often said, not very kindly, that Jaffe’s real goal is to become a “rock star,” using the platform of the hall to get there. Other complaints go deeper. In 2010, the Grammy-winning trumpeter Nicholas Payton wrote a blog post after the death of his father, Walter Payton, a longtime Preservation Hall musician. Payton’s screed was colored by grief and what seemed like personal animus; he and Jaffe (whom Payton pointedly called by his childhood nickname, Benji) had known each other since elementary school. Nevertheless, it encapsulated many of the critiques one still hears: that Jaffe can be perceived as a disrespectful and imperious boss. That he puts the interests of himself and the hall above those of the men who play there. That he pays musicians too little while the hall grows rich. Such behavior was “endemic of those who have controlled things in the music industry since its inception,” Payton wrote. “From my vantage point, he’s nothing but a vile predator who sucks the life blood out of the artists whom he uses to help maintain his wealth and status. None of whom receive a fair percentage of the wages which they work so tirelessly to earn.” Jaffe says he has been aware of such criticisms since the days he would overhear them whispered about his father. He considers much of it to be an inevitable condition of being the boss. “You learn to differentiate between someone’s frustration and anger, the need to criticize because that’s how they get attention, and something that’s real,” he says. Still, the grumbling is widespread, even if few are willing to grumble on the record, whether out of genuine ambivalence about criticizing an institution they love or fear of losing their employment. “It would be great if people could just be honest with Ben, but he might just haul off and fire you,” says Bradley Williams, who worked for four years at both the Preservation Hall Foundation and the hall itself, and was in a unique position to hear the complaints and concerns of its corps of musicians. “You might not have no gigs no more. Things might change for you.” Williams was 26 when he came to work at the hall in 2016, a year after following a girlfriend to New Orleans from Baltimore. The son of a jazz percussionist, he’s still not sure how he made it through the job interview, he was so excited. At first, he worked the door at night, selling tickets and sometimes stepping inside to introduce the band. He noted how few staff members of color, aside from the musicians, the hall employed — and how even fewer were Black. Visitors noticed, too. “Black customers would come up to me and ask, ‘So, where are we all at?’” he says. The absence felt even starker when Williams moved over to become a program associate at the Preservation Hall Foundation, where he poured himself into educational programs at local schools and prisons. There, he was the sole Black employee.Williams’s boss, the program director Ashley Shabankareh, who wrote the foundation’s founding documents, says she tried to call attention to the hall’s diversity issue for much of the 13 years she worked there. “It was a consistent conversation: ‘Uh, does anybody else find it weird that we’re an organization promoting Black culture and we’re an almost all-white staff?’” she says. Management’s response, says Shabankareh, who is of Middle Eastern descent, was either to say that they were simply hiring the most qualified people or to ignore the issue altogether. Until recently, the foundation’s board consisted of Ben and his wife, Jeanette, as well as two of Ben’s longtime friends, both also white, though it has since added several members of color. Williams says he was discouraged from talking to donors about his educational programs at the many fund-raising events the foundation held. “I was often told: ‘That’s not what they’re here for. They want to have a good time,’” he says. This became an ongoing concern: the sense that the foundation cared less about the programs he was committed to and more about throwing a perpetual party for rich white donors — even as its fund-raising marketing centered entirely on images of Black men. Kyle Roussel, the pianist in PHJB touring and recording band.L. Kasimu Harris for The New York Times“If the kids are important, if the music is what’s important, if supporting musicians is what’s important, then that’s what we should be focused on,” he says. Branden Lewis joined the Preservation Hall Jazz Band as its trumpet player in 2016. Only four years earlier, he was busking on a street in the French Quarter. Lewis, 33, grew up in Los Angeles, but his grandfather was the saxophonist for the New Orleans R.&B. band Li’l Millet and His Creoles, the kind of lineage that goes a long way with Ben Jaffe. Lewis has emerged as a charismatic frontman with a lyrical style. He says Jaffe has been a father figure to him, but he has also found himself frustrated by many aspects of his time at Preservation Hall. He, too, wonders about the lack of Black leadership, for instance. And he bristles at the hall’s liberal use of the word “collective” to describe the musicians who play in its various bands, when in fact creative decision-making is tightly controlled by Jaffe and his small management team. The musicians are all freelancers, paid by the gig and without benefits. “If there was some sort of profit-sharing, or a democratic process behind the artistic direction, yeah, I could agree it was a collective,” Lewis says. “Until then, we’re just a very unique group of hired guns.” Like many, Lewis also wonders about the hall’s pay structure. Rank-and-file musicians at the hall make $200 for four sets per night, with the band leader making $240. Even Preservation Hall Jazz Band members are gig workers, paid $270 when they play the hall and between $550 and $800 per show on the road. These fees are at the top of the market for local music clubs, though it’s debatable how much that should be a cause for celebration. (“Are we going by a minimum wage?” Lewis asks. “Is that where the bar is?”) According to the Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans, an advocacy group, musicians’ pay has stayed roughly the same since the 1980s, while rent in the city has nearly doubled. Whether the creators of the culture that defines New Orleans can afford to actually live in New Orleans has become a matter of acute local anxiety. When the pandemic hit in 2020, the foundation’s focus shifted to providing relief, in the form of stipends, to its corps of 60 out-of-work musicians. For many, if not all, of the recipients, the payments were a vital lifeline. “Without it, things would have been different for me,” says Will Smith, who received about $1,000 per month. “That could easily be some guy’s rent, or even their mortgage and a car note.” Still, it is striking that in 2020 alone the hall brought in nearly $3 million in Covid-related donations and distributed just over $1 million in grant and emergency-relief payments that year and the next. At least some of the remainder, Jaffe says, is meant to be a bulwark against whatever the next calamity may be. Early in the pandemic, the hall was one of 20 music organizations selected by Spotify to receive matching Covid relief grants from a pool of $10 million. In April 2020, both Williams and Shabankareh were told they would have to take furloughs. That June, Paul McCartney and Dave Grohl were among the guests to participate in a live-streamed fund-raiser that raised more than $300,000. Neither Williams nor Shabankareh have heard from Preservation Hall since, even as the foundation’s educational programs have restarted. Williams believes his outspokenness and willingness to challenge Jaffe, especially on issues of race and equity, contributed to the end of his time at the hall. Jaffe praises the work of both former employees but says the layoffs were a necessary response to the foundation’s new emergency focus. As for the question of the hall’s low number of Black employees, he insists that the organization is committed to diversity but that the goal is easier stated than accomplished. “We, and every other business I know in New Orleans, struggles to find qualified people,” he says. “We’re not New York. Our bench isn’t five people deep. We don’t even have a bench.”Williams, like others, was surprised to hear that Jaffe had raised the issue of Black Lives Matter. He remembers a staff retreat, held in Mississippi, in August 2017. This was not long after two Black men had been killed by Louisiana law enforcement in separate incidents. At the retreat, Williams brought up the idea of addressing the events with the hall’s corps of overwhelmingly Black musicians. “I told Ben, ‘The musicians are probably thinking about this,’” he says. “This is real to them.” Jaffe’s answer, Williams says, was to hold one hand above the other, denoting two different levels. “That’s happening down here,” he said, waving the lower hand. “We’re up here. We live above that stuff.” Jaffe told me he was likely referring to “the power of music” to say more than words, adding, “Bradley wouldn’t be privy to the private conversations I had with musicians at that time.” Still, it’s hard not to hear in the story an echo of Allan and Sandra Jaffe’s wish that Preservation Hall exist somehow beyond race. Jaffe with Arcade Fire at the Krewe du Kanaval celebration in New Orleans in 2020.Erika Goldring/Getty ImagesIn 1978, the concert impresario George Wein was summoned to a meeting held in New Orleans’s St. Bernard housing project. Wein, who died in 2021, was, like the Jaffes, a Jewish Northeasterner besotted with New Orleans culture. In 1970, he founded the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Eight years later, Jazz Fest had grown from a small local affair to a major, and profitable, tourist attraction. Now he had been called to the projects by a group calling itself the Afrikan American Jazz Festival Coalition. The meeting, as he describes it in his memoirs, grew quickly tense. A man in a dashiki laid out the group’s position: Black talent, Black art and Black labor were at the center of Jazz Fest’s popularity. Going forward, there would need to be more Black voices at every level of the festival’s management and decision-making. “We were saying, ‘You’re not gonna have a major event, and make money off of Black culture, and not include Black people in the decision-making process,’” one activist, Kalamu ya Salaam, said, according to the anthropologist Helen A. Regis. One of the festival’s first Black board members, Marion Greenup, reflected that it marked the moment that Jazz Fest’s organizers, well-meaning as they may have been, began to realize the event couldn’t be “simply a celebration that didn’t have more lasting effects for the community.” By the next year, Jazz Fest included an area called Koindu that was not only devoted to Black arts but autonomously controlled by Black programmers. Jazz Fest still receives no shortage of local criticism and complaint, but Congo Square, as the section was eventually renamed, has become a vital piece of each year’s event.Preservation Hall is both like and unlike Jazz Fest. On the one hand, it is a privately held French Quarter music venue and a privately held touring band (the P.H.J.B., which is technically a different company). On the other, it presents itself (and fund-raises) as something closer to a public trust. Which of these you happen to focus on — or which the hall prefers to emphasize at any given time — tends to determine how you view Preservation Hall, and Jaffe’s role and responsibilities as its steward. On the issue of musicians’ wages, Jaffe speaks like the small-business owner that he partly is, pointing out the economics of a venue that can accommodate fewer than 100 people at a time (though it often seems as if more are crammed in there), doesn’t sell booze and has been subject to a Job’s catalog of external challenges. “It’s always been my mission to find creative ways to create financial stability for the hall, to keep pulling rabbits out of my hat,” he says. “For 25 years, it’s been: ‘Here’s another rabbit. Here’s another rabbit. Oh, Katrina? Here’s three rabbits.’ Should musicians be paid more? Yes. The number should be higher. But I don’t know where it would come from.”By and large, the musicians — even those who have strong critiques of the hall in other areas — seem to see the situation through a similar lens, if with a more fatalistic bent. Sure, they would like to make more, they say, but such is the lot of their profession. And the hall is better than most. “Some places on Bourbon Street, you get $5 a set,” says Don Vappie, a member of the American Banjo Museum Hall of Fame who clashed frequently with Jaffe during his nearly 20-year-long tenure with the hall and eventually departed over their differences. “Some places you get nothing but tips.” New Orleans musicians are accustomed to piecing together a patchwork of gigs high and low, says the P.H.J.B.’s pianist, Kyle Roussel, who, among other things, plays Sunday mornings alongside the renowned drummer Herlin Riley at the tiny Greater New Home Missionary Baptist Church, in the Lower Ninth Ward. Even world-class musicians may find themselves playing one night at the 2,100-seat Mahalia Jackson Theater, the next on a platform by baggage claim at Louis Armstrong Airport. So, is it possible to make a living as a member of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band? “Yes,” Roussel says. He also says he doesn’t know anyone who actually does. Jaffe points to the Preservation Hall Foundation’s Legacy Program, which provides monthly stipends and other support to musicians who performed with the hall for 10 years or longer and are now older than 60. The Legacy stipends range from $500 to $4,000 a month. Roderick Paulin, an occasional Preservation Hall musician who last year formed the advocacy group the Musician’s Council on Fair Wages, says this is above and beyond the standards of most clubs. “I don’t know any other musical organization that is doing something like that,” Paulin says. “What it does, mentally and physically, is let these musicians know they’re not forgotten. I think it’s totally awesome.” Jaffe says the foundation’s recently rebooted educational programs also provide support for musicians, who are paid to play at schools or participate as mentors. They also play at foundation fund-raising events. As of September, the foundation had hired 52 musicians this year for almost 900 hours of paid work. Asked about musicians’ wages, Jaffe quickly grows impatient. “I’ve never heard a musician anywhere talk about how well they’re treated,” he says. “You go anywhere and the musicians ‘don’t get paid enough’; they’re ‘not admired enough’; they’re ‘not respected enough.’”The idea of giving Preservation Hall’s musicians a more traditional salary, he insisted, is “against the grain of the way that musicians in New Orleans interact with the music community.” Most of the hall’s musicians, he said, wouldn’t want to be salaried employees. In the end, though, it is clear that the issue for Jaffe is not merely one of dollars and cents. “When musicians play at Preservation Hall they have difficulty even understanding it: ‘Oh, my God, people aren’t bumping into me. They’re not spilling their drinks and talking over me,’” he says. “It’s the unique place where the audience is doing what musicians always argue they don’t do, which is sit and listen to them. I don’t know how to turn that regard into compensation. Because the regard is the compensation.” It is fair to wonder what Preservation Hall would be if its underlying reality was closer to the other vision — the one celebrated in documentaries and extolled in fund-raising materials. What if Jaffe were committed to a structural evolution as radical as the creative one he has pursued with such success and determination? There is a blueprint in place for the entire Preservation Hall operation to be taken under the foundation’s wing, thus becoming a nonprofit and theoretically removing one obstacle to change. But the goal of that complicated transaction, which Jaffe says will be completed in the next two to five years, is to ensure that the hall outlives him and his family, not necessarily to rock the boat. “The best-case scenario is that nobody even notices the transition,” he says. What if instead of the Legacy program — essentially a formalized version of the ad hoc aid that Allan Jaffe once provided his musicians — the hall took the more direct route of providing things like health insurance and retirement plans? What if it operated more like a true collective? What different collaborations might emerge from a more diverse set of decision makers? (“Foo Fighters are awesome, My Morning Jacket is awesome,” Lewis told me. “I love the scene we’re in, but there’s just different scenes you could be aligning yourself with. Younger. Blacker.”) What further threads of the New Orleans musical tapestry might the group choose to tease out, and to what exhilarating results? It is no dishonor to what Allan and Sandra Jaffe built to suggest that an institution born in the 1960s South might require rethinking in 2022. As Bradley Williams says: “I truly believe Ben loves music. I believe he loves the hall. But, I’m sorry: If I had a business and people called it Plantation anything, we would be having some meetings to figure out how to make people feel better about where they work. Even if it was my dad’s place. Especially if it was my dad’s place.”“It’s the unique place where the audience is doing what musicians always argue they don’t do, which is sit and listen to them,” says Jaffe.L. Kasimu Harris for The New York TimesThe Preservation Hall Jazz Band spent much of the summer on tour, opening for Josh Groban, with Jaffe remaining on bass and tuba. In November, he claims, the deferred plan for him to step back from his onstage role will take effect, with the veteran hall musician Kerry Lewis taking up the regular bass and tuba duties. To a man, his bandmates express amusement at the notion that the change will mean Jaffe’s relinquishing creative control. “I just know we’d be getting text messages from Ben as we’re walking onstage,” Maedgen told me.Jaffe smiled wryly. “You don’t have to always be physically present to inspire.” Jaffe also says he is in search of somebody to groom as a successor, though thus far the process seems to be rather a holistic one. “People who know me know my eyes are always open,” he says. “My finger is on the pulse. I’ve got eyes and ears in communities that you’d see and be like, ‘That’s a community?’ That’s who I am. I’m always looking, you know? Without, like, actively looking.” On one topic, Jaffe has remained adamant. For now, he insists, there’s nobody else with the blend of skill, talent, knowledge and history to run the hall. “I have the best understanding of what it is and how it operates — not just as a business, but philosophically and spiritually.” He saw what happened when his father’s tenure at Preservation Hall ended prematurely. “We carry a lot of weight on our shoulders,” he says. “For one family to carry as much weight as the Jaffes carry for this community is huge. It’s completely disproportionate. The knowledge I have is a blueprint and a model for how to operate, not to replicate, but how to evolve. I’m going to keep pulling rabbits out of my hat. That’s how much I believe in this thing.”At the 60th-anniversary show, there were congratulatory citations sent from the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana. The musical-culture wars of the hall’s past seemed to have been suspended, if not forgotten. The older musicians who make up the Preservation Hall Legacy Band — with some 190 years’ hall experience among them — played an incandescent set, and then several members stuck around to play with Big Freedia and Nathaniel Rateliff. Ben Jaffe took center stage only once, to speak about his parents and about the extended family gathered onstage and in the audience. He invoked something he said Cornel West once told him about race in New Orleans: “No place has it right, but make no mistake, New Orleans is way ahead of everyone else.” It’s a line he uses frequently, and while it may seem an absurd thing to say about a place where 32 percent of Black households live in poverty and 71 percent in so-called liquid-asset poverty, where the median household income of Black families is $40,000 lower than that of white families, where fully 99 percent of juveniles in the city’s youth jail are Black and where the Police Department and sheriff’s office have a recent history of civil rights violations so egregious that they’ve each spent much of the past decade governed by a federal consent decree, it was the kind of night that made you understand how one might believe it anyway. “Well,” Jaffe said, with a somewhat rueful smile, as the evening wound down, “I guess there’s only one way to end a Preservation Hall anniversary show.” Everybody retook the stage for a rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” The crowd went mad.“You don’t have to always be physically present to inspire,” says Jaffe.L. Kasimu Harris for The New York TimesBrett Martin is a writer in New Orleans and the author of “Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution.” More

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    Eight Ways of Looking at a Singular Composer

    Lukas Foss would have turned 100 this year. Here is a selection of key works from a long and varied (and now largely overlooked) career.“You can’t pin him down, and that’s the difficulty,” the conductor JoAnn Falletta said in a recent interview.Falletta, the longtime music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, was speaking about Lukas Foss, who led that ensemble in the 1960s and would have turned 100 this year. She and the orchestra are celebrating the occasion on Monday with a concert devoted to his works at Carnegie Hall.The polymathic Foss was a skilled and wide-ranging conductor, but he thought of himself primarily as a composer. His music grazed freely among Copland-esque Americana, thorny serial, wild chance-based, angular Neo-Classical, arch Neo-Baroque and churning Minimalist styles. That eclecticism, however, has worked against his lasting popularity, Falletta believes.“He was very proud that he did everything,” she said. “He thought the more techniques you used, the richer your vocabulary was as a composer.”Born Lukas Fuchs to a Jewish family in Berlin in 1922, he was gifted musically from an early age. With the rise of the Nazis, the Fuchses fled to Paris, then to Pennsylvania, where they changed their name to Foss and where Lukas studied piano, composition and conducting at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.“The Prairie,” an oratorio-style choral work to a long poem by Carl Sandburg, made his name as a composer when it premiered in 1944. An unabashed love letter to his adopted country, it was the start of a richly productive writing career — complemented by podium positions in Buffalo, Milwaukee and elsewhere, where Foss, who died in 2009 at 86, sought to ensure contemporary music held a position as valued as the old standards.Though Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project have made valuable recordings in recent years, Foss’s compositions — varied, yet with a singular voice and a pervasive curiosity — are played all too rarely these days.“There’s a kind of sadness that he doesn’t have many champions now,” Falletta said, adding that she hoped the Carnegie concert might in some small way help with that. “If this gives a chance to see about him and look into other things, that’s great.”In the interview, she discussed some key Foss works, including several she will be leading on Monday.‘Three American Pieces’ (1944)“This was originally a violin-piano duo,” Falletta said of a work that Foss orchestrated it in 1986, toward the end of his writing career.“When he first wrote it,” she added, “it was part of that love affair with his new country. It’s so interesting: It has this open-air quality, a little bit of that Ives or Copland language. But like Copland, it wasn’t really his language, because he was an immigrant. How wonderfully strange it is that it’s immigrants that gave us our country’s sound. Foss had no direct connection to the frontier. But there’s a mixture of folk sounds in there, blues, ragtime. I think it’s so delightful — that Americana style, the affection he had.”Symphony No. 1 (1944)“I think here he’s not only reflecting his gratitude to the United States,” Falletta said, “but you also see a kind of rhythmic vitality that’s much more like Stravinsky, and a counterpoint he must have honed with Hindemith. The tradition of the symphony is there, but the second movement is blues — in a classical symphony! And the third movement is jazz, but it’s a Scherzo, with a trio and everything. There’s structural tightness, but it’s always unpredictable. I don’t think he was one to break convention, but he really loved to bend it.”‘Griffelkin’ (1955)In the late 1940s, Foss wrote a lively opera based on the Mark Twain story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” It showed a gift for the kind of dramatic writing that would appeal to children, so he was a natural choice for NBC to approach in the wake of the success of the first opera it had commissioned for television, Gian Carlo Menotti’s “Amahl and the Night Visitors” (1951).Foss’s delightful result, inspired by a fairy tale about a disobedient young devil, was broadcast on Nov. 6, 1955. It was, Falletta said, “the last part of an age when classical music was for everyone.”‘Psalms’ (1956)“When you hear this,” Falletta said, “remember that the ‘Chichester Psalms’ of Leonard Bernstein — Lukas’s great friend from their Curtis days — had not yet been written.”In the 1940s Foss had already done two cantatas for voice and orchestra, “Song of Anguish” and “Song of Songs,” that were also on biblical texts. “The most dramatic part is the middle part,” she said. “It’s very rhythmic, it’s very jazzy — very Bernstein in its own way, very vivid. The outer movements are shorter and slower.”‘Time Cycle’ (1960)Foss’s best-known piece, this work for soprano and orchestra, dates to the period in which he began to experiment with alternatives to purely notated music; in 1957, he even founded the Improvisation Chamber Ensemble at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he taught. In “Time Cycle,” which the Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic premiered, four song movements (with jumpy vocal lines and texts about time and its ambiguities by Auden, Housman, Kafka and Nietzsche) alternate with improvised instrumental interludes.‘Echoi’ (1963)In works for small groups, Foss was able to delve deeper into avant-garde experimentation than he generally could in writing for larger ensembles. “Echoi,” for clarinet, cello, percussion and piano, draws on the kind of chance strategies that John Cage had made increasingly famous through the 1950s. Foss’s is a raucous piece in four sections, partly structured and partly open to swerves determined by the performers.String Quartet No. 3 (1975)“He went his own way,” Falletta said of Foss. That’s true, and he was no follower of trends, but he kept his ears open to new styles and he certainly heard the groundbreaking pieces that the young Steve Reich and Philip Glass were producing starting in the late 1960s. This quartet, its textures shifting throughout, is permeated with the intense, driving regularity of classic Minimalism, but married to the kind of spiky, even gritty dissonance that didn’t really interest Reich and Glass. (“Music for Six,” from a couple of years later, also explores Glassian repetition, sometimes in a gentler, more meditative mode.)‘Renaissance Concerto’ (1985)“When I was Lukas’s assistant at the Milwaukee Symphony, my first assignment was to go to Europe on tour with the orchestra,” Falletta said. “And he was always behind on writing deadlines, so he was working on this piece. He knew I played lute, so he asked me to bring him some music, and I brought him Noah Greenberg’s anthology of lute songs.”The flute was especially close to him; with the piano, it was the instrument he played best. “The third movement,” Falletta said, “is drawn from Monteverdi’s ‘Orfeo,’ with Orfeo lamenting the loss of Euridice: ‘Goodbye sun, goodbye sky, goodbye Earth.’ And then he tries to bring her back to life, and she’s following him before he turns around. And Lukas has a little offstage group of strings and the flute, following the orchestra a couple of beats behind, like a couple of steps behind. And then it disappears.” More

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    Joe Bussard, Obsessive Collector of Rare Records, Dies at 86

    His life revolved around his massive hoard of fragile 78 r.p.m. disks of jazz, blues, country and gospel music recorded between the 1920s and ’50s.Joe Bussard, who made it his life’s obsession to collect rare 78 r.p.m. records — some 15,000 of them, encompassing jazz, blues, country, jug band and gospel — and who spread his love for the music on radio and among visitors who joined him to listen to the fragile disks in his basement, died on Monday at his home in Frederick, Md., one floor above his hoard. He was 86.His death, in hospice care, was confirmed by his daughter, Susannah Anderson. She said the cause was pancreatic cancer, which was diagnosed in 2019.“He basically lived the songs, breathed the songs and passed them on to as many people as he could,” John Tefteller, a rare-records dealer and auctioneer, said in a phone interview. “It was his life from morning to night. I consider him a national treasure.”And any fan of his treasures could come to his house and listen to his 78s.“Anybody who got ahold of him, he’d say, ‘Come on over,’” Ms. Anderson said.From his home near the Blue Ridge Mountains, Mr. Bussard (pronounced boo-SARD) drove the country roads of the South seeking 78s that had been languishing in people’s homes. He was selective about what he brought back to his basement. He loved jazz but detested any jazz recorded after the early 1930s. He loved country music but decreed that nothing good came after 1955. Nashville? He called it “Trashville.” Rock ’n’ roll? A cancer.“How can you listen to Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw when you’ve listened to Jelly Roll Morton?” he said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2001. “It’s like coming out of a mansion and living in a chicken coop.”One day, in the 1960s, Mr. Bussard was driving the streets of Tazwell, a small town in Virginia — the kind of place he often canvassed door to door, asking people if they had 78s — when he met an old man who said he had some 78s at the shotgun shack where he lived.From a dusty box under the man’s bed, Mr. Bussard found some good country records (Uncle Dave Macon, the Carter family) and then the sort of mind-blowing discoveries he craved: a 78 on the Black Patti label, which recorded jazz, blues and spirituals in the late 1920s.“‘Oh my Gahhd!’” he recalled thinking in the liner notes to his CD “Down in the Basement: Joe Bussard’s Treasure Trove of Vintage 78s” (2002). “It was all I could do to keep my hands from trembling.”“So I laid it down, you know, and said, ‘Oh, that’s nice,” he continued. “The old man says, ‘Oh, them, there’s a lot of them in there.’”There were 15 Black Patti records, and the old man, who didn’t care for them, asked for $10 for the bunch. Years later, Mr. Bussard said, he was offered $30,000 for one of them, “Original Stack O’Lee Blues” by Long Cleve Reed and Little Harvey Hull. He didn’t sell it.“When I leave this world,” he added, “I think I’m gonna have that record laying on top of me in my coffin.”Mr. Bussard with an early record by the country music star Jimmie Rodgers, a particular favorite.Ted Anthony/Associated PressMr. Bussard built his life around his records. After working in a supermarket and in his family’s farm supply business, he held no regular job after the late 1950s. He was supported by his wife, Esther (Keith) Bussard, a hairdresser, and his parents.“It’s like my mom and I were in one world, he was in another,” Susannah Anderson said in a phone interview. “It was hard. He was like an absent father, even though he was in the house.”In a profile of Mr. Bussard in Washington City Paper in 1999, his wife was quoted as saying that if she had not been a “born-again, spirit-filled Christian, who the day I married him made a commitment to God,” she “would have left long ago.”But, she added, she loved music as well (she blared bluegrass records in another part of the house while her husband blared his music from the basement), respected his collection and appreciated that he was “saving it for history.”Mr. Bussard found kinship in people like Ivy Sheppard, a disc jockey and 78 collector with whom he recorded radio programs for several stations including WAMU in Washington and WBCM in Bristol, Va., all built mostly around his rare records but also including some of hers. He recorded shows for a variety of stations over more than 40 years.Ms. Sheppard recalled that she and Mr. Bussard often talked for hours on the phone while listening to records. She described visiting his basement as “the greatest experience in the world.”She added, “I’m lost in this world without that crazy old man. He was my best friend.”Joseph Edward Bussard Jr. was born in Frederick on July 11, 1936. His father ran a farm supply business, and his mother, Viola (Culler) Bussard, was a homemaker.When he was 7 or 8, Joe began stocking up on records by Gene Autry, the star of western movies who was known as “the Singing Cowboy”; within a few years he heard the country singer Jimmie Rodgers and was smitten. When he couldn’t find any of Rodgers’s records at a local store, he began hunting for them, knocking on local doors until a woman gave him a box that contained two of Rodgers’s 78s.As a teenager, he began hosting a local radio show from his parents’ basement. When he got his driver’s license, he expanded his search for the records he loved — the 78s made of hard, brittle shellac resin, the format that preceded vinyl — while canvassing in Virginia, West Virginia and North Carolina.It became an obsession, one that delighted him and made him dance and play air sax, air guitar and air banjo in his basement. (He also played the guitar and mandolin.)He made one last trip a month ago, to a flea market in Emmittsburg, Md., in search of 78s, but didn’t find any.“He had a lot of record hunting left in him,” Ms. Anderson said, adding that there were no plans, for now, to move the collection.Mr. Bussard in his basement in 1965. He not only collected 78s; he also built a studio there to make his own.Collection of Marshall WyattMr. Bussard not only collected 78s; he also built a basement studio in his parents’ house in the 1950s to make his own. Under his Fonotone label, he recorded artists like the Possum Holler Boys, a country and rockabilly band, and the Tennessee Mess Arounders, a blues group (he was a member of both), as well as the influential fingerstyle guitarist John Fahey. (He later moved his collection and his studio to the house he shared with his wife and daughter.)A five-CD collection containing 131 of Mr. Bussard’s 78s, “Fonotone Records: Frederick Maryland (1956-1969),” was released in 2005 by Dust-to-Digital and nominated for a Grammy Award for best boxed or special limited-edition package.In 2003, Mr. Bussard was the subject of a documentary, “Desperate Man Blues: Discovering the Roots of American Music,” directed by Edward Gillan.In addition to Ms. Anderson, he is survived by three granddaughters. His wife died in 1999.Once, in a little coal town in southwest Virginia, Mr. Bussard asked a gas station attendant where he could find records and was told to go to a nearby hardware store. When he got there, the owner guided him to a cache of 5,000 records, which had never been played.“The first one I pulled out was ‘Sobbin’ Blues,’ by King Oliver on Okeh, absolutely new, at least a $400 record,” he excitedly recalled in the Washington City Paper interview, referring to a record label founded in 1918. “The next one I pulled out was ‘Jackass Blues’ on Vocalion by the Dixie Syncopators.” He picked out four stacks of 78s and paid $100.“I was so high when I went out of that store,” he said, “I could have floated.” More

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    Sue Mingus, Promoter of Her Husband’s Musical Legacy, Dies at 92

    Charles Mingus was among the greatest bassists in jazz. She worked tirelessly to ensure that he was known as a great composer as well.Sue Mingus, the wife of the jazz bassist, composer and bandleader Charles Mingus, whose impassioned promotion of his work after his death in 1979 helped secure his legacy as one of the 20th century’s greatest musical minds, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 92.Her son, Roberto Ungaro, confirmed her death, at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.Though Charles Mingus’s reputation as a brilliant if volatile performer was secure by the time he died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, at 56, Sue Mingus made sure he was also elevated to the pantheon of great jazz composers, alongside the likes of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk.She organized three bands, each with different strengths, to wrestle with the more than 300 compositions he left behind, including his posthumously discovered masterpiece, the two-hour orchestral work “Epitaph.” He had despaired of seeing it performed in his lifetime, hence its title, but Ms. Mingus managed to bring the piece to the stage in a landmark performance at Lincoln Center in 1989.Mingus had exacting ideas about how each note from each member of his band should sound. But his wife saw that he had left his compositions supple and wide open to interpretation, allowing generations of musicians to return to them again and again. What resulted was a fresh, alluring texture rarely found in legacy bands playing the music of Ellington, Glenn Miller and others.“None of those leaders posthumously had the advantage of a Sue Mingus,” the jazz critic and journalist Nat Hentoff, a close friend of the Minguses, told The Boston Globe in 2004. “She’s got players who really dig into that music and remember that Mingus used to say, ‘You can’t play your own licks. I want you to play the music, but be yourself.’”Ms. Mingus with her husband’s basses in the late 1980s.Mingus ArchiveCharles and Sue made an unlikely couple: He was a temperamental Black bohemian raised in the Watts section of Los Angeles; she was a white Midwestern former debutante. And yet they clicked almost immediately after a chance encounter in 1964 at the Five Spot, a club in Lower Manhattan.He was playing his regular gig; she was there to soak in the city’s jazz scene, having recently appeared in “OK End Here,” a short film by the photographer Robert Frank with a score by the saxophonist Ornette Coleman.“My life had been one of order and balance, founded on grammar and taste and impeccable manners,” Ms. Mingus wrote in “Tonight at Noon: A Love Story” (2002), her memoir of their relationship. “And yet something about the man across the room seemed oddly familiar, like someone I already knew.”By the end of the 1960s they were more than lovers: She was his manager, his agent, his confidante and emotional support system. She booked his shows, arranged grants and teaching positions, and helped keep him levelheaded and relatively clean of the prescription drugs and alcohol that had disrupted his earlier career.And when, in the mid-1970s, he received his A.L.S. diagnosis, she hunted down experimental surgeries. They were in Mexico for one such treatment when he died; following his wishes, she spread his ashes in the Ganges River in India.It was after his death that Ms. Mingus showed the true strength of her commitment. She arranged for a two-day festival of Mingus’s music at Carnegie Hall, and soon afterward oversaw the creation of Mingus Dynasty, a seven-piece band that played both old Mingus standards and pieces he never brought to life, often arranged by Mingus’s longtime collaborator Sy Johnson, who died in July.The Minguses at their home in the Manhattan Plaza complex in Midtown Manhattan in 1978.Sy Johnson/Mingus ArchivesMs. Mingus had her husband’s compositions cataloged and donated to the Library of Congress, one of the largest gifts ever of a Black musician’s work. When one of the catalogers found the 200-page, 15-pound score for “Epitaph,” she wrangled 31 musicians to perform it, under the direction of the composer and conductor Gunther Schuller.That concert, a decade after Mingus died, revived interest in his music and led to the creation of two more repertory bands.In any given week in New York, a jazz fan might head to the Fez, a basement club on Lafayette Street, to hear the Mingus Big Band, then shuffle over to the City Hall Restaurant in TriBeCa to catch the Mingus Orchestra, which put more focus on composition and featured exotic instruments like bassoon and French horn. In between, one could pick up any number of recordings released under her record labels, Revenge and Sue Mingus Music.Revenge, which released music previously available only on bootleg recordings, demonstrated just how dedicated Ms. Mingus was to her husband’s legacy.By the late 1980s she had grown exasperated with the high volume of bootleg recordings of Mingus concerts. She got in the habit of taking as many as she could from record stores, not bothering to hide her antipiracy vigilantism and daring clerks to stop her.On a trip to Paris in 1991, one clerk did. She was whisked off to see the manager, who berated her before picking up the phone to call the police.“I told him to go right ahead,” she wrote in the liner notes to “Charles Mingus: Revenge,” a 1996 concert album. “I also suggested he call the daily newspapers as well as the television crews for the evening news and also the principal French jazz magazines whose offices happen to be across the street, so that I could explain everything to everyone at once.”The manager put down the phone and let her leave, with the records in hand.Sue Graham was born on April 2, 1930, in Chicago and raised in Milwaukee. Her family was musical: Her father, Louis Graham, was a businessman and amateur opera singer, and her mother, Estelle (Stone) Graham, was a homemaker and harpist.After graduating from Smith College with a degree in history in 1952, she moved to Paris, where she worked as an editor at The International Herald Tribune.A later job editing for an airline magazine called Clipper took her to Rome, where she met and married the artist Alberto Ungaro. They had two children, Roberto and Susanna, and moved to New York City in 1958. She worked for New York Free Press, an alternative weekly, and in 1969 founded Changes, a cultural magazine.She later separated from Mr. Ungaro, who died in 1968. Along with her children, Ms. Mingus is survived by four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.For all her decades of effort, Ms. Mingus remained unwilling to take full credit for burnishing her husband’s legacy.“It keeps itself alive,” she told The Boston Globe in 2002. “I just happen to be a passenger.” More

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    The Syncopated Sounds of Old San Juan Hill at the New Geffen Hall

    Etienne Charles’s composition for the reopening of the hall honors the Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center.Before there was Lincoln Center, there was San Juan Hill — a diverse neighborhood located in the West 60s in Manhattan. The “hill” refers to a peak at 62nd Street and Amsterdam.To some, the neighborhood’s reputation was synonymous with racial conflict. In a Page 1 article, in 1905, The New York Times reported that, on a weekly basis, the “police of the West Sixty-eighth Street Station expect at least one small riot on the Hill or in The Gut,” a stretch of the neighborhood on West End Avenue, involving the area’s Black and white rival gangs.But beyond the notoriety of the police blotter, a different American cultural story was taking shape on San Juan Hill. Around 1913, James P. Johnson could be found playing piano at the Jungles Casino, on West 62nd Street; the dances he witnessed there, which he described as “wild and comical,” would inspire “The Charleston,” his syncopated Roaring Twenties-defining hit, a decade later.During a recent interview at Lincoln Center, the jazz trumpeter and composer Etienne Charles noted that the musical legacy of San Juan Hill was particularly rich throughout the first half of the 20th century.“Thelonious Monk is from here,” Charles, 39, said. “And Benny Carter — to me Benny Carter is one of the most influential arrangers because he’s one of the first people to do a five-saxophone soli in big band, right? And he’s a great bandleader, a great improviser.”The musical aspect of the San Juan Hill story long predates the era in which the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance, led by Robert Moses, razed the neighborhood to make way for the sprawling Lincoln Center arts complex. (Using eminent domain, Moses’ “urban renewal” project displaced more than 7,000 economically vulnerable families, nearly all of them Black and Hispanic.)It was the lack of a broader appreciation for this history, Charles said, that made him excited to propose a work about San Juan Hill when Lincoln Center approached him in 2020 for a piece to celebrate the reopening of David Geffen Hall. Turns out, the organization had been thinking along similar lines.“It had already been in conversation, here,” Shanta Thake, Lincoln Center’s chief artistic officer, said; the organization was “starting to really think about: What was our history? How do we talk about our history?”They agreed that Charles would compose a piece evoking the old neighborhood — and that it would use the New York Philharmonic, Lincoln Center’s first-ever commission for a full orchestra. “San Juan Hill,” a 75-minute multimedia work, will have its premiere on Oct. 8, when Charles and his group, Creole Soul, join the New York Philharmonic for two performances.“We want to celebrate it and make sure as many people as possible see this as their first piece in the hall,” Thake said. (Tickets for the performances, which will be at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m., were made available on a choose-what-you-pay basis; a limited number of free tickets will be distributed that morning at 10 a.m. at Geffen Hall’s Welcome Center.)The Reopening of David Geffen HallThe New York Philharmonic’s notoriously jinxed auditorium at Lincoln Center has undergone a $550 million renovation.Reborn, Again: The renovation of the star-crossed hall aims to break its acoustic curse — and add a dash of glamour.‘Unfinished Business’: After a 17-year run in Los Angeles, Deborah Borda returned to the New York Philharmonic, which she led in the 1990s, to help usher it into its new home.San Juan Hill: Etienne Charles’s composition for the reopening of the hall honors the Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center.Timeline: From a troubled opening in 1962 to a full gutting in 1976 to the latest renovations, here is a brief timeline of the long road to the new hall.Thake said Charles’s new work “speaks volumes about what the future can look like” at Lincoln Center, adding that she couldn’t “imagine that it just won’t get deeper with time and that you’ll see more like this.”Charles at the piano. His score for the Philharmonic has a wealth of American musical textures, from vintage stride piano to modern hip-hop.Josefina Santos for The New York TimesAt the Kaplan Penthouse in Lincoln Center’s Rose Building, Charles was seated next to a piano and his score for “San Juan Hill” as he rattled off a roll-call list of all-stars with roots in the neighborhood, including, for a time, the writer Zora Neale Hurston. And he recalled learning about the neighborhood’s cultural legacy shortly after arriving, in 2006, to pursue a master’s degree in jazz studies at Juilliard.During preparations for a concert of Herbie Nichols’s music, the pianist and educator Frank Kimbrough gave Charles his first lesson on the topic — and pointed out a connection to Charles’s background. “He was like, ‘You’re from Trinidad?’” Charles said. “‘Well, Herbie’s parents were from Trinidad, and he was born right there.’ And he pointed to San Juan Hill.”It didn’t take long for that dual message — of local import, and of a broader tie to the West Indies — to be reinforced. When the pianist Monty Alexander stopped by the apartment Charles was sharing with another student, Aaron Diehl, he schooled Charles on a fresh way to hear the music of Monk. “Listen to Monk’s music and you hear that Caribbean bounce,” Alexander told Charles.On the Kaplan Penthouse’s piano, Charles played an appropriately bumptious figure from Monk’s “Bye-Ya” as punctuation for that anecdote. “It’s almost like dancehall,” he said.For Charles, one challenge of “San Juan Hill” was its scope. His first thought was: “I’ve never composed for orchestra,” he said. But thanks to his training at Juilliard, he had studied orchestration and completed some arrangements for orchestra. “So yeah,” he said to himself. “Let’s go.”

    Kaiso by Etienne CharlesWhile reflecting on the music that filtered into and out of San Juan Hill, Charles also went on fact-finding missions — looking through archives and speaking with people who lived in the neighborhood before 1959, including a former leader of one of its many gangs. (Charles said he couldn’t specify which leader or which gang.)Thake said such efforts were emblematic of how “deeply researched and how curious” Charles is as a performer. “He has a deep investment in this place, coming from Juilliard, moving through Jazz at Lincoln Center,” she said, noting that he was one of the first musicians to play a free concert in the organization’s Atrium space.That civic impetus is familiar to Charles’s former Juilliard roommate Diehl — a pianist who has also memorably collaborated with the New York Philharmonic. In a phone interview, Diehl remembered fondly Charles’s way of schooling him on the connections between Caribbean traditions and American jazz.“Spending time with him really revealed an entire world of Afro-diasporic music that I hadn’t even encountered,” Diehl said. “He will be very quick to tell you if you’re not playing one of those grooves correctly.”For the Oct. 8 performances, “San Juan Hill” will open with a mini-set by Creole Soul. While the group plays, images of the neighborhood, past and present, will be projected inside Geffen Hall. But the bulk of the piece involves the Philharmonic players and their music director, Jaap van Zweden, in dialogue with Creole Soul. Then, the images will be projected only between movements. (The multimedia aspects involve film elements directed by Maya Cozier, graffiti by the visual artist Gary Fritz (known as Wicked GF), and 3-D imagery by Bayeté Ross Smith.)The movements with the Philharmonic — there are five, representing about 55 minutes of the 75-minute performance — feature a wealth of American musical textures, from vintage stride piano to modern hip-hop.Charles: “I also wanted to channel the sounds of the immigrants. I’m from Trinidad; there was a significant number of English-speaking Caribbean people in this neighborhood — so I had to channel Calypso.”Josefina Santos for The New York Times“A lot of it is heavily influenced by what James P. Johnson was doing, what Fats Waller was doing,” Charles said. “And then I also wanted to channel the sounds of the immigrants. I’m from Trinidad; there was a significant number of English-speaking Caribbean people in this neighborhood — so I had to channel Calypso.”The historical record is also fodder for Charles’s musical imagination. The first movement with the orchestra, titled “Riot 1905,” refers to one of those infamous street altercations in San Juan Hill. That front-page story in The Times, from July 1905, had to do with a race riot that broke out when a Black man stepped in to assist a local ragman who needed help making his way through the neighborhood.But toward the end of “Riot 1905,” a rhythmic indication in the score name-checks the work of the hip-hop producer J Dilla, who died in 2006. It’s a playful fillip — and perhaps anachronistic, at first glance. But for Charles, it’s a way to draw a parallel between eras, since “people are still dealing with senseless acts of violence.”A movement for his group and the orchestra, “Negro Enchantress,” paints a portrait of Hannah Elias — at one point a courtesan and, later in life, a landlord and property owner and one of the richest Black women in New York City.Around the turn of the 20th century, Elias received hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts from a lover, John R. Platt, a white man. “I don’t know if you want to call it like an 1895 version of ‘The Tinder Swindler,’” Charles said. “But he sued her. And they put it all in the papers. She had a mansion on Central Park West. Seven-bedroom mansion! And this whole mob showed up outside her house. She won the lawsuit; he lost the lawsuit. She bought property all over New York.”The music of this movement begins softly and seductively, before taking on a suspenseful tinge. “It gets really out,” Charles said. “It’s like Jekyll and Hyde. You thought this person was one thing — but it’s also really that you’ve been convinced by your family that you shouldn’t be giving this person money.”The third and fourth movements — “Charleston at the Jungles” and “Urban Removal” — address the sharply divergent legacies of the pianist James P. Johnson and Robert Moses. But Charles didn’t want to end the piece on a downer, so the final movement for the orchestra, “House Rent Party,” is a delirious fusion of ragtime, Afro-Venezuelan waltzes and turntablism.“What is it like being a DJ in a party with people from everywhere?” Charles asked, rhetorically, after I pointed to the profusion of styles in this portion of the score. “You’ve got to give them a little taste.” More

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    Lizzo Plays New Notes on James Madison’s Crystal Flute from 1813

    A classically trained flutist, the singer, rapper and songwriter spent more than three hours admiring the flute collection at the Library of Congress. Madison’s instrument was made for the second inauguration by a Parisian craftsman.Lizzo looked uncharacteristically nervous as she crossed the stage in a glittering mesh leotard with tights and sequined combat boots.A classically trained flutist who began playing when she was in fifth grade and considered studying at the Paris Conservatory, she has woven flute into many of her songs, has played virtually with the New York Philharmonic, and her flute, named Sasha Flute, even has its own Instagram page.But waiting for her on Tuesday night was an exquisite (and highly breakable) musical instrument that had arrived at her concert in Washington under heavy security: a crystal flute that a French craftsman and clockmaker had made for President James Madison in 1813.“I’m scared,” Lizzo said, as she took the sparkling instrument from Carol Lynn Ward-Bamford, a curator at the Library of Congress, who had carefully removed the flute from its customized protective case. “It’s crystal. It’s like playing out of a wine glass.”As the crowd roared, Lizzo played a note, stuck out her tongue in amazement, and then played another note, trilling it as she twerked in front of thousands of cheering fans. She then carried the flute over her head, giving the crowd at Capital One Arena one last look, before handing it back to Ms. Ward-Bamford.“I just twerked and played James Madison’s crystal flute from the 1800s,” Lizzo proclaimed. “We just made history tonight.”It was a symbolic moment as Lizzo, a hugely popular Black singer, rapper and songwriter, played a priceless instrument that had once belonged to a founder whose Virginia plantation was built by enslaved Black workers. And the flute had been lent to her by Carla D. Hayden, the first African American and first woman to lead the Library of Congress.The moment came together after Dr. Hayden asked Lizzo on Friday to visit the library’s flute collection, the largest in the world, with about 1,700 of the instruments.Dr. Hayden wrote on Twitter: “@lizzo we would love for you to come see it and even play a couple when you are in DC next week. Like your song they are ‘Good as hell.’”Lizzo responded without much hesitation.“IM COMING CARLA! AND IM PLAYIN THAT CRYSTAL FLUTE!!!!!” she wrote.Lizzo arrived on Monday, with her mother and members of her band. Dr. Hayden and staff members ushered her into the “flute vault,” and gave her a tour of the collection, which includes fifes, piccolos and a flute shaped like a walking stick, which Lizzo said she might want as a Christmas present.Lizzo spent more than three hours at the library, trying out several instruments, staff members said.She played a piccolo from John Philip Sousa’s band that was used to play the solo at the premiere of his song, “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” And she played a plexiglass flute, made in 1937, filling the ornate Main Reading Room and marble Great Hall with music, to the delight of library workers and a handful of researchers who happened to be there.“Just the enthusiasm that Lizzo brought to seeing the flute collection and how curious she was about it,” Ms. Ward-Bamford said in an interview on Wednesday. “It’s been wonderful.”Most of the collection — including Madison’s crystal flute — was donated in 1941 by Dayton C. Miller, a physicist, astronomer and ardent collector of flutes.The flute’s silver joint is engraved with Madison’s name, title and the year 1813.Library of CongressMadison’s flute had been made for his second inauguration by Claude Laurent, a Parisian craftsman who believed that glass flutes would hold their pitch and tone better than flutes made of wood or ivory, which were common at the time.The flute’s silver joint is engraved with Madison’s name, title and the year 1813. “It’s not clear if Madison did much with the flute other than admire it, but it became a family heirloom and an artifact of the era,” the library said.The library believes that the first lady, Dolley Madison, might have rescued the flute from the White House in 1814, when the British entered Washington during the War of 1812, although it has not found documentation to confirm the theory.Only 185 of Mr. Laurent’s glass flutes remain, the library said, and his crystal flutes are especially rare. The Library of Congress has 17 Laurent flutes, it said.When Lizzo asked if she could play Madison’s crystal flute at her concert on Tuesday, the library’s collection, preservation and security teams swung into action, ensuring the instrument could be safely delivered to her onstage.“It was a lot thrilling and a little bit scary,” Ms. Ward-Bamford said.Or as Lizzo told her cheering fans after she played the instrument: “Thank you to the Library of Congress for preserving our history and making history freaking cool. History is freaking cool, you guys.” More