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      The Composer Who Turns Hayao Miyazaki’s Humane Touch Into Music

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      Joe Hisaishi’s scores have helped make Studio Ghibli films indelible. But in concert, the works stand on their own. That’s because “it’s about emotion,” he says.Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone, Steven Spielberg and John Williams: Some of the greatest filmmakers have cultivated enduring, mutually enriching relationships with musicians. The decades-long partnership between the Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki and the composer, pianist and conductor Joe Hisaishi certainly belongs in this hall of fame.Hisaishi first worked with Miyazaki on the eco-minded science-fiction feature “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind,” released in 1984. He has scored every Miyazaki feature since then, composing wonderfully evocative soundtracks for such favorites as the family fable “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988); the tale of young-girl independence “Kiki’s Delivery Service” (1989); the period epic “Princess Mononoke” (1997); and the Academy Award-winning “Spirited Away” (2002), a gem about a headstrong little girl that was the runner-up on The New York Times’s list of the 25 best films of the 21st century so far.This week, longtime fans and newcomers alike will be able to hear excerpts from those scores and more, when Hisaishi, 71, leads the American Symphony Orchestra in “Music From the Studio Ghibli Films of Hayao Miyazaki,” a series of concerts at Radio City Music Hall starting Saturday. (The performers will also include the MasterVoices choir and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, as well as the singers Amanda Achen and Mai Fujisawa, who is Hisaishi’s daughter.)While excerpts from the movies will be projected on a giant screen, Hisaishi’s concerts stand on their own and are not meant to be simply compilations of classic scenes backed by a live ensemble.“Watching a film is a whole different thing from hearing the music in concert, which gives the audience a different experience,” the composer said through an interpreter in a recent video conversation.Though Hisaishi’s concerts include clips from films like “My Neighbor Totoro,” they go well beyond compilations of classic scenes.Laurent Koffel/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty ImagesIndeed, Hisaishi built the set list as if he were putting together a single large composition, citing Mahler symphonies as a source of inspiration. “For example, the first movement is ‘Nausicaa,’ the second movement is ‘Kiki,’ the third is ‘Princess Mononoke,’ and so on,” he said.Hisaishi (who was born Mamoru Fujisawa but goes by a stage name) is also known to make slight tweaks for concerts. “The images are screened so that you relive the emotions you had watching the film,” Marco Bellano, who teaches the history of animation at the University of Padua, Italy, said in a video chat. “But at the same time when Hisaishi plays these compositions in concert, they are not exactly in the same shape, the same arrangements they have in the films. There is a piece from ‘Porco Rosso’ called ‘Madness’ that is identical in the soundtrack and one of the concert versions, but many other pieces are completely different. It’s really remarkable how he really cares about offering a new experience.”Rest assured that the changes are not drastic and that the concerts preserve the Hisaishi touch. Taken out of “My Neighbor Totoro,” “The Path of the Wind” (which brings to mind another great Japanese musician, Ryuichi Sakamoto) retains its tender melancholy, while “Bygone Days,” from “Porco Rosso” (1992), is still just as wistful live, halfway between jazz and French chanson.For James Williams, the managing director of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London, Hisaishi’s contributions are a perfect match for Miyazaki’s universe. “When you see those films, there’s a certain humanity about the story lines, and that’s absolutely reflected in Joe’s music,” said Williams, whose orchestra recently recorded an album of Hisaishi’s compositions. “It connects with people, regardless of their culture, and that’s really powerful. What Joe has done is somehow retain that integrity of Japanese culture, brought in that Western tonal system and found a way for the two to retain their identities in perfect harmony.”A distinctive appeal of Miyazaki’s films is that they trust viewers, no matter how young, to figure things out on their own. Partly, this means not using music to reinforce character traits or telegraph expected responses from a viewer. Fortunately, this suits Hisaishi. “The music does not need to match every character,” he said. “Rather, it’s about emotion, something the character might be feeling. And at the very deepest of a movie, the music doesn’t need to tell anything related to the character or even the feelings,” he continued. “There’s already something that the audience might be feeling just watching the film.”“Castle in the Sky,” released in Japan in 1986, neatly illustrates the way the Miyazaki-Hisaishi approach — which also involves knowing when not to score a scene — is different from that commonly found in American animation. In 1999, Hisaishi not only reworked his existing score for that film’s American release, by Disney, but he vastly expanded it, adding music in scenes that previously did not have any.For the American release of “Castle in the Sky,” Hisaishi reworked and expanded the score used in the Japanese version.Studio GhibliHisaishi also refrains from recycling catchy musical phrases over and over within the same movie. “From ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ on, you find more this idea of leitmotif, but it’s different from the Hollywood style, where the leitmotif appears very clearly and is very easy to remember,” Bellano said. “With Miyazaki and Hisaishi, that melody appears when it’s needed and is not repeated many times.”Hisaishi does write stand-alone pieces, including symphonies, and has worked with other feature-film directors — most famously Takeshi Kitano, for whom he scored such 1990s high-water marks as “Sonatine,” “Fireworks” and “Kids Return.”“I started my career as a minimal composer,” Hisaishi said, “and I use more my melodic side in Miyazaki movies and my minimalist side in Kitano movies — they are closer to what originally drew me to music, style-wise.”Still, it is his work with Miyazaki that has placed him solidly on the international music map.Over the decades, the two men developed an intricate working method involving a lot of back and forth. Early in the production process, Miyazaki would give Hisaishi an idea of the story, some sketches, sometimes just a few words. Based on those meager elements, the musician would come up with a so-called image album (which would receive a commercial release down the line). “For ‘Princess Mononoke,’ an early word Miyazaki-san mentioned was tension, as in an arrow’s tension,” Hisaishi said, using the Japanese honorific. He added that this inspired him to write a piece that “eventually became the title theme.” Once the film was ready, Hisaishi would write the score, which could also be released in a symphonic suite version.The composer has not slowed down. In fact, being home during the pandemic further spurred his creativity — and led to an epiphany of sorts that Hisaishi evoked in terms that felt Miyazakian.“It took me seven years to write my first symphony, but in 2020 and 2021, I finished two,” he said, referring to “Dream Songs” and “Songs of Hope.” That experience “made me realize I have a mission as a composer. People watch this changing world and are so disappointed: Where is happiness? What is going on? Look at what’s going on in Ukraine,” he continued. “This is not something we expected to happen again in the 21st century. As a composer, I need to see the world as it is, but I also can’t be disappointed: We do need hope for the future.” More

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      in Theater

      ‘Shy’ Excerpt: Mary Rodgers on Creating ’Once Upon a Mattress’

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      In this excerpt from “Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers,” a Broadway musical is born at a summer camp.A hundred-mile drive from New York City, on the fringe of the Pocono Mountains, Tamiment was for much of the last midcentury a resort for singles and a summer intensive for emerging theatrical talent. During the first half of each season, writers assembled an original musical revue every week; in the second half, if they were interested in cranking out a show with a story — and if Moe Hack, the barky, crusty, cigar-smoking sweetheart who ran the place, thought it was a good idea — they would be free to try.Among those who tried in the summer of 1958 was Mary Rodgers, a young composer whose father’s reputation preceded her; he was, after all, Richard Rodgers. Also at Tamiment was the lyricist and book writer Marshall Barer, her mentor and tormentor. Together, with assists from Dean Fuller and Jay Thompson, they would write the musical “Once Upon a Mattress,” a perennial favorite that grew from a summertime opportunity into an Off Broadway and Broadway success starring Carol Burnett. “Mattress” was also an unintentional self-portrait of a displaced young princess trying to find happiness on her own terms.“Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers,” written by Rodgers (1931-2014) and Jesse Green, the chief theater critic of The New York Times, is the just-published story of that princess. Over the course of two marriages, three careers and six children, sometimes stymied by self-doubt, the pervasive sexism of the period and her overbearingly critical parents (not just Richard but the icy perfectionist Dorothy), she somehow triumphed. But in this excerpt about the birth of her first (and only) musical hit — there would be substantial successes in other fields too — she recalls how triumphs can sometimes depend on little more than scrappiness, high spirits and a castoff from Stephen Sondheim.In New York City, Carol Burnett won the role of the Princess, whose sleep is disrupted by the incessant shrilling of the Nightingale of Samarkand, in “Once Upon a Mattress.”Friedman-Abeles/The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsMARSHALL FOUND ME a nice four-bedroom cottage for very little money, right down the hill from Tamiment’s main buildings and near a rushing river. He even saw to it that an upright piano was waiting in the living room. And Steve, now flush from “West Side Story,” sold me his old car for a dollar. Off we went like the Joads in early June: 27-year-old me; the kids, ages 5, 4, and 2; and the Peruvian nanny — all of us scratching westward thanks to Steve’s itchy fake-fur upholstery.My von Trapp-like cheerfulness in the face of uncertainty soon crashed, though. The whole first half of the season was, for me, demoralizing. Everybody was more experienced than I. Everybody was, I felt sure, more talented. Everybody was certainly more at ease. At the Wednesday afternoon meetings to plan material for the coming week, when Moe would fire questions at us — “Who’s got an opening number?” — the guys would leap up to be recognized like know-it-alls in math class. If they were little red hens, I was the chicken, silently clucking Not I. “Who’s got a comedy song?” More leaping; more ideas. “Who’s got a sketch?” Woody Allen always did.At 22, Woody looked about 12 but was already the inventive weirdo he would become famous as a decade later. His wife, Harlene, who made extra money typing scripts for the office, was even nerdier, but only inadvertently funny. She looked, and sounded, a bit like Olive Oyl, with reddish hair, freckles, and a bad case of adenoids. Woody, whenever he wasn’t working on his sketches — his best that summer was about a man-eating cake — was either sitting on a wooden chair on the porch outside the barracks, practicing his clarinet, or inside with her, practicing sex, possibly from a manual. He was doing better, it seemed, with the clarinet.I would spend eight hours a day plinking out tunes to accompany Marshall’s lyrics. These were revue songs, with titles like “Waiting to Waltz With You,” “Miss Nobody,” and “Hire a Guy You Can Blame,” fitted to the talents of particular performers with no aim of serving a larger story. “Miss Nobody,” for instance, with its super-high tessitura, was written for a thin little girl named Elizabeth Lands, who couldn’t walk across the stage without falling on her face but was a knockout and had an incredible four-octave range like Yma Sumac.Burnett, left, and Rodgers moving a mattress into the Alvin Theater (now the Neil Simon Theater) on Broadway in November 1959. The show had premiered earlier that year at an Off Broadway theater, the Phoenix, in the East Village.Bettmann/Getty ImagesMusic did not pour out of my fingers; the process was more like wringing a slightly damp washcloth. With Marshall’s lyric propped up on the piano desk, precisely divided into bar lines as a road map, I would begin with some sort of accompaniment or vamp or series of consecutive chords, then sing a melody that matched the lyric and went with the accompaniment, then adjust the accompaniment to service the melody, which began to dictate the harmony, until I had a decent front strain that satisfied me and, more important, satisfied Marshall, who wouldn’t stop hanging over my shoulder until he liked what he’d heard. Then he’d leave me to clean it up and inch it forward while he took a long walk on the golf course to puzzle out the lyrics for the bridge. Back to me, back to the golf course, back and forth we went, until the song was finished.Even when I did that successfully, I had another problem. My abandoned Wellesley education had taught me the rudiments of formal manuscript making, but Daddy had ear-trained me, not eye-trained me. As a result, I kept naming my notes wrong, calling for fourths when I meant fifths, and vice versa. This made the orchestrations sound upside down. I could just imagine the guys saying, “Get a load of Dick Rodgers’s daughter, who can’t even make a lead sheet.”Actually, the orchestra men, kept like circus animals in a tent apart from the rest of us, were the merriest people at Tamiment. They weren’t competitive the way the writers were. They just sat there with a great big tub filled with ice and beer; you tossed your 25 cents in and had a good time. And I had the best time with them. Especially the trumpeter.Mary, left, with her parents, Dorothy and Richard; her sister, Linda, center; and Zoë d’Erlanger, right, who lived with the family for a time during World War II.via the Rodgers-Beaty-Guettel familyElsewhere at Tamiment, I felt patronized. It didn’t help that Marshall tried to dispel my parental paranoia by preemptively introducing me to one and all as “Mary Rodgers — you know, Dorothy’s daughter?” Between that and the chord symbols, it was enough to drive me to drink.Or pills, anyway.“What’s that you’re taking?” Marshall asked, when he saw me swallowing one.“Valium,” I told him.“Valium!” he screamed. “Why Valium?”“I asked the doctor for something to help me write.”“And he gave you Valium?” said Marshall. “Here. Try this.”He handed me a pretty little green-and-white-speckled spansule.Bingo! I wrote two songs in one day, and, whether because of the Dexamyl or the songs, felt happier than I’d ever been. It completely freed me up. Whatever inhibitions I had about playing in front of Marshall or feeling creative and being able to express it were suddenly gone.The story of me and pills — and, much more dramatically, Marshall and pills — can wait for later; what matters now is that Marshall had for a couple of years been nursing the notion of turning the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea” into a musical burlesque for his friend Nancy Walker. Nancy, a terrific comedian, liked the idea but was too big a star by then to be summer-slumming at Tamiment. Still, since Marshall was stuck with me anyway, he figured it was worth a try. Did I like the idea? he asked.As it happens, I did, very much, but it wouldn’t have mattered if I hated it. I did what I was told. At Tamiment, even Marshall did what he was told. Moe said we could write this “pea musical” on the condition that it would accommodate his nine principal players with big roles. Nine big roles? Moe had hired them at a premium, he said, and he wanted his money’s worth.The deal struck, Moe scheduled the show for Aug. 16 and 17. It was now late July.The program for the Tamiment Playhouse performance of “The Princess and the Pea,” as the musical was known that summer of 1958.Jesse Green/The New York TimesTo save time, we custom-cast the show on the cart-before-the-horse Moe Hack plan, before a word, or at least a note, was written. There was, for instance, a wonderful girl, Yvonne Othon, who was perfect for the lead, Princess Winifred: appealingly funny-looking, very funny-acting, and the right age — 20. But there was a significant drawback: She wasn’t one of Moe’s principal players. Meanwhile, Moe wanted to know what we were going to do for Evelyn Russell, who at 31 was deemed too ancient to be the Princess but was a principal player. OK, OK, we’d cast Evelyn as the Queen: an unpleasant, overbearing lady we just made up, who is overly fond of her son the Prince and never stops talking. We would give her many, many, many lines and maybe even her own song. And to seal the deal, even though the Princess was (along with the Pea) the title character, we would cut her one big number; we’d been planning to have her sing “Shy,” a revue song that hadn’t worked earlier in the summer. That was just as well because it was a tough, belty tune and Yvonne couldn’t sing a note. She was a dancer.Lenny Maxwell, a comedian and a schlub, would be Prince Dauntless, the sad sack who wants to get married but his mother won’t let him; since he had limited singing chops, we’d only write him the kind of dopey songs any doofus could sing. We created the part of the Wizard for a guy who, I had reason to know offstage, was spooky; he was practically doing wizard things to me in bed. Meanwhile, Milt Kamen, by virtue of his age (37) and credits (he’d worked with Sid Caesar), was considered by Moe, and by Milt, to be the most important of the principal players, but he too had a couple of drawbacks: He couldn’t sing on key and couldn’t memorize lines. He claimed, though, to be an excellent mime, so Marshall and Jay invented the mute King to function as counterpoint to the incessantly chatty Queen. Marshall brilliantly figured out a way to make his lyrics rhyme even though they were silent: They rhymed by implication.In this way, one role at a time, we wrote the show backward from our laundry list of constraints: a dance specialty for the good male dancer who played the Jester, a real ballad for the best singer, even a pantomime role for Marshall’s lover, Ian, who moved beautifully but, well, fill in the blank.Soon all personnel problems were solved except what to do with Elizabeth Lands. You remember, the gorgeous but klutzy Yma Sumac type? When Joe Layton, the choreographer, and Jack Sydow, the director, started teaching all the ladies of the court — who were meant to be pregnant, according to Marshall’s story — how to walk with their hands clasped under their boobs, tummies out, leaning almost diagonally backward, Liz kept tipping over. Pigeon-toed? Knock-kneed? We never discovered what exactly, but she was a moving violation. Thus was born the Nightingale of Samarkand, who was lowered in a cage during the bed scene while shrilling an insane modal tune to keep the Princess awake.Do not seek to know how the musical theater sausage is made. More

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      Mary Ellin Barrett, Daughter and Defender of Irving Berlin, Dies at 95

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      When the great American songwriter’s character came under attack after his death, Ms. Barrett sought to correct the record with a candid but tender memoir.The songwriter Irving Berlin defined a very American style of sunniness. “Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better)” delighted in competition. “Puttin’ On the Ritz” made social mobility silly. “White Christmas” exalted innocence. With “God Bless America,” Berlin, an immigrant from Russia, wrote the unofficial second national anthem of his adopted home.Yet by the time he died at 101 in 1989, after years of avoiding the spotlight and restricting the use of his music, many puzzled over an apparent gap between Berlin’s art and his character.“The man who wrote such wonderfully romantic songs as ‘Cheek to Cheek,’ ‘Always’ and ‘What’ll I Do?’ appears to have been an egotist and a boor,” the book critic Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times wrote in 1990 in a review of a biography. In a news article the same year, the paper reported that people in the theater and music businesses described Berlin as a “recluse” and “miser.”Then, in 1994, Mary Ellin Barrett, one of Berlin’s three daughters, disputed the criticisms of her father in an interview with The Times and announced a mission: “Presenting the father I knew to the world.” She said she was writing a book.“Irving Berlin: A Daughter’s Memoir” was published later that year. In it, Ms. Barrett offered a new portrait of her father: droll, self-effacing, with an unspoken perfectionism that would doom him to bitterness in old age but that for four decades of maturity pushed him to dazzling artistic achievements, along with attentiveness to his family.That has become a definitive insider’s view of Irving Berlin. The Times critic Stephen Holden credited Ms. Barrett with the ability to balance affection for her father with awareness of his flaws, and he called her book a “touching, wise, gracefully written memoir.”Ms. Barrett died on July 16 in Manhattan at 95, her daughter Katherine Swett said.Ms. Barrett’s account of family life helped reconcile Irving Berlin the artist and Irving Berlin the man.Ms. Barrett did not take the position of a biographer, giving a full account of Berlin’s life, or the position of a critic, translating to prose the power of his music and the sources of his creativity. (She instead called him an “inexplicable genius.”)But her account of family life helped reconcile Berlin the artist and Berlin the man.She recalled her father making head-spinning comparisons between their childhoods. Young Mary Ellin got a scar from falling off a swing; young Israel Beilin, as he was then known, got a scar in the berth of the ship he took to America when someone dropped a penknife on him, almost hitting his eye.In the East River, near Mary Ellin’s penthouse home, her father had once, at 8 years old, nearly drowned; when rescued, he was found still clutching the pennies he had earned that day selling newspapers.He often seemed a “shaky, uncertain man,” Ms. Barrett wrote — drumming his fingers, molding the inside of dinner rolls into compact balls, smoking too many cigarettes, chewing too much gum, jumping when the telephone rang, fiddling with his piano.Yet out came hit after hit after hit; between his 20s and his 60s, he wrote about 1,500 songs.Ms. Barrett came to see her father’s drive as the product of anxiety and toughness that lingered from a ghetto childhood. He was “the street fighter,” she wrote, “not noisy and brawling but quiet, dogged,” never shaking the sense that he acted “with his back against the wall, writing, composing, negotiating his way out of a corner.”Mary Ellin Berlin, who was born on Nov. 25, 1926, in Manhattan, grew up in a different universe. Her girlhood memories included dinner parties with the Astaires, the Goldwyns, the Capras and Somerset Maugham, who once lay on the floor, balanced a glass of water on his forehead and stood up without spilling a drop.Though she sometimes had to chase her father for attention and felt alienated by the fame of her parents — her mother, Ellin Mackay, was an heiress and a popular novelist — Mary Ellin felt less resentment than enchantment with her good fortune. When she relentlessly invited people to the family’s theater house seats for her father’s 1946 Broadway megahit, “Annie Get Your Gun,” one annoyed friend told her to knock it off.She graduated from Barnard College in 1949 with a degree in music and worked as an editorial trainee at Time magazine, where she met the author and journalist Marvin Barrett. They married in 1952; he died in 2006. Later in her career, Ms. Barrett worked at Glamour and Vogue magazines and wrote book reviews for Cosmopolitan. She published three novels in addition to the book about her father.Ms. Barrett, right, with her sisters Elizabeth Peters, left, and Linda Emmet at Town Hall in New York in 2016, attending a performance of the one-man show “Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin.”Eugene Gologursky/Getty ImagesMs. Barrett’s sister Elizabeth Peters died in 2017. In addition to her daughter Ms. Swett, Ms. Barrett is survived by another sister, Linda Emmet; two other daughters, Elizabeth Matson and Mary Ellin Lerner; a son, Irving Barrett; five grandsons; and a great-grandson.When Ms. Barrett was 2 years old, her infant brother, Irving Jr., died on Christmas Day. Although her father, who was Jewish, would later write one of the nation’s best-loved Christmas tunes (her mother was Irish Catholic), her parents came to “hate” the holiday, her mother told her when Ms. Barrett was an adult.As a girl, Mary Ellin did not know that she had ever had a brother. At the time, she considered Christmas “the single most beautiful and exciting day of the year,” she wrote. She saw a revealing parallel looking back at the celebrations of her youth.“The tree was trimmed behind closed doors and revealed to the children in full splendor, with all the presents beneath it, on Christmas morning,” she wrote. “So it was with a show.” More

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      Raja Kumari Brings West Coast Rap to India

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      After writing songs for Gwen Stefani and Iggy Azalea, she is now producing singles under her own label, Godmother Records.Name: Raja KumariAge: 36Hometown: Claremont, Calif.Now Lives: In a three-bedroom apartment in the Juhu section of Mumbai, India.Claim to Fame: Ms. Kumari is a songwriter, singer and rapper whose work straddles both Western and Indian music, in a reflection of her dual identities as a South-Asian American. She blends English and Hindi lyrics, and classical Indian riffs over rap beats. Last year, she performed her single, “N.R.I.” (it stands for nonresident Indian) at an Asian-American inaugural ball for President Biden. Sample lyric: “Dot head eating samosas. Too brown for the label. Too privileged for the co-sign.”Big Break: Ms. Kumari started dancing and singing at 6 and, by 10, was performing traditional Indian dance forms across India. She began writing and recording her own songs in her early 20s and eventually signed on with Pulse, a music producer and publisher in Los Angeles, where she wrote songs for Gwen Stefani, Fall Out Boy and Iggy Azalea. Her work with Ms. Azalea on “Bounce” (the video was shot in India) was a spark for Ms. Kumari to get back into the studio herself. “It woke me up,” she said. “I was, like, people want to add my voice, but they don’t want to have a South Asian woman do it? Why am I not taking that leap?”Latest Project: In May, Ms. Kumari released her latest single — “Made in India” — that remixed a ’90s Indian pop hit, featuring the iconic Bollywood actress Madhuri Dixit Nene. A 2020 single that Ms. Kumari’s worked on was featured in the new Disney+ series, “Ms. Marvel.”Raja Kumari’s single “Made in India”Godmother Records/Raja Kumari; Album Art Design by Kirti NarainNext Thing: After years of working with Western labels, Ms. Kumari has started Godmother Records, with “Made In India” being the first single produced under that label. “I owe it to myself to now stand on my own two feet,” she said. Her goal is also to use the label to discover and sign up-and-coming talent in India. “I have this dream of discovering a girl in India, and she wins a Grammy,” she said. “That would mean a lot.”Manifesting: Ms. Kumari, whose real name is Svetha Yellapragada Rao, created her stage name when she was 14 to project a fearless version of herself and to build a visual identity around female Hindu goddesses. “It’s the character I needed,” she said. “I thought about the concept in my room and made it a reality to the point that I was on a billboard in Times Square. I don’t know anything more powerful than that.” More

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      The Pedal Steel Gets Its Resurrection

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      As the sound of country music has shifted, the emotive whir of its classic instrument has often been sidelined. The complicated antique has found new life in surprising forms.When DaShawn Hickman was 4 years old, living just 32 steps from the tiny granite House of God church in Mount Airy, N.C., he picked up a lap steel his uncle had built for his mother. Stretching the electric guitar across his tiny knees for the first time, using a D-cell battery as his slide, he traced the hymns his mother sang.Hickman soon graduated to the pedal steel, the lap steel’s byzantine successor, with as many as 24 strings controlled not only with two hands but also with both feet and knees. A quick study, Hickman was 13 when he began leading services at House of God with his steel/strings, the centerpiece of a century-old style of Black gospel called Sacred Steel.“This instrument is a ministry, a tool to help someone overcome,” Hickman, now 40, said by phone from Mount Airy. “Where the human voice can’t fully reach, the pedal steel can.”In June, Hickman released “Drums, Roots & Steel.” More restrained than many of its Sacred Steel predecessors, his solo debut is a showcase for the instrument’s emotional breadth, equally capable of prayers for the wounded and paeans for the joyous.It is one of several recent recordings that suggest that the pedal steel — familiar mostly for the lachrymal textures it has long lent to country music — is finding renewal in unexpected places. As the sound of slick modern country shifts from this large and esoteric accessory, ambient and experimental musicians have tapped it for much the same reason as Hickman’s Sacred Steel lineage: its ability to harness and even rival the expressiveness of the voice itself.“Since its existence, you had to learn how to play one way to get a backing role in some country band,” said Robert Randolph, the son of a New Jersey House of God deacon and minister who came to prominence more than two decades ago when he dared to take his 13-string purple behemoth out of the church. He was soon opening for the Dave Matthews Band at Madison Square Garden. “So it’s an instrument that’s never been fully explored.”With his boisterous Family Band, Randolph expanded Sacred Steel’s reach by turbocharging its sound, strings screaming for three hours over soulful marches and Allman-sized jams. His sound and style have since mellowed, and he has collaborated with Carlos Santana and Ozzy Osbourne. “Guitar, trumpet, piano, keyboard — they’ve all had nine million babies,” he continued. “But the pedal steel is so new to so many people they don’t even know what it is. There are so many ways to evolve this instrument.”Robert Randolph helped expand pedal steel’s reach, collaborating with musicians including Carlos Santana and Ozzy Osbourne.Michael Nagle for The New York TimesThat evolution is accelerating: The modern steel icon Greg Leisz played on half of Daft Punk’s final album, while the funk band Vulfpeck recently commissioned the Los Angeles whiz Rich Hinman to interpret a Bach chorale. The Texan Will Van Horn went viral in 2016 for covering Aphex Twin with pedal steel, while Dave Harrington, half of the haute electronic duo Darkside, used it as his compositional tool for Alanis Morissette’s recent meditation album. A new fleet of stirring steel players has emerged, and an 11th volume of the long-running guitar compilation “Imaginational Anthem,” out Friday, offers a snapshot of the evocative instrument’s intrigue.“One reason it has taken so long to grow out of the genre it’s been pigeonholed in is because it’s so technically complex, and that complexity has kept a lot of people in the country world,” said Luke Schneider, the Nashville player who curated the new collection, by phone. He detailed how the knees push levers that bend strings, how the feet trigger pedals that stretch them, how the hands work in constant harmony. “It might be the most difficult instrument in the Western world to learn,” he concluded.Schneider, 42, once thought he might have to stay in the country world, too. A longtime devotee of ambient music who knew of other Nashville players flirting with experimental sounds, he instead backed the singer-songwriter Margo Price in her early country years and later joined the masked musician Orville Peck’s band. Nashville sounds, Nashville paychecks.But he then encountered Susan Alcorn, one of the instrument’s rare iconoclasts alongside the tinkerer Chas Smith and the famed producer Daniel Lanois. Her 2006 album, “And I Await the Resurrection of the Pedal Steel Guitar,” felt like a pioneer’s sketchbook of exotic places a young player might take the antique. Schneider followed her lead, trying to use the pedal steel’s stature to his advantage.“You’re literally playing this instrument with your whole body. You have to conjure your feelings, then connect them to your toes, your knees, your fingers, your eyes, and your ears,” Schneider said. “All of that combined can express the voice of a musician in a way few other instruments can.”Schneider recorded his solo debut, “Altar of Harmony,” which arrived early in 2020 lockdown, using only pedal steel, shaping sighing strings into hypnotic drones. “By its very nature, the sound the instrument produces is ethereal, so it’s calming for the player and listener,” he said. “That still comes through at the edges of modern music.”Likewise, before he began collaborating with Morissette during the pandemic, Harrington discovered a postmodern poignancy inside the pedal steel’s mechanics. For years, he’d played a solo guitar rendition of “Pure Imagination” from “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,” often as a soundcheck warm-up. When he added steel, he spotted the song’s bittersweet heart and cut it as an album finale.“You’re literally playing this instrument with your whole body,” Luke Schneider said. “You have to conjure your feelings, then connect them to your toes, your knees, your fingers, your eyes, and your ears.”Morgan Hornsby for The New York Times“It unlocked a little trap door into the feeling of one of my favorite songs of all time, like the camera had been turned 45 degrees,” Harrington, 36, said via video chat. “It’s a happy song that’s just so sad.”Despite the pedal steel’s manual demands, this rush of applications and ideas is a result, in many ways, of digital accessibility. The Danish guitarist Maggie Björklund, 57, stowed her pedal steel in a closet for two years when she first tried to learn around 2000 because its mechanics proved too difficult and she knew maybe three men in Denmark who played it. She ultimately flew to Nashville to study with Jeff Newman, a beloved instructor who informed her she’d been doing it all wrong.“I thought I knew a little bit about pedal steel, but he said, ‘You sound like a German hausfrau,’” she recalled by phone from north of Copenhagen, laughing. “He ripped all that away from me and gave me the basis I still play.”Just five years later, the New York guitarist Jonny Lam decided to pursue pedal steel as a way to differentiate himself in a city with a glut of guitarists. He stumbled upon The Steel Guitar Forum, where amateurs building instruments in garages argued with the likes of Buddy Emmons, who had revolutionized the instrument’s design, tuning and sound.Those cranky older denizens (“No one ever knows how to post a picture,” Lam, 42, joked) became his gateway, offering a low-stakes way for a Chinese American neophyte to learn the lessons of Nashville. He devoured classic instructional texts and records, but the forums (and, now especially, YouTube) remain founts of inspiration for Lam and younger players, reducing barriers to entry for an expensive and isolating instrument.“Twenty years ago, I didn’t know what a pedal steel was. There was this monoculture of white males,” Lam said. “But now people are doing quirky things with it online, and different kinds of people are being exposed. That representation matters.”Still, for both Björklund and Lam, pushing past the pedal steel’s conventional territory took time. Lam played pristine honky-tonk fare with his band Honeyfingers and supplied old-school textures for Norah Jones and Miranda Lambert. Björklund cut two elegant folk-rock albums as a steel-wielding songwriter, then played in Jack White’s backing band.Their tracks on “Imaginational Anthem XI,” however, feel like coming-out parties. During “Rainbows Across the Valley,” Lam’s high and low tones slowly curl around chattering birds. Björklund’s “Lysglimt” backs a sinister Spaghetti Western theme with unsettling noise and electronic throbs, like a storm cloud commandeering the horizon. Lam has composed a modern Chinese opera for the pedal steel, and Björklund is now finishing a series of solo pedal-steel abstractions. These are new starts for their old instrument.“Traditional pedal steel is beautiful, but the notes have already been played. It would be such a shame for it to be a dusty instrument in country music,” Björklund said, sighing. “It is much more interesting to explore the outer edges, where it comes into contact with the modern world.” More

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      Five Minutes That Will Make You Love Duke Ellington

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      We asked jazz musicians, writers and others to tell us what moves them. Listen to their choices.A few years ago, Zachary Woolfe, a New York Times critic and editor, posed a question: What are the five minutes or so that you would play for a friend to convince them to fall in love with classical music? How about Mozart? Or the violin? Or opera?Over the course of more than 25 entries, dozens of writers, musicians, critics, scholars and other music lovers attempted to answer, sharing their passions with readers and one another.Now, we’re shifting the focus to jazz — and what better place to start than with Duke Ellington? A nonpareil composer, pianist and bandleader, he arrived in New York from Washington, D.C., just as the Harlem Renaissance was getting underway; soon, the Duke Ellington Orchestra had become the soundtrack to an epoch. He grew to be a Black American icon on the national stage, and then an ambassador for the best of American culture around the world. Jazz’s status as a global music has a lot to do with Ellington: specifically, his skill as a leader, collaborator and spokesman, who rarely failed to remind his audience, “We love you madly.”Here are 13 tracks that we think will make you love Ellington. Enjoy the listening, and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Darcy James Argue, bandleaderAn underappreciated part of Ellington’s artistry is his mastery of misdirection. You think you know where the music’s going … then you blink and realize Duke’s taken you on a wild detour. This sleight-of-hand animates the A-side of “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” Ellington’s 1937 inverted arch-form masterpiece. It’s a blues; what could be more straightforward? But Ellington bobs and weaves, stretching out chords and turnarounds, twists the 12-bar form back on itself like an ouroboros, and careens through a dizzying set of modulations: five keys in under three minutes! But the journey isn’t just loud to soft — it’s discombobulation to clarity. The ’56 live version from Newport is legendary for the saxophonist Paul Gonsalves’s immortal 27-chorus “wailing interval,” but it’s “Diminuendo” that sets the stage.“Diminuendo in Blue”Duke Ellington (Columbia/Legacy)◆ ◆ ◆Ayana Contreras, criticMahalia Jackson’s resonant yet winged vocals float masterfully across the expressive string and horn arrangement of “Come Sunday,” Ellington’s ode to the singular day that Black workers historically, clad in Sunday best, could shed the sweat and grit of labor: emerging as glistening butterflies, gathered to praise the Lord. According to Irving Townsend’s 1958 liner notes for “Black, Brown and Beige,” the album it’s taken from, Jackson “hums an extra chorus as if she were aware of the power of her performance and wanted to let it linger a moment more.” Of course she knew. “Come Sunday” communicates with crystal clarity Ellington’s admiration for laborers and his elegant insistence on unconditional respect.“Part IV (with Mahalia Jackson) — a.k.a. Come Sunday”Duke Ellington, Mahalia Jackson (Columbia/Legacy)◆ ◆ ◆Giovanni Russonello, Times jazz criticHere’s Johnny Hodges, delivering four minutes of the most seraphic alto saxophone playing to be found on record, on this chestnut from Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s “Far East Suite.” That title is more or less a misnomer: Almost every piece in the suite has a Middle Eastern inspiration. And Strayhorn — Ellington’s composing and arranging partner of over 25 years — actually wrote “Isfahan” before their visit to that Iranian city in 1963. (Its original title was “Elf.”) This is one of Strayhorn’s classic cascading melodies, and the arrangement is Ellingtonian balladry at an apex, with its luxuriously dragged tempo and drumlike dabs of trombone harmony. As usual, it’s a featured band member that really makes the recording — this time, Hodges, cradling each note between his teeth, firm but not too tight, smearing and giving them all kinds of feeling without muddying or obscuring a thing. It’s a standard, but when’s the last time you heard a pianist cover this tune? That’s Hodges’s doing.“Isfahan”Duke Ellington (Legacy Recordings)◆ ◆ ◆Billy Childs, pianistI cannot listen to the first 50 seconds of the opening credits to “Anatomy of a Murder” without seeing shapes: Cubist shapes like a Picasso painting, with fragmented shards of sound from the different sections of the band, punctuated by the pointillistic drum pattern. From the opening “wah” of the cupped trombone, through the white-hot trumpet bursts, to the saxophone mini-cadenza, this piece grips me like a vise. The main body of the tune, a gutbucket blues passacaglia over which trumpet, clarinet, saxophone and piano solo, conjures in my mind a sublime sense of foreboding which perfectly sets up the mood for the entire movie.“Main Title and Anatomy of a Murder”Duke Ellington (Columbia/Legacy)◆ ◆ ◆Marcus J. Moore, jazz writerDuke Ellington always had this way of pulling strong emotions from the keys of his piano. On the 1962 version of “Solitude,” featuring the bassist Charles Mingus and the drummer Max Roach, Ellington properly evokes the feeling of isolation through sullen, spacious chords reflecting dark and light textures. Where the 1934 original elicited a certain optimism, this one, from the album “Money Jungle,” sounds gloomier — headphone music made for inclement weather. By the time Mingus and Roach arise near the song’s back end, Ellington has locked into the upper register of his solo, shifting the sound from ambient to a bluesy number with light drum brushes and subtle bass. It was a grand victory lap for one of jazz music’s pioneers.“Solitude”Duke Ellington (Blue Note Records)◆ ◆ ◆Harmony Holiday, poetMingus and Roach accompanied Ellington on the first recording of “Fleurette Africaine,” for “Money Jungle.” Left alone with his reflection in this solo version, Duke’s sway and almost-smile conjure longing and remembrance. He plays with the ghosts of his friends and spares them blunt nostalgia. He hesitates as if approaching a sacred altar of sound, and then surrenders to his solitude, allowing himself to be haunted by their absence but not diminished by it. This version is more jagged than the original, as Ellington confronts the missing tones by blurring them with his own. For a man who spent so many years maintaining a large orchestra that could play back the tones he heard in his head, Ellington seems to find the most solace alone. It’s as if all of that time spent in public was in pursuit of this isolated spiral, either as a soloist or with the phantoms of a couple of friends in a garden he invented for them. He’s soloing here, but he’s not alone, which would be frightening if it weren’t so beautiful.“Fleurette Africaine”Duke Ellington (via YouTube)◆ ◆ ◆Maurice Jackson, jazz historian“Black, Brown and Beige” encapsulates the full orchestration of Ellington’s work. The suffering of Black people through the wailing of the trumpeter Rex Stewart. Their struggles through the saxophonist Harry Carney’s musings. Triumphs using the “tom tom” of the drums. Duke called it “a tone parallel to the history of the Negro in America,” dedicated to Haitians who fought to save Savannah, Ga., from the British during the Revolutionary War. “I have gone back to the history of my race and tried to express it in rhythm,” Ellington said. “We used to have a little something in Africa, ‘something’ we have lost. One day we shall get it again.”“Part I (with Mahalia Jackson)”Duke Ellington, Mahalia Jackson (Columbia/Legacy)◆ ◆ ◆David Berger, musician and scholarRecorded March 6, 1940 — the first Ellington recording session with Ben Webster’s tenor saxophone and Jimmy Blanton’s propulsive bass completing what I would call the greatest band in jazz history. If Ellington’s oeuvre can be reduced to the marriage of the unschooled and the sophisticated, “Ko-Ko” is his finest example: a three-chord minor blues that tightly develops the motif introduced in the first measure through six dissonant, wild and imaginative choruses, serving notice on jazz composers and arrangers for decades to come. Modern jazz began here with an explosion.“Ko-Ko”Duke Ellington (Columbia/Legacy)◆ ◆ ◆Jon Pareles, Times chief pop music criticEllington’s music stayed open to jazz’s younger generations. “In a Sentimental Mood,” from an album he recorded in 1962 with John Coltrane and members of his quartet, leans into the ambiguities of a composition first heard in 1935. Ellington’s opening piano figure tiptoes around the chords it implies; Coltrane’s saxophone wafts in as if the melody is nearly too exquisite to disturb. Later, Ellington’s piano solo summons and then dissolves its own hints of 1930s swing, and Coltrane just teases at his own sheets-of-sound approach before returning to the grace of the original melody. The track is a paragon of mutual respect and shared, subtle exploration.“In a Sentimental Mood”Duke Ellington, John Coltrane (Impulse!)◆ ◆ ◆Miho Hazama, bandleaderThe happiest music in the world! I’ve had the privilege of conducting this “Nutcracker” suite a couple of times, and it always makes me wish I had annual gigs to keep performing it every holiday season. With a huge admiration for Ellington and Strayhorn, who wrote specific notes for each band member, this score is phenomenally done. The performance on the record is hard-swinging, exhilarating and authentic, from one of the orchestra’s later golden ages.“Peanut Brittle Brigade (March)”Duke Ellington (Columbia Jazz Masterpieces)◆ ◆ ◆Fredara Hadley, ethnomusicology professor“A Rhapsody of Negro Life,” from Ellington’s score for the 1935 film “Symphony in Black,” demonstrates his deep engagement with the moods and shades of Black life. In nine minutes he moves us musically from the plodding pulse of work songs to the swing of 1930s Harlem nightclubs. He matches the drama and the wail in “The Saddest Tale” with the beauty and the contemplation of “Hymn of Sorrow.” This music isn’t a treatise; it is a rhapsody in the best sense, in that each musical vignette is full of heart and intimate understanding of the joys and pains of Black humanity.◆ ◆ ◆Guillermo Klein, bandleaderI was immediately captivated by the storytelling of this tune — simple, yet profound and witty. The core of “Searching (Pleading for Love)” relies on the conclusion, which he states at the very beginning of the piece, as an intro, like a narrator sharing what it’s all about in a prologue. The theme follows a standard model: three times an idea and a conclusion. The bridge of the tune modulates two times, and that conclusion motif is present throughout. Right at the climax he varies it, giving a sense of pleading. His use of sound and space is just his own. Even on a trio recording like this, you can definitely hear the big band in his playing.“Searching (Pleading for Love)”Duke Ellington (Columbia/Legacy)◆ ◆ ◆Seth Colter Walls, Times music criticI recommend including this 1936 masterpiece in party playlists. When “Exposition Swing” comes on — with Ellington’s locomotive writing pulling listeners aboard — watch as guests tilt toward your speakers. Next, Harry Carney opens his baritone sax feature with a strutting, descending figure. As he finishes the solo, the orchestra cheers him with a modernist swell built from sustained tones, complex and cool. After another minute of dexterous soloist-and-orchestra interplay, stride-piano and blues accents from Ellington trigger the piece’s climactic phase, which incorporates collective shouts of that same descending motif heard during Carney’s opening. It’s a perfect hangout in microcosm.“Exposition Swing”Duke Ellington (Naxos)◆ ◆ ◆Song excerpts via Spotify and YouTube. More

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      Dan Smith Might Teach You Guitar

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      Teaching is a calling for New York’s king of the marketing flier, whose students include the former governor David Paterson. But he won’t take just anyone.For three decades, Dan Smith has been making a solemn promise to New Yorkers. He has posted his flier — “Dan Smith Will Teach You Guitar” — thousands of times in the city’s bodegas, coffee shops, pizza parlors, delis and laundromats. Parodied by Jon Stewart and the guitar god John Mayer, Mr. Smith has reached local legend status alongside the likes of Cellino & Barnes, Dr. Zizmor and Keano.There have been at least 60 versions of the sign, and most have included a photo of a seemingly ageless, sinewy and smiley Mr. Smith posing with his instrument. But spotting one in the urban wild may soon become a rarity, because New York’s go-to guitar teacher is doing less of his vintage style of promotion and embracing a more 2022 approach.Three months ago, Mr. Smith, 51, started a YouTube channel, where he has posted short instructional videos to help aspiring guitarists navigate “Should I Stay or Should I Go” (by the Clash), “I’ll Be Your Man” (the Black Keys) and more songs. Others have had success as YouTube guitar instructors: “Marty Music” has 3.3 million followers, and “Andy Guitar” has 2.2 million. Mr. Smith, a newcomer to the world of online tutorials, had 144 followers as of this week.While reporting this story, I took my old guitar from its case, where a family of cockroaches had taken up residence a few months before, and tried to play along with a couple of his videos, only to get frustrated. I quickly gave up, as I had many times before when trying to learn instruments.My can’t-do attitude makes me exactly the kind of person Dan Smith does not want to teach. In fact, when I asked him if he would give me lessons, he said no. In other words, Dan Smith will not teach me guitar. At one point, he even threatened to cancel an interview.After we had re-established the traditional journalist-subject relationship, I asked him why he had soured on me. “You didn’t really want to learn how to play guitar,” he said.Correct.“I understand why I’m perceived as just an amazing promoter,” he said. “Of course, that’s how people perceive me, because, in many ways, that’s all they’ve known of me so far.”To crack Dan Smith the man, I would need to look past Dan Smith the marketer.Mr. Smith, with his Gibson Hummingbird guitar, at his teaching studio in Manhattan.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesMr. Smith, who lives in Manhattan with his wife, Melissa, a photographer, charges $150 for a one-hour private session. He also offers group workshops and lessons in songwriting and solo performance. He said he has supported himself by teaching guitar since the mid-1990s.He started giving lessons at age 16 in his hometown, Newton, Mass. A few years later, after doing some experimental theater, busking outside Le Centre Pompidou in Paris and putting in some time at New York University, he decided to pursue a career in music and theater. He started teaching again to make money, and it soon became a calling.“I’m trying to help people connect to themselves,” he said.He has stipulations about whom he’ll teach and how, pedagogical rules he said he had come up with after thousands of lessons.Students must see him at least one hour a week, as a sign of their commitment. And they should not go to him with the idea that his lessons are all about learning to pick and strum or play solos like a guitar hero.“Music is a lot more than just putting your fingers on the strings,” he said. “It’s telling a story, it’s creating a mood, it’s evoking an emotion.”Mr. Smith does not teach his friends. “You need some distance,” he said. “You need some objectivity.”He does not take on students under 21. “Everybody pays as they go,” he said, “because I want everybody to think about it every time they have a guitar lesson: ‘I’m paying for this. What am I bringing to the table?’ The person who’s doing it needs to pay for it, because that’s what makes it real for them.”There are yet more stipulations: Mr. Smith does not offer gift certificates; he does not teach people who have signed up for lessons at someone else’s behest, like singers or actors whose managers want them to learn guitar; and he does not take notes for his students or permit them to take notes.“It doesn’t work,” he said. “I’ve tested everything that I know for a fact. That’s another thing that separates me from other teachers: I’ve done the research.”Mr. Smith plays his acoustic guitar in Central Park.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesFor those who meet the criteria, the experience can be transformative.“It’s not just about learning an instrument but expanding my feelings about myself, about what I’m about,” said David A. Paterson, the former governor of New York, who has been studying with Mr. Smith since 2020.Mr. Paterson, who takes a two-hour lesson each week, said that he and Mr. Smith frequently spend half a session just talking. “I think that’s his meditation technique,” he said. “That’s how he gets you in the mood to play.”Mr. Paterson, who is legally blind, added that he appreciated his teacher’s patience and an approach that goes beyond technique. “He’s a psychologist,” he said. “I’ve always been someone who thinks that, to make up the difference, that I have to hurry.”“When you do a song,” Mr. Paterson continued, “it’s almost like you’re shoveling snow: You just drive through. You have a lot of energy and you work hard, but it’s not an intellectual pursuit; it’s getting the feel of things. The great musicians call it ‘Make room for Jesus.’ In other words, you play — and then you just stop. That little space is as much a part as the music. I’m still struggling with just stopping.”Mr. Smith said that the time spent in conversation serves a purpose: “If a student arrives and they are tense or distracted — everybody needs time to, in my opinion, clear the runway for themselves before they can really make music.”In 2020, six months into his studies with Mr. Smith, Mr. Paterson and his teacher took the stage of Bar Nine in Manhattan, where they performed “Stand By Me” by Ben E. King and “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” by Marvin Gaye.The “Dan Smith Will Teach You Guitar” flier has had at least 60 incarnations over the last three decades.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesMr. Smith sometimes plays solo at Paddy Reilly’s Music Bar and other Manhattan clubs. His original songs include the city-centric “Sixth Avenue” and “New York Forever.” During our time together, he mentioned that he was about to perform in front of a large audience at an outdoor show in Battery Park. In the days leading up to the gig, he texted me to make sure I would be there. Mr. Smith’s wife echoed the gravity of the moment, telling me how excited they were for the occasion.It was billed as “a talent show” featuring the city’s “most notable and iconic characters.” The lineup was put together by Nicholas Heller, a filmmaker and social media personality known as New York Nico. It was timed to the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of Mr. Heller’s documentary film short, “Out of Order.”“There’s a BuzzFeed list of people who are super-famous in New York, and Dan Smith is on it,” Mr. Heller said. “To me, he’s more important than a worldwide celebrity.”With his trusty Gibson Hummingbird guitar, Mr. Smith took the stage at dusk. He looked serious, earnest. It was clear that, unlike some others on the bill, he did not view his performance as a stunt, but as a chance to show New York what he is made of.He started playing “New York Forever,” which he had written in the early part of the pandemic as a tribute to the city’s resilience. In the middle of the song, another New York character appeared onstage, on stilts. It was the one-name street performer Bobby, who regularly walks the city towering over crowds.As Bobby loomed over the stage, Mr. Smith seemed unfazed. He has, after all, had decades of practice in teaching others about what it means to take your time and seize the moment. And when his song was over, the crowd cheered not for the man from the flier but for the performer who was trying to realize a New York dream like the rest of us. More

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      Joni Mitchell Performs Surprise Show at Newport Folk Festival

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      The 78-year-old artist performed a full set, her first in about two decades, at the renowned festival in Rhode Island on Sunday.Joni Mitchell, the revered Canadian singer-songwriter and one of the defining musicians of the 1960s and ’70s, surprised an audience in Rhode Island on Sunday when she appeared at the Newport Folk Festival to perform her first full set in about two decades, guitar in hand.Mitchell, never one for the limelight, has remained largely out of the public eye since having a brain aneurysm in 2015. As she recovered, she made a few brief appearances: In December, she gave a rare public speech as she accepted a Kennedy Center Honor, and in April, made a televised appearance at the Grammys and was honored at a gala for MusiCares, a Grammy-affiliated charity.But on Sunday, Mitchell, 78, wearing a beret and sunglasses, performed some of her most iconic songs, including “Carey,” “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Both Sides Now.”At one point, Mitchell, an electric guitar slung over her shoulder, performed a several-minutes-long solo during “Just Like This Train,” as fans whooped and cheered.“After all she’s been through, she returned to the Newport Folk Fest stage after 53 years and I will never forget sitting next to her while she stopped this old world for a while,” the singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile, who sang backup for Mitchell during her festival appearance, said in a Tweet.Having “looked at life from so many sides,” Mitchell has come “out of the storm singing like a prophet,” she added.Although Mitchell has limited her appearances in recent years, she has not avoided the headlines.In January, Mitchell joined Neil Young in boycotting the streaming service Spotify, over its role in giving a platform to Covid-19 vaccine misinformation.“Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives,” Mitchell wrote of the company at the time. She added, “I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue.”On Sunday, several musicians, including Carlile, flanked Mitchell onstage, and sang with her. “I will never be over this. I can’t even watch it without the tears coming back,” Carlile wrote later on Twitter. “Please forgive me.”As Mitchell and Carlile sang “A Case of You” from the influential “Blue” album, released more than 50 years ago, Mitchell sang:Oh, I could drink a case of you, darlingAnd I would still be on my feetOh, I would still be on my feet.The crowd roared. More