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

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      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

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      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

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      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

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      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

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      Rita Gardner, an Original ‘Fantasticks’ Star, Is Dead at 87

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      In 1960 she originated the lone female role in an Off Broadway show that became part of theater history thanks to a record-setting run.Rita Gardner, who in a long cabaret and theater career earned an enduring place in stage history in 1960, when she originated the role of Luisa in the musical “The Fantasticks,” the longest-running musical in theatrical history, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 87.Claire-Frances Sullivan, her personal assistant and caretaker, said the cause was leukemia.Ms. Gardner was in her mid-20s and not particularly well known when she responded to an audition notice for “The Fantasticks,” a romantic fable with a book and lyrics by Tom Jones and music by Harvey Schmidt. She had called Lore Noto, the show’s producer, before attending the audition, and he told her that though the creative team already had another actress in mind for the part, she should audition anyway.“I didn’t know Tom or Harvey or anybody,” she said in an interview for the book “The Amazing Story of ‘The Fantasticks’” (1991), by Donald C. Farber and Robert Viagas. “I came in, essentially, off the street. They didn’t know me either.”She sang the song she had once used to win an “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” contest, “Over the Rainbow.” Mr. Schmidt heard a quality he liked.“With a lot of singers you can tell when they go from head to chest voice; it’s two different voices,” he said in an interview for the same book. “With Rita it was all one voice. Rita was like a pop singer, yet she could do these obbligato things, and it didn’t seem strange.”She got the part of Luisa (also sometimes called simply “the Girl”), the only female role in the piece. The show, whose signature number, “Try to Remember,” became a standard, opened in May 1960 at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village. Tickets were $3.75.In The Daily News, Charles McHarry pronounced the show “recommended without reservation.” But in The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson, while having kind words for the actors, thought the story lost steam. “Although it is ungrateful to say so,” he wrote, “two acts are one too many.”In a 2000 interview with The Associated Press, Ms. Gardner recalled that keeping the show open was touch and go until that August, when the production took time off amid the New York City summer and played in East Hampton, N.Y., for a week.“All the posh people saw it and told their friends,” she said. “Audiences started to grow.”Ms. Gardner with the other members of the original cast of “The Fantasticks,” including, top row center, Jerry Orbach.PhotofestThe show ran for 42 years, closing in 2002 after more than 17,000 performances, and then reopened in 2006 and ran until 2017. Ms. Gardner stayed only until the end of 1960. (Jerry Orbach, who was also in the original cast, left at about the same time.) But she was with the show long enough to record the original cast album.In a 2001 interview with The Bradenton Herald of Florida, Ms. Gardner recalled that, about 10 years earlier, she had attended a production of “The Fantasticks” for the first time as an audience member.“I didn’t know I had been in something so good,” she said.She was in Bradenton performing a revue she had assembled called “Try to Remember: A Look at Off Broadway,” in which she sang songs from “The Fantasticks” and other shows and told stories. A few months earlier she had staged the show at the Sullivan Street Playhouse, the same theater where she had originated the “Fantasticks” role 40 years earlier. There, her performance started at 10 p.m. — because “The Fantasticks” was still running in the theater’s main evening slot.Rita Schier was born on Oct. 23, 1934, in Brooklyn to Nathan and Tillie (Hack) Schier. She studied opera and dance and sang in a close-harmony group called the Honeybees; in the late 1950s she appeared in a revue called “Nightcap,” which featured songs by the then unknown Jerry Herman. In 1957 she married the playwright Herb Gardner, who would become known for “A Thousand Clowns.” Their marriage ended in divorce, as did her marriage to Peter Cereghetti. At her death she was married to Robert Sevra, who is her only immediate survivor.Ms. Gardner left “The Fantasticks” to appear in a movie called “One Plus One” (1961), and she had small parts in other movies over the years. She also appeared on television, including in several episodes of “Law & Order,” the show that helped make Mr. Orbach an instantly recognizable star. She appeared on Broadway in “A Family Affair” (1962) as well as in the 1963 revival of “Pal Joey,” among other shows.She performed frequently on the cabaret circuit, where she employed not only her fine singing voice but also her droll sense of humor. In her show “Try to Remember,” she talked about life beyond Broadway’s bright lights.“Off Broadway is not just a location, it’s a definition,” she said. “The Actors Equity definition is a theater that has less than 300 seats, but my definition growing up Off Broadway was a little different. It was a theater that had less than 300 seats, most of them broken.” More

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      Pharoah Sanders, Whose Saxophone Was a Force of Nature, Dies at 81

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      Pharoah Sanders, a saxophonist and composer celebrated for music that was at once spiritual and visceral, purposeful and ecstatic, died on Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 81.His death was announced in a statement by Luaka Bop, the company for which he had made his most recent album, “Promises.” The statement did not specify the cause.The sound Mr. Sanders drew from his tenor saxophone was a force of nature: burly, throbbing and encompassing, steeped in deep blues and drawing on extended techniques to create shrieking harmonics and imposing multiphonics. He could sound fierce or anguished; he could also sound kindly and welcoming. He first gained wide recognition as a member of John Coltrane’s groups from 1965 to 1967. He then went on to a fertile, prolific career, with dozens of albums and decades of performances.Mr. Sanders in a recording studio in 1968. He made his first album as a leader, “Pharoah,” in 1964, shortly before he began working with John Coltrane.Gilles Petard/RedfernsMr. Sanders played free jazz, jazz standards, upbeat Caribbean-tinged tunes and African- and Indian-rooted incantations such as “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” which opened his 1969 album, “Karma,” a pinnacle of devotional free jazz. He recorded widely as both a leader and a collaborator, working with Alice Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Randy Weston, Joey DeFrancesco and many others.Looking back on Mr. Sanders’s career in a 1978 review, Robert Palmer of The New York Times wrote, “His control of multiphonics on the tenor set standards that younger saxophonists are still trying to live up to, and his sound — huge, booming, but capable of great delicacy and restraint — was instantly recognizable.”Mr. Sanders told The New Yorker in 2020: “I’m always trying to make something that might sound bad sound beautiful in some way. I’m a person who just starts playing anything I want to play, and make it turn out to be maybe some beautiful music.”Pharoah Sanders was born Farrell Sanders in Little Rock, Ark, on Oct. 13, 1940. His mother was a cook in a school cafeteria; his father worked for the city. He first played music in church, starting on drums and moving on to clarinet and then saxophone. (Although tenor saxophone was his main instrument, he also performed and recorded frequently on soprano.) He played blues, jazz and R&B at clubs around Little Rock; during the era of segregation, he recalled in 2016, he sometimes had to perform behind a curtain.In 1959 he moved to Oakland, Calif., where he performed at local clubs. His fellow saxophonist John Handy suggested he move to New York City, where the free-jazz movement was taking shape, and in 1962, he did.At times in his early New York years he was homeless and lived by selling his blood. But he also found gigs in Greenwich Village, and he worked with some of the leading exponents of free jazz, including Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry and Sun Ra.It was Sun Ra who persuaded him to change his first name to Pharoah, and for a short time Mr. Sanders was a member of the Sun Ra Arkestra.Mr. Sanders made his first album as a leader, “Pharoah,” for ESP-Disk in 1964. John Coltrane invited him to sit in with his group, and in 1965 Mr. Sanders became a member, exploring elemental, tumultuous free jazz on seminal albums like “Ascension,” “Om” and “Meditations.”After Coltrane’s death in 1967, Mr. Sanders went on to record with his widow, the pianist and harpist Alice Coltrane, on albums including “Ptah, the El Daoud” and “Journey in Satchidananda,” both released in 1970.Mr. Sanders had already begun recording as a leader on the Impulse! label, which had also been Coltrane’s home. The titles of his albums — “Tauhid” in 1967, “Karma” in 1969 — made clear his interest in Islamic and Buddhist thought.His music was expansive and open-ended, concentrating on immersive group interaction rather than solos, and incorporating African percussion and flutes. In the liner notes to “Karma,” the poet, playwright and activist Amiri Baraka wrote, “Pharoah has become one long song.” The 32-minute “The Creator Has a Master Plan” moves between pastoral ease — with a rolling two-chord vamp and a reassuring message sung by Leon Thomas — and squalling, frenetic outbursts, but portions of it found FM radio airplay beyond jazz stations.During the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Sanders’s music moved from album-length excursions like the kinetic 1971 “Black Unity” toward shorter compositions, reconnections with jazz standards and new renditions of Coltrane compositions. (He shared a Grammy Award for his work with the pianist McCoy Tyner on the 1987 album “Blues for Coltrane.”) His recordings grew less turbulent and more contemplative. On the 1977 album “Love Will Find a Way,” he tried pop-jazz and R&B, sharing ballads with the singer Phyllis Hyman. He returned to more mainstream jazz with his albums for Theresa Records in the 1980s.But his explorations were not over. In live performances, he might still bear down on one song for an entire set and make his instrument blare and cry out. During the 1990s and early 2000s he made albums with the innovative producer Bill Laswell. He reunited with the blistering electric guitarist Sonny Sharrock — who had been a Sanders sideman — on the 1991 album “Ask the Ages,” and he collaborated with the Moroccan Gnawa musician Maleem Mahmoud Ghania on “The Trance of Seven Colors” in 1994.Mr. Sanders at the 1996 North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague, Netherlands.Frans Schellekens/RedfernsInformation on Mr. Sanders’s survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Sanders had difficult relationships with record labels, and he spent nearly two decades without recording as a leader. Yet he continued to perform, and his occasional recorded appearances — including his wraithlike presence on “Promises,” his 2021 collaboration with the London Symphony Orchestra and Sam Shepherd, the electronic musician known as Floating Points — were widely applauded.Reviewing “Promises” for The Times, Giovanni Russonello noted that Mr. Sanders’s “glistening and peaceful sound” was “deployed mindfully throughout the album,” adding, “He shows little of the throttling power that used to come bursting so naturally from his horn, but every note seems carefully selected — not only to state his own case, but to funnel the soundscape around him into a precise, single-note line.”Mr. Sanders and Sam Shepherd, the electronic musician and composer known as Floating Points, during the recording of the album “Promises” in Los Angeles in 2019.Eric Welles-NyströmIn 2016 Mr. Sanders was named a Jazz Master, the highest honor for a jazz musician in the United States, by the National Endowment for the Arts.In a video made in recognition of his award, the saxophonist Kamasi Washington said, “It’s like taking fried chicken and gravy to space and having a picnic on the moon, listening to Pharoah.” The saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin said, “It’s like he’s playing pure light at you. It’s way beyond the language. It’s way beyond the emotion.” More

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      Belle, Sebastian and Me

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      Following the world’s twee-est band down the Pacific Coast after a divorce and the death of a parent.May 31, 2022, Seattle, Paramount TheaterMy favorite band is on the road and I’m putting on a mask and going with them. I’ve been a little beaten up by the world the last couple years — maybe the same amount as anyone, but that’s plenty. I need to get out. Like the saddest, oldest groupie in the world, I’m following the Scottish indie band Belle and Sebastian down the west coast of America.I’m starting out in Seattle, where I live. My grown children come along and this feels just right, for the band’s presence in my life maps directly onto my motherhood. I discovered them when my first child was a baby. The voice of the lead singer, Stuart Murdoch, accompanied me over the next two decades, ringing out as I drove the school run in my VW van (little kids), then my Prius (medium-size kids), then a sensible Mazda (teenagers).Or should I say “lisping out.” If you know anything about Belle and Sebastian, you know they are twee and also, sometimes, the singer lisps. That’s what’ll be on their grave: TWEE LISPERS. As a person who grew up suckling at the bitter teat of punk rock, I didn’t see myself ending up here. But Belle and Sebastian has been the great musical love of my adulthood, and as the years slip by, it’s my belief that I am lucky to love anything at all. I don’t exactly understand why I love them, but I do.I’ve seen them so many times that I know exactly where to stand: at the rail, stage right, because that’s the direction Stuart faces when he plays piano.At the Paramount, the kids and I line up, stage right, and the band files out. There are so many of them: seven in the band, plus the few local musicians they add at each stop. They sound fantastic, but there are off-kilter notes: Sarah Martin, the violinist, is out with Covid. And they don’t do their traditional rave-up dance party to “The Boy With the Arab Strap,” when the audience jumps onstage with them. They’re all here, my secret friends, my superheroes, but I feel slightly cut off from the experience. My eyes dart around the crowded theater, looking for maskless folks who might be exposing me and my kids to the virus.I’m focused on my own fear, my own story. I am here, but not quite here.June 1, 2022, Portland, Roseland TheaterBarreling down I-5 the next morning, I have some time to reflect, not necessarily a welcome state of affairs. Reflection is a young woman’s game — it tends to go better when you don’t have quite so much to reflect about. And I have plenty: In the last two years, my very long marriage has ended (amicably, but still), I’ve sold the family home, I’ve nursed my beloved father to his death in the midst of a Covid-riddled hospital. These are the things I think about, or try not to think about, as I drive the familiar freeway.In Portland, I’m meeting up with my boyfriend — such a strange word for me, a person who was married for 20-plus years. He’s a music writer who has occasionally mocked me about my B & S love. He’s game to go to some shows, but I’m a little worried he might not get it, whatever it is. That indefinable thing that makes me love this band.Roseland is hot and crammed with all kinds of people — young queer couples, middle-aged former punks, families with little kids. My boyfriend angles us to a spot stage left, and I’m too embarrassed by my trainspotter-ish tendencies to insist that we move to the other side. I fall into conversation with a bunch of fellow enthusiasts, the kind of middle-aged white men who show their band love by accruing details about set lists and venues.Sarah is back! The venue is tiny. Stuart is right there. I start to feel the miracle of seeing a band you love — they have flown out of your car speaker or your earbuds and are now made flesh before your eyes. Stuart sits on the edge of the stage and slings one leg over the other. He looks like a very relaxed, debonair lamb. He extemporizes verses to “Piazza, New York Catcher.” A bald man leans his bulk on me. Two wild-haired young people in front of us twine their arms around each other’s necks. We all hold our breath and can’t believe our luck.When we walk out into the hot night, my boyfriend pulls his mask down and says, “I loved that” with great force.June 3, 2022, Oakland, Fox TheaterThe drive to Oakland passes in a dream of sunshine and grubby rest areas and Starbucks. This is the road trip that has been eluding me since the pandemic started. It turns out I only need a single day of being, as Gram Parsons sang, out with the truckers and the kickers, and I am starting to feel more human. My boyfriend, with the fervor of the newly converted and the completist tendencies unique to music writers, Spotifies his way through the Belle and Sebastian catalog as we drive.At the Fox, in downtown Oakland, I take my spot at the rail. The band fills the stage and the evening unfurls its magic. There’s a mysterious exchange between band and audience at their best shows; their very multitudinousness makes you feel somehow like you’re part of their project. All these other people are in the band, why not you? I forget my fears, I forget to be annoyed by the other audience members, or afraid of them. I lose myself in the sea of fans.When we walk outside, people line the sidewalks, dancing and singing. I had forgotten what it was like to be “out among ‘em,” as my granny used to say. It feels like the world has erupted with joy.The next day we go to the de Young to see a show of Alice Neel paintings. Neel burst into creative flower in midlife. In the 1970s her work became vibrant, celebratory, wicked, funny, communal. Her paintings are crowded with unexpected people wearing violet scarves and robin egg blue eye makeup. I walk around and around the galleries, taking in the spectacle of unending difference. “People Come First,” the show is called.And then I see it, the why of my love: Belle and Sebastian people my world. Their songs are filled with louche, ungovernable characters: the lazy painter Jane, who gets a dose of thrush from licking railings; Judy, who fantasizes about horses; Sukie, who likes to hang out in the graveyard; Hillary and Anthony, who kill themselves because they are bored and misunderstood; Chelsea and Lisa, who find solace in each other’s arms.My own world, over the last few years, has grown smaller and harder. Between divorce and death and quarantine, my soul has shrunk like a wool sweater in a washing machine. Even as I’ve walked alone through my difficulties, trying to solve every problem through sheer force of my solitary will, Belle and Sebastian have kept me company — with the characters they’ve invented, and with the performance of collaboration that defines the band. “We’re four boys in our corduroys,” one of their oldest tunes goes, “we’re not terrific, but we’re competent.” Their bleak cheerfulness has made them my boon companions, even when I was trying my hardest to do everything myself, when I was beginning to see other people as the enemy. They remind me that people come first.We have tickets to shows in Southern California but we’ll abandon the tour and stop here in San Francisco for a while. We’ve gotten what we came for. And we’re awfully old to be driving that far.Episode is a weekly column exploring a moment in a writer’s life. Claire Dederer is the author of “Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning” and “Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses.” More

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      The Remarkable, Resilient Loren Connors

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      Three decades ago, the New York guitarist was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. His output still hasn’t slowed.If Loren Connors was going to get to his gig, the guitarist knew he would need to crawl. It was late January 2007, two months after he had smashed into a Brooklyn sidewalk and broken his hip while carrying an armload of art, resulting in major surgery and an 11-day hospital stay.But he had agreed to rally for a concert organized by his record label two miles from his apartment, improvising with a trio he’d never met. After all, this was his life now: Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease 16 years earlier, he expected the falls and concomitant broken bones to escalate.After a lift from a friend, there was just one unexpected hurdle on that winter night — 16 steep stairs leading to the venue, tucked inside a silo alongside the Gowanus Canal. “Loren got on his hands and knees and started crawling up,” Eric Weddle, the founder of Family Vineyard, said by phone. Weddle started his label in part to issue Connors’s music, and now he stood at the top of the stairs, dumbstruck. “His laundry list of injuries is crazy, but none of this has stopped him. It is resilience.”Connors, 72, can barely cross a room now. The pills he takes a dozen times each day often steal his speech until he can only stutter; even on good days, the syllables blur together. His legs kick at night, and he is mostly confined to the cramped Brooklyn Heights apartment he has shared with his partner, the singer and lawyer Suzanne Langille, since 1990.“Parkinson’s is a curse,” he said on his landline early one recent morning, when his speech is typically best. “It doesn’t kill you, but it just makes your life terrible. I’m hanging in there.”He is hanging in there, to some extent, because he can still play guitar and paint, both of which he does most days. In the three decades since his diagnosis, he has released about 100 records — gentle suites of forlorn melodies, relentless spans of plangent notes, and, most recently, sprawling drifts of ghostly tones.This is one of the most productive periods of his career, too, as a confederation of labels rushes to reissue his rarest albums, which often fetch hundreds of dollars online, and to distribute new recordings. During the last year, Connors has shared live collaborations with Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and the Australian experimental impresario Oren Ambarchi, plus a book of impressionistic flower sketches. “Airs,” a quiet 1999 collection of gorgeous and brief pieces, will be reissued Friday, with another art book and at least a half-dozen other records due in the next year.“It’s a passion and a compulsion — he has to create all the time,” Langille said by phone. “And he’s still doing it with all this weight on his back. It comes down to his determination, courage.”Connors grew up in New Haven, Conn., born to the opera singer Mary Mazzacane and the inventor Joe Mazzacane. The family of five wobbled at poverty’s edge — “shanty Irish,” Connors quipped. He developed a reputation as a rapscallion, less interested in school than drawing, the guitar and rowdy misadventures into New York.A work from Connors’s book “Wildweeds.”Loren ConnorsIn 1975, after an unhappy — if artistically inspiring — year at the University of Cincinnati, he became a janitor at Yale. For a decade, he lived rent-free in a warehouse crammed with 20 artists, the smell of paint and shellac commingling with fumes from plastic melted by a businessman making toys. (With no family history of Parkinson’s, Connors believes his exposure to these toxins ultimately led to his disease.)Connors had fallen hard for acoustic blues and electric guitarists like Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, still a favorite. (“All my avant-garde friends don’t like Clapton, because he’s a pop star,” he said. “He’s more than that.”) He ran an art gallery and hosted shows by visiting musicians. In the late ’70s, he began self-releasing a series of splenetic improvisations that suggested the blues broken into bits following a violent car crash. “The reception was absolutely terrible,” Connors said by video call soon after sunrise on a September morning, Langille laughing to his right. “Everyone thought I was a real weirdo — pretty discouraging.”Actually, not everyone: Connors often cleaned the office of the Southern culture scholar William Ferris, who learned that his janitor had taken the job in part to access Yale’s voluminous library. Connors began sending him those early recordings, and Ferris offered his academic imprimatur via liner notes. “It crossed so many boundaries, redefined the blues in a very modernist way,” Ferris said in an interview. “He taught me where the roots music I loved was moving and wrote a new chapter in American music.”He found another convert in Langille, a recent Yale Law grad mesmerized the moment she saw him sit at a piano to improvise with a saxophonist in 1984. He loved the intensity of her eyes; she loved, as she put it, that “the whole composition was in him from the first note, just flooding out.” Two years later, they had their only child, Jamie. Four years after that, Connors quit his paper route, his final job apart from art. The trio moved into their 600-square-foot apartment in Brooklyn Heights in 1990 so Langille could work as a public lawyer, arguing against incinerators and advocating for wetlands.Connors in Brooklyn with his wife, the singer and lawyer Suzanne Langille.Daniel Weiss for The New York TimesFor Connors, the move fulfilled a lifelong goal he’d never been able to afford. New York became his wellspring. After Langille headed to work, Connors and Jamie would make daily pilgrimages over the Brooklyn Bridge to explore Hell’s Kitchen or Five Points. They’d spend hours at the library, researching Connors’s Irish heritage, the city’s homeless paperboys or the work of artists like Mark Rothko.“I would come home from school, and there would be paint all over the ceiling and walls from these big canvases in this tiny apartment,” Jamie said. “Or he would be recording albums in our living room, and I’d just sit there, really quietly, watching.”Connors began to meet younger experimental musicians who, much to his surprise, knew his work. His network ballooned. When Connors had been in New York for less than a decade, for instance, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth organized a monthlong series of concerts to celebrate his 50th birthday. Four nights per week, Connors played with someone new. (His favorite? Chan Marshall, a.k.a. Cat Power.)This cadre admired his obsession with seemingly small ideas — like starting so many compositions in A minor — and recognized Connors’s fabled compulsion to make anything, always.“On 9/11, picking up a guitar was the last thing on my mind, but Loren recorded,” said Alan Licht, Connors’s most consistent collaborator for 30 years. “The city’s on fire, but he’s making music in response, like, that day. That’s how deeply ingrained it is.”It may seem cruel that Connors was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 1991, just a year after arriving in New York, the place he’d always wanted to be. Langille and Connors both demurred at the notion. Instead, she saw how motivated he became, hoping to work as much as he could before losing control of his hands. (He hasn’t yet.) He even learned to schedule his pills so they didn’t interfere with his music. “He dived in and became incredibly productive,” she said. “Once he got into that rhythm, he never stopped.”That cycle — playing and painting every day — has created a kind of artistic map of his disease’s progression. He is improvising with the changing state of his body. Connors once bent strings wildly, as if the entire guitar quaked beneath his blues. But now, with his small-bodied Fender, he produces wide washes of subtle sound. They shift gradually, like leaves losing color in autumn. He doesn’t mind the change, even if he didn’t choose it.“People these days are always making plans — I never did that,” Connors said, chuckling softly. “When you’re a kid, you play like a kid. When you grow up, you leave kid stuff, like licks, behind.” More