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      ‘Anonymous Club’ Review: The Joy of Creation

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      The Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett goes on a world tour in this music documentary, and finds that a change is needed.The singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett started out as a DIY artist, home-recording energetic songs communicating knotty feelings. Early in this documentary, written and directed by Danny Cohen, a cheery interviewer leads into a question by saying that it’s not too common to hear artists “singing about panic attacks.” This reflects more on the limited listening experience of the interviewer than anything else, but you get the idea.The images in “Anonymous Club” are pretty conventional for a music documentary, particularly at the start. Barnett’s work blew up commercially after the 2015 release of her album “Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit.” World tours with a backing band followed: We see trucks being unloaded at stadiums, lighting rigs going up, and electric guitars rocking out with post-punk clamor.At Cohen’s request, Barnett kept an audio diary over several years. In it, she speaks about how the repetition of touring is giving her emotional state a beating. Barnett muses on the contradiction of how, in one performance, she might be “vivid and alive” and in the next “distant,” even though she’s going through the same motions with each show.Because Barnett is shy by nature, and prone to depression and anxiety, touring gets to be a special kind of drag. In public she’s a sport: When a glib German interviewer quotes her lyric “I’m not your mother/I’m not your bitch” and then asks with a grin “who are you mad at?” she doesn’t take the bait.Back at her home in Melbourne, she sits with her depression. Clearly a change is needed. A stripped-down tour with no backing band — and a musical collaboration with the drummer Stella Mozgawa of Warpaint — get Barnett back to the joy of creating. Perhaps not surprisingly, she achieves it in a setting not too different from the one in which she began.Anonymous ClubNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters. More

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      This Trumpeter’s Legacy Also Includes Composing String Quartets

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      A new boxed set of string quartets by Wadada Leo Smith, an anchor of American experimental music, reveals his sustained engagement with the form.The trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith has played an outsize role in American experimental music for the last 50 years.His early writings on “creative music” — distinct from both classical and jazz traditions — proved influential to a wide swath of artists in the 1970s, including the pianist and opera composer Anthony Davis.In more recent years, Smith’s work has incorporated collaborations with the pianist Vijay Iyer and the indie-rock group Deerhoof. Another major project was his “Ten Freedom Summers,” an ambitious, four-hour-plus suite that traces the civil rights movement over a long timeline, including sonic evocations of the Dred Scott case and the Jim Crow era.The string quartet writing in the suite — the four-CD recording was a finalist for the music Pulitzer in 2013 — gave most listeners their first chance to hear his work in that vein, previously found on just a few low-profile releases. “String Quartets Nos. 1-12,” a new seven-CD boxed set on the Finnish label TUM, fills out that history, revealing his sustained dedication to the format, going back to 1965 and his String Quartet No. 1 (revised in 1982).In a phone interview from his home in New Haven, Conn., he described string instruments as being in a four-way tie as his “favorite instrument,” along with piano, drums and his cherished trumpet. “The other instruments you can give or take away from me anytime.”These string pieces rarely start at full throttle. Instead, Smith offers an idea in a contemplative way: a polyphonic passage, a drone or a melody that starts, pauses and repeats with a slight but crucial change. Then those changes begin to proliferate and pile up. Unlike stun-gun experimentalists, Smith has a complex style that sneaks up on you, and feels all the more ravishing for its patient progress.That style will be familiar to fans of Smith’s work with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (or A.A.C.M.), a collective born on the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s. Autodidacticism was a cornerstone of the association’s ethos, a way to expand on members’ formal training. (During a stint in the Army, Smith studied in a U.S. Military band program; he later studied at the Sherwood School of Music and Wesleyan University.)By the time he joined the collective in 1967, Smith was already a practiced string quartet composer. “I had already finished at least two versions of String Quartet No. 1,” he said. “When I came to the A.A.C.M. nobody had string quartets, not a single person. And my string quartet had a really big impact — even though nobody ever heard it, because it never was played. But I showed it to people.”A lot of thought and revision went into the first quartet. “I wrote movement No. 1 over and over for three years,” he said, “because that was my initial training of how to write and how to think about strings.” Also part of the training: studying quartets by Debussy, Bartok, Beethoven and Ornette Coleman.In the new recording of that first quartet, you can hear traces of Bartok’s advanced harmony and Coleman’s intensity of attack. By the second quartet, though, Smith has found his recognizable, mature language, especially in the pacing.Smith’s compositional voice and approach to group performance are so strong that listeners may have a hard time teasing out the wide-ranging stylistic inputs. In the liner notes, Smith describes the inspiration of blues guitarists, like B.B. King and Muddy Waters, on his writing for strings.“If people can’t hear that, I don’t understand what’s wrong,” he said in the interview, with a laugh. “I can hear!”What about his String Quartet No. 3, “Black Church,” from 1995: Can the way the players tear through sequences of semitones be seen as a tip of the hat to fast-picked streaks of electric-guitar blues?“Yes, that’s a blues connotation feeling,” Smith said. “Secretly, I say that that string quartet is a blues and a spiritual — at least the first movement.” But the second movement, he said, is about rhythm and repetition.In his later string quartets, Smith has doubled down on those repetitions. In his notated scores, he often puts brackets over phrases in each string part, with numbers above a given bracket indicating methods of repeating the melodic material.While his five-line-staff writing is idiosyncratic, it seems conventional compared with the image-based “language scores” in his Ankhrasmation series. (The scores double as detailed artworks, and have been presented in galleries.) Players use a “constructed key” of Smith’s design when interpreting and creating their responses to the symbols and colors on each page. Some of his quartets require players to move back and forth between traditional notation and Ankhrasmation pages, within a single movement.An Ankhrasmation page from the score for String Quartet No. 11, Movement 9.Wadada Leo SmithNavigating this takes practice and dedication. And for decades, it meant there were strikingly few performances of this music. Smith said he stopped approaching established quartets in 2000. But after taking a teaching position at the California Institute of the Arts in 1996, he found a group of talented young musicians in and around Los Angeles who were eager to learn his languages.That group, now called RedKoral — heard on the boxed set — boasts players with solid contemporary classical résumés. Shalini Vijayan (first violin) has worked with Southwest Chamber Music. Mona Tian (second violin) is part of the celebrated Los Angeles group Wild Up. The cellist Ashley Walters has played with several of Smith’s groups, and records as a solo artist.And the violist Andrew McIntosh is also a composer whose music was recently performed at the Ojai Festival. McIntosh said Smith had influenced his approach to composition. “I’m more willing now to take risks with the way material unfolds over time than I was five or 10 years ago,” he wrote in an email.Smith has called the ensemble “the most advanced advocate and performer of my music, ever.” RedKoral’s recent live performance of String Quartet No. 10 — “Angela Davis Into the Morning Sunlight” — helped to show how they’ve achieved this.Presented at Roulette in Brooklyn as part of this year’s Vision Festival, that rendition was slightly different from the recorded version. But the lyrical feeling of Smith’s motifs was also immediately identifiable.In an interview, Vijayan said Smith was rarely prescriptive when handing out new directives before a concert. Instead, she said: “It was always from a place of emotional inspiration. ‘What is the feeling behind this tonight?’ And it could be different every night.”That well-drilled flexibility allows the group to handle the Bartokian language of the first quartet as well as it handles the blues connotations of the third. Quartet No. 11, the 100-minute opus that takes up two discs in the boxed set, seems like a summation of the players’ ability to absorb everything Smith can throw at them.The second movement, dedicated to Louis Armstrong, is a three-page, multicolored Ankhrasmation score. It omits a traditional staff, but features repeating structures. Its final page indicates a chord in a low string range. Bracketed instructions specify that this chord be played six times, before a pause. Then four times (with another rest after). And finally five more times. It makes for a dramatic, arresting climax.String Quartet No. 11, Movement 2: Louis ArmstrongWadada Leo Smith and TUM RecordsThe next movement, dedicated to Smith’s mother, is more traditionally notated — and offers the riddling complexity that Smith builds from motivic repetition.String Quartet No. 11, Movement 3: Sarah Bell Brown-SmithWadada Leo Smith and TUM RecordsSmith’s sound is all over these performances. And his trumpet joins the mix for String Quartet No. 6 (one of four in the set that features guest players). There, RedKoral responds to the trumpet’s virtuosic shifts of instrumental color and dynamics with intimate, collaborative intelligence.“My playing of the trumpet — my drawings and construction of Ankhrasmation pieces — all of that goes into the expression of who I am,” Smith said. “All of my works express precisely who I am.” More

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      Far From Kabul, Building a New Life, With Music and Hope

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      LISBON — On some nights, when her dorm room here turns dark and the church bells stop ringing, the young trumpet player thinks about the distant afternoon when her uncle took her to the graveyard to gather stones.That was in Afghanistan, in the chaotic days after the United States withdrew last year and the Taliban reasserted control. Her uncle had insisted that they pay respects at the family cemetery before they packed their bags with walnuts and spices and books of poems by Rumi, before they began their lives as refugees.Standing by the graves, she watched as her uncle closed his eyes and listened to the wind. The ancestors, he said, were displeased with their decision to leave Afghanistan. Even the stones, he said, seemed to speak, urging them to stay.Zohra Ahmadi, 13, could not hear the voices her uncle described. But as she scooped rocks and soil from the cemetery into a plastic container, following her uncle’s instructions, she said she heeded his words, and vowed one day to return.CULTURE, DISPLACED A series exploring the lives and work of artists driven far from their homelands amid the growing global refugee crisis.On a sweltering May morning, when the sun had already melted buckets of ice at the seafood market and the priests at Nossa Senhora da Ajuda church were just beginning their morning verses, a series of unfamiliar sounds emanated from the top of a former military hospital in western Lisbon.The Afghanistan National Institute of MusicThe orchestra gathers for one of its first rehearsals since its members left Kabul for Lisbon.The strumming of a sitar, the pounding of tablas, the plucking of a violin — these were coming from the hospital, now the makeshift home of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music. More than two dozen of its young musicians had gathered for one of their first rehearsals since arriving as refugees in December.Under the American-backed government in Kabul, the institute, which opened in 2010, had flourished, becoming a symbol of Afghanistan’s changing identity. It was a rare coeducational establishment in a country where boys and girls were often kept separate. While many programs focused exclusively on Afghan culture or Western music, it embraced both, preparing hundreds of young artists, many of them orphans and street hawkers, for careers in the performing arts.Ahmad Naser Sarmast, the school’s leader, on the compound’s roof.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesMusic students playing soccer at the compound.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesThe Taliban had long treated it as a threat. Fearing for their safety, more than 250 students and teachers as well as their relatives, fled Afghanistan and sought shelter abroad in the months after the American withdrawal, eventually arriving in Portugal, where they were all granted asylum. In their absence, the Taliban commandeered the institute, damaging instruments and turning classrooms into offices and dorms.As students prepared to make music that morning, Ahmad Naser Sarmast, the school’s leader, spoke about the role they could play in countering the Taliban, a presence even in the rehearsal room, with news of starvation, violence and persecution back home lighting up the students’ phones.“We can show the world a different Afghanistan,” said Sarmast, who was wounded by a Taliban suicide bomber who infiltrated a school play in 2014. “We will show how we can raise the voices of our people. We will show where we stand.”The orchestra rehearses in Lisbon. After the students fled Kabul, the Taliban commandeered their school and damaged instruments.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesThe students readied their instruments. First, they played a popular Afghan song, “Sarzamin-e Man,” or “My Homeland.” Then they turned to a new work, “A Land Out of Earth?” written by a conductor of the orchestra, Mohammad Qambar Nawshad. He explained the inspiration for his piece: Aug. 15, 2021, the day the Taliban seized Kabul. He had stayed home, scared and shaking.“That was the day everyone left us alone, and we were in the hands of evil,” he said. “There was no longer any guarantee that a team of Taliban would not come search for each of us and kill us.”Reporting From AfghanistanInside the Fall of Kabul: ​The Taliban took the Afghan capital with a speed that shocked the world. Our reporter and photographer witnessed it.On Patrol: A group of Times journalists spent 12 days with a Taliban police unit in Kabul. Here is what they saw.Face to Face: ​​A Times reporter who served as a Marine in Afghanistan returned to interview a Taliban commander he once fought.A Photographer’s Journal: A look at 20 years of war in Afghanistan, chronicled through one Times photographer’s lens.He lifted his arms, locked eyes with the students, and the room filled with the sounds of violin and sitar.‘My Homeland’The orchestra plays a passage of a popular Afghan song, “Sarzamin-e Man,” or “My Homeland.”First, it was the music of Tchaikovsky that captured Zohra’s imagination: the Neapolitan Dance from “Swan Lake,” which she liked to play on repeat as she danced around her room. Then she fell for more popular fare: big-band hits and standards by the singer Ahmad Zahir, the “Afghan Elvis.”By 9, Zohra was convinced: She wanted to be a professional musician — and a ballerina, a mathematician and a physicist. She decided to start with the trumpet. Her parents enrolled her at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, sending her from her native Ghazni Province, in southeastern Afghanistan, to Kabul to live with her uncle.She excelled at her music studies, mastering Afghan folk songs as well as classical works. But when the Taliban took power last year, her trumpet became a liability.Zohra was convinced from a young age that she wanted to be a professional musician.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesThe Taliban had banned nonreligious music when it last held power, from 1996 to 2001. In the weeks after the American withdrawal, Taliban fighters harassed and intimidated musicians, and pressured radio stations, wedding halls and karaoke parlors to stop playing nonreligious songs.Zohra’s relatives worried she would be punished if she were caught playing her trumpet. In August, her uncle sent the instrument back to Zohra’s mother in Ghazni, along with a violin, a flute and a harmonium.“We didn’t want to keep anything in Kabul that showed we were playing music,” Zohra said. “I didn’t know what could happen to me if I were caught.”The books and paintings inside their home were also a risk, her uncle had determined. One night, in the wood stove they used to keep warm in the winter, he burned the family’s most prized possessions: works by Freud, novels by Salman Rushdie and portraits that his brother had painted.Zohra tried not to watch, running from the fire. But from a distance, she caught glimpses of her favorite books being destroyed. “My heart,” she said, “was burning.”Juma Ahmadi, Zohra’s uncle, in his room at the former military hospital.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesIn Portugal, the Afghans enjoy newfound freedoms. The boys and girls can go swimming together. They can date. The girls can wear shorts and skirts without fear of judgment. The older students can drink alcohol.But life in Lisbon has also been a challenge. The students spend their days largely inside the military hospital, where they eat, sleep, rehearse, wash clothes and play table tennis, nervous about venturing too far or making new friends. Unaccustomed to Portuguese food, they keep bottles of curry, cardamom and peppercorn in their rooms to add familiar flavors to traditional dishes, like grilled sardines and scrambled eggs with smoked sausage.On weekdays, they go to a local school for special classes in Portuguese and history, practicing phrases like “Bom dia” and “Obrigado” and learning about the country’s Roman Catholic heritage.Some students, including Mohammad Sorosh Reka, 16, a sitar player, made the 5,000-mile journey to Portugal alone. He has watched from a distance as friends and family share news of bomb attacks, mass unemployment and corruption scandals.Sorosh Warms UpAt an afternoon sitar class, Sorosh plays a traditional Afghan song.In phone calls and WhatsApp messages, Sorosh tells his family to stay strong and to imagine a day when the Taliban loses power. Not wanting to add to his families’ troubles, he avoids speaking about the challenges he faces adapting to life in Portugal. He wears a golden ring that his mother gave him two days before he left Afghanistan, to remember his family.“Sometimes they’re giving me hope,” he said, “and sometimes I’m giving them hope.”Mohammad Sorosh Reka, 16, with his sitar at the compound. “Sometimes they’re giving me hope,” he said of his family in Afghanistan, “and sometimes I’m giving them hope.”Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesHe blames the United States and its allies, at least in part, for the turmoil in his home country.“They were our friends and helping us, telling us they were here to help us at any time,” Sorosh said. “When the Taliban took Afghanistan, they just left and disappeared. That’s why we are very hopeless and sad.”At night, the students often dream about Afghanistan. Amanullah Noori, 17, the concertmaster of the school orchestra, has recurring nightmares about Taliban attackers, armed with guns, descending on his parents’ home in Kabul. Sometimes he dreams about trying to return to Afghanistan, only to be blocked by the Taliban.He receives messages from friends back in Afghanistan, fellow musicians who have given up their careers because of Taliban restrictions on playing music. They tell him they have hidden their instruments inside closets and cellars, fearing they might be attacked for being artists.“The Taliban doesn’t want to hear music anymore,” Amanullah said. “They want a world that is silent.”Embracing Afghan IdentityStudents from a sitar ensemble play traditional songs, part of their effort to preserve Afghan culture.For months on end last fall, Zohra was trapped in Kabul, unable to get a passport to leave Afghanistan.She watched with envy as her classmates fled for Doha on special flights arranged by the government of Qatar. (A global network of philanthropists, artists, educators and officials helped the school get its students and staff, and their relatives, to safety.)As the weeks stretched on, Zohra began to doubt whether she would ever be able to join her friends and teachers. She remembered the days in Kabul when she and her classmates played music late into the night and sang together in the school choir.At her uncle’s home, Zohra passed the time by learning to weave handkerchiefs, bags and scarves. There were only a few books left in the home, which she read so many times, she said, that she could recite some passages by memory.Sometimes, when no one was watching, she said she put her hands in the air and pretended to play her trumpet.“I could hear it in my head,” she said, “just like when I was in the practice room.”Farida Ahmadi, left, and her cousin Zohra, in their room at the compound. When the Taliban took power last year back home, Zohra’s trumpet became a liability.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesThen, in mid-November, nearly three months after the Taliban seized power, Zohra, her uncle, Juma Ahmadi, and her cousin, Farida, 13, who also studied at the institute, got their passports. They boarded a flight for Doha, where they were quarantined and awaited visas to enter Portugal.When they landed, Sarmast, the school’s leader, hugged them and cried as they rushed off the plane. They were the last three in the group to make it out of Afghanistan.“There was never a moment,” he told them, “when I doubted that I would get you out.”On her first day in Doha, Zohra started a journal. She wrote that she was heading to Europe to begin life as a refugee.“I am hopeful,” she wrote, “that the future in Portugal is bright for us all.”Sevinch Majidi, 18, and Shogufa Safi, 18, students at the institute, walking in the Lisbon neighborhood near the compound. Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesOver time, the girls — who make up about a quarter of the school’s 100 students — have begun to feel more at ease. They have learned to ride bicycles in the school’s courtyard. They occasionally join the boys for lunch at McDonald’s, teasing them about their stylish sunglasses. They go out on weekends, to the beach or shopping for clothes or chocolate chip cookies.Sevinch Majidi, 18, a violinist, said she felt she had the freedom to pursue her own education and interests in Portugal, free from expectations around marriage and child-rearing and the restrictions of Afghanistan’s patriarchal society.“When I was walking on the streets of Kabul, I was scared,” said Sevinch, who plays in an all-female ensemble at the school. “This is the first time I can walk without fear, without being scared.”The boys, too, are changing. While many of them felt pressure in Kabul to go to mosques regularly, some have taken a more relaxed approach to their faith in Portugal, choosing to sleep through services during the Eid holidays.Sami Haidari, 15, a cellist, enjoying a swim in the Tagus River. “We have water in Afghanistan,” he said, “but not like this.”Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesAfter rehearsal one day for upcoming concerts in Portugal and abroad, a group of boys went swimming in the Tagus River, on the edge of the Atlantic.Sami Haidari, a 15-year-old cellist, paused before he went into the water. He took in the ocean scene — men in fluorescent shorts stretched out on the sand next to women in bikinis — and wiggled his toes in the sand. Joining hands with his friends, he charged toward the water.“I feel free; the ocean brings us freedom,” he said after returning to shore, his teeth chattering. “We have water in Afghanistan, but not like this. Afghanistan’s water is very small. That’s not free.”Remembering HomeLife in Lisbon has at times been a challenge, but the students turn to music to remember Afghanistan and their families.In Lisbon, Zohra has embraced the strangeness of her new surroundings. She is a star student in Portuguese, she plays jazz in the wind ensemble, and she has learned to cook eggs and potatoes on her own.In her journal, she jots down her plans to lead a music school of her own one day, alongside reflections on music and a few short stories, including one about gamblers in New York City.“There are not any human beings without wishes and dreams,” she wrote in her journal. “I am one of these humans too. One can’t be without dreams because dreams give us hope.”“If you have a dream, follow it, even if it’s the worst of dreams,” she added. “One has to struggle for the best of dreams and for the worst of dreams.”Zohra at school. She is a star student in Portuguese.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesPortuguese vocabulary in Zohra’s room.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesInside Room 509 of the former military hospital, where she lives with her uncle and her cousin, she has hung drawings of ballerinas and horses. A poster lists the Portuguese words for family members: mãe, pai, irmão, irmã.There are reminders of Afghanistan: photos of her grandfather, decorated with hearts and butterflies; a book of poems; and a painting of her grandmother.Below a gold vase on the windowsill is the container of rocks and soil from the ancestral grave. Next to it, she keeps another container filled with the soil she collected from the campus of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music in Kabul.Zohra said she still remembered peaceful days in Ghazni Province, when her family gathered near the mountains and made chicken soup and kebabs. She said she hopes that her parents can join her some day in Lisbon, too.Looking out at the Tagus River from her room, she said the people of Afghanistan needed music, just like residents of other countries.“I really want to go back to Afghanistan some day,” she said. “When the Taliban are not there.”Zohra’s room with a view. She would like to return to Afghanistan one day, she said, “when the Taliban are not there.”Isabella Lanave for The New York Times More

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      A Global Hit, ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ Finally Lands in New York

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      The splashy show, an example par excellence of what makes modern French musicals distinctive, begins a run at Lincoln Center.When Americans are asked to name French musicals, their go-to is “Les Misérables,” which opened in Paris in 1980 before an extensively retooled English version went on to conquer the world a few years later.That, or some of the films that Jacques Demy directed in the 1960s, like “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and “The Young Girls of Rochefort.”Usually not mentioned on our shores are the wildly popular homegrown stage musicals that appeared in France in the late 1990s. But now the most famous of them, “Notre Dame de Paris,” is having its New York premiere at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center on Wednesday, and will run there through July 24.One of its creators has issues with the terminology used to describe his work, though.“I don’t think of ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ as musical theater,” the composer Richard Cocciante said by video from Rome, where he was preparing for a concert tour in Italy. “For me it’s a people’s opera. That’s because it’s entirely sung-through. We don’t call the numbers arias, though: ‘Belle’ or ‘Le temps des cathédrales’ stand alone as songs,” he added, mentioning two of the show’s many sweeping ballads and its biggest hits.The show, a spectacle with a cast of 30, made its debut in Paris in 1998.Alessandro DobiciBased, like “Les Misérables,” on an epic 19th-century novel by Victor Hugo (which also inspired the Disney animated film “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” to name just one of many adaptations), “Notre Dame de Paris” successfully exploited a distinctively French approach to modern stage musicals.The lyricist Luc Plamondon already had a successful career writing for artists both in his native Quebec (a certain belter released an album of his songs, “Dion chante Plamondon,” in 1992) and in France, where he wrote the lyrics for the musical “Starmania” in the late 1970s. (That perennial favorite is returning to the Paris stage in November.)Looking for another long-form project two decades later, Plamondon thought that “Notre Dame de Paris” would be a fitting source and called up Cocciante, who happened to have a tape of odds-and-ends melodies laying around.“The first song began with him singing ‘Time … da-da-da,’” Plamondon, 80, hummed on the phone. He had been thinking of the scene in the 1956 film adaptation in which Anthony Quinn, as the hunchback, Quasimodo, begs Gina Lollobrigida’s Esmeralda, the object of all the men’s attentions, for water. “He’s chained to the wheel and he goes ‘Belle … belle …’” Plamondon continued, quoting the French word for beautiful. “That gave me the idea to replace ‘time’ with ‘belle’ in the song.”And they were off. “From then on it gushed out of both us,” Cocciante, 76, said. “We wrote ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ in a kind of trance.”Hélène Ségara as Esmeralda in the original 1998 production of “Notre Dame de Paris.”Stephane Cardinale/Sygma, via Getty ImagesIn the French answer to a backers’ audition, he played the score on the piano and sang all the parts for the producer Charles Talar, who signed on and booked a run at the Palais des Congrès in Paris for the fall of 1998.It was fitting for Talar to get that venue, which is not a traditional theater but a cavernous concert hall, because he came from the music industry: He wanted to release an album first, then build on it to sell the stage show. It’s an approach Andrew Lloyd Webber successfully used for “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Evita,” but overall it’s not common in the United States and Britain, where a show precedes its recording.“He assumed he could activate the networks he had built and use some of the same strategies he used to sell records,” Nicolas Talar said on Zoom, recalling his father’s game plan. (Charles Talar died in 2020.) “The idea was to familiarize audiences with the music before the show started. The specificity of French musicals is that we promote them the way we would promote a pop record. If one or two songs become popular, you’re the star of the moment, you get on television and people want to see you,” he added. “The only way to hear ‘Belle’ live was to see the musical.”That song, a trio for the three men in love with Esmeralda, was released in the spring of 1998, months before the show’s opening, and went on to become the biggest-selling single of the year in France.“There was this miracle — I don’t know how else to describe it — of ‘Belle,’” said Daniel Lavoie, 73, who played the archdeacon Frollo in the original production and is back in the cassock for the New York run. “It was almost 5 minutes, which was inconceivable on the radio at the time because they didn’t play anything longer than 3 minutes. I remember that at our first TV appearance we were asked to do the song again. We knew then we were onto something.”Another number, “Le temps des cathédrales,” was almost as popular — many Americans might have discovered it on the 2015 Josh Groban album “Stages” — cementing the status of “Notre Dame” as the It show that year. And unlike in the United States, where stage personalities don’t tend to make a dent on the Billboard Hot 100, it turned the cast members Garou, Patrick Fiori and Hélène Ségara into pop stars. (Lavoie already had an established career as a singer by then.)“Notre Dame” was so huge that other producers followed in Talar’s footsteps, most prominently Dove Attia, who was behind the popular “Les Dix Commandements” (2000), “Le Roi Soleil” (2005) and “Mozart, l’opéra rock” (2009). That last was among the few to actually, er, rock, which may partly help explain why those shows have not had much of an impact in English-speaking countries, where the tolerance for a high ratio of power ballads seems to be lower than in France, Russia or South Korea.A decisive move by the “Notre Dame” team was to have the cast sing live to recorded tracks, which are still used in productions worldwide, though the New York engagement will supplement them with a full orchestra. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Lavoie said in English, before reverting back to French. “‘Notre Dame de Paris’ was conceived as a show outside of time.”“Notre Dame” has been translated into eight languages and performed in 23 countries, though its producers now prefer presenting it in the original French, which is how its cast of 30 will perform it in New York (with English supertitles). Still, this and similar musicals have faced an uphill battle to win over reviewers at home.“Musical theater doesn’t get much critical support in France,” said Laurent Valière, the producer and host of the weekly program “42e Rue” on French public radio as well as the author of a book about musicals. “The press pans it — sometimes with good reason and sometimes not.” (Full disclosure: I have been a guest commentator on the show.)The French hit factory seems to have hit a snag in recent years as it strains to find successors to the blockbusters of the 2000s. There are oddities like the biomusical “Bernadette de Lourdes,” which is based on the true story of a young girl who claimed to see the Virgin Mary and plays in Lourdes, the town where it all happened. In a different vein is “Résiste,” a jukebox musical based on France Gall’s pop songbook that benefited from a live band playing the original arrangements and contributions from the rising choreographer Marion Motin.Still, “Notre Dame de Paris” endures. “Another distinctive trait is that no matter where it’s playing, it’s staged the same way,” said Nicolas Talar, who is now producing the show and copresenting it in New York. (He also has producing credits on Broadway’s “Funny Girl” and “Moulin Rouge! The Musical.”)“Sometimes we wonder if the show has become outdated, but the themes are evergreen and the music was intentionally arranged to sound timeless, so we keep postponing making changes,” he added. “So far audiences haven’t complained and the show is doing well, so we’re staying the course.” More

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      A Perfect Weekend in Asbury Park, N.J.

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      An hourlong drive from Manhattan offers a seaside idyll for rockers, diners, surfers, art patrons and fans of just relaxing on the beach. Here’s how to make the most of a weekend there.To call Asbury Park a secret would betray its tumultuous and storied history: A wellspring of American music, tucked around the swamps of Jersey. A home to national icons. A vibrant L.G.B.T.Q. community. A city that bears the scars of the civil rights movement, blighted for decades by mismanagement and mistrust, that’s now in the midst of a soaring recovery fueled by the very soul that gave Asbury its reason for being: music.Now Asbury Park is called “the Coolest Small Town in America” by travel magazines and is regularly placed on “top beach destinations” lists.Yet just an hourlong drive from Manhattan without traffic, Asbury Park still feels like a discovery, a New Orleans-meets-Dogtown city by the sea that’s ignored by the bumper-to-bumper traffic of the Long Island Expressway out to the Hamptons, the overcrowded ferries shuttling day-trippers to Rockaway Beach or the snarled causeway lined with cars to Long Beach Island.Ignored, of course, at their own loss. Because as I’ve learned since my first trip to Asbury 25 years ago, to catch the Warped Tour with my dad in the lot behind the storied Stone Pony, Asbury Park offers a Jersey Shore idyll for all comers: the rockers, diners, surfers, art patrons and just fans of a simple relaxing day on the beach. I’ve been keeping a rotating and updated list of suggestions for friends and family for years now to help them have the perfect summer weekend. Now I’ll share it with Times readers, too.The beach scene in Asbury Park, which is regularly placed on lists of “top beach destinations.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesA beach weekendYou’re here for the beach, so let’s start with that. Most important: This is the Jersey Shore, home to paid beach access and draconian parking rules. Asbury Park, fortunately, has ample parking near the beach, and imposes no time limit on metered parking, though it will run you $3 an hour from 8 a.m. to 2 a.m. with no discounts on a full day rate. Then an all-day beach pass costs $6 per person on weekdays, and climbs to $9 on the weekend.OK, time to pick a jetty. Surfers, head north, as the only summertime surf beach during lifeguard hours is off Eighth Avenue and Deal Lake Drive (of course, no restrictions on dawn patrol or sunset sessions). Non-surfers eager to shred can book lessons at the surf beach through Summertime Surf. For the similarly active but terra firma crowd, make for the beaches near Sixth Avenue and look for the volleyball nets to join a pickup game or host your own.The northern beaches are also home to the “dog beach,” a necessity in a city where bars build puppy playgrounds, host dog-friendly “Yappy Hours” and the Mardi Gras parade centers on costumed pooches; it’s not uncommon to see dogs in party hats trotting along the boardwalk following a birthday shindig. So, in the early mornings and every night after 6:30 p.m., the beach near Deal Lake is open to dogs (and their owners).For those just looking to sit on the beach and relax, pick up a beach read at the Asbury Book Cooperative, a unique and locally owned bookstore that operates as a co-op, with members given voting power over decisions and discounts on new books.Bars, restaurants and a pinball museum are among the diversions on the Asbury Park boardwalk.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThe Asbury Park boardwalk, storied as it may be through its appearances in Springsteen songs and Sopranos scenes, is not the kind of amusement park-on-the-water that many other Shore towns claim; more restaurants and bars line the planks here. But there’s still some traditional beach fun, including the Asbury Splash Park, where sprinklers, hoses and other water-emitting devices line the lot for children. And the Silverball Pinball Museum, an arcade that doubles as a museum of historic pinball machines dating back to the 1950s, offers an opportunity to join the wizards down on Pinball Way.The Stone Pony has been a favorite spot for music since the 1970s.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesA music weekendEvery September, Asbury Park is the site of SeaHearNow, a nationally recognized, two-day festival, but on any given weekend, it can feel like its own music festival, as anywhere from a brewery to a bookstore to a coffee shop to a hotel lobby sometimes plays host to live music.Start off in the afternoon at the Transparent Clinch Gallery, where local artists play on an intimate stage beneath the gaze of countless music legends photographed by the renowned photographer Danny Clinch. A Jersey Shore native, Mr. Clinch has photographed Bruce Springsteen, the Foo Fighters, Tupac and more, and his gallery on the eastern end of the Asbury Hotel is packed with portraits of iconic artists, including a (nearly) life-size Mr. Springsteen leaning against a muscle car that visitors can pose with for a picture. Mr. Clinch will often join the bands onstage with his harmonica, holding down a recent blues duet with the local Seaside band Johnny Nameless.The Saint — “packed into a sliver of a space that could easily double as a punky dive bar” — is another storied music venue in Asbury Park.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesFrom there, walk downtown to the House of Independents, a large sunken venue that can pack 500 fans in for a Jersey punk showcase, a more reflective, indie marquee night or simply put a D.J. onstage and have a dance party. Close the night by heading a couple blocks down to the Saint, a venue that feels unchanged since it opened its doors in 1994, for a mix of local artists and nationally touring bands, that are packed into a sliver of a space that could easily double as a punky dive bar.R Bar, a New Jersey-meets-New-Orleans restaurant and bar on Main Street, hosts a brass brunch on Saturday and a blues brunch on Sunday in the backyard garden.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThe second day of our self-styled festival kicks off with brunch at R Bar, a new standout New Orleans-themed restaurant on Main Street that hosts a brass brunch on Saturday and a blues brunch on Sunday in the backyard garden. Grab a Kane Head High on draft and some blue crab beignets and settle in for a perfect Jersey-meets-New-Orleans combo.The main event is down Second Avenue, where the siren song from the legendary Stone Pony is still echoing down the boardwalk, 48 years since it first opened its doors, and Mr. Springsteen still shows up on occasion. The venue’s Summer Stage, housed in the back lot, hosts major national acts from Phil Lesh to Jason Isbell to the Bouncing Souls, while the aftershow might be inside the Pony, where local bands grace the same stage that Mr. Springsteen, Stevie Van Zandt and Southside Johnny regularly called home.If your ears aren’t ringing yet, head back on the boardwalk at the Asbury Park Yacht Club, which often has late night concerts going past midnight on the weekends, and sweaty dancers spilling out into the salt air.For a sit-down dinner, head to Pascal & Sabine for French-inspired fare.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesA food tour, Jersey styleAsbury’s many music venues may only be eclipsed by the booming restaurant scene. There’s a lot to eat, so let’s start early.This is New Jersey, after all, so for breakfast, you’re going to eat that greasy, salty chopped pork shoulder product: Taylor Ham (or, as they call it in Asbury, Pork Roll). It’s available all over the city, but for the best experience, head to the Johnny Pork Roll truck in the North Eats Food Truck park and get the Sandwich, a traditional pork roll, egg and cheese with “saltpepperketchup,” a condiment accompaniment that must be uttered in a single breath.At the Johnny Pork Roll truck in the North Eats Food Truck park, try the locally traditional pork roll, egg and cheese sandwich.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesIf experimenting with the state’s most precious and peculiar cuisine is not in the cards, head to Cardinal Provisions for a mix of traditional brunch standards and original takes, like the cacio e pepe eggs.You’ll want to walk off that breakfast, so stroll downtown toward Frank’s Deli and Restaurant for a classic, multi-page laminated menu and formica-topped booths. There’s nothing bad on this menu, but you’re here for jaw-locking Italian sandwiches. Order them like Anthony Bourdain used to: a heaping pile of ham, salami, pepperoni, provolone, tomatoes, onions, shredded lettuce and hot peppers, drenched in oil and vinegar.Frank’s Deli and Restaurant is a New Jersey institution, famous for its Italian sandwiches, a favorite of Anthony Bourdain.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesNow, dinner can go in two directions. You could fashion a full pizza tour, sampling all the styles of New Jersey in the Asbury square mile. Start at Maruca’s on the boardwalk for a slice of “Tomato Pie” a Jersey original where the sauce swirls like a spiral out from the center, mingling with the cheese rather than being buried by it. Then Talula’s hawks some of the best Neapolitan pizzas in New Jersey or New York, sourcing all their ingredients from local farms identified on a blackboard above the bar. Or head to Killer Pies for a traditional slice and a custom, classic fountain soda.For more of a sit-down dinner, head to Heirloom at St. Laurent (where a $75 prix-fixe meal with a signature duck dish may be the finest dining in town), Pascal & Sabine for French-inspired fare, or Barrio Costero for elevated Mexican cooking and some of the best shrimp tacos on the shore. The boardwalk is home to Langosta Lounge and its famous Surf Curry, with fresh seafood floating in a house blend of yellow and green curry. Newcomer R Bar offers classic Big Easy dishes like gumbo, but also Jersey-inspired spins like a fried pork roll sandwich that is a homage to the famous fried bologna sandwich at Turkey and the Wolf in New Orleans. And since the fish are swimming so close by, there’s plenty of seafood at the Bonney Read.If you saved room for dessert, head to Confections of a Rockstar and order cupcakes and other treats like a Macaroon 5, S’more than a Feeling or a Oreo Speedwagon (I could keep going but I’ll save some surprises for the visit).The Asbury Ocean Club is one of the newest and most luxurious hotels in town.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesWhere to stayUnlike many Jersey Shore towns, Asbury Park boasts multiple large hotels with full amenities and a range of prices. To experience the new, modern essence of Asbury, stay at the Asbury, a hotel fashioned out of the historic Salvation Army building that often has live music in the lobby, a rooftop bar and a pool out back (weekdays start at $395, weekends $660). Just across Bradley Park is the Berkeley Oceanfront Hotel, a long-running hotel that has been remodeled and upgraded (weekdays start at $295, weekends $459). At the other end of the beach is the Empress hotel (weekdays $229, weekends $339), a popular spot for L.G.B.T.Q. visitors, with views of the ocean.For those looking for luxury, the new Asbury Ocean Club (weekdays start at $585, weekends $905), housed in a shimmering glass tower at the center of the beach expanse, is like stepping out of Asbury and into a Hamptons or South Beach scene. The lobby, bar and pool is all on the second floor of the hotel, with the only street exposure a small vestibule with elevators. And the St. Laurent ($425 to $600 most nights), newly opened this summer in the historic Hotel Tides building, counts 20 individually styled rooms — each is decorated with a custom surfboard by a local artist and comes with complimentary beach passes — above an expansive restaurant, whiskey bar and backyard pool.52 Places for a Changed WorldThe 2022 list highlights places around the globe where travelers can be part of the solution.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. More

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      in Theater

      Cabaret Champion Michael Feinstein Teams With Café Carlyle

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      The performer and entrepreneur is ending his partnership with 54 Below and will perform his first-ever shows at the Upper East Side venue in October.One of cabaret’s most famous champions is about to forge a new collaboration with one of its most storied venues, and end his association with another.On Oct. 11-22, Michael Feinstein will perform a series of shows marking a new relationship with Café Carlyle, the Upper East Side room renowned for its association with Bobby Short. Since opening in 1955, the Carlyle has hosted generations of cabaret fixtures and aspirants, from Eartha Kitt and Elaine Stritch to the “American Idol” hopeful Katharine McPhee and the designer Isaac Mizrahi.The new arrangement will mark the end of Feinstein’s creative partnership with 54 Below, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in June. Feinstein, a historian and archivist as well as a performer and entrepreneur, had joined forces with the younger venue, which bills itself as “Broadway’s living room,” in 2015; Feinstein’s/54 Below was the recipient of an honor as part of the Tony Awards last month. Before that, he was affiliated with another hotel not far from the Carlyle; Feinstein’s at the Regency closed in 2013.“I’m excited for 54 Below and their future and for my future and the future of my brand,” Feinstein told The Times. “I’ve been thinking about a move for two years now. I’ve accomplished everything I had envisioned with Feinstein’s/54 Below and I felt like it was time to make a change. How do you top a Tony Honors? You do it by joining forces with Café Carlyle, the most prestigious nightclub in the world. I couldn’t be more thrilled.”Feinstein’s October shows will be his first ever at the Carlyle; he is expected to perform more engagements there in the future.In a joint statement, the 54 Below partners Richard Frankel, Tom Viertel and Steven Baruch said, “We’ve enjoyed our six-year relationship with Michael and wish him well at the Café Carlyle. We decided several months ago that we would be returning to our original name of 54 Below and shared that information with him and his management. We look forward to what the next 10 years hold for 54 Below and bringing to Broadway’s living room more brilliant new artists and legendary performers.”Café Carlyle will not adjust its name. In a statement, Marlene Poynder, the managing director of the Carlyle Hotel, said the venue is looking forward to “adding the Feinstein name to the Café Carlyle legacy.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘This Much I Know to Be True’ Review: Nick Cave Prepares for the Stage

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      A new music documentary by Andrew Dominik explores the collaboration of Cave and Warren Ellis.The singer-songwriter (and novelist and screenwriter) Nick Cave is a longtime chronicler of dread, erotic obsession, morality and mortality. The director Andrew Dominik, not exactly a screwball comedy guy himself (“Killing Them Softly”), proved an apt collaborator with Cave on the 2016 documentary “One More Time With Feeling.”That film was a tricky proposition, undertaken in the wake of the 2015 death of Cave’s teenage son Arthur. It documented the making of “Skeleton Tree,” one of Cave and his band the Bad Seeds’ most moving records.The new “This Much I Know to Be True,” shot in spring 2021 before a tour, and largely devoted to presenting songs from the recent albums “Ghosteen” and “Carnage,” is a lighter affair. It opens with Cave speaking about how he handled the pandemic: “I took the government’s advice,” he says, pausing to chuckle, “and retrained as a ceramicist.” He then shows off sculptures depicting a history of the devil.Cave’s partner in music, the multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis, is the other main presence here. (Marianne Faithfull, a stalwart friend of Cave’s, pops in for a memorable scene.) Cave waxes droll on their collaboration: “He took a subordinate role of embellishing what was going on,” he says of Ellis, adding, “And slowly, one by one, taking out each member of the Bad Seeds. I know I’m the next to go.” More seriously, he talks about the Red Hand Files, his newsletter, a sort of metaphysical advice column, in which he exercises a compassion that he admits “doesn’t come naturally.”Dominik shows off his own inventive playfulness here. He shifts aspect ratios from shot to shot. He lays bare cinematic contrivances by showing dolly tracks in a shot, only then to fake out the viewer with a lighting trick. A rather fun Nick Cave movie might not have been on your 2022 bingo card, but here we are.This Much I Know to Be TrueNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Mubi. More

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      in Music

      Kool & the Gang Get the Dance Floor Moving. Have They Gotten Their Due?

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      The group’s funk, disco and pop songs have been sampled over 1,800 times, but haven’t collected the same accolades as many contemporaries. A new boxed set takes a look back.“Do something,” the producer Gene Redd instructed the drummer George Brown and the bassist Robert “Kool” Bell during an early recording session in New York. “Say something! Sing something.”That prompt in the late ’60s was what Kool & the Gang — a jazz group with a crack horn section that evolved into funk, then transitioned to disco — needed to get moving. “Right off the top of the heads,” Brown, 73, said of group’s early years, when it was making instrumental tracks influenced by both James Moody and James Brown. “We’d just start, and bingo, there it is: ‘Raw Hamburger’ and ‘Chocolate Buttermilk,’” he added, referring to two memorable tracks. “It just flowed. And we’re just grooving.”Over nearly six decades, Kool & the Gang have released 25 albums and toured worldwide, playing Live Aid in 1985 and Glastonbury in 2011. Their 12 Top 10 singles are funk, disco and pop classics, underpinning movies including “Pulp Fiction” and “Legally Blonde”: “Jungle Boogie,” “Ladies Night,” “Hollywood Swinging,” the undeniable 1980 party anthem “Celebration.” They are foundational for hip-hop and have been sampled over 1,800 times, according to the website WhoSampled, including memorable turns on Eric B. & Rakim’s “Don’t Sweat the Technique” and Nas’s “N.Y. State of Mind.” (Questlove played a three-hour-plus set of songs featuring the group’s samples during a 2020 livestream.)Yet Kool & the Gang haven’t collected the same accolades as many of their contemporaries. They haven’t even reached the ballot for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Why?“We’re asking the same question,” said Bell, 71, in a separate interview. The bassist and singer left the Imperial Lords street gang and joined the first version of the group in Jersey City, N.J., in 1964.A new boxed set out this week, “The Albums Vol. 1: 1970-1978,” makes an argument for the band’s influence — 199 tracks over 13 CDs, celebrating a transitional period, one that would push the group to the edge of megastardom. (Part 2, covering the ’80s, is due in the fall.)Bell was video chatting from Orlando, Fla., wearing a leopard-print dress shirt, with a bass, a Kool & the Gang-branded guitar and framed gold and platinum records behind him. He’s an animated storyteller, delighting in remembering the band’s early days in Youngstown, Ohio, when he and his brother Ronald Khalis Bell, often credited under his Muslim name, Khalis Bayyan, pounded on empty paint cans to make rhythms.Their father, Bobby, was a boxer who hung out with the jazzmen Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk; Monk later became Robert’s godfather. Robert tried boxing, but only lasted a year. When the family moved to Jersey City, he fell in with local gangs.Music eventually pulled him out: The group sparked when Ronald visited the home of a high-school classmate, Robert “Spike” Mickens, who could flawlessly play the jazz classic “Desafinado.” Soon the Bell brothers were hanging around Mickens’s house, and Kool picked up a guitar, learning the one-note bass part in Herbie Mann’s “Comin’ Home Baby.” His instinctive style, with help from his more accomplished brother, became the group’s rhythmic foundation.“Didn’t take no lessons. Nothing like that,” Bell said. “Just listening.”Through most of the band’s early period, Kool & the Gang had no bona fide singer, and for a while, it didn’t matter. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesThey formed the Jazz Birds, then the Jazziacs, then Kool and the Flames, after Bell’s street nickname, modified from a friend called Cool. In 1969, wanting to avoid trouble from James Brown and His Famous Flames, they renamed themselves Kool & the Gang.The group found a manager and began playing gigs, learning Brown and Motown hits, backing minor R&B stars in their swings through town. “So now you have the jazz and the funk coming together,” Bell said. The band’s live, mostly instrumental 1970 debut “Kool and the Gang” reflected this combination.Kool & the Gang were prolific, and their sound evolved over a long period. Michael Neidus — global commercial manager for the British record label Demon Music Group, which licensed the Kool & the Gang catalog from their longtime label, Universal Music, for the boxed sets — decided to separate the group’s more grooving ’70s phase, when the band frequently worked with the producer Redd, from the smash-hit era that begins with “Ladies Night” in 1979 and “Celebration” in 1980.“It’s too much in one go,” he said. “There are two distinct periods of the band’s success.”Even in the band’s first decade, it was clear that other musicians were paying close attention to their sound. In Indianapolis in the early ’70s, Funk Inc. was studying early Kool & the Gang albums. Funk Inc. interpolated “Kools Back Again” into its own “Kool Is Back,” which was memorably sampled many times.“They pitched a good pocket,” said Steve Weakley, Funk Inc.’s guitarist, in an interview. “They had single-note lines in the melodies.”“Celebration” is one of the most recognizable songs in pop, appearing on numerous best-of playlists for weddings and sporting events.Frederic REGLAIN/GettyThrough most of the band’s early period, Kool & the Gang had no bona fide singer, and for a while, it didn’t matter. When a record executive requested they make their own version of Manu Dibango’s hit “Soul Makossa,” Kool & the Gang came up with “Jungle Boogie,” “Funky Stuff” and “Hollywood Swinging” during a one-day marathon rehearsal session in New York for their “Wild and Peaceful” album.“These guys could make hit records with no singers,” said Pete Rock, the D.J. and producer whose Jamaican family in the Bronx owned all the Kool & the Gang singles and albums. “Funky as hell — that’s the only way to describe that rhythm section.”Rock said once the pioneering hip-hop D.J. Kool Herc of the Bronx popularized the isolation of breakbeats grabbed from other artists’ records, Kool & the Gang became essential: “Everybody was on a James Brown kick in hip-hop, but certain producers listened to other music by other groups.”By the late ’70s, Kool & the Gang had survived long enough to realize they could be even bigger if they found their elusive frontman. Dick Griffey, a concert promoter, was the first to suggest the idea, and the group hired James “JT” Taylor.A small detail at the end of “Ladies Night” turned out to be crucial — Meekaaeel Muhammad, a member of the group’s songwriting team, fleshed out the chorus with a countermelodic “Come on, let’s celebrate.” It pointed to the band’s next hit: “Celebration,” based on an idea from Ronald Khalis Bell. “The track had that kind of down-home feeling, almost like you’re somewhere in Alabama, with grandma sitting on the porch with some lemonade. A rocking-chair vibe,” Bell said. “One of the guys came up with that ‘yahoo!’”“Celebration” is one of the most recognizable songs in pop, on best-of playlists for weddings and sporting events — it was even played on the International Space Station. The track kicked off a commercially rich period in the ’80s (“Get Down On It,” “Cherish,” “Fresh”), but after so many years of funky polyrhythms, disco and pop got “a little boring, if you know what I mean,” Brown said. “You eventually get into it, but it wasn’t like playing jazz or funk. Those two genres, you can stretch out.”The hits mostly dried up by 1989, and the group continued to make albums and tour internationally throughout the ’90s and 2000s, replacing original members with younger artists. In 2011, David Lee Roth saw Kool & the Gang perform at Glastonbury and invited the band to open for Van Halen on its tour the following year. The group’s tracks have streamed 2.8 billion times worldwide to date, according to the tracking service Luminate.But the last few years have been difficult. Ronald Khalis Bell and the saxophonist Dennis “Dee Tee” Thomas, died; Robert Bell lost his wife and another brother. When the pandemic hit, the group’s remaining members had to cut off their touring schedule. Discussing this period, Bell’s smile drooped, and he turned contemplative. “A lot of memories,” he said. “But we continue to move on.”Brown said a new album is scheduled for October, and the band is on the road once again.Perhaps it will eventually reach the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, too. Bell smiled wryly. “Yeah, well,” he said. “Maybe next year.” More