More stories

  • in

    Abdul Wadud, Cellist Who Crossed Musical Boundaries, Dies at 75

    He performed with classical ensembles, but he was best known for his work with cutting-edge composers and improvisers like Anthony Davis and Julius Hemphill.Abdul Wadud, a distinctive cellist who crossed genres and was a key collaborator with the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis, died on Aug. 10 in Cleveland. He was 75.His son, the R&B singer Raheem DeVaughn, said the death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of multiple recent illnesses.Mr. Wadud converted to Islam while in college but continued to use his given name, Ronald DeVaughn, when playing with classical ensembles, as he did with the New Jersey Symphony in the 1970s.He also performed in Broadway pit bands and with Stevie Wonder. But he is best known for his work with Mr. Davis, the saxophonist and composer Julius Hemphill, and others who were central to the development of American composition and improvisation in the late 20th century.Skilled at eliciting variations of instrumental color with a bow, Mr. Wadud pioneered a pizzicato language on the cello that was sometimes subtle, sometimes booming.For many of his contemporaries, the first taste of his instrumental prowess came via his appearance on Mr. Hemphill’s 1972 album, “Dogon A.D.” (Like many important recordings featuring Mr. Wadud, it is currently out of print.)Over the title track’s unusual loping groove, Mr. Wadud supported Mr. Hemphill’s saxophone lines with crying, bluesy bowed phrases as well as some select, forcefully plucked notes. Baikida Carroll, the trumpeter on that session — and, like Mr. Hemphill, a member of the St. Louis-based Black Artists Group — remembered Mr. Wadud’s insightful questioning during rehearsals about that composition’s 11/16 meter.“He asked Julius about the relation of the drum part and the cello part, how they hook up,” Mr. Carroll recalled in an interview, adding that he “pointedly observed” Mr. Wadud’s working methods “because I was, like, This is the cat!”The composer, trombonist and scholar George Lewis said in an interview that he regarded Mr. Wadud’s playing on “Dogon A.D.” as a landmark of 20th-century music. He tied that performance to Mr. Wadud’s later solo recording, “By Myself,” which is also out of print.“There’s the electricity — he’s amplified — there’s the funk, there’s the off-meter; a lot of the stuff that turns up being crystallized in ‘By Myself’ is sort of foreshadowed in ‘Dogon A.D,’” Mr. Lewis said. “It’s like James Brown — but I bet even James Brown couldn’t have done it if it had been in 11/16.” (A 1977 live performance of the piece is included on a boxed set of Mr. Hemphill’s work, released in 2021 by New World Records.)Mr. Wadud did not record much of his own music, aside from his 1977 solo LP, but his solo work had an impact. Writing in The New York Times about the Abdul original “Camille,” from “By Myself,” the cellist Tomeka Reid praised him for using “the whole range of the cello” and moving “between lyrical, free playing and groove with ease, something I strive to do in my own work.” In a recent interview, Ms. Reid added, “What Pablo Casals did for the Bach suites, I feel like Abdul Wadud did for the new generation of cello in jazz.”Around the time of “By Myself,” Mr. Lewis chose Mr. Wadud for an ensemble that performed the Lewis composition “Monads,” his attempt to “come to terms” with the graphic scores of the composer Morton Feldman.“Abdul knew all about that kind of thing; he knew more about it than I did,” Mr. Lewis said. “That combination, of having the strong kind of Black bass and having all these other possibilities — equally strong — made him someone you could work with who was super versatile and could do anything.”Similarly, the clarinetist J.D. Parran noted that “you could run into Abdul Wadud anywhere.” He remembered with particular pleasure seeing “this gigantic smile” on Mr. Wadud’s face during their tour with Stevie Wonder, in support of the album “Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants.” (Mr. Parran added that Mr. Wadud was the contractor for the ambitious, larger than usual outfit Mr. Wonder used on that tour.)Mr. DeVaughn, Mr. Wadud’s son, recalled his father offering his ear when Mr. DeVaughn was recording his album “The Love Reunion.” “He went with me to a couple studio sessions,” the son said. “And he would make some cool suggestions.”Mr. Wadud in concert at Washington Square Church in Manhattan in 1990.Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos/Getty ImagesRonald Earsall DeVaughn was born on April 30, 1947, in Cleveland, the youngest of 12 children of Alberta Miller and Edward DeVaughn. He studied at Youngstown State University and Oberlin College in Ohio and, though accepted to Yale for graduate work in performance, chose to attend Stony Brook University, on Long Island, for his master’s degree, so that he could study cello with Bernard Greenhouse of the Beaux Arts Trio.In 2014, in one of his last interviews, Mr. Wadud said of Mr. Greenhouse: “He had the ensemble background. At that time, I was thinking if I wanted to do something in classical, it would be in an ensemble, an arranged quartet, piano trio, or something of that nature.”Mr. Wadud clinched some of these chamber music ambitions in the 1980s as part of a stellar trio with Mr. Davis and the flutist and composer James Newton.“A lot of people have spoken about his pizzicato playing, but I was also excited by his arco tone,” Mr. Davis said in an interview, referring to Mr. Wadud’s use of the bow. “He had a unique sound, a beautiful sound. I think James and I were both so excited; it opened up so many avenues in terms of our composition, to create pieces for him.”When the trio performed with the New York Philharmonic, as soloists in an orchestral performance of Mr. Davis’s “Still Waters,” there came a distinct moment of respect for Mr. Wadud’s musicianship, Mr. Newton recalled.“The principal cellist in the orchestra at that time said, ‘Mr. Wadud, what is the fingering that you’re using for this phrase?’” Mr. Newton recalled saying to himself, knowing the Philharmonic’s reputation for icy welcomes, “We got ’em.’”At the same time, Mr. Davis had unwittingly spoiled Mr. Wadud’s strategic use of his dual musical identities, in which he went by his original name, Ronald DeVaughn, for classical gigs while saving the name Abdul Wadud for improvisational work. “He was laughing,” Mr. Davis remembered, “Because, he said, now I had busted him: People in the classical world knew he was Abdul Wadud.”In addition to his son, Mr. Wadud is survived by a daughter, Aisha DeVaughn; a brother, Marvin DeVaughn; a sister, Floretta Perry; and five grandchildren. He was married and divorced twice.Shortly after recording the album “Oakland Duets” with Mr. Hemphill in 1992, Mr. Wadud retired from playing. Mr. Newton said of that decision: “I think when people believe that you’ve changed an instrument, as he did, the level of what they’re looking to hear every night is not always easy.” Citing Mr. Wadud’s ability to operate in so many worlds, he said, “You add all of that together, and the pressures are not minimal.”Ms. Reid said she had tried to coax Mr. Wadud back into playing. He was the guest of honor at the 2016 edition of her Chicago Jazz String Summit. And she repeatedly told him how influential he was.But a revival did not occur. “He was just so humble,” Ms. Reid said. “And I think he was happy that I even reached out to him.” She added that many record companies have since approached her, wondering if Mr. Wadud would be interested in reissuing “By Myself.”Mr. DeVaughn, Mr. Wadud’s son, said that just such a release remains in the cards. “I plan to definitely keep the torch burning,” he said, “and having that stuff put on vinyl.” More

  • in

    Why Do We Love TikTok Audio Memes? Call It Brainfeel.

    Why Do We Love TikTok Audio Memes? Call It Brainfeel. On March 25, 2020, Chris Gleason was in bed at his parents’ house in Pennsylvania, thinking up ideas for videos that might go viral. Just before graduating from college with a musical-theater degree in 2019, he took a job at a nautical-themed restaurant in the […] More

  • in

    Willie Nelson’s Long Encore

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Willie Nelson has a long history of tempting, and cheating, death. In 1969, when his home in Ridgetop, Tenn., caught fire, he raced into the burning house to save two prized possessions, his guitar and a pound of “Colombian grass.” He has emphysema, the consequence of a near-lifetime of chain smoking that began in childhood, when he puffed on cedar bark and grapevines, before turning to cigarettes and then — famously, prodigiously — to marijuana. In 1981, he was taken to a hospital in Hawaii after his left lung collapsed while he was swimming. He underwent a voluntary stem-cell procedure in 2015, in an effort to repair his damaged lungs. Smoking has endangered his life, but it also, he thinks, saved it: He has often said that he would have died long ago had he not taken up weed and laid off drinking, which made him rowdy and self-destructive. Now, in his late 80s, he has reached the age where getting out of bed each morning can be construed as a feat of survival. “Last night I had a dream that I died twice yesterday,” he sang in 2017, “But I woke up still not dead again today.”Still, some close calls are closer than others. One evening in early March 2020, the singer and his wife, Annie, were sitting outside the sprawling log cabin residence at their ranch in Spicewood, Texas, in the Hill Country about 30 miles northwest of Austin. It was warm and clear. The sun was going down. “We were watching the sunset,” Annie recalled not long ago. “And these little lights started to zip across the sky. The first one kind of flashed past in the distance. Then there was a second, which went by a little closer. All of a sudden, the light went right past us — like, two feet over Will’s head.”The couple scrambled into the house and got down on the floor. According to Annie, the neighbors were “having another one of their gun parties. Apparently they got drunk and left a bunch of kids with semiautomatic rifles.” The police, she said, explained that the lights came from tracer bullets. “I said, ‘Are those even legal?’ But of course, nuclear weapons are legal in Texas. I told the police to please just pass along this message: ‘Dude, you don’t want to be the one that kills Willie Nelson. Especially in Texas.’” “Anyway,” she said, “that was the beginning of our Covid quarantine.”Days earlier, Nelson played for a crowd of more than 70,000 at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. Now cities were going into lockdown. Given Nelson’s age and underlying conditions, a deadly virus that attacked the respiratory system was a frightening proposition. So the Nelsons hunkered down in Spicewood, where they were joined by their adult sons — Lukas and Micah, both musicians — and Micah’s wife, Alex. For the first time in decades, Willie Nelson was staring at an empty calendar. For several months, only Annie left the ranch, once a week, to buy groceries. Nelson and his sons played lots of poker, dominoes and chess. Nearly every evening, the three would gather in the living room with their guitars to sing Nelson’s songs and old favorites by the likes of Hank Williams and Roger Miller. “It kept us sane, sort of,” Lukas says. “My dad was bored. He was anxious. He was in a state of existential dread, fearing that this thing he’d done his whole life would never come back.” Nelson tried to keep busy, meeting with a physical therapist for online sessions, sitting for Zoom interviews and performing livestreamed benefit concerts. But his famous tour bus sat by the entrance to the ranch, uncharacteristically idle.Nelson has spent much of his life on tour buses, answering the siren call of the Interstate and the concert hall. “I can’t wait to get on the road again/The life I love is making music with my friends,” he sang, decades ago. There are thousands of songs about roving troubadours, but “On the Road Again” must be the most joyful and unabashed. For Nelson, barnstorming the country with a hot band is pure freedom. There was a moment, in the 1990s, when he pulled himself off the road, signing a contract for a six-month residency at a theater in Branson, Mo. But his cabin fever grew so acute, he wrote in his autobiography, that he took to “pitching a big sleeping tent in my hotel room and pretending I was out in the woods.”Now, during the pandemic, he was marooned again. “Every day,” he says, “it was more and more like a prison sentence.” Sometimes, he would sit in his parked tour bus, “just to pretend I was going somewhere.” “At the end of every tour, Will talks about retiring,” Annie says. “ ‘I think I might retire.’ But then we’ll have a conversation: ‘Well, what would you do if you retired?’ We both know the answer: Just lay down and die. It’s impossible to imagine him not being out there.”Willie Nelson and his band onstage in Austin, Texas, in April.Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesFor as long as anyone can remember, Nelson has been opening his concerts with “Whiskey River.” No one is certain when he started; when you’ve had a career as long as his, the math can get fuzzy. A newspaper reviewer once wrote that the song had been Nelson’s opening number “since the dawn of time,” a claim that stretched the truth, but not by much. The best guess is that it was installed as the set-opener around 1974, which would mean Nelson has sung it at the start of something like 6,500 shows. When you take your seat at one of his concerts, you know the scene that will unfold: A small man with a bandanna and braids will amble onstage, strap on a scuffed nylon-string guitar and launch into a famous chorus. “Whiskey river, take my mind/Don’t let her memory torture me/Whiskey river, don’t run dry/You’re all I’ve got, take care of me.”That’s more or less what transpired this April 29 at Austin’s Moody Center, a new 15,000-seat arena on the campus of the University of Texas. Some 9 months earlier, Nelson’s pandemic concert moratorium had come to an end. That night, he was a warm-up act, opening for another legend, George Strait — at 70, a spring chicken compared with Nelson, and by some measures the most popular country artist of all time, with dozens of No. 1 singles and album sales of nearly 70 million. But Nelson doesn’t play second fiddle to anyone, especially in Austin. The Moody Center sits less than a mile from the university building that, for decades, housed the soundstage for “Austin City Limits,” the live-music TV showcase indelibly associated with Nelson and the outlaw-country movement he spearheaded in the 1970s. Today, “Austin City Limits” is taped in a theater on Willie Nelson Boulevard, the downtown thoroughfare where you’ll find an eight-foot-tall Willie Nelson statue, cast in bronze. There are other works of Nelson-themed public art around town, including a giant “Willie for President” mural that is a magnet for Instagrammers. Shops are full of Nelson merchandise: bobbleheads, shot glasses, T-shirts emblazoned with song lyrics (“Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die”) and bad puns (“Austin is Willie Weird”). George Strait might be a megastar, but in Austin, and nearly everywhere else, Willie is a deity. In 2019, Strait recorded “Sing One with Willie,” a cheeky complaint about how Nelson — who has performed duets with countless artists, from Sinatra and Joni Mitchell to Snoop Dogg and Jessica Simpson — had never bestowed the honor on Strait himself.It was just after 8 p.m. when the house lights dimmed and Nelson took the stage, wearing a straw cowboy hat and a T-shirt that read “I Stand With Ukraine.” Recently, he had switched to performing while sitting down, a concession to age. Video screens suspended from the ceiling captured close-ups of the singer: handsome, white-bearded, with a face as craggy and weather-beaten as a desert outcropping. He gave his usual greeting (“How y’all doing?”), hammered on a chord a half-dozen times and, sure enough, the strains of “Whiskey River” rippled across the arena.When Nelson first recorded the song, in 1973, it was an outlaw-country anthem, a woozy blend of honky-tonk and funk and blues — a sound more redolent of weed than whiskey. Its lyrics sketched the story of a spurned lover with a death wish; it was the testimony of a drowning man. But at the Moody Center, Nelson delivered it with a sly twinkle, like a song about a pleasure cruise. It was a festive occasion, after all: Nelson’s 89th birthday, and also the release date for “A Beautiful Time,” his 97th studio album (give or take; there are conflicting counts). It was unclear how many of those in attendance were aware of these milestones, and Nelson didn’t call attention to them. He simply went to work, leading his four-man band through a set that featured hits (“Always on My Mind”), classics from his songwriting catalog (“Crazy”), jazz standards (“Georgia on My Mind”) and hymns (“I’ll Fly Away”). The crowd at Nelson’s concert in Austin.Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesA Willie Nelson concert is a study in efficiency. He packed 20 songs into an hour, dispatching with most in three minutes or less, while keeping the banter to a bare minimum. But those brief, brisk songs contained multitudes. “The reason Sinatra was my favorite singer was his phrasing,” Nelson told me. “He never sang a song the same way twice. I don’t think I do either.” Nelson is indeed one of music’s great iterators, with a Sinatraesque knack for daubing in different colors, rendering old songs in revelatory new ways. His gift is to make that art seem artless, camouflaging technique with naturalism. His unruffled vocal tone is unmistakable and unchanging; songs roll out as natural as speech, as if he were not singing so much as thinking out loud. These effects rest on Nelson’s rhythmic play: His vocal phrases and guitar solos glide over the meter, lagging behind the beat or charging ahead, bringing suspense to every note and syllable. There is a term for this kind of derring-do — rubato — but Mickey Raphael, Nelson’s longtime harmonica player in the road band known as the Family, puts it another way. “That’s Willie’s prerogative,” Raphael says. “He goes where he goes. Our task is to follow him.”It’s not an easy gig. At the Austin show, Nelson’s regular bassist, Kevin Smith, was sidelined with Covid, so he had brought in Robert Kearns, who normally plays with Sheryl Crow. Kearns had less than a day’s notice; the band never rehearses and, “Whiskey River” aside, doesn’t have a set list. Nelson sometimes counsels musicians to feel, not count — to disburden themselves of metronomic ideas about tempo and go with the flow. But that’s easier said than done, and you could hear Kearns laboring to keep track of Nelson’s floating cadences and hairpin turns. “Willie pulled out every trick, every idiosyncrasy,” Raphael said later. “Robert’s a great, great bass player. But all he could do was, you know, just kind of hang on.”Nelson finished the set with a jaunty rendition of an old Mac Davis number, “It’s Hard to Be Humble.” About 90 minutes later, he reappeared onstage, joining Strait for a couple of duets. They did “Sing One With Willie,” a goofy crowd-pleaser, and the Townes Van Zandt ballad “Pancho and Lefty,” featuring a searching guitar solo from Nelson. As Nelson made his way offstage, Strait told the crowd, “You know, it’s Willie’s birthday,” and then led a chorus of “Happy Birthday.” Nelson boarded a golf cart, which whisked him through the audience and out of the arena. Soon he was on his bus, rolling through Austin, on his way out of town. The careers of successful musicians tend to follow predictable patterns. You break through in your 20s and perhaps hit your prime in your early 30s. Talent knows no age limit, but inspiration often has a sell-by date. As midlife sets in, you may lose contact with the muse. Tried-and-true moves grow stale, sounds and styles that once brimmed with character curdle into caricature. The day-to-day demands on musicians exact a greater toll. The thrill of life on the road fades, and the bummers — loneliness, boredom, long hours, bad food — become harder to bear. Willie Nelson is the exception that proves every rule. He hit his stride as a recording artist around age 40 and reached superstardom at 45. He has kept up a relentless pace ever since, recording thousands of songs while averaging more than 100 live dates per year, decade after decade. In 2022, his compulsion to sing and pick his guitar and ramble the roads is undiminished and, evidently, unappeasable. “Sometimes we’ll be off the road for three weeks or a month,” says Raphael, who has played with Nelson for 49 years. But then: “I’ll get a text from Willie, out of the blue, at some random hour of the day or night: ‘Let’s pick.’ The break might have just started, and he’s ready to get back out there.”As Nelson has rounded the bend into old age, another unusual thing has happened: He has been making more music. He has had a very busy 21st century, producing a staggering 36 albums of new material since the turn of the millennium. He has recorded collections of children’s music and songbook standards and country-and-Western jukebox hits. He has released tribute albums to Sinatra, to George and Ira Gershwin, to the songwriter Cindy Walker. He has done album-length collaborations with indie rockers, with Western-swing revival bands, with Wynton Marsalis and members of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. He made a gospel-themed album with his sister and four of his children. He put out a reggae record, and it wasn’t embarrassing. He’s said to have hundreds more recent recordings in the can. The Willie Nelson of 2022 is an anomaly, perhaps unprecedented in popular music: His discography stretches back to the Eisenhower era, and he remains one of America’s busiest working musicians. “It’s a decent job,” he says. “Best one I’ve had, at least.”Nelson’s songs unspool in the voice of a man who has gazed into the abyss and come back drawling punch lines.Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesIn the past five years alone, Nelson has produced nine albums. On these records we hear more than the sound of a famous voice reinterpreting familiar material. Nelson’s catalog of original songs has been growing and taking on heft: Many new songs find him reckoning with the weighty matter of his own dwindling days. Death has always had a place in Nelson’s work. (A singer steeped in the earthy existentialism of country and blues could hardly avoid the topic.) But in recent times, it has become his Topic A.This may be shrewd business. Albums of this sort are recording-industry mainstays; Nelson’s old pal and collaborator Johnny Cash won critical raves for a string of late-life releases that focused on his own impending demise. But where Cash’s mortality music was brooding and gothic, Nelson’s is Nelsonian: mischievous, droll, intrigued by cosmic conundrums and amused by the state of his own mortal flesh. The songs unspool in the voice of a man who has gazed into the abyss and come back drawling punch lines: “Heaven is closed and hell’s overcrowded/So I think I’ll just stay where I am.” Sometimes he allows himself a flight into the mystical, imagining his transmutation into a “blue star” in the night sky, or envisioning a jam session in the afterlife with departed musical comrades. Sometimes his jokes verge on metaphysical riddles: “I don’t go to funerals/I won’t be at mine.”“Death is just a pretty good subject to write about,” he says. “It’s good material.”When tracer bullets aren’t flying overhead, the land that Nelson christened Luck Ranch is a rather nice place to spend time. (“When you’re here, you’re in Luck,” he is fond of saying. “When you’re not here, you’re out of Luck.”) The ranch rolls across 700 acres, dotted with cedar and juniper trees. Like much of the region’s pastureland, the Nelsons’ acreage has been damaged by overgrazing and erosion, and the couple has undertaken a program of regenerative agriculture to restore the soil and revive the native flora. Dozens of horses wander the ranch; most are rescues, adopted so they wouldn’t be sent to the slaughterhouse. For years, Nelson was prone to wandering the property himself, usually at high velocity. “I liked to bust through those cedars,” he says, “either on a horse or in a pickup truck.”The ranch is home to other animals too: sheep, pigs, chickens. This came in handy during the Covid lockdown. “If we were low on eggs,” Annie says, “I could go grab some from under a chicken butt.” She cooked the family meals, and to streamline the operation, the Nelsons came up with a menu they nicknamed the Pandemic Pantry: vegan meatloaf on Mondays, tacos on Tuesdays, etc. (“The deal was: If you want something else, make it yourself,” Annie says.) Tensions can creep in when you’re sequestering for long stretches, perhaps especially among strong-willed people with artistic dispositions. The Nelsons maintained harmony with a set of rules that have become famous among fans, reproduced on swag for sale at shows:1. Don’t be an [expletive]. 2. Don’t be an [expletive]. 3. Don’t be a goddamn [expletive].“They’re good rules, but we’ve all broken them,” Nelson says. “I’ve definitely broken Rule No. 3. My loved ones will confirm that.”Annie is Nelson’s fourth wife. She is also, he has often said, the love of his life. They met in 1986, in Arizona, on the set of the made-for-television Western drama “Stagecoach,” where she was working as a makeup artist. They first bonded over the question of Nelson’s hair, which they agreed he did not need to cut short in order to play the role of Doc Holliday. But a relationship seemed unlikely. Ann Marie D’Angelo was 30, Nelson was 53. She had vowed never to date celebrities or get involved with men who had messy marital backgrounds or children. Nelson was separated but not yet divorced from his third wife; he had five kids, one of whom was born to the woman who would become Wife No. 3 at a time when he was still married to No. 2. But Nelson and D’Angelo were both quick-witted, tough-minded and warm — a good match. He pursued her ardently; they fell in love. Lukas Autry Nelson was born on Christmas Day 1988; Jacob Micah Nelson arrived in May 1990. Willie and Annie were married in 1991.Nelson considers Luck his true home, but the Nelsons raised their sons far away, in an oceanfront house on the northern coast of Maui. Nelson, of course, was often gone, on the road up to 200 days a year. Lukas and Micah grew up surrounded by musical equipment and taught themselves to play, bashing out classic-rock songs in a band room near the little building in the rear of the house where Nelson gathered with friends when he was not on tour. While Nelson got high and played poker, he followed his sons’ increasingly tighter and more assured renditions of Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd songs. “I always looked at music as a way to get closer to my dad,” Lukas says. “There was never any pressure about it. But I knew that he loved music so much, and that if I did it, too, I’d make him happy, and we’d be able to spend more time together.”Today Lukas, 33, is a star in his own right: a gifted songwriter and guitarist with a reedy vocal tone reminiscent of his father’s. His acclaimed roots-rock quintet, Lukas Nelson and Promise of the Real, has released eight full-length albums and served as Neil Young’s backing band. (They were also the backing band for the fictional singer played by Bradley Cooper in the 2018 “A Star Is Born” remake, whose soundtrack includes eight songs co-written by Lukas.) Micah, 32, is a sometime Promise of the Real member himself, joining the band on its tours with Young; he also records solo work, which tilts toward the noisy and experimental, under the moniker Particle Kid. The nickname was coined one day when he was 14 and his (very stoned) father tried and failed to say the phrase “prodigal son.” Nelson has played and recorded with his daughters Paula, 52, and Amy, 49. Now Lukas and Micah have become his musical right-hand men, with an intimate view of his late-life creative burst. “He’s been making some of the best music he’s ever made,” Micah says. “He’s singing and writing songs now that he couldn’t have written at 30 or 40. He’s decorating the story of his life, and he’ll continue to do it till he’s no longer breathing.”His discography stretches back to the Eisenhower era, and he remains one of America’s busiest working musicians. Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesA theme that has run through Nelson’s songs from the beginning is his hunger for the road. It was there, obliquely, in his very first single, written and recorded in 1957, a lament about a failed romance whose refrain is a nomad’s itchy motto: “This is no place for me.” Perhaps his most intriguing disquisition on the subject is “Still Is Still Moving to Me” (1993), one of his signature songs, a kind of koan set to a backbeat and spaghetti-Western guitar. “I can be moving or I can be still,” he sings. “But still is still moving to me.” Precisely what he’s getting at is uncertain; in the song, he concedes he is straining to express elusive and ineffable ideas. “It’s hard to explain how I feel/It won’t go in words but I know that it’s real.”“He wants to move,” Lukas says. “He needs to move. He needs to roam the land and play his music and be free. He’s been moving since he was a very young kid. He’s been in the hustle of the times ever since he left the cotton fields in Abbott, Texas.”Abbott, a small town about 25 miles north of Waco, is where Nelson was born, in 1933. When he was 6 months old, his young parents split up, leaving Willie and his 2-year-old sister, Bobbie, in the care of their paternal grandparents. Nelson sees this as a stroke of good fortune. His grandparents, Nancy and Alfred — “Mama and Daddy Nelson” — were devoted and conscientious caretakers. They were also musicians. Mama gave singing lessons from home; Daddy, a blacksmith, played guitar. By the time Willie was 6, he had his first six-string and was learning to play chords and write songs. Bobbie was a piano prodigy who seemed to instantly assimilate new styles; she would become her brother’s enduring musical collaborator and “closest friend for a whole lifetime.”To grow up in rural Texas during the Depression was to know an existence defined by struggle and want. But musically, Abbott held riches. Willie basked in the hymns at the United Methodist Church. The radio transmitted enthralling sounds, too: the Western swing of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, the jazz of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, Tin Pan Alley hits like “Stardust” and “All the Things You Are.” Willie was also captivated by the music he heard at movie matinees, especially the drifter anthems sung by Hollywood cowboys like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. And he worked alongside his sister and grandmother in the cotton fields, where other songs rang out. “There were a few of us white people out there,” he says. “But over here, there’d be Mexicans singing mariachis. And over there, you’d hear a Black guy singing the blues.” The trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis recalls a revealing backstage moment. “It was me, Willie, B.B. King, Ray Charles and Eric Clapton,” he says, all shooting the breeze — “and Willie said: ‘Well, gentlemen, I think I’m the only one here who actually picked cotton.’” Everyone burst into laughter. “Willie has had some profound experiences,” Marsalis says. “His music, his knowledge, comes from a long, long way.”At 10, Nelson joined a Czech polka band that played beer halls; when he and Bobbie were teenagers, they formed a dance band with Bobbie’s young husband. He graduated from high school in 1950, served in the Air Force for nine months (he received a medical discharge for a bad back), then tried college at Baylor University in Waco before dropping out to pursue music. He married his first wife, Martha, at 19, and had three children in short order. For the next several years, he bounced around the country while working a series of jobs (saddle maker, dishwasher, door-to-door salesman) and honing his craft. Eventually he made his way to Nashville, where he gained a reputation as an uncommonly gifted songwriter. Had he never succeeded as a performer, the handful of hits he wrote in the late 1950s and early ’60s might have secured his legend anyway. Songs like “Family Bible,” “Hello Walls” and “Funny How Time Slips Away” were miracles of concision, speaking volumes in spare words while smuggling in melodic and harmonic twists. The torch song “Crazy,” a hit for Patsy Cline in 1961, poured out heartache in a swooping tune that sounded more jazz than country. “Night Life,” a hit for Ray Price two years later, showed Nelson’s genius for poetic plain-speaking: “The night life ain’t no good life/But it’s my life.”Nelson on television in 1962, the year his first album was released.Johnny Franklin/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images“He’s one of those extraordinary songwriters who embodies a genre and transcends it,” Elvis Costello says. “He’s got an ear for changes, for passing tones, that aren’t found in country songs at all. I think I knew ‘Funny How Time Slips Away’ for 20 years before I realized the ‘Nelson’ on the songwriting credit was Willie Nelson — I assumed it was an old jazz ballad.”Nelson got a record deal with RCA Victor in 1964 and released a string of LPs, but he bridled under the label chief, Chet Atkins, who favored the ornate production of the so-called Nashville Sound. In 1969, Nelson bought a new guitar, a nylon-string Martin N-20, which he fitted with a pickup to produce a tone reminiscent of one of his musical gods, the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. He named the guitar Trigger, after Roy Rogers’s horse, and before long his fingers had worn a hole in the soft spruce above its bridge. His music was getting more scraped and scarred, too, its Music Row sheen peeling away as he sought a starker sound. In 1971 he recorded “Yesterday’s Wine,” a concept album about the life and death of an “imperfect man.” He thought it was the most honest LP he’d ever made; an RCA executive called it “some far-out [expletive] that maybe the hippies high on dope can understand.”Nelson had run his course in Music City. He moved back to Texas and considered taking up pig farming. But while visiting Nashville in 1972, he attended a house party where songwriters were playing their tunes and, late at night, offered some of his own new material. Among the small crowd still present was the Atlantic Records executive Jerry Wexler, who astonished Nelson by offering him both a contract and creative freedom. (Forget commerce, Wexler said: “You’re going for art.”) What followed was groundbreaking: The LPs “Shotgun Willie” (1973), “Phases and Stages” (1974) and “Red Headed Stranger” (1975) cleared a path forward for country music by looking to the past, combining the attitude and ambition of album rock with the raw, rootsy sounds of honky-tonk, bluegrass, folk and gospel. Nelson in an Atlantic Records studio in 1973 with, from left, the producer Arif Mardin; his sister, band pianist and “closest friend,” Bobbie Nelson; and his drummer, Paul English.David Gahr/Getty ImagesNelson’s new direction reflected the ferment of his home in Austin, where hippies and rednecks rubbed shoulders and a funky new species, the hippie-redneck, emerged. The figureheads of this scene were Nelson and the band he assembled after moving to town in 1972. The Family — Bobbie Nelson (piano), Mickey Raphael (harmonica), Bee Spears (bass), Jody Payne (guitar) and Paul English (drums) — wore long hair and thick beards, jettisoning Grand Ole Opry rhinestones for jeans and T-shirts. The look was anti-establishment, with a hint of menace. English was the group’s muscle, ready to straighten things out when club owners stiffed the band; he was rumored to carry two guns at all times. (Nelson immortalized their relationship in one of his most beloved songs, “Me and Paul.”) A platinum-selling 1976 compilation, “Wanted! The Outlaws,” gave the movement a name and established its commercial bona fides: “Outlaw country” would prove a sales juggernaut, minting new stars (Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson) and invigorating the careers of renegade veterans (Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard). The biggest success was Nelson. “Red Headed Stranger” was his first true hit album. Then, in 1978, came a blockbuster, “Stardust,” a collection of standards that stayed on the country album charts for a full decade, establishing the cowboy warbler as an interpreter of the American Songbook on par with the greatest jazz vocalists. In the years that followed, Nelson reached superstardom, attaining a presence in popular culture that arguably no other country singer has, unless Taylor Swift counts as a country singer. He starred in motion pictures. He visited the White House on numerous occasions. (On one visit, he got high on the roof with President Carter’s son Chip.) He did a public service announcement for NASA alongside Frank Sinatra and had a huge international hit with Julio Iglesias, the oily and absurd “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.” He was one of few country artists to join the pop, soul and rock demigods on the charity single “We Are the World.” Nelson at his annual Fourth of July Picnic in 1974.Bettmann/Getty ImagesNelson’s renown is bound up with his image as a rebel, a reputation enhanced by his yearslong showdown with the Internal Revenue Service (which seized a good share of his assets in 1990) and his multiple busts for marijuana possession. A decent case could be made that he is history’s most famous pothead, the man whose likeness should be carved into the golden bong of posterity. For decades, he has been an advocate for legalization, and in 2015 he launched the cannabis company Willie’s Reserve (tagline: “My stash is your stash”). You can hear a stoner sagacity in both his lyrics and the way he sings them — in the freedom of his rubato, his gliding excursions through musical space-time.Nelson is a scrambler of categories. He’s down-home and urbane, countercultural and traditional, a political progressive who occupies the loftiest perch in America’s most conservative musical genre. (Presumably, many fans in his home state take issue with his endorsement of Beto O’Rourke and his call to support Texas Democrats in their fight against voter suppression.) It’s impossible to name a white performer more steeped in qualities we associate with Black music — syncopation, improvisation, blue notes, the push and pull between sacred and earthly yearnings — yet not a trace of minstrelsy can be detected in his sound. He is always — indubitably, irreducibly — Willie Nelson.The most striking feature of his career is not length but breadth. There appear to be no songs he can’t sing and few he hasn’t. Though nominally a country artist, he is really more like an American musical unconscious, tapped into the deepest wellsprings of popular song. He has a way of making everything he sings — from “Amazing Grace” and “Danny Boy” to “Time After Time” (the Cyndi Lauper song) and “The Rainbow Connection” (the Kermit the Frog song) — sound Platonic and primordial. The only comparable figures, according to Marsalis, are Ray Charles and Louis Armstrong. “To be great in all the forms that Willie is great in — it’s extremely rare,” he says. “He has whatever that spiritual thing is, that thing you can’t describe. It’s like a shamanistic type of insight into the nature of all things. From that place of understanding, he can play anything he wants to play that comes out of the American tradition.” Nelson as part of the Highwaymen, with Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson, in 1992.Rob Verhorst/Redferns/Getty ImagesFor a guy who makes so many records, Nelson doesn’t spend much time in recording studios. He is a legendarily speedy worker. “He records fast because he has zero patience,” says Micah Nelson. There are tales of sessions in which Nelson materialized to make a guest appearance on someone’s record, laid down a vocal track or guitar solo in a single spotless take and then left as quickly as he’d come, roaring off on his tour bus.Pedernales Recording Studio, which Nelson built in the early 1980s, sits one mile from Luck Ranch, adjacent to a 9-hole golf course Nelson also owns. Buddy Cannon, 75, is a veteran Nashville songwriter and producer who has overseen much of Nelson’s recent work there. The two first met in the late 1970s in Amarillo, Texas, at a promotional concert, when a mutual friend asked Cannon if he wanted to smoke a joint with Nelson. (“It’s a pretty good way to meet Willie Nelson, smoking a joint in a broom closet,” Cannon says. “I probably wasn’t the first guy to meet him that way.”) They met again three decades later, in Nashville. Cannon was producing a 2007 Kenny Chesney session for which Nelson had agreed to sing a duet. Nelson liked the sound of the recording so much that he hired Cannon to produce his next album, “Moment of Forever.” They’ve gone on to make 15 more albums, with Cannon assuming not only mixing-board duties but also a role as Nelson’s songwriting partner. Their working relationship is one neither could have envisioned when joints were passed in broom closets: They write via text message, volleying lyrics back and forth. Usually Cannon will arrive at the studio with a rough outline of a tune, but it is Nelson who does the finishing work, improvising while the tape rolls. As a producer, Cannon’s goal is to be as unobtrusive as possible, offering the cleanest view of what he calls Willie World. “I try to treat his music the way it treats us,” Cannon says. “I just try to capture the Willie vibe.”Sometimes the vibe arrives unbidden, overnight, in Cannon’s iPhone. On the morning of July 29, 2020, he awoke to a text from Nelson, the first verse of a prospective new song.Imagine what you want then get out of the wayRemember energy follows thought so be careful what you saySo be careful what you ask forMake sure it’s really what you wantBecause your mind is made for thinkingAnd energy follows thought“Write a verse,” Nelson added. “If you like it.” Cannon came up with some lines about how wisdom is dispensed in dreams and through the intercession of spirits, and the songwriters traded messages until Nelson was convinced they’d done the job. The result, “Energy Follows Thought,” is the emotional — or cosmological — centerpiece of Nelson’s latest album, “A Beautiful Time.” It’s a stately ballad, crooned by Nelson in confiding tones over shivering, echoing production. A kick drum beats out a low, steady pulse; Nelson’s guitar rumbles and probes. The sound is both intimate and gigantic, like a lullaby sung in an amphitheater on the moon. Nelson says the song is “one of my philosophies.” To Mickey Raphael, the harmonica player, it “scratches on quantum physics.” But with its talk of ghostly visitors that speak through dreams, “Energy Follows Thought” may well be another lion-in-winter anthem, one more shadowy rumination on what lies beyond. The cover of “A Beautiful Time” shows Nelson striding, guitar in hand, into a blazing sunset.“He’s lost so many people, so many loved ones,” Annie says. In 1991, Nelson’s son Billy, one of the three children from his first marriage, committed suicide at age 33. Those close to Nelson say that he’s been hit hard by the deaths of friends and fellow travelers, like Cash and Haggard and Ray Price. Recently he has endured the losses of even closer musical compatriots. Paul English passed in February 2020. On March 10 of this year, Bobbie Nelson died in hospice care in Austin. “I don’t want to be the last man standing/On second thought, maybe I do,” Nelson sang in 2018. It was a good line, another wisecrack at Pale Death’s expense. But truth lurks behind the quip. It is hard to be the last man standing. And he really doesn’t go to funerals.Nelson in April.Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesOn May 4, less than a week after Nelson’s 89th birthday, Willie and Annie were in Nashville. The singer woke up in the middle of the night, on his tour bus, struggling to breathe. A health care worker was summoned. A rapid PCR test was administered. Nelson was Covid positive.“I had a nebulizer on the bus,” Annie says. “I started everything I could at that point, including Paxlovid. He had the monoclonal antibodies. He had steroids.” They drove through the night and made it home to Spicewood, where Annie got a mobile medical unit out to the ranch. “We turned the house into a hospital,” she says. “There were a couple of times when I wasn’t sure he was going to make it.”“I had a pretty rough time with it,” Nelson allows. “Covid ain’t nothing to laugh at, that’s for sure.”Six days after taking ill, he was out of the woods. Two weeks after that, he was back on tour, playing a pair of shows in New Braunfels, Texas. From there it was on to Little Rock, Ark.; Oklahoma City; Camdenton, Mo.; Wichita, Kan.; El Dorado, Ark.; St. Louis; Grand Rapids, Mich.; Noblesville, Ind.; and Franklin, Tenn. On the afternoon of June 29, the Honeysuckle Rose — the fifth custom-designed Willie Nelson tour bus to bear that name — pulled into a parking lot outside a hotel in Louisville, Ky. His bandmates and road crew usually stay in hotels, but Nelson himself only ever sleeps on the bus. He has spent many nights there — many years, if you crunch the numbers. There are occasions when he has chosen to sleep on the bus even when it was parked in the driveway of one of his palatial homes. “There’s everything you need right here,” he said, from the kitchen area. “Good food to eat. Two bathrooms. A shower. A nice bed. If I felt like writing a song, I bet I could find a guitar in here somewhere.”The Honeysuckle Rose looms large in Willie lore. Vast sums have changed hands on the bus, in games of poker and dominoes. A president has visited (Carter), as have innumerable musicians, movie stars, journalists and members of law enforcement, like the Louisiana State Police officers who paid a visit in 2006 and extracted 1.5 pounds of marijuana and 3 ounces of psychedelic mushrooms. Many have boarded the Honeysuckle Rose with a spring in their step and, sometime later, staggered off, having taken too many hits of Nelson’s powerful weed. Often one hit was too many.The scene these days is less freewheeling. Nelson is supposed to have given up smoking marijuana in favor of an edibles-only regimen. (“It wasn’t good for my lungs,” he says.) The pandemic has also brought changes to his touring routine. With occasional exceptions, like the birthday show at the Moody Center, he plays only outdoors. Daily Covid tests are mandatory for everyone in the band and crew; masking is obligatory backstage. Onstage, musicians are instructed to give Nelson at least six feet of room. The most zealous enforcer of these protocols is Annie Nelson. “If I have to be the bad guy to keep him safe, I’ll be the bad guy,” she says. “A virus doesn’t care who you are, what you believe, how famous you are.” Health concerns have forced Nelson to scale back his touring schedule. His concerts are carefully spaced, with far fewer dates stacked up, giving the singer time to rest and recuperate. He’s on the road again, but he may never again hit the 100-show-​per-year marker that was, for years, the bare minimum.Mark Rothbaum, Nelson’s manager, does not regard his 89-year-old artist as a legacy act. “I want everyone to know him, everyone to see him,” he says. “If he’s playing and it’s 3,000 people, well, I’d rather it be 300,000 people.” Nevertheless, legacy management — getting an official history on the record — is a priority. Live recordings are being exhumed from archives. A multipart documentary in the works aims to chronicle Nelson’s “extraordinary life and career.” The singer himself has co-authored a number of books — memoirs, folksy works of fiction, collections of essays and aphorisms. The latest, “Me and Paul: Untold Stories of a Fabled Friendship,” will be published in September.And there are the new records. The next studio album — No. 98, give or take — is a tribute to the Nashville songwriting ace Harlan Howard; it will probably be out early in 2023. “My attitude always is: What’s next?” Rothbaum says. “What’s the next record? Where’s the next show? Where’s the bus headed? Willie likes to keep things rolling forward, and so do I.” Nominally a country artist, Nelson is really more like an American musical unconscious, tapped into the deepest wellsprings of popular song. Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesA priority is “getting Willie out with his people”: not just putting him on tour, but booking special shows with artists who are his heirs and disciples. The concerts are logistically trickier than ever, what with the Covid precautions, but there is no thought of stopping. Younger musicians are eager — ecstatic, usually — to work with Nelson; he, as ever, is up for a picking party, and seems to enjoy the adulation. Sometimes these events take place, literally, in Nelson’s backyard. In 1985, a replica Old West town was built on Nelson’s property for the filming of the motion picture “Red Headed Stranger,” loosely inspired by his 1975 album; Nelson preserved the set and eventually installed an outdoor stage and sound system. This became the setting for occasional one-off concerts and special events, including the Luck Reunion, a festival held each March that draws thousands. There are also the birthdays, big occasions in Willie World. For Nelson’s 90th, next year, Rothbaum is planning the largest celebration yet, perhaps stretching over two days, maybe at the Hollywood Bowl. The guest performers, he says, will include “everyone you can think of.” Another staple is Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Picnic, a daylong concert, headlined by Nelson, that has been going since 1973. This year’s edition — the first since 2019, because of the pandemic — took place in Austin, at the 20,000 seat Q2 Stadium, home of the city’s Major League Soccer franchise. The supporting acts on the bill included Jason Isbell, Allison Russell and other young stars representing country music’s progressive wing. The paying audience was a typical Willie crowd: a cross section of humanity that seemed to represent every gradation on the local social spectrum, from hick to hipster. It was multigenerational, overwhelmingly but not entirely white and fashion-forward, in its way. There were cowboy hats and lots of American-flag-themed apparel, worn with greater and lesser degrees of irony. A sizable number of those in attendance were men and women in their 20s and 30s decked out in period-perfect redneck-hippie chic: big boots, big belt buckles, big beards, lots of hair. At a Willie Nelson concert, it’s always 1973 in spirit.The man himself arrived onstage wearing his own version of patriotic garb: an oversize U.S. men’s soccer team jersey bearing the uniform number 420. Walking is difficult for Nelson, especially after his bout with Covid. He gets winded quickly; a few steps can leave him gasping. When he sings and plays, though, the signs of strain ease. “According to the doctors, singing is the best exercise for the lungs,” he says. “I think that’s true.” At the picnic he was in robust voice, pushing out his songs with power, agility and flair. “Whiskey River” came first, of course, delivered in an insolent purr. Ballads unfurled in whispers and croons; livelier numbers were sung with snap, sometimes in a thick twang that Nelson seemed to have dragged out of the 1930s for the occasion. Seated to his left was the Particle Kid, Micah, who played rhythm guitar and got a star turn on a number whose lyrical hook — “If I die when I’m high, I’ll be halfway to heaven” — came from a quip by Nelson at the dominoes table during Covid lockdown. (When Micah told his dad that the phrase would make a great song, Nelson said: “You write it.”) Early in the set, the band cued up “On the Road Again,” and Beto O’Rourke dashed onstage with his own 11-year-old son to strum an acoustic and shout along.Nelson played some fine guitar. During “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,” one of his most lustrous love songs, he took a solo that gusted between genres and across borders, flowing past in a blur of swinging syncopations and block chords and hard strumming that pulled in Gypsy jazz, Texas blues, mariachi, even flashes of surf rock. The performance brought whoops from the crowd and, when he reached Bar No. 16, drew an impressed head shake from Nelson, in the split second before he sang the next line — a fond farewell to a lover that, on this occasion, sounded more like a guitar hero urging himself on. “Fly on,” he sang. “Fly on past the speed of sound.”Jody Rosen is a contributing writer for the magazine. His book “Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle” was published in April. Philip Montgomery is a photographer whose work examines the fractured state of America. His new monograph of photography, “American Mirror,” is a chronicle of the country’s historic struggles over a decade. More

  • in

    Upending Expectations for Indigenous Music, Noisily

    After long being consigned to a legacy of stereotypes, Indigenous American artists are making some of the country’s most engaging experimental music.Raven Chacon wasn’t sure he should accept the commission that would soon earn him the Pulitzer Prize for music. A Milwaukee ensemble had asked Chacon — a Diné composer, improviser and visual artist born on the edge of the Navajo Nation — to write a piece for its annual Thanksgiving concert in 2021, slated for a 175-year-old cathedral downtown. The offer smacked of cliché, another act of holiday tokenism.“My impulse is to turn down any Thanksgiving invitation, not because I’m anti-Thanksgiving but because that’s the only time we get asked to do stuff,” Chacon, 44, said in a recent phone interview.But he slowly reconsidered, recognizing that performing on Thanksgiving in a cathedral (with an enormous pipe organ, no less) offered a rare opportunity to address the Catholic Church’s violent role in the conquest of Native Americans. He penned “Voiceless Mass” and, at the premiere, positioned violinists, flutists and percussionists around the seated audience, their parts cresting through a hangdog drone.“If you hear there’s a Native composer, a lot of assumptions happen,” Chacon said, recounting the times that even fans have said they hear the desert in his music. “But I am interested in what’s important to the community I represent — land, justice, injustice. It’s meaningful for me to make work that is challenging, not easy to digest.”When “Voiceless Mass” won the Pulitzer in May, Chacon became the first Native American to be awarded the prize. That honor is part of a recent rush of representation and recognition for Indigenous American artists in literature, food and streaming TV, increasingly prevalent since the galvanizing protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline began at Standing Rock in 2016. “The best of our artists are really good, and people are catching up,” Paul Chaat Smith, a curator at the National Museum of the American Indian, said in an interview. “That means we’re not always starting from square one.”Raven Chacon’s “Voiceless Mass” won the Pulitzer in May. “If you hear there’s a Native composer, a lot of assumptions happen,” he said.Camilo Fuentealba for The New York TimesBut Chacon is also the first harsh noise musician to win the Pulitzer, an unlikely ascent for someone who started making music on the Navajo Nation by turning snare drums into amplified feedback chambers before becoming a fixture of experimental spaces in Los Angeles. Indeed, he is just one of a loose confederation of Indigenous artists finding a wider audience by working at the fringes of modern music. The immersive sound art of Suzanne Kite, the self-made scrapyard instrumentation of Warren Realrider, the scabrous violin solos of Laura Ortman — these musicians and many of their peers are rapidly upending ideas about what it means to sound Native.Nathan Young, another prolific musician, was just a child in Tahlequah, Okla., the capital of the Cherokee Nation, when he realized the story of Native American music was deeper than powwow incantations. His father, a member of the Delaware Tribe, traded rare tapes of all-night peyote ceremonies from the Native American Church, cherishing the hypnotic melodies of singers like Joe Rush.“I thought about the sounds our ancestors made that we could never imagine, how we might not be considering what could be ‘Native music,’” Young, 46, said from his home in Tulsa, wondering what had been lost through centuries of genocide.During college, a VHS tape of the Japanese electronics icon Merzbow widened Young’s sense of what music could be, as did a subsequent home recording that Maori artists in New Zealand played while giving him a traditional Ta moko tattoo. “It was them rubbing rocks against rocks, making this ‘primitive ambient music,’” Young said. “Hearing other Indigenous people express those sounds made me realize I wasn’t the only one who thought this way, interested in this noise.”Back in Oklahoma, Young joined Postcommodity, an influential Indigenous collective that included Chacon. Soon he was running the label Peyote Tapes and recording dozens of albums with the aggressive, distortion-driven duo Ajilvsga.Where Young pushed against the preconception that all Native American music included the chants and drums of powwows, Joe Rainey leaned into the typecasting. Raised near Little Earth, a Minneapolis housing complex that has for decades been home to members of dozens of tribes, Rainey began taping powwows when he was 8. Using a hand-held GE cassette recorder, he amassed an estimated 500 hours of performances.“This album helped me make sure I was mentally OK,” Rainey said of “Niineta.”Erinn Springer for The New York TimesRainey has collected an estimated 500 hours of performances at powwows.Erinn Springer for The New York TimesFor more than 20 years, Rainey, an HVAC installer and a father of five, has also been a competitive powwow singer, sometimes vying for prizes of $10,000. Misconceptions of modern powwows as sacred spaces bemuse the Ojibwe singer. “To you, we might be conjuring energies,” Rainey, 35, joked in an interview from his home in Oneida, Wis. “But we’re showing up to just have fun, singing and dancing.”By the summer of 2020, Rainey had been partnering with the veteran Minneapolis producer Andrew Broder for a year, trying but failing to find a fitting modern context for his songs and samples. When Broder attended a powwow between the buildings of Little Earth, he understood he’d been mishandling the material.“The sound wasn’t unlike the way a car driving around with a booming system fits into a city’s landscape,” Broder said by phone. “These voices and the drum bouncing off the walls of the projects had a similar quality. That was where I wanted to go, where the sound was smeared out.”Broder and Rainey began operating around an axiom of “organized chaos,” using Public Enemy’s abrasive Bomb Squad productions and Nas’s narrative candor as twin lodestars. The resulting “Niineta” — which was released in May and whose title is Ojibwe for “just me” — pins layers of powwow songs to industrial-strength drums and blizzards of static, suggesting a radical musical representation of what Rainey often called the “urban Indian.” Samples of Rainey’s incarcerated cousin and dead friends supply a gravitas as he sorts loudly through grief.“This album helped me make sure I was mentally OK,” Rainey said. “Continuing on is what this album made me do.”A similar evolution also animates “Medicine Singers,” the self-titled July debut from a wild rock offshoot of the Eastern Medicine Singers, an Algonquin drum group based in northern Rhode Island. The album is a collaboration with Yonatan Gat, an Israeli-born guitarist who first earned attention in the feral rock band Monotonix and has since started a label to collaborate with traditional musicians around the world. Gat encountered the Eastern Medicine Singers at South by Southwest in 2017, then formed ad hoc bands with the likes of the new-age pioneer Laraaji and the powerful drummer Thor Harris to improvise with them.The Medicine Singers’ founder, Daryl Black Eagle Jamieson, worried they might bend those historic sounds until they broke. A 62-year-old Air Force veteran who learned the Massachusett language only as an adult, Jamieson asked his mentor, Donald Three Bears Fisher, to approve the lyrics for “Daybreak,” the album’s first single and an ecstatic aubade with pounding drums. “He said, ‘I want it played everywhere,’” Jamieson remembered in an interview. Fisher died in 2020. “So that’s what I’m doing.”Young has seen similar responses from elders in Oklahoma. “I come from an additive culture. Things fascinate us,” he said. “We are not trying to live in the past. We’re in this long conversation about how we can make these sounds work for what we want to express.”Still, reckoning with a past of forced removal and assimilation remains a vital component of this music. Ortman and Kite both began playing violin after they were adopted by white families. Ortman said she chose the instrument, which gave her permission to be someone else and a hope she would find her family, as she did among the White Mountain Apache Tribe in 2001.“Meeting my mother and older sister was like seeing eye-to-eye while the world is spinning around you,” Ortman, 49, said by phone. Many of her subsequent records have contemplated the life lost with her family; she often plays an Apache fiddle, made from an agave stalk, that she received during that reunion trip.“People You Must Look at Me,” an early performance piece by Kite, helped her process the loss of her mother, who died by suicide, and embrace her identity as an Indigenous artist whose ancestors escaped Wounded Knee by foot. Her work now incorporates a half-dozen other disciplines, including artificial intelligence — all ways of learning from Indigenous Americans’ past in order to reimagine their future.“I am not very interested in Western art music,” Kite admitted with a laugh. “There is too much to learn from community members who don’t have degrees. I see that as the pathway for generating new things.” More

  • in

    Solange Enters New Territory: Ballet Composer

    The multihyphenate pop star will compose her first ballet score for the Fall Fashion Gala at New York City Ballet in September.Solange, the pop star whose artistic tendrils have reached into the worlds of music, choreography, fashion, film, visual art and more, will soon add a new genre to her repertoire: ballet composer.New York City Ballet announced on Monday that Solange would write an original score for a work (as yet untitled) by Gianna Reisen that will premiere at the company’s annual Fall Fashion Gala, on Sept. 28. The score is composed for a chamber ensemble that will be made up of some of Solange’s musical collaborators and members of the City Ballet orchestra.This step into ballet is the latest in a series of adventurous turns by Solange, 36, who began her career young as a singer and dancer — including with her sister, Beyoncé, in Destiny’s Child. Solange’s work later blossomed into multihyphenate and more independent territory, with her music — starting with the 2012 album “True” and continuing with “A Seat at the Table” (2016) and “When I Get Home” (2019) — often doubling as a gathering place for genre-crossing, interdisciplinary artists. In her art and in the streets, she has also been an activist for Black Lives Matter and other causes.Solange has long had a theatrical edge that brought her into contact with Lincoln Center regulars and collaborators beyond the musical sphere. She has worked with the designer Carlos Soto, a regular partner of the auteurist director Robert Wilson, and organized programming — as well as brought her own performances — to spaces like the Guggenheim and Getty museums, as well as the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, and the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany.Her music for Reisen will be her debut in ballet, which was formative for her as a child in Houston. She saw Lauren Anderson, a pioneering Black principal dancer at Houston Ballet, and once told the writer Ayana Mathis, “My dream was to go to Juilliard.”The new dance is Reisen’s third for City Ballet, and will feature costumes by Alejandro Gómez Palomo of Palomo Spain. The Fall Fashion Gala, which pairs choreographers with designers, will also feature a premiere by Kyle Abraham, with costumes by Giles Deacon; and the first live performance of Justin Peck’s “Solo,” which premiered virtually in 2021 in a film directed by Sofia Coppola, and now features costume design by Raf Simons. Rounding out the gala evening is a George Balanchine masterpiece, “Symphony in C” from 1947. More

  • in

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

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

  • in

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

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

  • in

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

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