music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Sid Mark, Disc Jockey Devoted to Sinatra for Six Decades, Dies at 88

      by

      He hosted four radio shows that focused on the singer, who at one concert singled him out in the audience and said, “I love him.”Sid Mark, a longtime disc jockey in Philadelphia who made Frank Sinatra’s songs the center of his musical universe for more than six decades, died on April 18 in Bryn Mawr, Pa. He was 88.His daughter, Stacey Mark, confirmed the death, in a hospital, but did not cite the cause.Mr. Mark brought a warm, conversational style to his broadcasts. Between selections from his trove of vinyl albums and CDs, he offered bits of his aficionado’s knowledge, told stories about hanging out with Sinatra and played snippets of interviews with him.He hosted three shows on various Philadelphia radio stations: “Friday With Frank,” “Sunday With Sinatra” and the syndicated “The Sounds of Sinatra,” which has run for 43 years and at its height was heard on 100 stations. He also hosted a fourth, “Saturday With Sinatra,” on stations in New York.In 1966, Sinatra’s office invited Mr. Mark to Las Vegas to see him perform as a reward for helping to stoke sales in Philadelphia of the singer’s newly released live album, “Sinatra at the Sands,” by playing it nonstop for a week.While there, he dined with Sinatra and a group of other stars, including Jack Benny, Lucille Ball and Milton Berle. Afterward, Mr. Mark recalled, Sinatra told him, “I’ll see you at the show,” but Mr. Mark said that he and his wife, Loretta, did not have tickets.“He thought that was pretty funny, as did everyone at the table,” Mr. Mark told Vice.com in 2009, “and he gave me a little pinch on the cheek and said, ‘No, you’re sitting at our table.’ I walked in with all these celebrities and everyone knew who everyone was, but they had no idea who we were. Like ‘Who’s that with the pope?’”It was the start of a friendship that lasted until Sinatra’s death in 1998. Mr. Mark attended many of Sinatra’s performances and would sometimes visit him at his suite at the Waldorf Towers in Manhattan. At times, during a concert, Sinatra would single him out from the audience.“I love him, and I say that publicly, I love him,” Sinatra said in 1991 at the Spectrum in Philadelphia. “He’s one of the best friends I’ve ever had in my life.”Mr. Mark in a recent photo hosting “Sunday With Sinatra,” which was on the air for more than 40 years.Family photoSidney Mark Fliegelman was born on May 30, 1933, in Camden, N.J. His father, Aaron, and his mother, Sylvia (Pfeffer) Fliegelman, owned a variety store in Camden. The family lived above the store, where Sid got his first taste of Sinatra’s music by listening to his sister Norma’s records. He hoped to one day get a job in radio.He entered the Army in 1953 and served at Camp Polk (now Fort Polk) in Louisiana. His admiration for Sinatra’s music swelled when he listened to his records on the radio at night in the barracks. “Somehow his voice got to me and I realized he knew exactly what he was singing about,” he told Vice. “If he was singing about lonely, he knew what lonely was. If he was singing about love, he knew what love was about.”Mr. Mark stopped using his surname early in his career but never changed it legally.After his discharge in 1955, Mr. Mark got a job at the Red Hill Inn, a jazz club in Pennsauken, N.J., as a talent coordinator. His responsibilities included driving artists like Count Basie and Duke Ellington to and from their hotels. They would often talk about Sinatra, further stoking Mr. Mark’s interest in his music. More important, he was hired around that time as a disc jockey at WHAT-AM, a jazz station in Philadelphia. He hosted a one-hour show called “Sounds in the Night.”One night in 1955, when the station’s overnight D.J. did not show up, Mr. Mark was asked to fill in.“It was a show called ‘Rock and Roll Kingdom,’ and I wasn’t going to do that,” he told The New Yorker in 2021. He asked his audience what they wanted to hear, and one fan suggested playing an hour of Sinatra’s music. “The all-night guy got fired for not coming in, and they kept me on.” Several months later, in 1956, the show formally began its run as “Friday With Frank.”By the early 1960s, Mr. Mark’s popularity in Philadelphia was growing. He was hosting “Friday With Frank” and a daily six-hour jazz show, “Mark of Jazz,” which would run for nearly two decades, on WHAT. He also had a weekly jazz program on local public television.Mr. Mark hosted “Friday With Frank” for 54 years, “Saturday With Sinatra” for about 17 and “Sunday With Sinatra” for more than 40. “The Sounds of Sinatra” will remain on the air and present archival shows, said his son Brian Mark, the executive producer.In addition to his daughter and his son Brian, Mr. Mark is survived by his wife, Judy (Avery) Mark; two other sons, Eric and Andy Fliegelman; and two grandchildren. His marriage to Loretta Katz ended in divorce.The playlists of Mr. Mark’s Sinatra shows did not consist entirely of solo recordings by Sinatra. He also played duets Sinatra recorded with singers like Liza Minnelli, Lena Horne and Sammy Davis Jr., as well as records by Dean Martin, Tony Bennett and Davis.There have been other Sinatra devotees on the radio over the years. William B. Williams emphasized Sinatra’s music on his “Make Believe Ballroom” on WNEW-AM in New York (and gave him his nickname Chairman of the Board). Jonathan Schwartz was known for his loyalty to Sinatra on several New York stations. But with four Sinatra shows, Mr. Mark was probably singular in his commitment.“D.J.s can often be disappointing in person, which was not the case with Sid,” James Kaplan, the author of a two-volume biography of Sinatra — “Frank: The Voice” (2010) and “Sinatra: The Chairman” (2015) — said in a phone interview. “He was physically impressive, a tall, striking-looking guy who had a real warmth. He didn’t have a phony atom in his body, and he had a true love of Sinatra and everything about Sinatra. His enthusiasm was real.” More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Dispatch Has Rereleased ‘The General’ in Russian to Support Ukraine

      by

      The band members Chadwick Stokes and Brad Corrigan said they hope that Russian soldiers will hear the antiwar song and discontinue their invasion.The roots rock band Dispatch on Tuesday rereleased its popular antiwar anthem, “The General,” after recording it in Russian in hopes, the band said, that Russian soldiers might hear the song and its message and “question their role” in the Ukrainian invasion.The song, originally released in 1998, tells the story of a “decorated general with a heart of gold” who has a dream about the opposing soldiers (and their affected mothers) on the eve of battle and wakes up to tell his men about a change of heart.“He said, ‘I have seen the others, and I have discovered that this fight is not worth fighting,’” the band sings in the chorus. “‘And I’ve seen their mothers, and I will no other to follow me where I’m going.’”“‘So take your shower, shine your shoes, you got no time to lose; you are young and you must be living,’” the original chorus continues. “‘Go now, you are forgiven.’”Chadwick Stokes and Brad Corrigan, two of the founding members of the band, said in a statement that they realized how relevant the lyrics were to the war in Ukraine. Stokes then recorded the whole song in Russian, working with Olga Berg, who acted as a translator and language coach.“I would say, ‘There’s too many syllables in this line; I just can’t fit it in,’” Stokes said in a video interview. “And in other places, I’d say, ‘I need more syllables for it to work.’ It was a lot of jigsaw puzzling.”The duo also tweaked much of the wording, as literary translations are rarely direct. “I’ve seen their mothers,” in English, for example, became “I’ve seen the eyes of their mothers.” In the second line, the “stories” that the general told were replaced with a Russian expression that roughly translates to “wealth of stories.”Berg, who was born in Zaporizhzhia in Southeastern Ukraine, is working with several nonprofit organizations to support Ukraine, including the Polish Institute for Emergency Medicine.“This song, it’s an effort toward unity, toward humanity,” Berg said in the same interview. “We all speak the same language, we all have mothers, we all have children, and we want them to stay alive.”All proceeds from streaming the song will go toward the Leleka Foundation, which provides first aid kits for fighters and emergency medical responders in Ukraine. Founded in 2014 after Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, the foundation says it has now raised almost $2 million since the war began in February.Dispatch, formed in 1996, has crafted eight studio albums and five live albums. On hiatus since 2002, the band reunited in 2011 for a national tour. This summer, Dispatch will tour North America with the rock band O.A.R.The idea for the Russian version came from social media comments, including one on a Ukrainian flag graphic that Dispatch posted to the band’s Instagram account.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 6Gavriel Heine. More

    • 100 Shares139 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Great Comet’ Producer Hasn’t Paid Royalties, Composer Says

      by

      Dave Malloy has filed a petition seeking the help of an arbitrator in his dispute with Howard Kagan over international productions.The creator of “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” says the show’s producer has refused to fully compensate him for international productions of the musical, and the artist is now going to court in an effort to force payment.Dave Malloy, who wrote the book, music and lyrics for the show, has filed a petition in New York County Supreme Court asking a judge to appoint an arbitrator to settle his dispute with the producer Howard Kagan.In the court documents, filed on April 11, Malloy says he is owed “hundreds of thousands of dollars” for productions of the musical that took place in Japan in 2019 and in Korea in 2021.“The Great Comet,” adapted from a section of the classic Tolstoy novel “War and Peace,” arrived on Broadway in 2016 after a series of Off Broadway and out-of-town productions, starting at the nonprofit Ars Nova. The musical, starring Josh Groban, won strong reviews and was nominated for 12 Tony Awards, but it won just two, for scenic design and lighting, and closed at a loss in 2017.The production endured several previous public controversies. In 2016, Ars Nova asked the courts for help in a bitter dispute with Kagan over how the nonprofit was credited in the show’s Playbill. That dispute was settled, but then the next year the Broadway production imploded after a controversy over who would play the show’s lead role after Groban’s departure, and amid questions about its finances.Lawyers for Malloy and Blue Wizard Music, the publisher of “Great Comet,” declined to comment; lawyers for Kagan and his producing entity Comet Lands on Broadway did not respond to requests for comment. More

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      One Night, Several String Quartet Premieres

      by

      The JACK Quartet and the Danish String Quartet presented new works that nodded to the past and spoke to the present.On Thursday evening, two eminent string quartets presented premieres in New York. At Merkin Hall, the JACK Quartet unveiled Patricia Alessandrini’s “A Complete History of Music (Volume 1),” Khyam Allami’s “Ma-a a-ba ud me-na-gin Ma-a di-di-in” and George Lewis’s “String Quartet 4.5.” Not far away, at Zankel Hall, the Danish String Quartet paired Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” with Lotta Wennäkoski’s new “Pige.” Our critics were at both events.JACK QuartetYou always remember your first.The first live concert you attended after the initial pandemic lockdown, that is. So the JACK Quartet will always hold a place in my heart. But after that outdoor performance, at the Morris Museum in New Jersey in August 2020, it was back to a long digital-streaming relationship for me and the group. So seeing them in person again on Thursday evening, almost two years later, felt like another of this era’s many happy reunions.Appearing at Merkin at the tail end of “Bridges,” a series presented by the Kaufman Music Center and the John J. Cali School of Music at Montclair State University, the JACK — Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violins; John Pickford Richards, viola; Jay Campbell, cello — now had optimal indoor acoustics to show off their uncanny clarity and agility in these three premieres.In the cheekily titled, 12-minute “A Complete History of Music (Volume 1),” the quartet’s skittering, airy playing is translated, through electronic processing, into fragments of recordings of works from the classical canon, which seem to mistily surround the live sounds.The results might have been clearer over the super-sophisticated speaker system at Empac, the experimental arts center in upstate New York where the piece was workshopped earlier this month. At Merkin, you could make out a chorus in the first section — heard faintly, as if from a distant room. In the final section, “Appendix 2” (there is no “Appendix 1”), the electronics were still very quiet, and impossible to identify, but had a certain density, a soft sumptuousness.A trembling motif passes around the four instruments in Allami’s “Ma-a a-ba ud me-na-gin Ma-a di-di-in,” gradually overlapping in waves for a kind of dusky, shaggy old-school Minimalism. The piece feels shorter than its 19 minutes, the music receding and rebuilding with a carefully wrought naturalness, and ending in a serene coda of slow, hazy unison chords.Before the JACK played his “String Quartet 4.5,” Lewis — the eminent composer and scholar recently named the next artistic director of the International Contemporary Ensemble — said from the stage that he wrote the piece “against complacency,” as a reminder for audiences to “stay alert.” This is a political posture, but it’s also a declaration of Barnum-style showmanship, and the 17-minute work richly delivered, commanding attention like a ringmaster conjuring acrobats.The acts included sudden slides; a long unison squeal; a tiny, precious duet of little scratches between the first violin and the cello; and a passage of nearly lilting, Mendelssohnian delicacy. The other players twinklingly twittered as Campbell’s hand slid up and down the neck of his cello, for a woozy ondes Martenot effect. Near the end, crunchy grinding gave way to balletic glassiness. It was a spectacularly varied circus — and serious fun. ZACHARY WOOLFEThe JACK Quartet, from left: Austin Wulliman, Christopher Otto, Jay Campbell and John Pickford Richards on Thursday at Merkin Hall.Joan JastrebskiDanish String QuartetThe men of the Danish String Quartet — the violinists Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen and Frederik Øland, the violist Asbjørn Nørgaard and the cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin — are masters of juxtaposition.Their enlightening “Prism” albums trace lines from Bach’s fugues to late Beethoven and works of the 20th century. Another series, “Doppelgänger,” pairs Schubert’s final quartets (and his finest piece of chamber music, the String Quintet in C) with premieres that respond to them.“Doppelgänger” has had a delayed start in New York. Because of the pandemic, Part I will arrive here last; on Thursday, the second installment came first, featuring the famous “Death and the Maiden” Quartet (D. 810) and Wennäkoski’s “Pige.”Nørgaard introduced “Death and the Maiden” as “almost the definition of the Romantic string quartet,” though you wouldn’t have guessed that at first in the group’s interpretation — a controlled accumulation that built toward a sprinting and desperate tarantella.This work’s nickname comes from Schubert’s earlier song “Der Tod und das Mädchen,” whose funereal opening serves as the theme for the second movement. Sørensen, as the first violin, was a stand-in for the Maiden, his articulation at the start delicate, even reticent. As the music becomes more animated, it lashes out and retreats, torn between fury and woe; the Danish players opted for restraint, their command of the score absolute but their passion understated.In the second movement, they revealed the power in Schubert’s pauses, particularly with a patient ending, like an attempt to prolong its moment of peace. That couldn’t last forever, though: At the coda of that tarantella finale, here impressively cohesive amid increasingly frantic chorales and unstable runs, Death arrives in a sudden minor-key turn, delivered in grandly Romantic fashion.“Pige” (Danish for “Girl”) shifts the focus from Death to the Maiden. As response pieces go, this one reflects less on the quartet — though nods to it abound, as in a version of Schubert’s long-short-short rhythm — and more on the original song. Schubert’s quartet never quotes the Maiden’s verse, which gets its due in the first movement of “Pige,” a series of phrases that start and disintegrate in wispy fragments and fading arpeggios.Throughout, Wennäkoski balances extended technique and expressive lyricism, sometimes layering the two, but bringing the instruments together for affecting silences. Then comes the bright, episodic finale, “The Girl and the Scrapbook,” which takes flight with up-bow flourishes and a casual reference to Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” In the final measure, the cellist (Schubert’s voice for Death in the quartet) tears a sheet of paper — “slowly and continuously,” the score says, at a forte.The group followed “Pige” with a transcription of “Der Tod und das Mädchen,” a straightforward treatment with a touch of frostiness in trilled harmonics. That could have been a baked-in encore, but the Danish players returned with another arrangement: of “Der Doppelgänger,” the series’s namesake.They referred to it as “one of Schubert’s best songs.” I’d agree, and add that it’s also one of his most terrifying, which they teased out by building on its harmonic ambiguity for a tension almost as discomfiting as the thought of death itself. JOSHUA BARONE More

    • 50 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      Do You Skip Intro?

      by

      Elyssa Dudley and Listen and follow Still ProcessingApple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherWesley worries the “skip intro” button is killing the TV theme song. When we skip, we’re denying “the possibility of having this connection with a show that becomes bigger and more meaningful than the show itself.”He takes his concern to his friend Hanif Abdurraqib, a poet, music critic and MacArthur “genius grant” winner. Together, they explore their childhood memories of “Good Times,” “The Wonder Years” and “The Jeffersons.” Then, producer Hans Buetow unearths a rendition of a theme song that blows their minds — and they vow never to hit “skip intro” on it.Can you help us identify this choir?On today’s episode, Wesley and Hanif are played this video of a choir singing the “Good Times” theme song. Now, we need your help: Can you identify the choir?We have confirmed that the singers are backstage at the Saban Theater in Beverly Hills, Calif., but who are they? We’d love to find out and get in touch with them.If you have any ideas or information about the choir, please email us at stillprocessing@nytimes.com.Theme songs as beautiful wallpaperHanif shares a story about how a photographer visiting his home was struck by the blue wallpaper in his front entryway. Before the pandemic, Hanif would travel more frequently, so coming home and crossing his entryway was “a real beautiful experience,” he says. But now, he’s so consumed by errands — setting down groceries, making sure his dog doesn’t run out — that he’d forgotten about his wallpaper.“The theme song acts as almost the wallpaper,” Hanif says. “When I do notice it, if it’s something that I can pause and notice and I enjoy it, I’m thrilled. But otherwise, it’s kind of like a border between me and something that I have to do, or something that I feel like I am driven to do. But it is nice to notice it when it comes along if it’s wonderful enough.”Hosted by: Jenna Wortham and Wesley MorrisProduced by: Elyssa Dudley and Hans BuetowEdited by: Sara Sarasohn and Sasha WeissEngineered by: Marion LozanoExecutive Producer, Shows: Wendy DorrAssistant Managing Editor: Sam Dolnick More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Kae Tempest’s Music Defies Boundaries. A New LP Demolishes Even More.

      by

      The prolific British poet and musician’s fourth album, “The Line Is a Curve,” is personal in new ways.LONDON — “I’m just going to go into it, and I’ll see you on the other side,” Kae Tempest told the crowd at an intimate concert earlier this month.Over the following 30 minutes, Tempest — who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns — performed their new album, “The Line Is a Curve,” a cappella. Standing alone onstage at Rough Trade East, Tempest closed their eyes and swayed, trance-like, to the rhythm of the words, occasionally wiping sweat into their cropped hair. The 300 audience members were silent and still, as though sharing the same reverie.When Tempest performs, “I want to conduct this power that’s in the room,” they said in a recent interview at a cafe near their home in Catford, southeast London. “I want us to plug into each other and see if we can connect.”That impulse has guided Tempest since they started rapping under the name Excentral the Tempest as a teen. Now 36, Tempest has been influential in London’s poetry and spoken-word scenes, creating a formidable body of work including poetry, plays, fiction and nonfiction books, and albums that feature spoken lyrics over a variety of atmospheric backdrops, two of which were nominated for the Mercury Prize.“The Line Is a Curve,” released earlier this month, is Tempest’s fourth album, and perhaps their most personal call for connection yet. Tempest’s previous records and poems offered portraits of the inner lives of contemporary south London characters and ancient Greek gods. “The Line Is a Curve” is firmly in the first person: “I love you when I see you” Tempest chants over moody synths on “Salt Coast”; another track features a voice note Tempest recorded for a friend, intoning, “There can’t be healing until it’s all broken, break me.” The first track’s refrain is “to be known and loved.”“The Line Is a Curve” might be Tempest’s most personal call for connection yet.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesThe album’s cover is the first in eight years to feature a picture of Tempest. Dan Carey, who worked as a producer on “The Line Is a Curve” and all Tempest’s solo albums, said that compared to their previous records, the new album “feels a bit more kind of tender, with a bit more acceptance. I think that Kae’s had some realizations about themselves that make it closer.”Recently, the artist has started to share more of themselves. In August 2020, Tempest came out as nonbinary and changed their first name. Sitting in the south London cafe, Tempest’s eyes glistened as they spoke about this new process of self-acceptance. “I feel relief,” they said. “Trans people are beautiful, so why was I afraid of that person in me? We’re blessed people.” Since coming out, “Maybe I’m able to connect more fully with myself,” they added. “But I’ve been on a journey toward connection my whole life.”Ian Rickson, who directed one of Tempest’s plays, an adaptation of Sophocles’ “Philoctetes” called “Paradise” at London’s National Theater last year, described this as a “shamanic” element of Tempest’s work. When Tempest won the prestigious Ted Hughes Award for poetry at 26, for a piece of live performance poetry called “Brand New Ancients,” there was still a rift “between what was perceived to be ‘literary’ and what was spoken-word/performance and perceived as somehow ‘not literary,’” said Maura Dooley, one of the judges for that year, in an email. Bridget Minamore, a poet and Tempest’s friend, said Tempest was instrumental in bridging that divide.In the years since, Tempest has had many imitators in the spoken-word scene. “There is almost a mythology around them,” Minamore said, attributing it to Tempest’s combination of high energy and raw vulnerability onstage. “You watch Kae sometimes and you’re like, you’re going to rip yourself in two,” she said.Capturing this live energy in a recording was central to Tempest and Carey’s goals on “The Line Is a Curve.” Tempest likes to record an entire album in one take, “so I’m going through it while you’re going through it.”“I’ve been on a journey toward connection my whole life,” Tempest said.Wolfgang TillmansBut for this album, they did something even more raw and bold, and recorded each vocal track three times, live in a theater, to different audiences. The first contained three teenagers; the second, Minamore, who was 30; and the last included one person, who was 78.In live performance like this, “Your physiology responds to somebody else, there’s things that the voice will do in real communication,” Tempest said. “It takes it out of the realm of like, here’s some lyrics I’ve written, the words become a bridge.”During the performance Minamore saw, “I smiled a lot listening to it,” she said, noting the record’s lightness and feeling of “letting go.” In the end, the takes recorded before Minamore were the ones Tempest used for almost the entire album. The LP features additional vocals from Lianne La Havas and Fontaines D.C.’s Grian Chatten, and was executive produced by Rick Rubin.The beauty and mundanity of human interaction have always provided inspiration for Tempest, especially in southeast London, where they have lived more or less their entire life. In the cafe, their gaze drifted out of the window, tracking the movements of passers-by. “Most of what really comes to me in the process of creativity is observations, people,” Tempest said, pointing out at the street. “Even now it just feels so good to me, watching how people do it.”Carey remembered waiting in line for a cab at an airport with Tempest. Ahead of them, some men were causing a delay by trying to maneuver a large appliance into a taxi. Carey was annoyed, but “Kae just turned to me and said, ‘I love people, just watching these people trying to do this thing,’” he said, laughing. “It’s moments like that, where Kae is able to come away with something beautiful from a situation where most people wouldn’t see it.”As Tempest performed, the audience seemed to share the artist’s reverie.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesThe crowd at Rough Trade East.Alex Ingram for The New York TimesThe everyday isn’t the only thing that fuels Tempest’s art. In their 2020 nonfiction book “On Connection,” they wrote about the Jungian notions of spirit of the times, the zeitgeist and the place in the soul where creativity emerges. Talking about these ideas in the cafe, Tempest’s blue eyes were large and earnest behind the thick lenses of their glasses. “I feel like I exist too much in the depths,” Tempest said. “Sometimes I’ve got to really pull it back.”They do this by talking about “random rappers on the U.K. chart and reality TV,” Minamore said; Tempest is a huge “MasterChef” fan. “Sometimes my mind is firing on all cylinders, thinking about a million things, trying to write characters, plot, narrative, rhyme,” they said, “but other times I just want to sit in the pub and not talk about anything interesting and just have a laugh.”Tempest will embark on a European tour next month, and described the feeling of a good gig as being like “going to space.” “It’s really physical, it feels like being bound to this moment and to each other,” they said, “when it’s all happening, it’s like we’re all breathing the same rhythm.”At Rough Trade East, Tempest achieved liftoff. “It just felt so personal, like they were speaking to everyone individually,” said Rob Lee, a 28-year-old fan, after the show. “I was in tears for most of it.” More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Chika Has Never Lost Sight of Her Dream

      by

      5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00a.m. 6:00 7:00 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00p.m. 8:00 9:00 10:00 11:00 12:00 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 Samuel R. Delany Jonathan Bailey Piet Oudolf […] More

    • 75 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      She Taught New York to Sing

      by

      “Throw the note over your shoulder!” Debbie Harry, Kathleen Hanna, Justin Vivian Bond and other singers recall Barbara Gustern, a beloved vocal coach who was killed last month at age 87.Barbara Maier Gustern, a 4-foot-11 woman from the tiny town of Boonville, Ind., exerted an improbable and little-known influence over New York’s overlapping music scenes, guiding cabaret performers, stage actors and rock stars to get the most out of their voices.Ms. Gustern, who died last month, had a gift for unusual metaphors that made her teachings stick. In the bedroom of her 17th-floor apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, where she gave lessons almost every day deep into her 80s, she would ask her students to build theaters inside their heads. Your tongue, Ms. Gustern said, is the stage. Your soft palette is the fly space. You must sing from the very back of stage, projecting your voice into the fly space, through a blowhole at the top of your head.“Your blowhole — these weird little tips that you’re like, ‘That just changed my life,’” said Kathleen Hanna, the frontwoman of the bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, who credited Ms. Gustern with restoring her singing voice after medical issues so severe that she thought she might never sing again.The cabaret singer Justin Vivian Bond prepared for a performance at Carnegie Hall with Ms. Gustern’s help. “I filled that room effortlessly, because the inside of my head was basically an extension of the room,” Mx. Bond said.Another one of her students, Tammy Lang, who performs under the stage name Tammy Faye Starlite, said, “Everyone I knew in the downtown scene worked with her. She was the mother to us all.”Her friends and students recalled her as the grandmother who wore dominatrix gear to perform as a go-go dancer at a playwright’s birthday party; who left her friends in the dust as she ran to catch a subway; who danced on top of a table at the cabaret theater Joe’s Pub.Ms. Gustern with one of her star pupils, the performance artist and singer Taylor Mac.Jackie RudinShe had come to the city in the late 1950s with dreams of making it on Broadway. After realizing she wasn’t going to be a star of the stage, she stopped auditioning for parts and dedicated herself to the work that would bring her an unexpected kind of glory.In a recent Facebook post, she wrote that she wanted to die at age 127 by running across the street and accidentally colliding with a Dewar’s Scotch truck. The end came in what appeared to be a senseless act of violence, when someone shoved her to the sidewalk near her home on March 10. The suspect, Lauren Pazienza, who turned herself in almost two weeks after the incident, has been charged with manslaughter.At the time of her death, Ms. Gustern was three days away from recapturing the fantasy of her youth, and returning to the stage.‘Sing It to the Back 40!’Barbara Joan Maier’s family ran a hardware store in Boonville. Bobbi Jo, as she was known, sang at the Methodist church and, as a teenager, taught Sunday school. Later, as a student at nearby DePauw University, she joined the Young Republicans club.Her pursuit of a stage career took her away from all that. She auditioned for parts in New York and joined regional theater troupes along with summer stock companies in the Poconos, landing parts in “The Sound of Music” and “Threepenny Opera.” She traveled the world, a cruise-ship mezzo-soprano.While singing in choirs at a synagogue in the Bronx and a church in Brooklyn, she got to know the man who would become her husband, Josef Gustern, a singer and actor with a bass voice. They married in 1963 and had a daughter, Katherine.While they scrounged to make a living in music, the names of Ms. Gustern’s peers were appearing more and more frequently in Playbill and on Broadway marquees. At around age 40, she faced the fact that she was too old to be cast in lead roles, much less as an ingénue, and she began her next act by taking a job as a teacher at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in Manhattan. Her husband continued to hustle for stage work, and finally in the early 1990s he scored a long-running part in the Broadway production of “The Phantom of the Opera.”As she settled into the city, Ms. Gustern gained an appreciation for New York’s rough-and-tumble glamour. For some years, prostitutes hung out on the street where she lived, and on morning walks she would try to tell the future by counting the condoms on the sidewalks, as she wrote on her Facebook page, which she treated like a diary. Fewer than three meant trouble; more than three portended good luck; a colored condom indicated that a million-dollar check was on the way; a black one signaled imminent nuclear attack.She began to establish a reputation among insiders of New York’s singing scene in the 1980s, when the avant-garde singer Diamanda Galás took a lesson from her while visiting New York. Ms. Galás ended up moving to the city full-time, in part to keep studying with Ms. Gustern.“Diamanda opened the gate,” said Ms. Lang, the cabaret singer. “And then everybody saw that, ‘Oh, this is somebody who’s open to something that is different.’”Debbie Harry, the lead singer of Blondie, sat in for one of Ms. Galás’s lessons around 1998. Then she began studying with Ms. Gustern. “I had never really tried to learn how to sing properly,” said Ms. Harry, the rare performer who has sung at CBGB and the Café Carlyle. “She taught me more about the voice and your body as an instrument.”Debbie Harry, left, and Ms. Gustern at the Broadway opening of the musical “Passing Strange” at the Belasco Theater in 2008. Ms. Harry credited Ms. Gustern with teaching her “how to sing properly.”Nick Hunt/Patrick McMullan, via Getty ImagesAnother of Mr. Gustern’s students was Murray Hill, an actor, comedian and singer, who spoke at a gathering for her at Joe’s Pub on March 27, after a memorial service at the Church of the Holy Apostles in Midtown. “She was the first, and only, person to say I wasn’t tone-deaf,” Mr. Hill wrote in an email.Tragedy seemed to reinforce Ms. Gustern’s devotion to teaching. In 2003, her daughter died of a drug overdose. Her husband died in 2017. After whole days of lessons, she often spent her nights at students’ performances.Perhaps the biggest job of her career came recently, when she served as the vocal coach for the 2019 Broadway revival of “Oklahoma!” She stayed with the production, which won the Tony Award for best musical revival, until it closed in 2020.“Her career was actually at a high point at 85 years old,” said James Davis, who played Will Parker in the show.During a typical lesson, Ms. Gustern would sit in an antique wooden chair on one side of the bed, a portable keyboard on the blanket before her. The student would stand facing her, on the other side of the bed.“Throw the note over your shoulder!” was one of her catchphrases. Ms. Gustern used bits of Indiana argot to make a point. Rather than telling students to project their voices, she would say, “Sing it to the back 40!” City metaphors crept in, too: “Your mouth is a taxi cab,” she would say, “and your molars are the back doors of the taxi cab. And they’re opening, both of them.”When leading scale exercises, she told her students to use the phrase “he is a really bad bad bad bad man” or the schoolyard taunt “nyah-nyah nyah-nyah-nyah.” She recorded herself going through warm-up exercises and gave the recordings to her students, so that they could practice along with her when they were apart.Ms. Hanna, whose punk style compels her to sing abrasively, said she started meeting with Ms. Gustern more than 10 years ago, after she had undergone surgery on her vocal cords to remove polyps. For a time, her work with Ms. Gustern was her only artistic activity. She learned she had been holding her breath when she should have been letting it go. Under Ms. Gustern’s guidance, she began to exhale before hitting certain notes and to pronounce an ‘h’ before glottal strikes.Ms. Hanna’s voice is back. This month she is starting a tour with her band Bikini Kill. “Without her, I would have been done,” Ms. Hanna said of Ms. Gustern. “How do you thank someone for your career?”Back to the StageBeginning in 2016, Ms. Gustern directed a series of cabaret evenings featuring Austin Pendleton, an actor noted for his character roles in films, and Barbara Bleier, who made her Carnegie Hall debut at age 4. “Make your mouth a little narrower at the top,” Ms. Gustern would comment at rehearsals, and the right rendition of a song would pop out, Ms. Bleier recalled.Now and then Ms. Gustern would perform as part of their show, including a memorable “Santa Baby,” which she sang while making eyes at Ms. Bleier’s husband. But she preferred to remain in the background.That had begun to change in recent months, when she was leading rehearsals for “Barbara Bleier and Austin Pendleton Sing Steve and Oscar,” an evening dedicated to the songs of Oscar Hammerstein and Stephen Sondheim. As they headed toward opening night at Don’t Tell Mama, a Midtown piano club, the group decided that Ms. Gustern would sing three songs herself. For one of them, the “Oklahoma!” showstopper “I Cain’t Say No,” Ms. Gustern planned to pantomime sitting on the lap of a cowboy.“The thought of doing a show was like sentencing me to be tortured,” she wrote on Facebook on March 10. “But as of today all that is reversed.” Now, she continued, “I feel like a singer again for the first time in forever.”A few hours after posting those words, Ms. Gustern was shoved. She died from head injuries brought on by the fall. Ms. Pazienza, a 26-year-old former events coordinator from Queens, has been released on bail from Rikers Island and is due to appear in court on May 10.In the weeks before her death, Ms. Gustern was leading rehearsals of a cabaret show featuring Barbara Bleier, center, and Austin Pendleton, right. After a postponement, they took the stage at Don’t Tell Mama in Midtown Manhattan on March 27, with Paul Greenwood on piano.Dolly Faibyshev for The New York TimesThe “Steve and Oscar” show went on without Ms. Gustern, postponed to March 27. Before an audience of cabaret regulars seated in the banquettes of Don’t Tell Mama, Ms. Bleier and Mr. Pendleton turned the show into a tribute to their friend and director. “All these lyrics mean so many new things,” Mr. Pendleton said from the stage. He soon appeared befuddled, asking the pianist, “What am I going to sing here?”Others who relied on Ms. Gustern find themselves a little lost. The performer and writer Penny Arcade had drafted Ms. Gustern to be the musical director of a show scheduled to start around July. She said she was so shaken by Ms. Gustern’s death that she is now considering a start date in late fall. Eric Schmalenberger, a cabaret producer and performer, said he will lose what was, for a long time, the closest thing he had to an annual family tradition: trimming the Christmas tree at Ms. Gustern’s apartment with others in the music community who had nowhere else to go.But Ms. Gustern’s students have not lost her completely. She will live on for them in the form of the warm-up tapes she gave them. Many performers who studied with her said they listen to the tapes of her before every show; a few said they listen before rehearsals, too.Ms. Gustern on the carousel at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn at a party after “Only An Octave Apart,” a 2021 show featuring Justin Vivian Bond and Anthony Ross Costanza.Joy EpisallaAmelia Zirin-Brown, a cabaret singer under the name Rizo, said that she has listened to hers more than 2,000 times. Ms. Harry and Mx. Bond estimated “thousands”; Ms. Hanna, between 500 and 1,000.They have become attached to one particular warm-up session, made specially for them. They have transferred the recordings from cassettes to CDs to computers to phones. They have backups, and backups of backups. No matter how many times they are told how to hit certain notes, or how to position their faces, they treasure the reminders.The tapes preserve the past. Mx. Bond’s includes Ms. Gustern discussing a lover from decades ago. Ms. Zirin-Brown’s assistants know the tape so well that they can predict the exact moment when, out of nowhere, Ms. Gustern’s cat jumps onto the keyboard.Ms. Gustern might have thought of herself as a helpmeet or second banana, but her students didn’t see her that way.“She meant so much more to me than I did to her, and that was totally OK,” Ms. Hanna said. “I would see her and she wouldn’t understand — I’ve been around the world with you. You’ve been here and you’ve been doing all your stuff, and, meanwhile, I’ve been in France, and you were with me. I’ve been around the world with Barbara a few times. I’m still going to be going around the world with Barbara.” More