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      ‘A Million Miles Away’ Review: From the Fields to Outer Space

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      In this biopic, a boy from a family of migrant farm workers watches the moon landing in 1969, which ignites his desire to be an astronaut.The dream of being an astronaut was planted in José Hernández (Michael Peña) early, when he and his family were migrant workers in 1960s California. Back when the U.S. immigration policy resembled a revolving door more than a steel wall, tens of thousands of families would travel north to harvest seasonal crops. For his parents, the work was in service of a long-held dream: to build a house in their native Michoacán. The children were frequently uprooted and placed in new schools as the family zigzagged across the state, following the work. It wasn’t until a teacher, Ms. Young (Michelle Krusiec), intervened that the Hernández parents settled in Stockton, Calif., forsaking their dream for their children’s education. That’s where young José saw the 1969 moon landing on T.V., a moment that ignited a lasting passion for flight.Sacrifice, grit, perseverance, tenacity: These are the themes that drive “A Million Miles Away,” directed by Alejandra Márquez Abella and based on José Hernández’s memoir, “Reaching for the Stars: The Inspiring Story of a Migrant Farmworker Turned Astronaut,” a true up-by-the-bootstraps tale. The film spans decades, from childhood to, eventually, the NASA space program. He married Adela (Rosa Salazar), a car saleswoman and aspiring chef, with whom he had five children; along the way he also worked as an engineer at a federal research facility. He is propelled by the support of his wife and family as well as a “recipe” for success from his father, Salvador (Julio César Cedillo), around which the film is framed.Beautifully shot and interspersed with historical footage of migrant workers and spacecraft launches, the film’s most effective and touching scenes revolve around the family relationships, particularly José’s with his cousin Beto (Bobby Soto), who became a farmworker like his parents. In one scene, Beto says: “I just think it’s great that I get to be so freaking proud and have no idea what you’re talking about, cousin.” It’s a line that aptly distills what many upwardly mobile immigrants face. There are moments that show the clashes of the two worlds, and those that show their melding: José’s driving to work blasting a ranchera on the radio; using a corncob as a spaceship; or washing dishes in his astronaut uniform. These are heartwarming scenes, and it’s hard not to be moved by the enormity of the challenge he undertook and conquered.But the grit narrative at times becomes a bit heavy-handed, with quotes such as “Hard work or nada,” from his father, and “Tenacity is a superpower” from his NASA trainer, Kalpana Chawla (Sarayu Blue). José Hernández applied to the space program 11 times before succeeding, and the film centers almost exclusively on this plight. There are meaningful glances at his hands, an echo of the calloused hands that supported him, and montages of his persevering through training.In peddling the mythical American dream narrative, the film misses an opportunity for conflict or character development and falls short of delving into bigger, more interesting themes: assimilation, immigration, gender roles, family conflict. Doing so would have made for a more meaningful watch and felt more in line with our present understanding of the reality of migrants’ lives.A Million Miles AwayRated PG. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters, and streaming on Prime Video Sept. 15. More

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      Len Chandler, an Early Fixture of the Folk Revival, Dies at 88

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      A singer who performed alongside Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, he was known for his topical songs, some of which he wrote in minutes.Len Chandler, who was an early fixture of the folk music revival that swept through Greenwich Village in the late 1950s and ’60s and who sang alongside Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and other higher-profile stars at civil rights marches and Vietnam War protests, died on Aug. 28 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 88.Lew Irwin, a longtime friend who in the late 1960s brought Mr. Chandler to Los Angeles to provide music for an unusual new radio show he was creating, confirmed the death. He said Mr. Chandler had recently had several strokes.Mr. Chandler was a classically trained oboist when he arrived in New York from Ohio, where he had graduated from the University of Akron in 1957, and met the singer Dave Van Ronk at the Folklore Center, a Greenwich Village shop that sold records, books and sheet music and was a gathering point for folk musicians.Mr. Van Ronk “introduced me to the Washington Square Park folk scene,” Mr. Chandler said in an essay included in the book “Folk City: New York and the American Folk Music Revival,” by Stephen Petrus and Ronald D. Cohen (2015). “Every Sunday it was filled with folk singers. I remember learning to play on borrowed guitars in the park until someone said, ‘Buy your own damn guitar.’ I said, ‘OK’ and bought his for 40 bucks.”Mr. Chandler with Bob Dylan at Newport in 1964. Mr. Dylan recalled playing poker with Mr. Chandler in the back room of the Gaslight Cafe in New York. “Chandler told me once, ‘You gotta learn how to bluff,’” he said.Jim Marshall Photography LLCSoon he was playing regularly at the Gaslight Cafe, which opened in 1958 and was later famous as a proving ground for Mr. Dylan and others.“It was mainly a scene for poets,” Mr. Chandler said in an interview for the book “Folk Music: More Than a Song,” by Kristin Baggelaar and Donald Milton (1976), “and there wasn’t much happening for singers, except for me.”An executive from the Detroit television station WXYZ saw him there and in 1959 hired him to be the featured musician on “The After Hours Club,” a late-night variety show. By the time Mr. Chandler returned to New York about six months later, the folk music scene was in full swing at the Gaslight, Folk City and other clubs.That scene that included, among others, Mr. Dylan, Mr. Van Ronk, Tom Paxton, Richie Havens and Noel Paul Stookey, later of Peter, Paul and Mary. In “Chronicles: Volume One,” his 2004 memoir, Mr. Dylan wrote of the back-room poker game at the Gaslight where musicians would pass the time waiting their turn to perform.“Chandler told me once, ‘You gotta learn how to bluff,’” Mr. Dylan wrote. “‘You’ll never make it in this game if you don’t. Sometimes you even have to get caught bluffing.’”Mr. Chandler performing in New York City in an undated photo.PL Gould/Images Press, via Getty ImagesMr. Chandler, as John Christy of The Atlanta Journal once put it, “possesses a sharply honed guitar-vocal arsenal of ‘message’ songs, blues songs, jazz songs, country songs, and just songs.” But he was especially known for songs he wrote inspired by the news of the day. The first, Mr. Chandler said, was written in 1962 about a disastrous school bus accident the year before in Greeley, Colo.“Then I started writing many songs about the Freedom Riders and sit-ins,” he was quoted as saying in the “Folk Music” book. At the March on Washington in 1963, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I have a dream” speech, Mr. Chandler sang the traditional song “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize (Hold On)” with some updated lyrics. Ms. Baez and Mr. Dylan were among the backing singers.The next year he toured with Dick Gregory, the comedian known for sharp-edged material involving race. In the summer of 1969 Mr. Chandler was on the maiden voyage of the Clearwater, the sloop Mr. Seeger used to raise awareness of Hudson River pollution and other environmental causes, sailing from Maine to New York and staging concerts at stops along the way.In 1970 and 1971 he was part of a troupe led by Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland that brought an antiwar revue known as “F.T.A.” (which stood for Free Theater Associates, or Free the Army, or something else involving the Army that is unprintable) to military towns and bases at the height of the Vietnam War.If Mr. Chandler never achieved the name recognition of some of those with whom he shared stages and causes, he did write at least one song with lasting appeal: “Beans in My Ears,” which the Serendipity Singers turned into a Top 30 hit in 1964. Aimed at adults but simple and repetitive like a children’s song, it was about people’s tendency not to listen to others. “I think that all grown-ups have beans in their ears,” the final verse went, with “beans in their ears” repeated again and again.Perhaps the song would have climbed higher on the charts had medical professionals in some cities not denounced it. “‘Beans in Ears’ Alarms Doctors Who Fear Children Will Try It,” a 1964 headline in The Indianapolis Star read over an article that said WIRE in Indiana had stopped playing the song. That step was taken by other radio stations as well.Len Hunt Chandler Jr. was born on May 27, 1935, in Summit County, Ohio. He started learning the piano at 9, but once he reached high school he wanted to join the school band, and the only instrument available was the oboe, so he began playing that.He continued to study music at the University of Akron, where he also showed the beginnings of the activism that would characterize his singing career. In a sharply worded letter to the editor published in The Akron Beacon Journal in 1954, he told of being barred from a public pool because he was Black.“When will we, the people of the United States, learn to practice the principles of democracy that we preach?” he wrote.After he earned his undergraduate degree, a $500 scholarship helped take him to New York to continue his music studies. He would eventually earn a master’s degree in music education at Columbia University, but by then he was immersed in the folk scene.By the mid-1960s Mr. Chandler was a familiar presence at coffee houses in the United States and Canada, and in 1968 his dexterity with topical songs landed him a seemingly impossible job at KRLA radio in Pasadena, Calif. Mr. Irwin was creating a current-events show there called “The Credibility Gap,” and Mr. Chandler was to write and sing three songs a day for the show, based on the news. The first song was due by 9 a.m., the second by noon and the third by 3 p.m.“Sometimes I start writing a half-hour, 20 minutes before the show,” he told The Los Angeles Times in November 1968, when he’d been doing the job for about five months, “so I rip it out of the typewriter and run upstairs without ever having played it on the guitar, decide what key I want to sing it in and put my capo in place. The engineer says, ‘Go,’ and I sing it.”In a Facebook post, Mr. Irwin estimated that Mr. Chandler wrote 1,000 songs from 1968 to 1970.“Reporters speak to the mind; Len aimed at the gut,” he wrote. “And always with gentleness to make his words land with the fullest impact.”Mr. Chandler was on the job at KRLA in June 1968 when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. A song he wrote for that occasion included these lyrics:Long line of mourners,Long lines of the slain,Long lines of teletypeSpelling out the pain.Long lines at the ballot boxCasting votes in vain.Long lines line the long, long trackOf another lonesome train.Mr. Chandler in 2009. After settling in Los Angeles, he was a founder of the Los Angeles Songwriters Showcase and helped run it for 25 years.Brendan Hoffman/Getty ImagesMr. Chandler released two albums in the late 1960s, “To Be a Man” (1966) and “The Lovin’ People” (1967), though neither made much impact. He settled in Los Angeles, and in 1971 he and John Braheny founded the Los Angeles Songwriters Showcase, where songwriters performed new material for music publishers and recording executives. They ran it for 25 years, providing exposure for up-and-coming artists including Stephen Bishop, Stevie Nicks and Karla Bonoff.Mr. Chandler’s survivors include his wife, Olga Adderley Chandler, who acted under her maiden name, Olga James, and was the widow of the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, who died in 1975. They also include a son, Michael Fox.“One thing about Chandler was that he was fearless,” Mr. Dylan recalled in “Chronicles.” “He didn’t suffer fools, and no one could get in his way.”“Len was brilliant and full of good will,” he added, “one of those guys who believed that all of society could be affected by one solitary life.”Kirsten Noyes More

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      David LaFlamme, Whose ‘White Bird’ Captured a 1960s Dream, Dies at 82

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      As a founder of the San Francisco band It’s a Beautiful Day, he was at the center, if not in the forefront, of the Haight-Ashbury acid-rock explosion.David LaFlamme, who infused the psychedelic rock of the 1960s with the plaintive sounds of an electric violin as a founder of It’s a Beautiful Day, the ethereal San Francisco band whose breakout hit, “White Bird,” encapsulated the hippie-era longing for freedom, died on Aug. 6 in Santa Rosa, Calif. He was 82.His daughter Kira LaFlamme said the cause of his death, at a health care facility, was complications of Parkinson’s disease.Mr. LaFlamme had seemed an unlikely fit for the role of flower-power troubadour. He was a classically trained violinist who had performed with the Utah Symphony Orchestra. He was an Army veteran. “When I was a young man, I carried my M-1 very proudly and was ready to do my duty to defend my country,” he said in a 2007 video interview.But the times were the times, and in 1967, the year of the Summer of Love, he and his wife, Linda, a keyboardist, formed It’s a Beautiful Day. The band bubbled up from the acid-rock cauldron of the Haight-Ashbury district, which also produced the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and other groups.The band never found the commercial success of its hallowed San Francisco contemporaries. Its debut album, called simply “It’s a Beautiful Day” and released in 1969, climbed to No. 47 on the Billboard chart. “White Bird,” sung by Mr. LaFlamme and Pattie Santos, did not manage to crack the Hot 100 singles chart, perhaps in part because of its running time: more than six minutes, twice the length of most AM radio hits.Even so, the song became an FM radio staple, and an artifact of its cultural moment.The LaFlammes wrote the song in 1967, when they were living in the attic of a Victorian house during a brief relocation to Seattle. The lyrics took shape on a drizzly winter day as they peered out a window at leaves blowing on the street below.White birdIn a golden cageOn a winter’s dayIn the rain“We were like caged birds in that attic,” Mr. LaFlamme recalled. “We had no money, no transportation, the weather was miserable.”He later said the song, with its references to darkened skies and rage, was about the struggle between freedom and conformity. In an email, Linda LaFlamme said that she considered it a song of hope, and that the only rage they had felt was about the Seattle weather.Still, the song, with its pleading chorus, “White bird must fly, or she will die,” seemed to echo the mounting disillusionment of 1969, as marmalade skies turned into storm clouds with the realities of drug addiction and social turmoil, as epitomized by the bloodshed at the Altamont rock festival that year.“It was a very solemn period of music on that first album,” Mr. LaFlamme said in a 2003 interview published on the music website Exposé.“If I would have kept going that way,” he added, “I would have ended up like Jim Morrison, getting more and more into that personal torture trip.”It’s a Beautiful Day’s debut album, released in 1969, reached No. 47 on the Billboard chart. But the band never found a fraction of the commercial success of some of its fellow San Francisco bands.Columbia recordsDavid Gordon LaFlamme was born on May 4, 1941, in New Britain, Conn., the first of six children of Adelard and Norma (Winther) LaFlamme. He spent his early years in Los Angeles, where his father was a Hollywood stunt double, before settling in Salt Lake City, where his father became a copper miner.David was about 5 when he got his first violin, a hand-me-down from an aunt.“I began fooling around with it on my own and taught myself to play ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,’” he said in a 1998 interview. Formal training followed.After joining the Army — he was stationed at Fort Ord, near Monterey, Calif. — he suffered hearing damage from the firing of deafening ordnance. He ended up in a military hospital in San Francisco, then put down roots in the city after his discharge in 1962.He found lodging in the same house as his future wife, Linda Rudman. “By the second day that I was there, she and I had already written a song together,” he said.In 1967, Mr. LaFlamme formed a band called Electric Chamber Orkustra, also known as the Orkustra, with Bobby Beausoleil, a young musician who played bouzouki and would later be convicted of murder as a follower of Charles Manson. A run with Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks followed before the LaFlammes formed It’s a Beautiful Day.The band got its break in October 1968, when the promoter Bill Graham had it open for Cream in Oakland. It’s a Beautiful Day signed with Columbia Records soon after.The band’s second album, “Marrying Maiden,” rose to No. 28 on the album charts. But by then the LaFlammes had split up and his wife had left the band. (They divorced in 1969.)It’s a Beautiful Day carried on with varying lineups and released three more albums, including “At Carnegie Hall” in 1972, before disbanding a year later.In addition to his daughter Kira, from his first marriage, Mr. LaFlamme is survived by his third wife, Linda (Baker) LaFlamme, whom he married in 1982; his sisters, Gloria LaFlamme, Michelle Haag and Diane Petersen; his brothers, Lon and Dorian; another daughter, Alisha LaFlamme, from his marriage to Sharon Wilson, which ended in divorce in 1973; and six grandchildren.Mr. LaFlamme released several albums over the years, including a solo album in the mid-1970s called “White Bird,” which included a disco-ready version of the original single. It actually outperformed the original, peaking at No. 89 on the Billboard Hot 100.But, he said in 1998, “It was a very difficult period musically, because during that period disco music ruled the earth.”“It was really the day the music died,” he said. More

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      Robbie Robertson’s 12 Essential Songs

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      The Band’s arrangements evoked bygone eras but weren’t limited by them. Hear some of the best tracks led by the songwriter and guitarist, who died this week at 80, alongside standout solo material.In Robbie Robertson’s music, earthiness and mystery were never far apart.Robertson, who died on Wednesday at 80, wrote songs that were firmly and widely rooted. Although he was Canadian, his music was steeped in Americana: in blues, country, ragtime, Cajun music, parlor songs, Appalachian ballads, gospel, circus bands, vaudeville and his Indigenous heritage. The way he deployed his guitar was twangy, sly and rigorously pithy, allowing no wasted motion. The lyrics he wrote could be cryptic or narrative, character studies or tall tales or riddles, and they were informed by history, myth and paradox.Particularly in the luminous years of the Band’s recording career — from 1968 to 1976, but forged by a full decade of playing together before that — Robertson shaped an ensemble sound that was down-home and communal but laced with thoughtful details. In a late-1960s pop moment of florid psychedelia and sprawling, be-here-now jams, the Band was a counterweight: measured, grown-up and fully aware of a long past.The Band’s arrangements evoked bygone eras but weren’t limited by them. Robert’s pointed guitar licks teased against Garth Hudson’s ornate keyboards; vocal harmonies tumbled in from odd directions, and little musical nooks and crannies hinted at secrets just out of reach. With Levon Helm, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel all in the Band, Robertson didn’t need to be a lead singer.After the Band’s decisive farewell in 1976, Robertson depended on his own limited voice — often bolstered by guest singers — and he worked with studio groups that hadn’t built the road-tested reflexes of the Band. But he continued to write songs steeped in American lore, very much including his own embrace of his Native American ancestry. Earnestness had fully replaced the Band’s jovial camaraderie, but Robertson’s ambitions were undiminished.Here are 16 essential Robertson recordings:Bob Dylan and the Hawks, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” (1966)Some of Bob Dylan’s British fans were still outraged that he’d gone electric when he toured in 1966; he was backed by the Hawks, a precursor of the Band. Their response to folky resistance was to dig in and turn up the volume, in performances that still ring with jubilant defiance. “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” from “Live 1966: The ‘Royal Albert Hall’ Concert,” was actually recorded in Manchester at a show that was bootlegged and mislabeled for years. The tempo is louche and unhurried, and Robertson and Hudson use the spaces between Dylan’s taunting lines to carry on a merry country-vs.-calliope wrangle.The Band, “Yazoo Street Scandal” (1967)“Yazoo Street Scandal” appears on the 1975 collection “The Basement Tapes”: songs recorded in 1967 in Woodstock and Saugerties, N.Y., by Dylan and the Band while he was in seclusion after his 1966 motorcycle accident. “Yazoo Street Scandal” is the Band on its own, with a wiry, stop-time riff and Helm yowling lyrics that juggle bawdiness and biblical allusions.The Band, “The Weight” (1968)A fable of callous indifference. A series of setups and punchlines. Some scattered biblical allusions. A stolid march and a potential hymn. “The Weight” is all of those, droll and haggard at the same time, paced by Helm’s laconic drum thumps. Helm and Danko trade verses, and group harmonies stack up in a rising, hopeful chorus before the narrator realizes, once again, “They put the load right on me.”The Band, “Chest Fever” (1968)Robertson’s cackling guitar counters the pomp of Garth Hudson’s organ intro and the hefty chords in the verses. Richard Manuel sings about a tantalizing, bewildering woman. In the chorus, as “my mind unweaves/I feel the freeze down in my knees,” organ, piano and guitar capture the vertigo in woozy stereo syncopation, topped by groaning lead guitar licks that insist on comedy.The Band, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” (1969)Robertson wrote “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” based on the Southern memories of Helm, the only American in a band with four Canadians. The song captures wounded pride, multigenerational loyalties and lingering bitterness in a mournful processional. Helm’s swelling, extended drum rolls hint at military funerals, and after each chorus, there’s a solemn pause, as if facing the next verse is almost too much to bear.The Band, “Up on Cripple Creek” (1969)A happy trucker narrates “Up on Cripple Creek,” praising Bessie, his free-spirited hookup in Lake Charles, La. “If I spring a leak, she mends me/I don’t have to speak, she defends me,” Helm exults. A ratchety groove grows out of Robertson’s opening guitar licks, and before the end, Helm is yodeling with glee.The Band, “King Harvest (Has Surely Come)” (1969)In “King Harvest,” a farmer faces calamities — drought, fire, a horse gone mad — and finds his last hope in joining a union, as sharecroppers did during the Depression. His rising desperation comes through as Manuel sings the verses, and in the subdued choruses, his love of the land endures.The Band, “The Shape I’m In” (1970)The beat is peppy, almost eager, and Hudson’s note-bending organ interludes and outro are downright jaunty. But Manuel sings about a mounting collection of woes: loneliness, jail, homelessness. Robertson’s guitar provides brief hints of the blues, but this narrator is just going to have to muddle through.The Band, “Stage Fright” (1970)Performing in the spotlight is “Just one more nightmare you can stand” in “Stage Fright,” a reflection on trauma and fame that may have been autobiographical. “For the price that the poor boy has paid/He gets to sing just like a bird,” Danko sang with a quaver, leaping into falsetto for a few notes after “bird.” The music pushes the fearful singer onstage and the song understands the compulsion to perform despite it all: “When he gets to the end, he wants to start all over again.”The Band, “Life Is a Carnival” (1971)Robertson worked at carnivals as a young man, and he remained fascinated by a traveling carnival’s perpetual mix of fun and sleaze; after the Band broke up, he co-wrote and acted in a 1980 movie, “Carny.” He and the Band came up with a staggered, prismatic funk for “Life Is a Carnival.” Amid cheerfully cynical lyrics — “Hey buddy, would you like to buy a watch real cheap?” — and a syncopated horn arrangement by Allen Toussaint, Robertson lets loose some of his most aggressive lead guitar.The Band, “Acadian Driftwood” (1975)Robertson turned to Canadian history in “Acadian Driftwood,” writing about the British deportation of Acadians from eastern Canada in the mid-18th century; some ended up in Louisiana, where Acadians became Cajuns, although the narrator sings, “I got winter in my blood.” Between verses, Cajun fiddle trades off with what sounds like British fife (actually Hudson on piccolo), nodding to history.The Band, “It Makes No Difference” (1976)The heartache is palpable in “The Last Waltz” version of “It Makes No Difference,” a straightforward soul ballad that brought out a riveting Danko vocal: quivering, aching, almost sobbing, as he sings about a sunless world of unbearable hurt and sorrow after a breakup. But he has his pride: “It’s all I can do just to keep myself from telling you/I never felt so alone before,” he confesses.Robbie Robertson, “Somewhere Down the Crazy River” (1987)Robertson narrates the verses with a knowing growl in the noirish “Somewhere Down the Crazy River.” He piles up archetypes — “a jukebox coming from up the levee,” “Madame X,” “a ’59 Chevy,” “a blue train” — over sleek, echoey 1980s funk.Robbie Robertson & the Red Road Ensemble, “Ghost Dance” (1994)Robertson provided soundtrack music for a 1994 mini-series, “The Native Americans,” striving to mesh contemporary pop with Native American tradition. “Ghost Dance” mixes Native American-style drums, flutes and chanting with a stoic march of remembrance and perseverance: “They outlawed the ghost dance/But we shall live again,” he vows.Robbie Robertson, “Unbound” (1998)Robertson embraced electronica on his 1998 album, “Contact From the Underworld of Redboy.” In “Unbound,” he’s enveloped by sustained synthesizer chords and looping percussion as he sings about irresistible desire. The wordless vocals of Caroline McKendrick draw him like a siren song.Robbie Robertson, “Once Were Brothers” (2019)In “Once Were Brothers,” a stately march with touches of harmonica, Robertson mourns the estrangement of comrades: “We lost a connection after the war,” he sings. “There’ll be no revival/There’ll be no encore.” Could he have been thinking of bandmates? More

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      Why Nina Simone Was Always Ahead of Her Time

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      A recently unearthed live version of “Blues for Mama,” written by Simone and Abbey Lincoln in the 1960s, took on domestic abuse in a momentous way.Nina Simone was always ahead of her time. And in the mid-1960s she found a fellow musical innovator and ideal feminist collaborator in the jazz vocalist Abbey Lincoln, whom she teamed up with to write the song “Blues for Mama.” When Simone performed it at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1966, she introduced it as “a gutbucket blues.”“It will appeal to a certain type of woman,” she said, “who has had this kind of experience.”That experience was domestic violence, a trauma that the titular Mama endured and that others blamed her for causing. “They say you’re mean and evil/Don’t know what to do,” Simone sang. “And that’s the reason that he’s gone/And left you black-and-blue.”I’ve been intrigued by “Blues for Mama” since I first heard it on Simone’s 1967 album “Nina Simone Sings the Blues.” And now, thanks to Verve Records’ recent issue of the previously unreleased recording of her Newport performance — packaged as the album “You’ve Got to Learn” — we have an even earlier version of the song out in the world.“Blues for Mama” signified a new moment. Rather than accept the abuse and the negative rumors, Nina tells Mama to set the record straight: “It wasn’t you that caused his bitter fate.”The track appears at the album’s midpoint, before the politically trenchant “Mississippi Goddam,” a song Simone wrote in response to two tragedies in 1963: the assassination of the civil rights activist Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the murder of four African American girls in a church bombing in Birmingham, Ala.Her fans are likely to have appreciated “Blues for Mama” as further proof of her musical dexterity and ability to seamlessly move across genres. And it stands out as one of few songs from the era to explicitly take on gender-based violence, actively refusing to blame the victim. “They say you love to fuss and fight/And bring a good man down,” Simone narrated. “And don’t know how to treat him/When he takes you on the town.”At the time, Lincoln, too, was known for both her vocal virtuosity and her radical politics, including her collaboration as the lead singer on “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite,” the civil rights jazz album from the bebop drummer Max Roach, whom she later married. Though “Blues for Mama” is one of Lincoln’s earlier songwriting credits, it isn’t so surprising that she and Simone chose to embed their critique of sexism within a blues format.“Violence against women was always an appropriate topic for the blues,” the activist Angela Davis wrote in the book “Blues Legacies and Black Feminism.” Davis goes on to say that this is because the blues, as a genre, often blurred the boundaries that separate the “private sphere from the public,” making the violence that Black people experience in their homes as lyrically and politically relevant as what happened to them outdoors and on the road.Lincoln and Simone were, in some ways, extending a tradition that dated back to the early 20th century, when classic blues singers recorded songs about domestic violence, among them Ma Rainey in “Black Eye Blues” (written by Thomas A. Dorsey) and Bessie Smith in “Outside of That” (by Jo Trent and Clarence Williams).Later, Billie Holiday sang, “Well, I’d rather my man would hit me/Than for him to jump up and quit me” in her cover of the blues standard “T’ain’t Nobody’s Business if I Do.” (It’s worth noting that Dianne Reeves changed those lyrics in her 1997 take on the song to, “I’d rather my man quit me/Than for him to even rear up and think about how he might even try to hit me.”) Except for Rainey’s “Cell Bound Blues,” about a woman jailed for shooting her violent lover, most blues songs presented abuse against women matter-of-factly and as one of many experiences that led to their feeling the blues.“Blues for Mama” was the rare protest song that could galvanize multiple social justice movements — civil rights, women’s liberation and Black Power — at once. It would take a quarter century for Simone to reveal in her memoir, “I Put a Spell On You,” that her marriage in the 1960s to Andy Stroud was rife with violence, while Lincoln would later allude to the tumult in her relationship with Roach.“He was a great big drummer, but he was a gorilla,” Lincoln told The Chicago Tribune. “I got tired of him ‘gorilla-ing’ me and telling me what I had to do.” She also revisited the themes in the later part of her career when she, divorced from Roach, established herself as a consummate songwriter. She recorded “Blues for Mama” as “Hey, Lordy Mama” in 1995, and addressed abuse in the ballad “And It’s Supposed to Be Love” (1999).Perhaps Simone sensed even back then that “Blues for Mama” would have to be rediscovered to be more fully appreciated. That July evening at the Newport festival, she broke midsong to admonish her audience and declared, “I guess you ain’t ready for that.” More

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      Astrud Gilberto, ‘The Girl From Ipanema’ Singer, Dies at 83

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      It was the first song she ever recorded. And it played a key role in making the Brazilian sound known as bossa nova a phenomenon in the United States.Astrud Gilberto, whose soft and sexy vocal performance on “The Girl From Ipanema,” the first song she ever recorded, helped make the sway of Brazilian bossa nova a hit sound in the United States in the 1960s, died on Monday. She was 83.Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

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      Cynthia Weil, Who Put Words to That ‘Lovin’ Feeling,’ Dies at 82

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      With her husband and songwriting partner, Barry Mann, she wrote lyrics for timeless hits by the Righteous Brothers, the Animals and Dolly Parton.Cynthia Weil, who with her writing partner and husband, Barry Mann, formed one of the most potent songwriting teams of the 1960s and beyond, churning out enduring hits like the Drifters’ “On Broadway” and the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’,” signature tunes of the baby boomer era, died on Thursday at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 82.Her death was confirmed on Friday by her daughter Jenn Mann, who did not specify a cause.“​​We lost the beautiful, brilliant lyricist Cynthia Weil Mann,” the chart-topping singer and songwriter Carole King wrote in a statement posted on social media.Recounting the friendship and rivalry that she and her former husband and songwriting partner, Gerry Goffin, shared with Ms. Weil and Mr. Mann (a friendship memorialized in Broadway’s “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” from 2014), Ms. King added, “The four of us were close, caring friends despite our fierce competition to write the next hit for an artist with a No. 1 song.”Ms. Weil and Mr. Mann, who were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2010, notched their first hit — “Bless You,” recorded by Tony Orlando — in 1961, two years after the music supposedly died with the Iowa air crash that claimed the lives of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson, known as the Big Bopper.In fact, the pop and rock explosion of the 1960s was just beginning, thanks in no small part to key contributions from songwriters like themselves, Burt Bacharach, Neil Sedaka, Neil Diamond and Ms. King, who were part of the star-studded songwriting community centered on the Brill Building, the storied hit factory on Broadway and 49th Street in Manhattan.Ms. Weil and her husband toiled two blocks away, in fact, at 1650 Broadway. It was a humble setting in which to create musical masterpieces.“There were, like, three or four writing rooms there, and each room had an upright and an ashtray, because everybody smoked like crazy back then,” Mr. Mann said in a telephone interview on Friday. “Even though it was sparse, we worked and worked, and,” he added with considerable understatement, “some good things came out of there.”Ms. Weill with her husband and songwriting partner, Barry Mann, during the induction ceremony. Chad Batka for The New York TimesThose good things included two soaring, almost sepulchral No. 1 singles for the Righteous Brothers: “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’,” from 1964, which in 1999 the music licensing agency BMI ranked as the most played song on radio and television of the 20th century, and “(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration,” from 1966.Another potential hit written for the Righteous Brothers, “We Gotta Get Out of this Place” (1965), ended up in the hands of Eric Burdon’s band, the Animals, who added some grit to it that helped it become an anthem for battle-weary soldiers in the Vietnam War. (“In this dirty old part of the city,” Ms. Weil’s lyrics began, “Where the sun refused to shine, people tell me there ain’t no use in tryin’).Whatever the style or genre, Ms. Weil supplied a trademark touch of poetry and wit. In her statement, Ms. King said her favorite Weil lyric is in the song “Just a Little Lovin’ (Early in the Mornin’),” recorded by Dusty Springfield in 1968: “Just a little lovin’ early in the mornin’ beats a cup of coffee for startin’ off the day.”While many of their songs became emblems of the 1960s, Ms. Weil’s lyrical success continued well after the mud of Woodstock had dried.In 1977, Dolly Parton hit No. 1 on the Billboard country chart and No. 3 on the pop chart with the Weill-Mann song “Here You Come Again.” (The song brought Ms. Parton a Grammy Award for best female country vocal performance.) In 1980, the Pointer Sisters hit No. 3 on the pop charts with “He’s So Shy,” which Ms. Weil wrote with Tony Snow.“There’s no reason a person shouldn’t write better 20 years after they start,” she said in an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 1986. “Writers know more and have more life experience to draw on.”Which is not to say that she found it easy to stay on top in the music business. “You kind of have to sit through the trends,” she continued. “Live through bubble gum and disco and everything else we’ve lived through. You’ve got to be a creative survivor.”Ms. Weil was born on Oct. 18, 1940, in New York City, the younger of two children of Morris Weil, who owned a furniture company, and Dorothy (Mendez) Weil.Growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and later on the Upper East Side, she trained as an actress and dancer and dreamed of a life in theater, a subject she later majored in at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y.“I was always fixated on Broadway,” she said in a 2016 video interview with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. “I wanted to write for Broadway, I had always pictured myself doing something on Broadway.”She channeled those youthful longings into the lyrics for “On Broadway,” which she originally wrote from the point of view of a small-town girl dreaming of a future on the Great White Way — a dream that, the lyrics acknowledged, often comes with dashed hopes:They say the neon lights are bright on BroadwayThey say there’s always magic in the airBut when you’re walking down the streetAnd you ain’t had enough to eatThe glitter rubs right off and you’re nowhereMs. Weil eventually changed the song’s protagonist to a male for the Drifters’ version, which charted No. 9 as a single in 1962. Sixteen years later, George Benson lodged his own jazz-inflected version at No. 7.In addition to her husband and daughter, Dr. Mann, a psychologist, she is survived by two granddaughters.Despite her Broadway ambitions, Ms. Weil’s career took a different turn in 1960, when she met Mr. Mann, who had already co-written a couple of Top 40 hits, including one he recorded himself in 1961, the doo-wop sendup “Who Put the Bomp (In the Bomp Bomp Bomp),” which he wrote with Mr. Goffin.It was Ms. Weil who first noticed the man with whom she would craft a career and life. As her daughter recalled by phone, her mother had asked Don Kirshner, the Brill Building power broker music publisher, to find her a writing partner, hoping it would be Mr. Mann. She “thought he was really hot,” Dr. Mann said.Instead, Mr. Kirshner set up a meeting with a different up-and-coming songwriter. On the day of that meeting, Ms. Weil “was sitting and waiting,” Mr. Mann recalled, “and in walks Carole King. She thought, ‘Oh, what a drag, I don’t want to have to write with that chick.’”He added, “It worked out fine for both of them.” More

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      Redd Holt, Drummer on ’60s Instrumental Pop Hits, Dies at 91

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      He played in the Ramsey Lewis Trio when it released “The ‘In’ Crowd” in 1965, and a group he co-led recorded the funky hit “Soulful Strut.”Redd Holt, a drummer who in the 1960s, before jazz fusion became a popular term, struck a beat that had both the kick of funk and the delicacy of jazz on a number of surprisingly popular instrumental tunes, died on May 23 in Chicago. He was 91.The death, at a hospital, was caused by complications of lung cancer, his son Reginald said.Mr. Holt scored his biggest hit as the drummer with the pianist Ramsey Lewis’s trio, whose original lineup also included Eldee Young on bass.In 1965 — nearly 10 years after the band’s first record — they came out with “The ‘In’ Crowd,” a live album whose title track was a cover of a recently popular song by the R&B singer Dobie Gray.The Lewis Trio version superseded Mr. Gray’s, reaching the top of the Billboard R&B chart and No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. Their “‘In’ Crowd” won the 1965 Grammy Award for best instrumental jazz performance by a small group or soloist.The group had found a winning formula — repeating a catchy melody over and over, as in a pop tune, adding a bluesy rhythm and leaving room for improvisation. Later in 1965 they released the album “Hang On Ramsey!” It included two bluesy instrumental covers of pop songs that also appeared as singles: the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Hang On Sloopy,” which the McCoys had made a No. 1 hit in 1965. The trio played each of them to shouts of encouragement from a live crowd.Success, however, proved the be the group’s undoing. In 1966, following disagreements over artistic direction and money, Mr. Holt and Mr. Young left Mr. Lewis to form the Young-Holt Trio, later renamed Young-Holt Unlimited. (Mr. Lewis replaced Mr. Holt with Maurice White, who went on to found Earth Wind & Fire.)Mr. Holt, left, and Mr. Young in about 1968, after they had broken with Ramsey Lewis to form their own jazz ensemble, Holt-Young Unlimited. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesMr. Holt and Mr. Young continued making music in a pop-friendly vein. Their 1968 single “Soulful Strut,” with a funky, danceable groove, reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, behind Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It on the Grapevine” and “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me,” a joint release by Diana Ross & the Supremes and the Temptations.(“Soulful Strut” sounded a lot like an instrumental version of “Am I the Same Girl?,” a late-’60s single by the soul singer Barbara Acklin. Some questioned whether Mr. Young and Mr. Holt had actually played on the recording credited to them, suggesting rather that they had allowed their band name to be used for work done by studio musicians who had backed Ms. Acklin. Reginald Holt said that Carl Davis, the producer of both songs, told him that his father and Mr. Young had indeed played on “Soulful Strut,” and that his father would laugh when questioned about it.)Another Young-Holt single, “Wack Wack,” reached No. 40 on the charts in 1967. With a monotone male voice repeating the word “whack” in the manner of a quacking duck, the song expressed the merry spirit of Mr. Holt’s style of jazz.Isaac Holt was born on May 16, 1932, in Rosedale, Miss., a Mississippi River town in the northern part of the state. He got his nickname when he was young, a reference to his light-toned skin. His father, Willie, worked in a lumber yard, and his mother, Mary (Gilliam) Holt, was a homemaker who sometimes taught crocheting and worked as a nurse’s aide.Redd’s father took him to see traveling minstrel shows when he was a boy, and he was particularly struck by the one-legged tap dancer Peg Leg Bates moving to the rhythm of a trap drummer.“I went home and from the moment on, I was banging on my mother’s pots and pans and buckets,” Mr. Holt told The Journal and Courier of Lafayette, Ind., in 1992. “That’s how it all came to be.”The family moved to Chicago as part of the Great Migration. Redd grew up in the city and lived there the rest of his life, mostly on the South Side. He served in the Army from 1954 to 1956.He played with Chicago jazz luminaries as a teenager, and he belonged to a local seven-piece jazz band called the Clefs. When several members were drafted, only Mr. Holt, Mr. Young and Mr. Lewis remained. They formed a trio, calling themselves the Gentlemen of Jazz, but changed the name when they were advised that it made more commercial sense to name the group after their pianist.In later years Mr. Holt performed in his own band, Holt Unlimited, and occasionally played reunion shows with Mr. Young and Mr. Lewis. Mr. Young died in 2007, and Mr. Lewis died last year.Mr. Holt married Marylean Green in 1954. In addition to his son Reginald, she survives him, along with two other sons, Isaac and Ivan; a brother, Benjamin; eight grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.Mr. Holt kept up a regular Friday night gig in Chicago until the onset of the pandemic, and he loved to talk about his craft with high school students.“Kids are hip,” he told The Journal Herald of Dayton, Ohio, in 1977. “They have open heads.” More