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      Thom Bell, a Force Behind the Philadelphia Soul Sound, Dies at 79

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      As a songwriter, arranger and producer, he brought sophistication and melodic inventiveness to hits by the Delfonics, the Spinners and others.Thom Bell, the prolific producer, songwriter and arranger who, as an architect of the lush Philadelphia sound of the late 1960s and ’70s, was a driving force behind landmark R&B recordings by the Spinners, the Delfonics and the Stylistics, died on Thursday at his home in Bellingham, Wash. He was 79.His death was confirmed by his manager and attorney, Michael Silver, who did not cite a cause.Along with Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, Mr. Bell was a member of the songwriting and production team — the Mighty Three, as they were called (and as they branded their publishing company) — that gave birth to what became known as the Sound of Philadelphia. Renowned for its groove-rich bass lines, cascading string choruses and gospel-steeped vocal arrangements, the Sound of Philadelphia rivaled the music being made by the Motown and Stax labels in popularity and influence.A classically trained pianist, Mr. Bell brought an uptown sophistication and melodic inventiveness to Top 10 pop hits like the Delfonics’ “La-La (Means I Love You)” (1968) and the Spinners’ “I’ll Be Around” (1972). He was particularly adept as an arranger: On records like “Delfonics Theme (How Could You),” strings, horns and timpani build, like waves crashing on a beach, to stirring emotional effect.He also wrote the arrangement for the O’Jays’ propulsive Afro-Latin tour de force, “Back Stabbers,” a No. 3 pop hit in 1972.Mr. Bell had a knack for incorporating instrumentation into his arrangements that was not typically heard on R&B recordings. He employed French horn and sitar on the Delfonics’ “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” (1970) and oboe on the Stylistics’ “Betcha by Golly, Wow” (1972). Both records were Top 10 pop singles, and “Didn’t I,” which was later covered by New Kids on the Block, won a Grammy Award for best R&B vocal performance by a duo or group in 1971.“The musicians looked at me like I was crazy. Violin? Timpani?” Mr. Bell said of his first session with the Delfonics in a 2020 interview with Record Collector magazine. “But that’s the world I came from. I had a three-manual harpsichord, and I played that. I played electric piano and zither, or something wild like that.”“Every session,” he went on, “there was always one experiment.”Mr. Bell, who typically collaborated with a lyricist, said that his chief influences as a songwriter were Teddy Randazzo, who wrote tearful ballads like “Hurts So Bad” for Little Anthony and the Imperials, and Burt Bacharach.“Randazzo and Bacharach, those are my leaders,” Mr. Bell told Record Collector. “They tuned me in to what I was listening to in a more modernistic way.”Mr. Bacharach “was classically trained also,” Mr. Bell said in the same interview. “He was doing things in strange times, in strange keys. He was doing things with Dionne Warwick that were unheard-of.”The recording engineer Joe Tarsia, the founder of Sigma Sound Studios, where most of the hits associated with the Sound of Philadelphia were made, was fond of calling Mr. Bell the “Black Burt Bacharach.” (Mr. Tarsia died in November.)Coincidentally, Mr. Bell’s first No. 1 hit single as a producer was Ms. Warwick’s “Then Came You,” a 1974 collaboration with the Spinners. (He also won the 1974 Grammy for producer of the year.)His other No. 1. pop single as a producer was James Ingram’s Grammy-winning 1990 hit, “I Don’t Have a Heart,” co-produced by Mr. Ingram.Mr. Bell produced dozens of Top 40 singles, many of which were certified gold or platinum. His influence on subsequent generations of musicians was deep and wide; numerous contemporary R&B and hip-hop artists, among them Tupac, Nicki Minaj and Mary J. Blige, have sampled or interpolated his work.Thomas Randolph Bell was born on Jan. 27, 1943, in Philadelphia. His father, Leroy, a businessman, played guitar and accordion. His mother, Anna (Burke) Bell, a stenographer, played piano and organ and encouraged young Tom (he only later started spelling his name Thom) and his nine brothers and sisters to pursue music and other arts — in Tom’s case, the piano.He was in his early teens when he first gave thought to pop music. The precipitating event was overhearing Little Anthony and the Imperials’ “Tears on My Pillow” on the radio while working at his father’s fish market.“I fell in love with the whole production,” he said of the epiphany he experienced in a 2018 interview with The Seattle Times. “I listened to the background, the bass, a lot more than just the lyrics.”Mr. Bell, center, with his fellow songwriters Leon Huff, left, and Kenny Gamble in 1973, when Mr. Gamble and Mr. Huff announced that he would be joining them in a production partnership.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesMr. Bell and his friend Kenny Gamble teamed up and made a go of it as a singing duo called Kenny and Tommy. They met with little success, but the experience confirmed Mr. Bell’s desire to pursue a career in pop music. He soon found work playing piano in the house band at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and at the Uptown Theater in Philadelphia, and he was eventually invited to play on the soul singer Chuck Jackson’s 1962 hit, “Any Day Now.”But he got his big break — coming while he was working at Cameo-Parkway Records in Philadelphia as, among other things, the touring conductor for Chubby Checker — when he wrote “La-La (Means I Love You)” with William Hart, the lead singer of the Delfonics.In the late 1960s, while continuing to collaborate with the Delfonics, Mr. Bell re-established ties with Mr. Gamble and his creative partner Leon Huff. He became part of their team at Sigma Sound Studios and, ultimately, the Sigma Sound house band, MFSB (the initials stood for “Mother Father Sister Brother”).By the early 1970s, Mr. Bell had started working as producer, arranger and songwriter (most often with the lyricist Linda Creed), first for the Stylistics and later for the Spinners, whose career he helped revitalize after it had stalled at Motown.He remained active as the ’70s progressed, even as the Sound of Philadelphia was being eclipsed by disco and rap. But apart from successful collaborations with Johnny Mathis, Elton John, Deniece Williams and Mr. Ingram, the hits quit coming.Mr. Bell had moved to Tacoma, Wash., in 1976 with his first wife, Sylvia, who suffered from health issues that her doctors believed might be alleviated by a change of climate. The couple divorced in 1984, and shortly afterward Mr. Bell remarried and moved to the Seattle area. He settled in Bellingham in 1998, having by then retired from the music business.Mr. Bell at a concert honoring the recipients of lifetime achievement Grammy Awards at the Beacon Theater in New York in 2017. He had been given a Grammy Trustees Award the year before.Michael Kovac/Getty Images for NARASHe was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2006 and the Musicians Hall of Fame 10 years later. In 2016, he received a Grammy Trustees Award, an honor that recognizes nonperformers who have made significant contributions to the field of recording. (Mr. Gamble and Mr. Huff received the award in 1999.)Mr. Bell is survived by his wife of almost 50 years, Vanessa Bell; four sons, Troy, Mark, Royal and Christopher; two daughters, Tia and Cybell; a sister, Barbara; four grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.Early in his career, Mr. Bell was met with questions about his often unconventional production and arrangements, particularly his extensive use of European orchestral conventions on R&B records.“Nobody else is in my brain but me, which is why some of the things I think about are crazy,” he told Record Collector magazine. “I hear oboes and bassoons and English horns.“An arranger told me, ‘Thom Bell, Black people don’t listen to that.’ I said, ‘Why limit yourself to Black people? I make music for people.’” More

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      Joe Tarsia, an Architect of the Sound of Philadelphia, Dies at 88

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      His work as an engineer at Sigma Sound Studios left a sonic stamp on R&B hits by the O’Jays, the Delfonics, the Stylistics and many others.Joe Tarsia, the recording engineer and studio operator who was among the architects of the lush, fervent blend of soul, disco and funk known as the Sound of Philadelphia, died on Nov. 1 in Lancaster, Pa. He was 88.His death, at a retirement community, was confirmed by a friend, the video producer Steve Garrin, who did not cite a cause.At Sigma Sound Studios, the recording hub he established in 1968, Mr. Tarsia worked with the producers Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff and Thom Bell on blockbuster hits by Philadelphia soul luminaries like the O’Jays and the Delfonics. Known for his precision at the mixing board and his imaginative use of echo and other ambient effects, Mr. Tarsia was the engineer on scores of gold and platinum recordings.“We were lucky to be recording at Sigma Sound with Joe Tarsia,” Mr. Gamble said in a 2008 interview with Crawdaddy magazine. “He was a great engineer and got a clean, clear sound from every instrument.“If you record the music right, it’s easier to mix, and, as an engineer he was the best,” Mr. Gamble added. “He knew what he wanted and kept us moving at the speed of thought.”In the early 1970s alone Mr. Tarsia captured the sound of dozens of acknowledged Philadelphia soul classics, including the Stylistics’ “Betcha by Golly, Wow,” the Spinners’ “I’ll Be Around” and Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes’ “If You Don’t Know Me by Now.”“TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia),” a proto-disco workout by MFSB, the Sigma Sound house band (the initials stood for Mother Father Sister Brother), became the theme song for the long-running television show “Soul Train.” “TSOP” was among Mr. Tarsia’s collaborations with Gamble and Huff that topped both the R&B and pop charts, as were the O’Jays’ “Love Train” and Billy Paul’s “Me and Mrs. Jones.”Mr. Tarsia was known to refer to the sumptuous strings, syncopated rhythms and gospel-bred call and response of the Philadelphia sound as “Black music in a tuxedo” — an aesthetic he in no small way shaped through the richness and clarity he lent to so many recordings.“If I made a contribution, it was that Philadelphia had a unique sound,” Mr. Tarsia told The Philadelphia Inquirer in an interview commemorating the 50th anniversary of Sigma Sound in 2018. “You could tell a record that came from Philly if you heard it on the radio.”Several years before opening Sigma Sound, Mr. Tarsia established himself as an audio engineer at Cameo-Parkway, one of the leading independent record companies of the early 1960s.The Cameo and Parkway labels were important sources of music and talent for “American Bandstand,” Dick Clark’s nationally televised dance show. “Bandstand” was based in Philadelphia, and local artists like Bobby Rydell and Chubby Checker, who recorded for Cameo-Parkway, received exposure they might not have gotten had the show been produced elsewhere.Mr. Tarsia, who became the chief engineer at Cameo-Parkway in 1962, attributed his early success there to Mr. Clark’s support.“He’s the reason I’m in the business,” he was quoted as saying of Mr. Clark in the book “Temples of Sound: Inside the Great Recording Studios” (2003), by Jim Cogan and William Clark.“He was an approachable guy. If you went up to him and said, ‘I have a record,’ and he played it, it was worth a thousand promotion guys, because it was heard all over the country.”Mr. Tarsia in 1980. He was known to refer to the sumptuous strings, syncopated rhythms and gospel-bred call and response of the Philadelphia sound as “Black music in a tuxedo.” — an aesthetic he in no small way shaped.Arthur StoppeJoseph Dominick Tarsia was born in Philadelphia on Sept. 23, 1934. He was the younger of two sons of Joseph and Rose (Gallo) Tarsia. His father was a tailor, his mother a homemaker.After graduating from Edward W. Bok Technical High School in South Philadelphia, Mr. Tarsia took technical courses elsewhere before being hired at the electronics company Philco. He was later a service technician for local recording studios, work that led to his decision to pursue a career in music.“I was always moonlighting at something,” he was quoted as saying in “Temples of Sound.” “I was fixing TV sets, and one day this guy says, ‘Can you fix a tape recorder?’ and I said, ‘Sure!’ It turned out that tape recorder was in a recording studio, and I never left.”Mr. Tarsia had been at Cameo-Parkway for just a few years when “American Bandstand” moved to Los Angeles in early 1964, effectively ending the company’s tenure as a pipeline for the show’s music.The Beatles’ first tour of the United States that year only compounded matters, as Cameo-Parkway’s teenage-oriented pop gave way to British invasion rock ’n’ roll and eventually the psychedelia of the counterculture.Meanwhile, Mr. Tarsia met and befriended Mr. Gamble, who as an aspiring songwriter would drop by Cameo-Parkway to shop his songs. He was eventually the engineer for several early recordings produced by the Gamble-Huff team, most notably “Expressway to Your Heart, a Top 10 R&B and pop hit for the blue-eyed soul group the Soul Survivors in 1967.Later that year, convinced that his future lay with the soul music of emerging vocal groups like the Intruders and the Delfonics, Mr. Tarsia borrowed against his home and used his savings to lease studio space in Philadelphia’s Center City. Naming it after the Greek letter he saw on a place mat in a Greek restaurant, he opened Sigma Sound the next August. Success quickly followed with hits produced by Mr. Gamble and Mr. Huff like Jerry Butler’s “Only the Strong Survive.”Established artists like Wilson Pickett and Dusty Springfield soon began traveling to Mr. Tarsia’s studios to record. In 1971, CBS Records offered Mr. Gamble and Mr. Huff, by then regular clients at Sigma Sound, a major distribution deal. That led to the founding of Philadelphia International Records, which became home to many of the acts associated with the Sound of Philadelphia.By the mid-1970s the likes of Stevie Wonder, David Bowie and the Jacksons were booking sessions at Sigma Sound as well. Seizing the moment, Mr. Tarsia opened Sigma Sound of New York, a trio of studios that, in the late ’70s and ’80s, hosted sessions by Madonna, Whitney Houston, Steely Dan and others.In 1990, Mr. Tarsia’s son, Michael, who died last year, became the president of Sigma Sound. Mr. Tarsia eased into retirement, increasingly spending his time lecturing and supporting educational programs like Grammy in the Schools. In 2003, 15 years after Sigma Sound of New York was closed, he and his son sold their original Philadelphia studios.Mr. Tarsia was a founder of the Society of Professional Audio Recording Services and a trustee of the Recording Academy. He was inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame in Nashville in 2016.He is survived by his wife of more than 60 years, Cecelia (Giarrizzo) Tarsia; a daughter, Lorraine Rawle; and three grandchildren.Mr. Tarsia was proud of the stamp he put on music in the 1960s and ’70s.“In those days, before the computer,” ” he recalled to The Philadelphia Inquirer, “records had personalities. There was the Motown sound. The Memphis sound. The Muscle Shoals sound. And there was the Sigma sound.” More

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      in Theater

      Making a Meal of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival

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      A handful of works deal with the many questions of nourishment and nurture. How we feed. How we are fed.Last Friday night, a group of about a dozen of us walked into a woman’s vagina. It was red, French-accented and soft. This was near the climax of “The Path of Pins or the Path of Needles,” a cynosure of this year’s FringeArts Festival in Philadelphia, which began on Sept. 8 and runs until Oct. 2.Philadelphia’s Fringe began in 1997, the same year that the New York International Fringe Festival got started, both of them modeled, loosely, after Edinburgh’s Fringe. (The New York festival hasn’t been presented since 2019.) Most years, the Philadelphia Fringe has included several big names on the performance circuit — big enough to attract out-of-town ticket buyers — while also demonstrating a strong commitment to local artists like Pig Iron Theater Company, Lightning Rod Special, Thaddeus Phillips and others.Since the pandemic, the presence of artists from beyond Philadelphia appears to have diminished, but the festival still includes more than 180 theater, performance art, dance, circus and comedy shows. Last weekend I could have seen a musical about sleep apnea or an improvised Dungeons & Dragons adventure — aren’t all D&D adventures essentially improvised? — or, if I were less uptight, “Bath House,” which was advertised as “a deeply sensory immersive theatrical experience dripping with erotic energy.”Instead, I went with “The Path of Pins or the Path of Needles,” a collaboration between Pig Iron and the filmmaker Josephine Decker, and “Food,” a solo show from the Pig Iron member Geoff Sobelle (who also makes work with the theatrical group rainpan 43). And as a kind of palate cleanser in between, “Yes, We’re Ready, We’ll Split an Order of Fries for the Table — Does That Work for You? — Sure, One Check Is Fine,” an elegy for the American diner. At a late-night cabaret, I also caught a drag peep show with a butcher shop theme. Nothing I saw felt finished (in fact, I received a post-show email from “Path” clarifying it as a work in progress), but all seemed to take on questions of nourishment and nurturing. How we feed. How we are fed.Diners sharing French fries in “Yes, We’re Ready,” a tribute to the diner. Mike Durkin“Path,” a site-responsive piece staged in a shabby mansion to the north of the city, imagines its audience members as people in the late, sway-bellied stage of pregnancy. The cast, mostly women garbed in flamboyant thrift-store finery, is spread out across the lawn — jumbled with beds, lamps and clotheslines — and the first floor of the house. It is nearly sunset when the show begins and just after dark when it ends. This golden-hour gloaming lends the show a dreamy, fairy-tale quality. If some of its subject matter inclines toward the grisly, that’s true of fairy tales, too.As a filmmaker, Decker (“Madeline’s Madeline,” “Shirley”) favors intense psychology and surrealistic flights. For “Madeline’s Madeline,” a movie set in and around the world of experimental theater, she studied with Pig Iron. This new collaboration marries that company’s physical and metaphysical theatrics with Decker’s feminine, fevered aesthetic. There’s a sense of play here. And also a sense of danger.Some scenes are quiet and abstract, as when a pile of clothes is flung into the air, then carefully folded. Others are noisy and more pointed, as when audience members are given scraps of paper, each of which details a mother’s failures, and asked to recite them, loudly. Much of the show suggests an ambivalence — angry, funny, raucous, witchy — toward pregnancy and motherhood and the lived reality of the female body. A pumping bra is used to droll effect (though, honestly, I had hoped to never see a pumping bra again), and many of the lines have a comic anguish.“I used to be a woman who washed my hair!” one performer wails.It wasn’t always clear if we spectators had the freedom to explore the various locations or if we were constrained to follow where led. (The freedom that a pregnant body does or doesn’t have is a resonant theme, especially now, but this tension felt accidental rather than intended.) I’m relatively obedient, so I went where I was bid and read from Daphne Spain’s “Gendered Spaces” when asked. But late in the play, when a performer asked, “Does anyone feel like decomposing?” I veered elsewhere. Because feeding a baby is one thing. Being food for worms? That’s another.Geoff Sobelle in “Food,” a meditation on what and how and why we eat.Maria BaranovaThe next day I found myself seated at a long table at one end of the Broad Street Diner, sharing a bowl of crispy, salty, twice-fried French fries. This was a highlight of “Yes, We’re Ready,” Mike Durkin and Nick Schwasman’s daylight tribute to the diner. Gentle if haphazard, this show celebrates the phenomenon of the all-night eatery with jokes, stories, snacks and friendly audience participation. Its relationship to theater feels remote and its structure limp in the way of an abandoned onion ring, but it is unfailingly cheerful and kind. And maybe theater would be a happier place if more shows allowed ticket holders, like the ones seated near me, to happily demolish shared plates of chicken fingers and Belgian waffles while the action unrolls.This was an appropriate appetizer for Sobelle’s “Food.” As he proved in “The Object Lesson” and his work with rainpan 43 (“all wear bowlers,” “Elephant Room”), Sobelle is both a philosopher and a clown, and “Food” is his meditation on what and how and why we eat. It begins with the first multicelled creature to evolve a mouth and ends with the promise and devastation of the global food system, with a multicourse dinner served in between. Not served to you, of course. Though if you are seated at the table at which the action takes place (I was shunted to a balcony), Sobelle may pour you a glass of wine.For much of the show, Sobelle plays a harried waiter — attentive, dandified, arrogant. Using prompts and magic tricks and graceful physical comedy, he makes an enormous amount of food appear and then disappear, seemingly down his own gullet, as in the Monty Python skit. A point of concern: Should one man really drink that much ranch dressing? Each course has been prepared with care, though how those courses interrelate and whether they constitute a full meal is less certain. The show seemed to end about five different times before actually concluding, which suggests a disjointedness, a difficulty in translating so many ideas — good ideas! — into theater.And yet, I would watch Sobelle do just about anything — like, say eat half a dozen apples in just a minute, even from far away. (And for those at the table, there are opportunities to do more than merely watch and listen.) The ending, when it does come, doles out one final conundrum. Do you applaud? Or tip your waiter? More

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      in Music

      Alex G and the Art of Interesting Choices

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      The 29-year-old musician has recorded with Frank Ocean, released a film score and made oodles of outré indie rock. One thing has guided his unusual career: gut decisions.Alex G in the studio earlier this year. The musician has become a Philadelphia hero, but his listenership is far from just local.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesPHILADELPHIA — On a blustery Thursday in June, the 29-year-old musician Alex Giannascoli sat on a bench in tranquil Penn Treaty Park, overlooking the Delaware River, the breeze occasionally shaking loose acorns from an overhead tree. Giannascoli, who is known professionally as Alex G, has dark, shaggy hair and a disheveled handsomeness that makes him look a bit like a softer, more approachable Andrew W.K. He clutched a large Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup and, whenever he felt like he’d gone on a tangent, blamed the caffeine.Before long, a hiply dressed 20-something walking an old dog came up and interrupted to politely ask if Alex G was indeed Alex G.Alex grinned sheepishly and laughed. “Yeah.”“I knew it!” the man said, shaking his head. “I just moved to Philly — and what do you know!”To a certain type of indie music fan, Alex G is a regional celebrity, the kind of artist who stands almost as a metonym for the place where he lives and works. Since 2010, he has released a string of albums that have showcased both his outré, D.I.Y. ethos and a melodic pop sensibility at the core of his music. Vocally and aesthetically, he is a restless shape shifter, altering the pitch of his voice, embodying uncanny characters (like, say, a cowboy who has survived the nuclear holocaust or an insecure teenage girl named Sandy), and plundering innumerable genres. All of these elements together make his albums feel like warped, scratchy transmissions from a sonic collective unconscious. Yet, somehow, they still sound unmistakably like Alex G.Over the past decade, his fandom has grown far beyond local love. It now includes Frank Ocean (who personally tapped Alex to play guitar on his 2016 opus, “Blonde”), a lively Subreddit whose members cheekily but reverently refer to him as “Mr. G,” and Michelle Zauner, the author of the best-selling memoir “Crying in H Mart” and the leader of the Grammy-nominated indie band Japanese Breakfast, which opened for Alex on a 2017 tour.“A lot of the music is still relying on my gut,” Alex G said. “Like, if I have a guitar part, and it gives me a gut feeling, I add that.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times“Honestly, he is one of my favorite contemporary songwriters,” Zauner said in a phone interview. “Everything he does is so brilliant and singular and bizarre. Every time you think you know what he’s up to, he does something else, and then a bunch of people just try to copy what he does.” Trying to pin down his personality, she gave up: “He’s just a really unique, weird man.”Alex G’s signature eccentricity was in full force in May when he released “Blessing,” the introductory single from his ninth album, “God Save the Animals,” due Sept. 23. On first listen, it sounded like an entirely different artist: Perhaps one of those vaguely goth, subtextually Christian alternative rock bands that proliferated during the nu-metal boom. “Every day is a blessing,” he whispers with menacing intensity. “If I live like the fishes, I will rise from the flood.”“I guess it’s kind of left-field,” he said at the park, shrugging. “After a long time of not really putting stuff out, I thought it would be the most interesting choice.”The cult of Alex G, a group down for interesting choices, has grown with each album. His last release, the wildly eclectic “House of Sugar,” was his most acclaimed and successful yet. This year he released his first ever film score, for the indie horror flick “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair.” He also recently played on a major late-night show for the first time, performing a memorable rendition of his single “Runner” on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”Yet at a time when so many musicians feel a professional obligation to share intimate details of their lives with fans on social media to grow their audience, Alex has carefully erected barriers protecting his privacy. (His longtime partner Molly Germer, a violinist who sometimes plays in his band, and his sister, Rachel, a painter who does the cover art for most of his records, both declined to comment for this article.)Still, there are moments on “God Save the Animals” that are so frank and plain-spokenly sincere — from inquiries about spirituality to anxiety about when to start a family — that some listeners will be inclined to wonder whether they are extensions of Alex’s inner dialogue.Alex remains reluctant to ascribe any meaning — least of all autobiography — to anything he writes. “It’s honesty like catching a ball or something,” he said of his songwriting process. “I just don’t allow myself to think, ‘Should I put my hand here or here?’”He laughed, looking at his now-empty coffee cup. “Maybe there’s someone who’s very good at this, buried deep down, who’s just not in touch with the dumb part of me that’s navigating the world.”“When I’m thinking of a song,” Alex G said, “it’s not like, ‘This would be a great ‘me’ song.’ I’m just like, ‘This would be a cool song.’”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesIN JANUARY, ALEX and his longtime collaborator Jacob Portrait, a founder of the band Unknown Mortal Orchestra, were in the final stages of mixing “God Save the Animals” at a studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Wearing a beanie and a black hoodie, Alex spoke enthusiastically about the Beatles documentary “Get Back,” which he’d just watched (“I just love how it felt like you were their friend”) and his recent obsession with the folk songwriter Gillian Welch. Talking about his new album, though, still felt difficult.“A lot of the music is still relying on my gut,” he said. “Like, if I have a guitar part, and it gives me a gut feeling, I add that.”Portrait spun around in his chair in front of the mixing console to assist. “Some people, the way that they analyze it feels almost scholarly,” he told Alex. “But you’re always like, ‘It doesn’t feel right.’ And then you go in and change something and it’s like, ‘Oh wow. That’s incredible.’”Alex said his instincts are a part of a creative process that can skew obsessive. “I am beyond a control freak — I’m a monster,” he told me. “I say it straight up to my band sometimes, because I’ll have them play on some of the songs, and sometimes I’m like, ‘Honestly you could play something so amazing and I might not like it just because I didn’t do it.’”After self-recording a prolific run of early albums, Alex was reluctant to invite anyone new into his process, but Portrait, who arrived to work on the 2015 album “Beach Music,” slowly became a trusted partner.Portrait recalled a turning point in their relationship, when Alex was writing his next album, the tuneful, quasi-folk “Rocket.” Alex was so excited about a new song he’d just written that he drove from Philadelphia to Brooklyn just to tape a USB stick containing the demo to Portrait’s computer screen. (“Which is hilarious,” Portrait said, “because the internet’s definitely around.”) When he plugged it in and listened, Portrait was blown away by one of the best songs Alex had ever written, a fractured country lament called “Bobby,” which has since become a fan favorite.Around this time, an email from Ocean’s manager arrived out of the blue. Alex ended up credited as a guitarist and arranger on two tracks from Ocean’s “Blonde”: the plangent, pitch-shifted “Self Control” and the diffuse “White Ferrari.” He also played guitar throughout the amorphous visual album “Endless” and joined Ocean’s live band for a six-gig stint.The scope of their fame is certainly different, but, in an aesthetic sense, Alex and Ocean are kindred spirits. Both value privacy and continue to work with a trusted circle of collaborators, incubated from outside timelines and trends, which allows their music to retain a power of intimacy no matter how many people listen to it.“As a producer, Frank really was thinking of Alex when he got some of his music onto that record,” Portrait said, “because you can get the feeling of some of those moments. You’re like, ‘Damn, that really is Alex.’”ALEX GREW UP in Havertown, a quiet suburb nine miles outside of Philadelphia. He has two artistic siblings who are roughly a decade older than him, so it took him a while to figure out his place. His brother played jazz and had formal training in music, but 7-year-old Alex quickly grew bored with the piano lessons he’d begged his parents for.His sister, Rachel, though, was an avid music fan who introduced him to his first “cool bands”: Nirvana, Radiohead. In his early teens, influenced by another one of his sister’s favorite artists, Aphex Twin, Alex started fiddling around on the computer, making what he laughingly dismissed as “beep-boop [expletive].” His older sister heard something in it, though, and that meant the world to him.“You could show her any outlandish thing and she’d be like, ‘Oh yeah, OK,’” he said, of sending her his songs. “It basically pushed me into the world of DIY music, the fact that I had this confidence to be like, ‘She thinks I’m good at it.’” They’re still close today, and live down the street from each other.In high school, Alex was into “typical pot-smoking teenager” stuff, he said: drawing, reading, writing, and, of course, honing his musical sensibility. His school hosted coffeehouses where local bands could play. He went to his first one when he was in middle school and felt a world of possibility open up: “It clued me in as a kid that, ‘OK, you can make a band. You can just do it.’”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesIn recent years, as would-be creatives continue to be priced out of New York, Philadelphia has become a kind of beacon for young artistic types, especially independent musicians. As soon as he started playing music, Alex felt the support of a strong local scene. Early in high school, he and his friend Sam Acchione, who still plays in his band, formed a group called the Skin Cells and performed their first show in the basement of a local library, opening for the New Jersey punk stalwarts Screaming Females. “I remember afterwards they were like, ‘Hey, great job,’” Alex said. “And then we went home, like, ‘They said great job!’”Still, for all his DIY bona fides, Alex’s influences often skew surprisingly mainstream. At the park, Alex said the production on “Blessing” was inspired by a song he became obsessed with while working on “God Save the Animals,” which he’d listen to endlessly on loop. I leaned in, expecting him to name-drop some obscure, crate-dug rarity.“It was this song ‘Like a Stone’ by Audioslave,” Alex said. “It came on the radio one night and I was like, ‘What the …? This is the best thing I’ve ever heard!’”“Blessing” is an outlier sonically, though not thematically, on the new album. Its title included, “God Save the Animals” riffs on religious imagery and sometimes even evokes a kind of funhouse-mirror Christianity (“God is my designer,” a surreal, helium-voiced Alex sings on one song, “Jesus is my lawyer”). Though Alex wasn’t raised in a religious household, he admits that spirituality has been on his mind these past few years, and that some of the songs likely sprang from that part of his subconscious. “I don’t really have a set of beliefs,” he said, “but it seems like a place everyone has to go at some point.”Even if Alex’s music has never felt especially spiritual, there has long been a recurring sense of morality in it. Terrible things happen in and around the margins of his songs — nuclear bombs; fentanyl overdoses; bottomless longing — but never without the possibility of renewal and carrying on.Similarly, one of the most stirring moments on the new album comes in the middle of “Runner,” which until then has been a mild-mannered lite-rocker in the vein of Soul Asylum’s “Runaway Train.” “I have done a couple bad things,” Alex sings in a pleasant voice, and then repeats the line several times, his voice becoming increasingly anguished until it turns into a bloodcurdling scream. It’s a gaping rupture in the song, but just as casually, it continues on.That it sounds nothing quite like anything he’s released before goes without saying — as does the fact that it’s still somehow so Alex G. “When I’m thinking of a song,” he said, “it’s not like, ‘This would be a great ‘me’ song. I’m just like, ‘This would be a cool song.’”“And so it sounds like me because I don’t know what I’m doing,” he added, his laughter rising against the wind. “But I’m pursuing it as far as I can go.” More

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      in Movies

      At the BlackStar Film Festival, a Revelatory Understanding of Cinema

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      Specializing in work by Black, brown and Indigenous directors, the annual Philadelphia event showcases experimental work from around the world.Don’t call it the Black Sundance.Though it was dubbed that by Ebony magazine, the BlackStar Film Festival, now in its 11th year, is a cultural institution all its own. Sharing a similar focus on independent cinema with its Park City counterpart, BlackStar — kicking off on Wednesday in Philadelphia with a slate of 77 features and shorts from all over the world — partly distinguishes itself from other festivals with its emphasis on work made exclusively by “Black, brown and Indigenous artists.” But as a regular of the festival, I’ve always been struck by its ambitious bridging of cultural specificity, social justice and the avant-garde, making it an exciting, expansive and revelatory cinematic experience.Founded by Maori Karmael Holmes in 2012, it was conceived as a one-off event to showcase Black films that hadn’t been screened in the Philadelphia area. “I had just moved back from Los Angeles and felt like there was a gap in Philly for these particular works,” Holmes told me. “And I started collecting films that hadn’t been shown in the area that had been made in 2011 or 2012, and very quickly had a list of 30 films, so I pivoted to making this a film festival.”Holmes, who now serves as artistic director and chief executive of BlackStar Projects, the organization behind the festival, explained, “It was just meant to be this one-time celebration.” But more than 1,500 people showed up, and after the festival was mentioned by Ebony as well as the director Ava DuVernay, in a New York Times interview, “suddenly, we had outsized attention, and people asked, ‘When’s the next one?’”The gathering quickly earned a reputation as the go-to festival for emerging and established Black experimental filmmakers. Terence Nance, perhaps more than any other director, knows this. The creator of the genre-bending TV series “Random Acts of Flyness,” his features and shorts have been shown at the festival every year since its start.“I would say BlackStar has been foundational for me,” Nance told me. “Before the pandemic, it was that yearly summer touch point in Philly for those of us interested in the project of Black cinema to get together, kick it and watch things that are pursuing a Black cinema language, ethos and way of being. That just doesn’t exist anywhere else and on this scale.”A scene from “Vortex,” the new short by Rikki Wright and Terence Nance.via BlackStar ProjectsBut it is also an opportunity to share new works and receive critical feedback, making it a rare space for filmmakers of color, especially those pushing the boundaries of their form. An experimental short by Nance and the director Rikki Wright, titled “Vortex,” will have its debut at the festival this year. “People will tell you your film was amazing but also what did not work,” Nance explained. “There, I think that it is possible to enter those conversations safely, or maybe an even better word is with love. I think that’s how communities refine and stick to each other.”The festival, named for the Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey’s international shipping line, offers audiences unique access to deeply political and highly experimental films from all over the African diaspora. “Something that I’m really proud of is the global outlook that BlackStar has,” the festival’s director, Nehad Khader, said. “We’re interested in Black American stories, but we’re also really interested in Black stories from the continent and the Caribbean, Latin America and Canada.” And though the festival has always featured filmmakers of color (Khader is a Palestinian American director herself), their inclusion is now an explicit part of the selection process. (The organization received 1,200 submissions this year alone.)“BlackStar started with a focus on Black cinema and then expanded into brown and Indigenous cinema as well,” Khader noted. “Now we don’t just have Black stories from Asia and the Arab world, but also Indigenous stories from Australia and Peru. This comes from an ethos that we are the global majority. We think about ourselves in this way.”This year’s program includes films that are both socially relevant and fantastic, futuristic and familial.Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s “Lingui, the Sacred Bonds,” for instance, is a tender, intimate Chadian drama about a single mother, Amina (Achouackh Abakar Souleymane), and her struggle to help her 15-year-old daughter, Maria (Rihane Khalil Alio), get a safe abortion in a country where it is illegal. While the film speaks to a larger battle over reproductive rights, it is also a warm, tightly woven narrative that transports us to the outskirts of Chad’s capital, N’Djamena, and shows us the vibrancy and vulnerability of female life in this majority Muslim country. “Haroun has a gift for distilling volumes of meaning in his direct, lucid, balanced visuals,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review in February, “which he uses to complement and illuminate the minimalist, naturalistic dialogue.”Thelonious Monk as seen in “Rewind & Play,” from Alain Gomis.via BlackStar ProjectsIn many ways, the documentary “Rewind & Play” by the French filmmaker Alain Gomis seems like it would be all dialogue. That’s because of its premise: In 1969, the great bebop pianist Thelonious Monk was interviewed for hours under the hot lights at a Paris television studio by a fellow musician, Henri Renaud. But rather than reproduce the false sense of camaraderie that Renaud strove for, Gomis blends the original footage with outtakes from the archives to both expand our appreciation of Monk’s genius as well as critique how the white Renaud (and thus mass media) sought to shape and create stereotypical representations of the Black avant-garde. Gomis reveals how Monk’s silence (the one time he shares his opinion, Renaud tells the producer, “I think it’s best if we erase it”) functioned as a strategy to circumvent Renaud’s racialized gaze and assert Monk’s agency and artistry beyond it.Experimentation dominates “One Take Grace,” the documentary debut from the South African actor and director Lindiwe Matshikiza. The film is the outgrowth of a decade-long collaboration with a 58-year-old Black South African domestic worker, Mothiba Grace Bapela. Following Bapela’s daily labor, uncovering her past trauma, and exploring her aspirations to be an actor herself, the film uses different lenses, including a fisheye, to reveal the rituals and rules that govern Bapela’s life. The result: a dynamic, curious and insightful portrait of a charismatic figure who might ordinarily be overlooked. Similar themes of visibility and gender inform the “Locomote” shorts program, which includes the trans activist Elle Moxley’s political coming-of-age story, “Black Beauty,” and Simone Leigh and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s experimental “Conspiracy,” set in Leigh’s studio on the eve of her landmark exhibition in the United States Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale.“One Take Grace” is the result of a collaboration between the director Lindiwe Matshikiza and a South African domestic worker, Mothiba Grace Bapela.via BlackStar ProjectsSuch diversity in geography, genre and narrative style is one of the main reasons the Nigerian British filmmaker Jenn Nkiru, best known for directing Beyoncé’s Grammy Award-winning video “Brown Skin Girl,” routinely makes the pilgrimage to BlackStar. Another is the sense of community it fosters, rendering it more of what she calls “a big, beautiful family reunion.” She said, “Even though it’s a festival, there’s such a level of concern for people’s work and welfare, and that’s very indicative to me of what I imagine Black filmmaking is.”This will be the festival premiere of her “Out / Side of Time,” a short about a fictional Black family in the 19th-century community of Seneca Village in New York City. Originally commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art for “Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room,” it stands out for its format as a five-channel black-and-white video playing on what looks like a 1950s television set. At BlackStar, Nkiru’s nonlinear, intergenerational story will be part of a larger conversation about form, temporality and the visual language of contemporary Black cinema.“I find that BlackStar is very experimental in what it showcases and what it celebrates,” she said, adding later, that’s “important because it serves as a reminder of the potentiality of Black cinema and of what we can do, not just in our art making but also in our nation-building as well.”The BlackStar Film Festival runs Wednesday through Sunday in Philadelphia. For more information, go to blackstarfest.org. More

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      in Music

      William Hart, Driving Force Behind the Delfonics, Dies at 77

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      With hits like “La-La (Means I Love You)” and “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time),” his group pioneered the soulful Philadelphia sound.William Hart, who as the lead singer and chief lyricist of the soul trio the Delfonics helped pioneer the romantic lyrics, falsetto vocals and velvety string arrangements that defined the Philadelphia sound of the 1960s and ’70s, died on July 14 in Philadelphia. He was 77.His son Hadi said the death, at Temple University Hospital, was caused by complications during surgery.The Delfonics combined the harmonies of doo-wop, the sweep of orchestral pop and the crispness of funk to churn out a string of hits, 20 of which reached the Billboard Hot 100. (Two made the Top 10.)Almost all of them were written by Mr. Hart in conjunction with the producer Thom Bell, including “La-La (Means I Love You),” “I’m Sorry” and “Ready or Not Here I Come (Can’t Hide From Love),” all released in 1968, and, a year later, “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time),” which won a Grammy for best R&B vocal by a duo or group.Alongside Motown in Detroit and Stax in Memphis, the Philadelphia sound was a pillar of soul and R&B music in the 1960s and ’70s. More relaxed than Motown and less edgy than Stax, it drew on both the doo-wop wave of the late 1950s — especially groups like Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and Little Anthony and the Imperials — and a slowed-down version of the funk perfected by James Brown.Mr. Hart looked to all those artists, along with songwriters like Burt Bacharach and Hal David, as inspiration. He preferred to write lyrics after the melodies were in place, working around the strictures they imposed to weave stories about heartbreak, jealousy and old-fashioned romance.“I could imagine at a very early age what a broken heart was all about,” he told The Guardian in 2007. “Being a young man, I had to put myself in that position. And I found I could just write about it. It’s like imagining what it’s like to jump off a cliff — you can write about it, but you don’t have to actually jump off that cliff.”In Philadelphia, the Delfonics became mainstays of the frequent “battles of the bands” held at the Uptown Theater, the white-hot center of the city’s soul scene, going toe to toe in satin lapels to see who could be the night’s smoothest crooners.Their reach went far beyond 1960s Philadelphia. Mr. Hart’s songs have a timeless, dreamy quality, at once emotion-laden and urbane. That’s one reason they have had second and third lives: Singers have remade them, rappers have sampled them, and filmmakers have featured them on soundtracks.The New Kids on the Block remade “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” in 1989, taking it to No. 8 on the Billboard pop chart. Prince covered “La-La (Means I Love You)” in 1996, the same year the Fugees released a reinterpreted version of “Ready or Not Here I Come (Can’t Hide From Love),” titled simply “Ready or Not.”The next year the Delfonics and Mr. Hart experienced an even bigger resurgence when Quentin Tarantino featured “La-La (Means I Love You)” and “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” on the soundtrack of his film “Jackie Brown” and as a plot point, using the songs’ smooth, nostalgic sound to draw together characters played by Pam Grier and Robert Forster.“I think the fact that our music is clean helps us make the crossover into the next generation,” Mr. Hart told The Philadelphia Tribune in 2008. “We sing songs that everyone of every age can enjoy. I write most of the songs, and that’s one thing I’ve always tried to do.”William Alexander Hart was born on Jan. 17, 1945, in Washington and moved with his family to Philadelphia when he was a few months old. His father, Wilson, worked in a factory, and his mother, Iretha (Battle) Hart, was a homemaker.His father gave him the nickname Poogie, which stuck with him long into adulthood.Along with his son, he is survived by his wife, Pamela; his brothers, Wilbert and Hurt; his sisters, Niecy and Peaches; his sons, William Jr., Yusuf and Champ; 11 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.William began writing songs when he was about 11 and immediately latched onto the themes of love lost and regained that would dominate his lyrics for decades.He joined his brother Wilbert and a friend from high school, Randy Cain, in a group they at first called the Orphonics, a variation on “aurophonic,” a term William saw on a stereo box. They tweaked the name to Delfonics at the suggestion of their manager, Stan Watson.Mr. Hart was still working a day job in a barbershop when a friend put him in touch with Mr. Bell, who was already well known around Philadelphia for the lush, sensual arrangements he had done for a local label.They became a hit-making duo, the Lennon and McCartney of West Philadelphia: Mr. Bell wrote the music and Mr. Hart supplied the lyrics, often almost simultaneously. Mr. Hart claimed they wrote “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” in two hours.The original Delfonics split up in 1975, but Mr. Hart continued to perform under the name, with lineups that might or might not include members of the original group. Wilbert Hart went on to tour with his own Delfonics, even after his brother won an injunction against him in 2000.In 2002 Wilbert Hart and Mr. Cain successfully sued William Hart for back royalties. The courtroom clash didn’t prevent the three of them from occasionally reuniting, at least until Mr. Cain’s death in 2009.Mr. Hart continued to tour using the Delfonics name, his falsetto a bit weaker but his presence still commanding. He also released a number of side projects, including “Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics” (2013), with Mr. Younge producing and Mr. Hart singing and sliding effortlessly back into the lyricist’s chair.“It’s like a blank canvas,” he said in a 2013 interview for the music magazine Wax Poetics. “I’m an artist; just give me the canvas, and I’ll paint the painting.” More

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      in Theater

      After 40 Years, a Luminary of Theater’s Avant-Garde Departs

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      “I have the energy, I have the interest,” says Blanka Zizka of the Wilma Theater. “But I need to go a different way.”When Blanka Zizka retired from her post as artistic director of the Wilma Theater at the end of July, it was truly the end of an era.“I have been at it for 40 years,” Zizka said in a video interview from Philadelphia, where the company is based. “That’s a long time.”Zizka and her husband, Jiri, were born in Czechoslovakia, where they immersed themselves in the underground scene of late 1960s and early ’70s, notably the work of innovative titans like Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor. The couple eventually emigrated to the United States and then landed at the Wilma Project in 1979, becoming artistic directors in 1981. They divorced in 1995, and she became the sole artistic director of the renamed Wilma Theater in 2010.And now, at 66, she will be its artistic director emeritus.Throughout the Wilma’s history, the Zizkas championed demanding work by directors and playwrights. The theater has had a fruitful association with Tom Stoppard, for example, who described Blanka in an email as “an intellectual steeped in theater language; a ‘writers’ director’ but freethinking in what she wants the audience to see.”The Wilma also often put on visually daring productions that stood out from the comparatively naturalistic fare by many regional companies. In recent years, Blanka also encouraged the resident acting company, the HotHouse, to explore experimental techniques and pushed artists to supersize their ambitions. (She will continue to work 20 hours a month over the next two years, some of which she said she is likely to spend with the HotHouse).“She taught me, as a young, queer, Black artist in the theater, that I could write Black queer stories at the scale that she was directing,” said James Ijames, who is now one of the Wilma’s artistic directors, with Yury Urnov and Morgan Green. “She just really blew open what I thought was possible.”In the video interview, Zizka shared the joys and frustrations of her years running a regional American theater company. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Keith J. Conallen, a HotHouse company member, in “Don Juan Comes Home from Iraq,” a 2014 production by Paula Vogel.Alexander IziliaevWhy leave the Wilma now?I started to think about it very strongly last August. Suddenly, I was spending some time with my son, who is now 44 and lives in Bellport, N.Y. I was always feeling so guilty about him because I felt I’ve never been a great mom; theater was always my first priority. It’s hard to say, but that was the reality. So it was kind of a reunion, in a beautiful way. I also spent two or three hours a day biking in wetlands and I realized: Oh my God, I’ve been living all my life in a space without windows. I started to feel something that I have not felt since I was about 15 or 16, this sense of freedom and of loving beauty and colors in nature. And I felt I need to experience it more before I kick the bucket [laughs].And yet in a 2015 interview, you said: “I feel that, professionally, if I’m lucky, I have, like, 10 years. There is not a history of old women running theaters.” Did you defiantly plan to stay on for another decade at the time?I said that exactly out of those feelings, but I don’t feel it anymore. I feel like that if I had wanted to stay at the Wilma, I could have. I have the energy, I have the interest. I didn’t lose the love for theater, for sure. But I need to go a different way. And there is also the danger of becoming your own prison for anybody who works in an institution for a long time.What were your earliest memories of American theater, having grown up behind the Iron Curtain?I never studied at university. I was working as a cleaning woman in the library during the day and doing underground theater in the evening. We used to go to Poland for a weekend to just see shows and I was able to see the Living Theater and Bread and Puppet Theater, the experimental-happening scene, Joseph Chaikin — those are my heroes. But that period was over by the time I got here.What were your early years in Philadelphia like?We were taking it step by step. We spoke very bad English — I could not ask for a cup of coffee, basically. For us it was about how do we survive? How do we support ourselves and our child? How do we learn English? I met people and I offered to teach them what I knew from Grotowski. When you are young, you’re audacious about teaching and you know nothing [laughs].Stoppard has played a big role at the Wilma, but what are other artists who have been meaningful to you?Athol Fugard was very important for me in the early days. In 1988, I produced “Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act,” which is about a white librarian and a Black schoolteacher falling in love. And the play is done in the nude, 90 percent of it. That was very daring at the time.Do you think it could be done now?I don’t know. That’s a question. I do want to mention Paula Vogel. She’s an amazing, generous artist who takes care of her colleagues. “I was working as a cleaning woman in the library during the day and doing underground theater in the evening,” Zizka said about her past.Michelle Gustafson for The New York TimesHow so?I had commissioned her to do a play, and she was doing a workshop, and I had to participate. I was terrified because my English is so bad. She said, “You can just write characters the way you speak.” Easy, right? [Laughs] She was constantly on me and said, “You have to keep writing.” So I did. Another person who was very helpful was Stew [of the musical “Passing Strange”]. He was my boyfriend for a moment, about six years ago. Like Paula, he encourages people to try things out and not to be afraid.What do you think are some of the biggest challenges facing American theater?In American theater, the people who are actually creating the work are the only people who are freelancers. How do you run theaters when you are surrounded by administrative staff only? Once foundations are away from the scene, you start pushing toward rich individuals. They can be great people, they can really love you — but something can happen in their life, and they move on. Because of this need to get money from so many different sources, you have to make people feel good; you have to do great parties. So your administrative staff is growing, and you are putting money there instead of into the art.You came of age with avant-garde theater, and at the Wilma you never stopped pushing the intellectual and aesthetic envelope. That’s not the easiest sell.The Wilma has been quite progressive in terms of programming, but it was very difficult for us to retain audiences. In America we are now in the grip of consumerism, where an audience wants theater to be exactly “the way I feel it, the way I want it, and if it’s not that I don’t like it and I will never come back again.” That is a very difficult situation to be in. The only reason I want to do theater is an exploration of life. Entertainment is part of life, but I don’t want the theater to be any escape from reality. Reality is beautiful, and there are multitudes of possibilities. But this consumerism and narcissism I find in American audiences at this time is really detrimental to the theater culture. More