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The memory-burning thrill of a first concert reverberated from child to parent. “I want to see it through their eyes, and my own,” said Paola Maina, a teacher, who came with her husband and 9-year-old daughter, Lola. And, she added, “I warned her: Mommy’s dancing.” More
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
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
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
“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
By joining forces, the two institutions hope to bounce back from the severe losses brought by the coronavirus.The pandemic forced many American arts organizations to resort to mass layoffs and deep pay cuts as ticket sales vanished for more than a year.Now one of the nation’s most prominent ensembles, the Philadelphia Orchestra, is trying another tack as it seeks to recover from the crisis: It announced plans Thursday to merge with its landlord, the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts.“We knew we needed a big move,” said Matías Tarnopolsky, the president and chief executive of the orchestra, who is set to lead the new organization, which will be called the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Kimmel Center, Inc. “The only way forward is collaboration.”Facing severe shortfalls, cultural groups across the country are looking for ways to streamline operations and establish new sources of revenue. American orchestras, including Philadelphia’s, are particularly vulnerable after years of rising costs.The Philadelphia Orchestra, one of the nation’s best ensembles, has struggled financially. Its music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, led them in 2017 at Carnegie Hall.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesThe orchestra and the Kimmel Center are betting that by pooling resources, they can better navigate the financial and artistic challenges of the post-pandemic era.The orchestra has won accolades for its artistry under the music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who also serves in that role at the Metropolitan Opera, but it has long struggled financially. After a year of mostly streaming concerts, the orchestra will begin a new season in October with a performance by the cellist Yo-Yo Ma.The merger will give the orchestra, which has tried for years to rebuild after declaring bankruptcy a decade ago, a leading spot at one of the country’s largest performing arts centers, and allow it to save on rent. (When the orchestra filed for bankruptcy in 2011, it cited the high cost of rent at the Kimmel Center, which then totaled $2.5 million a year, as contributing to its woes; it subsequently got a rent reduction.)The arrangement will allow the Kimmel Center, which is almost entirely dependent on ticket sales, the added support of the orchestra’s $266 million endowment. That endowment, which was bolstered by a $50 million gift in 2019, is now among the largest for an American orchestra.Both institutions have made painful cuts as they seek to recover from the pandemic. The orchestra lost about $26 million in ticket sales and performance fees after canceling more than 200 concerts. The orchestra’s leaders took pay cuts and its musicians agreed to reduce compensation temporarily by 25 percent.The Kimmel Center, which depends heavily on touring artists, Broadway shows and appearances by authors and public intellectuals, canceled more than 1,100 events and lost more than $42 million in ticket revenue. The center furloughed many of its 126 employees and led an emergency campaign to raise $10 million.The pandemic accelerated conversations about a possible merger, said Anne Ewers, the president and chief executive of the Kimmel Center, who initiated talks with Tarnopolsky last fall.“When the pandemic hit, every single earned revenue line was gone,” Ewers said. “I realized that our philanthropic base was not as deep and as broad as it needed to be.”The orchestra has called Verizon Hall, one of three venues at the Kimmel Center, its home since the center’s opening in 2001, playing more than 100 concerts a year there.But behind the scenes, the orchestra and the Kimmel Center sometimes clashed over schedules and programming choices, Tarnopolsky said.By merging with the Kimmel Center, he said, the orchestra would be able to expand its offerings, hosting classical music festivals, collaborating with Broadway performers and jazz artists, and taking part in outreach events and other live offerings.“It’s about seizing those opportunities rather than watching them go by,” Tarnopolsky said.The orchestra has balanced its budget in recent years as it has worked to recover from a financial crisis that drove it into bankruptcy in 2011. Despite cutting its expenses in bankruptcy, rebuilding has not been easy: In 2016, its musicians held a brief strike that began on the night of the orchestra’s season-opening gala.The pandemic has led many arts organizations to reconsider questions of structure and management, and some have come to see benefits in joining together during a time of uncertainty. The San Francisco Conservatory of Music last fall acquired Opus 3 Artists, a leading agency that was struggling with steep losses as venues around the world shut down.Ewers said she hoped the merger in Philadelphia would serve as a model for other institutions facing economic pressures.“Many people tell us there needs to be more of this kind of collaborative effort,” she said. “I’m hoping that we inspire that.” More
The Philadelphia musician’s only album as a bandleader was long thought lost in a fire. Now his legacy could undergo a reassessment.Hasaan Ibn Ali worked in an ensemble led by Max Roach and was credited as “the Legendary Hasaan” on one of the groundbreaking drummer’s mid-60s releases. But the pianist didn’t release an album as a bandleader during his lifetime — and in fact, only ever appeared on that one studio album — making him more of a jazz-world footnote than a household name.Now his legacy could undergo a reassessment. Ibn Ali did helm an ensemble in the studio in 1965, and the resulting album, long presumed destroyed in a fire, will be released on Friday as “Metaphysics: The Lost Atlantic Album.”The saxophonist Odean Pope, who played on the record, said Ibn Ali’s talents have long been overlooked.“He can play the most complex piece, like a ‘Cherokee,’ or the most beautiful composition like, ‘Embraceable You,’ and play those tunes extremely good,” Pope said of his mentor, who died in 1981. “Sometimes, he would play a ballad and tears would be coming down my cheeks.”Ibn Ali, who was born William Henry Lankford Jr. in 1931, evolved from a tradition-minded performer in the late ’40s after assimilating the bop advancements of the pianist Elmo Hope, who along with Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk is credited with helping reimagine the keyboard. And through living-room sessions at his North Philadelphia home, as well as at sporadic club gigs, Ibn Ali helped guide performers amid early, exploratory periods of their careers, like the saxophonist John Coltrane and the bassist Reggie Workman.A regular on the rich Philadelphia jazz scene, Ibn Ali was known for his adventurous playing as much as his sometimes-difficult demeanor. While Pope recalled the pianist as an empathetic and thoughtful teacher, Ibn Ali was said to have booted lesser players off the bandstand mid-performance. He also was renowned for a particular fashion idiosyncrasy: If he had to wear a tie at some gigs, it would hang only about halfway down his torso.Ibn Ali cut “Metaphysics” the same year Roach released “The Max Roach Trio Featuring the Legendary Hasaan,” which featured seven compositions by the pianist. Atlantic, which released the Roach album, was impressed enough to sponsor a quartet session for Ibn Ali.For the sessions, the pianist enlisted Pope, the bassist Art Davis and the drummer Kalil Madi, and the ensemble holed up in a New York hotel, working to grasp the bandleader’s new compositions. Sessions for the album started Aug. 23 and concluded on Sept. 7. But according to Alan Sukoenig’s liner notes for “Metaphysics,” following Ibn Ali’s incarceration on drug charges, Atlantic executives shelved the album, believing they wouldn’t be able to rely on the pianist to promote his work.Master tapes from the sessions were thought destroyed in a 1978 fire at an Atlantic warehouse in New Jersey. But a previously made recording from the reference acetates survived and was located in the Warner Tape Library late in 2017 through connections of the archival release’s associate producer, the jazz pianist and retired educator Lewis Porter.The saxophonist Odean Pope, who saw Ibn Ali as a mentor, was in the quartet that recorded the lost album in 1965.Frans Schellekens/Redferns, Via Getty ImagesUntil this point, Ibn Ali has been seen as an idiomatic performer and composer, though perhaps not a consequential or definitive figure of the genre. But artists as diverse as the pianist Brian Marsella and the vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz have covered his compositions, and the avant-garde pianist Matthew Shipp included him among a cohort of individualistic performers in a recently published essay titled “Black Mystery School Pianists.”“It’s an attitude, a code, a stance, a way of holding yourself against the jazz tradition,” Shipp said in an interview, explaining the qualities that defined such players.During the 1950s and ’60s, Ibn Ali was stretching for something new, Shipp said, adding that he was a precursor to ideas and sounds that today would be associated with the avant-garde.The release of “Metaphysics” serves to fill in an unknown bit of history. It also ramps up the total number of available tunes recorded by Ibn Ali from seven to 14; three cuts on the upcoming disc were captured in alternate takes and tacked on to the end of the album.The ballad “Richard May Love Give Powell” is a tribute to the bop pianist Bud Powell that features Pope playing fairly conventionally. But on pieces like “Atlantic Ones,” “Viceroy” (Ibn Ali’s cigarette of choice) and “Epitome,” the band pushes itself into more experimental territory, toying with melodic, harmonic and rhythmic ideas that coincided with the ascendance of the experimental wing of the genre.“After I had a chance to really start absorbing it, I was like, ‘OK, I hear it. I hear him searching and finding his voice,” said J. Michael Harrison, an educator and host of “The Bridge,” a long-running jazz program on Philadelphia’s WRTI, about the 26-year-old Pope’s playing on “Metaphysics.” “He had a lot of territory to travel through. But what I know today as Odean, I heard it start to seep through.”Following his experiences with the “Metaphysics” sessions, Ibn Ali remained in Philadelphia and largely eschewed public performances. After a 1972 fire destroyed his parents’ Philadelphia house, where he spent his adult life, the pianist lived out his final years at a convalescent home. Pope, who helped arrange his funeral, said poetry had supplanted the piano as Ibn Ali’s main mode of expression there.Even if the pianist’s myth rests on just a handful of published songs and memories of other performances and impromptu sessions from the early ’60s, his whispered artistic largess continues to pervade Philadelphia’s jazz scene.“Hasaan was like the whole town’s university. He’d explored and done so many things,” Pope said. “There should be a plaque, like at [Coltrane’s] house. I think he should be remembered as one of the great forerunners of our times.” More
Idris Elba leads us through the long-buried heritage of America’s Black cowboys, manifested in their modern-day urban descendants.There’s a quote that’s been circulating for years and years, apocryphally attributed to Ronald Reagan, Winston Churchill and a few other white men: “There is nothing so good for the inside of a man than the outside of a horse.” In “Concrete Cowboy,” the improving aspects of horseback riding — and, yes, stable maintenance — are demonstrated in the tale of a troubled Black teenager, Cole (Caleb McLaughlin).One afternoon Cole’s mom picks him up from school after a fight gets him expelled. She’s so fed up with her son that she drives him all the way from their home in Detroit to Philadelphia, where his estranged, taciturn father, Harp (Idris Elba), lives. With a horse.Harp is part of a group of urban riders. There’s not a lot of room in Philly for expansive stables, so it’s catch as catch can. Nevertheless, Harp and his buddies keep their operations sufficiently copacetic that they are not just tolerated but embraced by much of their community, although the local cop Leroy (Method Man) warns that the authorities might soon break up their party. Cole gets schooled in horse sense; his training features an in-your-face close-up of a wheelbarrow full of manure.Directed by Ricky Staub and adapted from G. Neri’s young adult novel “Ghetto Cowboy,” this picture offers a standard shot-at-redemption story, complete with temptation in the form of Cole’s renewed connection with an old friend who’s involved in drug dealing. But the movie’s convincing accretion of detail and its affectionate fictionalization of an actual subculture are disarming. (Some of the supporting players are members of the Fletcher Street Riders; the characters they play talk of the actual history of the Black cowboy in a scene around a vacant-lot campfire.) The quirks of Elba’s character suit his confident manliness well, and McLaughlin handles Cole’s defiance and sometimes practically equine skittishness with considerable depth.Concrete CowboyRated R for themes, language, drug use. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More
