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      High Schoolers Get In on Tyshawn Sorey’s Latest Music

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      Pleasant spring weather warmed the grounds of Girard College here on a recent afternoon. But even as classes were letting out for the weekend, some high school students at this boarding school had a few hours of work ahead of them.Inside the gymnasium of the school, which is devoted to children from single- and zero-parent homes who come from underserved communities, five teenagers began to gather around the bleachers.Nearby, in the middle of the basketball court, the contemporary classical group Yarn/Wire commenced a soundcheck while, off to the side, the director Brooke O’Harra consulted with a theater-tech team that was supervising audio amplification and video projections. But she quickly broke away to welcome the students as they entered. A few minutes later the composer Tyshawn Sorey conferred with the instrumentalists.Brooke O’Harra, with the microphone, speaking with student performers in the show, which will be performed inside a gym at Girard College.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York TimesThey had all gathered for one of the final rehearsals of their years-in-development, multimedia adaptation of Ross Gay’s book-length poem “Be Holding,” which premieres on Wednesday at the gym — featuring movement, music and work behind the scenes by the school’s students.Gay’s text is nominally about a balletic, baseline scoop shot from the 1980 N.B.A. finals, as improvised and executed by Philadelphia 76ers star Julius Erving (known as Dr. J); but it is also about the legacy of Black genius off the court, and about notions of community, or its faltering absence, in the United States.Adeshina Tejan, 16, a Girard sophomore who contributes movement to the production, praised Gay’s poetry, saying he particularly relished “the way he’s able to jump from topic to topic. But you still feel the sense that he’s still talking about ‘the shot,’ even when he’s talking about different situations.”Sae Hashimoto, one of the Yarn/Wire percussionists.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York TimesThe 18-year-old senior Jaelyn Handy, who contributes movement as well as chiming tubular bell playing alongside members of Yarn/Wire, cited a passage having little to do with basketball as one of her favorites. “The part in the poem where he’s describing a picture — and it’s a picture of a girl, and the girl is falling with her godmother,” she said. “That hits home because of the detail that’s given. And the background information of photographing Black pain: That was deep!”After the show’s performances this week, it could run elsewhere, including New York. If that happens, Gay might also participate in the recitation of his poem. In Philadelphia, the production will engage the talents of the local poets Yolanda Wisher and David A. Gaines, as primary speakers and movement artists.As the afternoon rehearsal gave way to a run-through around 8 p.m., Wisher and Gaines handed off selections of the text to perform as spoken-word solos; at other junctures, they echoed each other, or enunciated identical phrases in phasing patterns. At moments, the student collaborators mimed basketball scoop shots as an ensemble of dancers; at others, they contributed cascading individual vocalizations that echoed the lines being read by the adult performers.The poet Yolanda Wisher, who with another poet, David A. Gaines, is reciting “Be Holding” in the show.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York TimesDuring a dinner break, Wisher — a longtime friend of Gay’s — said that the poem’s imagery of Dr. J’s athletic feat works well as a visual element in the production, but that the show doesn’t rely solely on that imagistic coup for its drama.“There’s something about that poem on the page that is still superpowerful when you read from start to finish,” Wisher said. “He’s switching times: You’re going from the Middle Passage to a Dr. J clip. How to communicate that sonically, rather than cinematically, I think, is what’s happening here.”While finishing up a burger, she added: “A lot of times we’re working against the music, rather than trying to be floating on top of it — which, sometimes, is a lot of what poets and spoken-word artists do.”Gaines, center, with students in a rehearsal for “Be Holding.”Rachel Wisniewski for The New York TimesIn the piece, Yarn/Wire’s two pianists and two percussionists interpret what Sorey calls a “living score”: stretches of written-out material that can be juggled or adapted at will. After Friday’s rehearsal, Russell Greenberg from the group wrote in an email: “In ‘new music’ we are used to fully notated scores or instructions (this being related to CONTROL). But I’ve come to think about the music in this piece as an ‘energy map’: of different builds; densities; ebb and flow; tonal/chromatic; metal/wood; extended/traditional, etc. They all work together to push and pull against the text.”Sorey’s music here revels in a dreamy consonance during Gay’s first extended description of Dr. J’s drive to the basket. But as the poem explores tangential ideas and metaphoric asides, Sorey’s score trends chromatic — while making use of Yarn/Wire’s facility with the experimental techniques that Greenberg mentioned in his email. Later, there is a return to the opening’s beatific energy while the text of “Be Holding” lands on its expanded conception of communal joy.Gay’s poem is about a storied basketball play, the legacy of Black genius and notions of community.Rachel Wisniewski for The New York TimesIn a phone interview, Sorey congratulated Yarn/Wire for its ability to break down his personal language of conducted improvisations, known as Autoschediasms, and to apply it to this new “quote-unquote score,” to the point where he doesn’t even need to conduct the music.He said that the involvement of Girard students “makes the poem even more powerful, when they do the movements and when they get involved in some of the conversational parts of the poem.“It amplifies the positive spirit that it has; it gives it a different character,” Sorey added. “I think if it was just the poetry and the music, it might not affect me in the same way.”O’Harra said that her vision for Gay’s poem “starts out really kind of simple: We’re in a gym, there’s a person speaking,” then marshals an unusual blend of elements. (Itohan Edoloyi designed the lighting. Matthew Deinhart and the artist known as Catching on Thieves co-designed the video; Eugene Lew is the sound designer.)“You think almost mathematically” about all those layers, O’Harra said. “And then something nails you, and you wanna cry. Or you feel really moved. That’s what I love.” More

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      Pete Brown, Who Put Words to ‘Sunshine of Your Love,’ Dies at 82

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      A British Beat poet, he wrote lyrics for the band Cream and, after it broke up, continued to collaborate with Jack Bruce, the group’s lead singer and bassist.Pete Brown, a British Beat poet who wrote the lyrics to songs by the rock supergroup Cream, including the hits “White Room,” “I Feel Free” and “Sunshine of Your Love,” and who after the band’s breakup collaborated for nearly five decades with Jack Bruce, its lead vocalist and bassist, died on Friday at his home in Hastings, on the southeast coast of England. He was 82.His manager, Peter Conway, said the cause was cancer.Mr. Brown entered Cream’s circle at the request of Ginger Baker, the band’s drummer. They knew each other because Mr. Brown performed his poetry backed by jazz musicians and Mr. Baker had gotten his start in jazz combos; Mr. Baker asked Mr. Brown for help on the lyrics to the group’s debut single, “Wrapping Paper,” which preceded the release of “Fresh Cream,” its first album, in 1966.Mr. Brown quickly discovered a career-long writing partner in Mr. Bruce, whose fluid and propulsive playing provided counterpoint to Mr. Baker’s explosive drumming and the guitar pyrotechnics of Cream’s third member, Eric Clapton.In a short documentary about the making of “White Room” seen on Dutch television in 2018, Mr. Brown recalled, “It became evident that Jack and I had a chemistry, and when we wrote ‘I Feel Free,’ which was a big hit, so everyone went, ‘OK, that’s a team, let it roll.’”Mr. Brown did not provide the lyrics to all of Cream’s songs, but he was the group’s primarily lyricist. On its second album, “Disraeli Gears” (1967), he wrote the words to “Sunshine of Your Love,” a collaboration with Mr. Bruce and Mr. Clapton, as well as “Dance the Night Away” and two other songs.“White Room,” one of four songs he wrote with Mr. Bruce on the band’s third album, “Wheels of Fire” (1968), rose to No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1968. It was the second-highest ranking a Cream single achieved; “Sunshine” had peaked at No. 5 earlier that year.“White Room” began as a poem Mr. Brown wrote, inspired by his stay some years earlier in an actual white room, in an apartment.“I had been semi-destitute, a semi-bum, living on people’s floors, and eventually I began to earn some money from songwriting, and the white room was the first place I moved into,” he told the culture website Please Kill Me in 2022. In the Dutch documentary he added that he had stopped drinking and taking drugs in the room and decided to be a “songwriter rather than an itinerant poet.”“White Room,” begins with these lines:In the white room with black curtains near the stationBlack roof country, no gold pavements, tired starlingsSilver horses ran down moonbeams in your dark eyesDawn light smiles on you leaving, my contentmentI’ll wait in this place where the sun never shinesWait in this place where the shadows run from themselvesMr. Brown in concert in 1970 in Copenhagen. He found his voice as a singer in the decade after Cream broke up, performing with a number of bands.Jorgen Angel/Redferns, Getty ImagesPeter Ronald Brown was born on Dec. 25, 1940, in Surrey, England, with World War II underway. His parents had moved there after fleeing London during the Blitz. His father, Nathan Brown, whose birth name was Nathan Leibowitz, and his mother, Kitty Cohen, sold shoes.Peter started writing poems as a teenager, fired up by the works of Dylan Thomas, Federico García Lorca and Gerard Manley Hopkins. But he detoured, at least temporarily, to journalism, which he studied for nine months in 1958 at the Polytechnic-Regent Street (now the University of Westminster) in London.He returned to verse and published his first poem in 1961 in Evergreen Review, the boundary-breaking literary magazine based in the United States that filled its pages with work by luminaries like Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller and William Burroughs.In one early poem, “Few,” composed under the fear of nuclear war, Mr. Brown wrote:Alone and half drunk hopefulI staggered into the bogsat Green Park stationand found 30 written on the wall.Appalled I lurched outInto the windy blaring Piccadilly nightthinking surely,Surely, there must be more of us than that.Over the next few years, he was a working poet. He was part of the First Real Poetry Band, which included the guitarist John McLaughlin, and he had a jazz poetry residency at the Marquee Club in London.In 1965, he and more than a dozen other poets from around the world, including Mr. Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Michael Horovitz and Andrei Voznesensky, read their work at the International Poetry Incarnation, which filled Royal Albert Hall in London. On its website, the venue recalled the event as one “where beatniks met the emerging hippie culture.”The call for help from Mr. Baker jump-started a long songwriting career, first with Cream and then, when Cream split up after two years, with Mr. Bruce on his solo work. He wrote the lyrics to songs on nearly all of Mr. Bruce’s albums, from “Songs for a Tailor” (1969) to “Silver Rails” (2014). One of their collaborations, “Theme for an Imaginary Western,” became a staple in the repertoire of the band Mountain.“I was in awe of Jack,” Mr. Brown told The Guardian in an interview last month. But, he said, “Sometimes we had to have a rest from each other — two very big personalities in the same room sometimes wasn’t good, plus his addictions got in the way.”Mr. Brown, right, with Jack Bruce in 2005. The two began collaborating on songs when Mr. Bruce was the bassist and lead vocalist in Cream, and they continued writing together for nearly five decades.Brian Rasic/Getty ImagesMr. Brown found his own voice, as a singer, in the decade after Cream broke up. He performed with the bands Pete Brown & His Battered Ornaments, Piblokoto!, Back to the Front, Flying Tigers and Bond & Brown, which he formed with the British rock and blues musician Graham Bond. He also began a long songwriting collaboration in the early 1980s with the keyboardist Phil Ryan, a former member of Piblokto!, that produced several albums through 2013.He also helped write most of the songs on “Novum” (2017), Procol Harum’s last studio album. (He replaced Keith Reid, Procol Harum’s longtime lyricist, who died this year.)Mr. Brown’s autobiography, “White Rooms & Imaginary Westerns: On the Road With Ginsberg, Writing for Clapton and Cream — An Anarchic Odyssey” (2010), is being adapted as a documentary by the director Mark Aj Waters but has not yet been finished. Mr. Brown had recently been working on an album, “Shadow Club”; one of his collaborators was Mr. Bruce’s son Malcolm, an electric bassist like his father. (Jack Bruce died in 2014.)“We’ve naturally gravitated to each other,” Mr. Brown told The Guardian, adding that he was planning to write songs with Malcolm Bruce for his next album “as long as I can stay alive for a reasonable amount of time.”Mr. Brown is survived by his wife, Sheridan MacDonald; his daughter, Jessica Walker; his son, Tad MacDonald; and a grandson.Even after he began singing, Mr. Brown said, his admiration for Mr. Bruce initially led him to avoid singing the Cream songs he had helped write.“You know, ‘I’m not good enough,’” he told Dutch television. “Then I suddenly thought, ‘OK, I wrote those songs as well,’ and I thought, ‘It’s kind of about time I started singing some of these songs.’” More

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      Lucinda Williams Tells Her Secrets

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      The singer-songwriter reveals herself in a memoir that captures her adventures with charming rogues, puzzled music executives and her own demons.NASHVILLE — “Bless your heart!”Lucinda Williams delivered the Southern benediction in her distinctive drawl. She has a memoir coming out soon, and Ms. Williams, the celebrated singer-songwriter who has been compared to Raymond Carver for the acuity of her work, was nonetheless not too sure about this particular literary endeavor. So when a visitor complimented the book, “Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You,” she beamed. Like many a writer, she said she had a hard time letting go. “I thought, ‘I’m going to write this book and turn it in when I’m done,’” she said. “Much to my dismay it doesn’t work that way.”She wanted more time, and she missed the editorial eye and encouragement of her father, the poet and literary scholar Miller Williams, who died in 2015. Like his daughter, he was known for the gritty realism of his work, and they often performed together. For years he had looked over her lyrics — he was the king of grammar, she said — until she sent him “Essence,” the title song from her 2001 album, and he told her, as she recalled: “‘Honey, this is as close to pure poetry as you’ve come.’ And I said, ‘Does this mean I’ve graduated?’”It has been 25 years since Ms. Williams’s breakthrough, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.” That collection of anthems to love, loss and yearning made her an overnight success, as she said wryly, at age 45. Despite the stroke she suffered in 2020, she still looks vibrant and tough, with her smoky blue eyes and roughed up, rock ’n’ roll hair. Walking is a challenge (she takes it slow these days) and she can’t yet play guitar, but her voice is thrillingly unaffected.About that voice. Emmylou Harris once said Ms. Williams could sing the chrome off a tailpipe. Bonnie Raitt, in a phone interview, called it “unique, truly American and drenched in raw grit and soul and vulnerability.”Steve Earle, Ms. Williams’s occasional collaborator and old friend, described it this way over Zoom: “Have you ever been in New Orleans or Mobile or someplace really far South when the gardenias start to bloom? There’s a moment when the scent just permeates everything and there’s a viscosity to it and it’s substantial and that’s what her voice has always reminded me of. There’s an automatic atmosphere. Chet Baker was like that. Merle Haggard. The mood happens as soon as they open their mouths.”Ms. Williams, 70, and her husband, Tom Overby, who is also her manager and collaborator, live in a white clapboard bungalow with a peaked roof, gingerbread trim and a neat square of lawn. They moved to East Nashville from Los Angeles in February 2020, after which came a series of blows: the tornadoes that tore through the city in early March, flattening neighborhoods and shearing off part of their roof; the coronavirus pandemic, which shut things down a week later; the Covid death of her dear friend John Prine; and the stroke, which bludgeoned her in November.Ms. Williams onstage at the Palomino Club in Los Angeles.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesThe house was sparsely furnished with a pair of velvety sofas; metal shelves and storage containers spilling over with books, CDs and vinyl albums; and lots of audio gear. On the kitchen island, a bright yellow vase was filled with yellow button flowers. The gray walls were bare, save for a white board that proclaimed, “Lu’s Schedule. Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”“I have a bit of brain fog from the stroke,” Ms. Williams said, nodding at the board, “dates and days and such, but I think I always had that.”Mr. Overby, a loquacious man with bushy gray hair, rolled his eyes in assent. He’s the memory in the marriage, she added.In “Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You,” Ms. Williams writes of her decades playing for tips and spaghetti dinners and the perfidy of the record companies that didn’t know how to characterize her roots-inspired, renegade rocking style and her novelistic writing. “We don’t know what to do with this,” she said she was told over and over again. “It’s too country for rock and too rock for country.” It was somehow fitting that a British independent label, Rough Trade Records, signed her for her 1988 album, “Lucinda Williams.”She writes of the Hollywood director hired to make a video for “Right in Time,” the languid ballad about a woman’s desire from the “Car Wheels” album. As she recounts, he arrived for dinner at a restaurant thoroughly drunk before propositioning her, sloppily, while her boyfriend was in the bathroom. When she found his idea for the video corny, she sent him packing. She goes on to tell the story of the six-year odyssey to get the album made — the setbacks caused by vacillating record company executives and her dogged commitment to her own high standards. For her troubles, Ms. Williams was labeled a perfectionist, which, for a woman in a male-dominated industry, was not a compliment.“She just stood her ground and emerged a gleaming, burnished jewel,” Ms. Raitt said. “It doesn’t make you popular when you stand your ground, and that’s why she’s excellent.” A strong woman in the music industry is seen as “a control freak and a bitch,” she added, while a strong man is hailed as “an auteur and a genius.”Ms. Williams performing with Steve Earle at Town Hall in New York in 2007.Rahav Segev for The New York TimesMs. Williams turned to Mr. Earle to help her get the album finished. “He’d say, ‘It’s just a record, Lu,’” she said. “He was trying to help me get perspective. I was losing my perspective. He’d be like: ‘The vocal is great. You’re singing your Louisiana ass off. When are you going to trust somebody?’ I had hardly made any records before, compared to other artists, so the whole process of being in the studio was terrifying. It was my own neuroses. It’s not like I was brave or anything.”She has often been bedeviled by jitters. In 1994, when she won a Grammy thanks to Mary Chapin Carpenter’s hit version of her song “Passionate Kisses,” she was too nervous to attend the ceremony. Rosanne Cash had sent her to a Nashville boutique for an outfit, but she bailed at the last minute.“The truth is I was not just self-conscious, but also scared,” she writes in the memoir. “I feared that I didn’t belong. It’s a feeling I’ve been trying to shake my entire life. It’s a riddle I believe many artists have been trying to solve for centuries. It takes enormous fortitude to create the work in the first place, but then once it’s time to put it out in the world, the confidence required to go public is unrelated to the audacity that created the work.”“It was my fear of the unknown,” Ms. Williams said. “Of being around people with money and nice clothes and nice teeth or whatever.”She managed to make it to the Grammy ceremony in 1999, when “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” was honored as the year’s best folk album. But when her name was called, she found herself walking away from the stage. Mr. Earle, who was up for the same award, yelled out to her, as she told it: “‘Lulu! You’re going the wrong way!’ I was horrified. God. Thanks, Steve!”“Lucinda is one of the great geniuses of popular music, so how could she have struggled?” Ann Powers, a music critic for NPR, said. “A lot of it is personal and a lot of it is structural. The dynamic of how to corral a bunch of guys was complicated, it still is, but even more so then when women were relatively sparse in rock ’n’ roll circles.”It can be hard for bandleaders like Ms. Williams to be the only woman in the room. Ms. Raitt called it the problem of “women’s voices,” which “hits the mom button” for many men.Ms. Powers added, “In her music, she’s often questioning herself, expressing her vulnerability in profound ways.”“So it makes sense that she would have struggled to claim her authority,” she continued. “So often with artists the very thing we love about them is what poses a challenge for them in their life and work.”In any case, in addition to earning a Grammy, “Car Wheels” hit the Billboard charts, a first for Ms. Williams, and went gold. Critics reviewed it in ecstatic terms, and the record producer Joe Boyd called it “the ‘Blonde on Blonde’ of the 1990s,” referring to Bob Dylan’s canonical record.At home in Nashville.Kristine Potter for The New York TimesAs Ms. Williams’s fame grew, so did the dedication of her fans. She writes of the woman who began masturbating at a show in New Orleans and kept at it even as she was removed by security. (When Ms. Williams and her band heard the story after their set, they were fascinated, as she recalled: “Was she wearing pants? How did it work?”) There was the couple that sent her lingerie. The woman who delivered a crate of Vidalia onions because she’d heard Ms. Williams liked them. One fan, a drug counselor who credited his sobriety to Ms. Williams, had one of her songs tattooed in its entirety on his back. Then there are those who have sent her letters saying how much they appreciate “Sweet Old World,” her mournful lament for someone who died by suicide.Ms. Williams was born in Lake Charles, La., and grew up in New Orleans, Mexico and Chile, with stopovers in towns in Mississippi, Utah and Georgia. Her father, the son of a Methodist clergyman and early civil rights activist, sold encyclopedias and refrigerators before his mentor, Flannery O’Connor, recommended him for a poetry position at Loyola University in New Orleans. Hence the constant moving.“I’m so sorry,” Mr. Williams said when he first heard “Car Wheels,” which paints a picture of tense domesticity and a peripatetic family life. Her mother, Lucille, a thwarted pianist, was also the child of a minister — of the fire and brimstone variety — and she suffered from mental illness and self-medicated with alcohol. Lucinda and her siblings were mostly raised by their father and stepmother, his former student and the family’s babysitter. (Awkward at first, as Ms. Williams notes in the book.)Theirs was a Bohemian academic household, imprinted by the politics of the era. Mr. Williams was the host of a bibulous literary salon that included Charles Bukowski, the hard-living poet. As a teenager, Lucinda handed out “Boycott grapes” leaflets in front of a grocery store and played protest songs at demonstrations. When she refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in her New Orleans high school, her father said, “Don’t worry honey, we’ll get you an A.C.L.U. lawyer.” And when she was finally thrown out, after joining a civil rights march, he was unfazed.“To hell with it,” he told her. “You weren’t learning anything there anyway.” She spent a semester at the University of Arkansas, where her father was then teaching, but she dropped out to play music for tips at a club in New Orleans.Ms. Williams took the title for her memoir from the chorus of “Metal Firecracker,” a song from the “Car Wheels” album, one of her many compositions about “the poets on motorcycles” who are her preferred type.These men fill the pages of her memoir. There was the gentle crew member who turned violent after he moved in with her and made away with her third Grammy — for best female rock vocal performance in 2002 — and a good bit of her collection of folk art. And the erudite charmer who was her first long-term boyfriend and who died of cirrhosis of the liver in his 40s. The haunting “Lake Charles” is an elegy for him.Ms. Williams and Tom Overby, her husband and collaborator, at the Americana Music Association Honors and Awards Show at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville.Terry Wyatt/Getty ImagesThe man in “Metal Firecracker” was a charismatic bass player who doggedly pursued her while they were touring for her 1992 album, “Sweet Old World.” (“Metal firecracker” was his nickname for the tour bus.) Against the advice of bandmates, Ms. Williams succumbed, which meant breaking up with her boyfriend at the time, who reacted by busting up the furniture in their hotel room. The new suitor had a few irons in the fire, as she learned later, and when the tour was over, he vanished. He told her, in a wince-inducing phone call, “I love you but this relationship doesn’t fit my agenda right now.” At any rate, as she writes, she got a song out of it. Three, as it happens.Ms. Williams and Mr. Overby, a former music executive who is not a rogue but a bit of a poet, married onstage in Minneapolis in 2009. (When they were dating, she writes, his male colleagues warned him off: “Be careful. Our reps on her label tell us she’s literally insane.” He ignored them.) Her father wrote their vows and performed the ceremony. When they both declared, “Loving what I know of you, trusting what I do not yet know,” the audience roared with laughter.There is some dispute about who proposed to whom. Ms. Williams claimed it was Mr. Overby. In her recollection, he turned to her during a tour and asked if she wanted to go shopping for diamonds.Mr. Overby shook his head. “We were on the bus and out of nowhere you go, ‘So when are you taking me shopping for diamonds?’”Ms. Williams: “I did?”Mr. Overby: “You did!”Ms. Williams: “But you liked it.”Ms. Williams suffered a stroke in 2020, but her voice is intact. Her next album comes out in June.Kristine PotterMr. Overby organized a trip to a jewelry store owned by friends in Omaha, lining it up with a performance, but Ms. Williams was so nervous she couldn’t get off the bus until just before the store closed. When she saw the array of rings, she panicked. Mission aborted. They tried again the following year, and again she was flummoxed. Years later, they bought a pair of rings in Los Angeles — and Ms. Williams promptly lost them, her husband said.“Misplaced them,” she said, correcting him.The couple may not be the best jewelry collaborators, but lately they have worked nicely in the studio on Ms. Williams’s new album, “Stories From a Rock ’n’ Roll Heart,” out in June. As they did in their homage to John Prine, which they wrote after he died of Covid. Ms. Williams performed it last year at a tribute to him. It tells the story of a night long ago when Ms. Williams and Mr. Prine thought they might write a song together. They spent many jolly hours careering from bar to studio but never quite got down to the task.John and me were going to get togetherAnd write a song one timeGot about as far as the midtown barAnd ordered up a bottle of wineWhat could go wrong, working on a song?Then we got to talking, not looking at the timeTelling stories about folks we knowHad another bottle of wineWe were having funWhat could go wrong? More

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      Solange Curates Powerful Performances of Black Joy and Pain at BAM

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      Through Saint Heron, the musician brought Angélla Christie and the Clark Sisters for a night exploring Black religious music, and Linda Sharrock and Archie Shepp for a show that felt anything but safe.When the alto saxophonist Angélla Christie strode onstage on Friday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, she was joined only by a piano player. But Christie, one of the more prominent instrumentalists in contemporary gospel, was at full throttle from the very first note — playing in high-gloss, reverb-drenched ostinatos — and within moments, the crowd had become her rhythm section, clapping along on every off-beat.An usher got swept up while walking a couple to their seats, and on her way back up the aisle she shimmied a bit, her right hand flying into the air in a testifying motion. A woman sitting at the end of Row H reached out for a high five, and their palms gripped each other for a moment.It was just a few minutes into “Glory to Glory (A Revival for Devotional Art)” — part of BAM’s multidimensional “Eldorado Ballroom” series, brilliantly curated by Solange via her Saint Heron agency — and already something was hitting different.After Christie, the concert continued with two more sets: selections from Mary Lou Williams’s religious suites, delivered by the 14-person Voices of Harlem choir and a pair of virtuoso pianists, Artina McCain and Cyrus Chestnut; and a roof-raising show from the indomitable Clark Sisters, the best-selling band in gospel history and a fixture of Black radio since the 1980s.The Clark Sisters onstage at BAM on Friday, as part of a bill celebrating Black American religious music.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThat’s a lot already: a stylistic tour of Black American religious music, mostly in the hands of women, going back more than 50 years. But “Eldorado Ballroom” was aiming for even more. Rarely does a single series pull together so many strands — not just of Black music, but of Black creativity writ large — into an open-ended statement, speaking to what might be possible as well as making a comment on how Black creative histories ought to be remembered.“Eldorado Ballroom” is an extension of the work Solange has been doing for the past 10 years under the auspices of Saint Heron. As she told New York magazine’s Craig Jenkins recently, her aim with Saint Heron — whether you call it an agency, a studio, a brand or simply a creative clearinghouse — is “to centralize and build a really strong archive that in 20 years or 30 years can be accessible by future generations to be a guiding light in the same way that so many of my blueprints guided me.”Thanks to Saint Heron, Solange has managed to put her cultural capital to use while keeping her own celebrity mostly out of view. On Friday, the singer and songwriter sat beaming from an opera box near the stage while the Clark Sisters motored through a 40-plus-year catalog of danceable gospel hits, but she never took a bow.Saint Heron surfaced in 2013 with the release of a mixtape that helped set the standard for a new wave of outsider R&B. Some of its contributors, like Kelela and Sampha, became stars. Since then, Saint Heron has served as a flexible play space for Solange and her creative community, crossing lines between fashion and design, visual art, publishing, music and dance. Mid-pandemic, Saint Heron released a free digital library of books by Black writers and artists.Solange, middle, attends “Glory to Glory (A Revival for Devotional Art)” at BAM on Friday night. The singer and her Saint Heron agency curated the series, “Eldorado Ballroom.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAnd clearly, Solange has gained the attention of a broad, young, literary community of color. The capacity crowd at “Glory to Glory” on Friday was — unlike at most events in such spaces — about 90 percent Black, and as diverse in age and attire as Flatbush Avenue on any spring afternoon. Twenty-somethings in custom streetwear stood cheering next to older women in their Sunday finest.On Saturday, the crowd again skewed under 50 and majority Black for “The Cry of My People,” a night devoted to poetry and experimental jazz. If “Glory to Glory” was a celebration of how “triumphant and safe” gospel music can make a person feel, as Solange put it to Jenkins — a night devoted to joy, basically — then “The Cry of My People” was a confrontation of pain.The show began with a reading from the poet Claudia Rankine, who stood at center stage as the curtain came up, then read two poems: “Quotidian (1),” about inner turmoil, and “What If,” about a kind of exhausted rage. The second included the line: “in the clarity of consciousness, what if nothing changes?”Rankine had put words to something that the next performer, the vocalist Linda Sharrock, would express without them. Sharrock has been heavily respected in jazz circles since the 1960s for her raw and riveting use of extended vocal techniques: Moans, breaths and cries have been her musical units. But like so many women in jazz, she spent the peak years of her career in the shadow of a more famous husband, the guitarist Sonny Sharrock, and ultimately quit the scene. Before Saturday, her last show in New York City had been in 1979. In more recent years she has suffered health setbacks including a stroke that left her aphasic, and has performed only rarely.Linda Sharrock sang as part of “The Cry of My People” on Saturday night at BAM. Her last show in New York City before this past weekend was in 1979; she has suffered health setbacks including a stroke.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAt BAM, backed by a signal-scrambling, free-improvising, eight-piece band, Sharrock sat in a wheelchair beside an upright piano (that she often touched but hardly played) and sang in big, open vowel sounds. They felt confounding, yet clear. Most of the time, the sounds came in wide, billowing arcs; when she held a single, steady note — sometimes spiked with a growl — it brought the urgency to an almost unbearable level. Often there were hints at a secondary feeling (surprise? anger? wonder? all possible) but the main message was consistent: pain.The backstage crew seemed to have difficulty following the band’s cues, and after the curtain had been down for a solid three minutes following Sharrock’s set, it came back up. The band was still playing. Sharrock performed another mini-set before an awkwardly long wait for the curtain to come down once again. Maybe a clean ending wouldn’t have fit. The crowd — dazed, moved — gave Sharrock a warm response, but there was little that felt “triumphant and safe” about this night.It concluded with a set from Archie Shepp, the luminary tenor saxophonist, composer, vocalist and writer. A disciple of John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor, Shepp became a leading advocate for Black musicians’ right to self-determination in the 1960s and has hardly quieted his voice ever since. At 85, his saxophone chops have faded, and he needed help from other band members to bring the instrument into playing position, but the whispered notes he did get out of the horn carried fabulous amounts of weight.Archie Shepp, center, performs at “The Cry of My People,” backed by a nine-piece ensemble.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBacked by a nine-piece ensemble featuring three excellent vocalists (Amina Claudine Myers, Sarah Elizabeth Charles and Pyeng Threadgill) and a pithy, three-man horn section, Shepp pulled from across his broad repertoire. He revisited his classic cover of Calvin Massey’s stout, dirgelike “Cry of My People,” and the swiveling rock beat of “Blues for Brother George Jackson” from the “Attica Blues” LP. On Duke Ellington’s gospel standard “Come Sunday,” Shepp sang in an earnest baritone while Myers, who briefly took over the piano chair from Jason Moran, splashed him with generous harmonies. As Shepp sang the line, “God of love, please look down and see my people through,” the house erupted in a wave of support.His set, like his six-decade-long career, was a reminder that the walls that divide spiritual music, popular music and art music can often be arbitrary. “Where did they come from, anyway?” he seemed to ask. This, you could say, was the message of “Eldorado Ballroom” writ large.The series takes its name from a once-legendary venue in Houston’s Third Ward neighborhood, where Solange grew up. At the ’Rado, as it was known, jazz, gospel and soul — art, spiritual and popular — all appeared on the same stage, until an economic downturn and a pattern of police repression forced the venue to close in 1972.The night that Solange’s series kicked off — March 30, with a show featuring the outsider-R&B trifecta of Kelela, keiyaA and Res — the actual Eldorado Ballroom was celebrating its grand reopening in Houston, after a nearly $10 million restoration project. With a little luck, Houston may have its own “Eldorado Ballroom” soon, too. More

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      Keith Reid, Who Brought Poetry to Procol Harum, Dies at 76

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      He did not perform with the group, but his impressionistic words made it one of the leading acts of the progressive-rock era.Keith Reid, whose impressionistic lyrics for the early progressive rock band Procol Harum helped to fuel emblematic songs of the 1960s, most notably “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” has died. He was 76.His death was announced in a Facebook post from the band. The announcement did not say where or when he died or cite a cause, but according to news media reports he died in a hospital in London after having been treated for cancer for two years.During its heyday in the late 1960s and ’70s, Procol Harum stood out as musically ambitious, even by prog-rock standards — as demonstrated by its 1972 album, “Procol Harum Live: In Concert With the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra.”The band’s music, which at times bordered on the sepulchral, required lyrics that soared along with it. Mr. Reid was happy to oblige. “I always write them as poems,” he said of his lyrics in a 1973 interview with Melody Maker, the British music magazine. Indeed, with Procol Harum, the words tended to come first.As the lyricist Bernie Taupin has long done for Elton John, Mr. Reid generally submitted his lyrics to the band’s singer, pianist and primary songwriter, Gary Brooker, or sometimes the band’s guitarist, Robin Trower, or organist, Matthew Fisher, who also wrote songs.While Mr. Reid was a founding member of the group, he was more a rock star by association, since he did not sing or play an instrument and thus did not record or perform with Procol Harum. Still, he rarely missed a gig.“If I didn’t go to every gig, I would not be part of the group,” he told Melody Maker. Touring, he said, helped him write: “I find it much easier to shut myself away in a hotel room for two hours than to work at home, where there are far too many distractions.”Procol Harum showcased its musical ambitions on the 1972 album “Procol Harum Live: In Concert With the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra.”The results of such focus were apparent with “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” the first single off the band’s debut album, released in 1967. The song, which hit No. 1 on the British charts and No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States, sold around 10 million copies worldwide. And it endured long after the ’60s drew to a close.By the ’80s, it had achieved canonical status. It was often used to underscore the wistful memories of veterans of the flower-power era in films like Lawrence Kasdan’s 1983 hippies-to-yuppies midlife crisis tale, “The Big Chill,” and Martin Scorsese’s May-December romance installment in the 1989 film “New York Stories,” which also included short films by Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola.The song’s famous opening lines (“We skipped the light fandango/Turned cartwheels ‘cross the floor”) conjure bawdy images of drunken debauchery at a party, illuminating a failing romantic relationship. They are set to a haunting chord progression with echoes of Bach, rendered in ecclesiastical fashion by Mr. Fisher’s organ, and sung by Mr. Brooker in a raspy voice, soaked with longing and regret.She said “There is no reasonAnd the truth is plain to see.”But I wandered through my playing cardsWould not let her beOne of sixteen vestal virginsWho were leaving for the coastAnd although my eyes were openThey might have just as well’ve been closed.“I had the phrase ‘a whiter shade of pale,’ that was the start, and I knew it was a song,” Mr. Reid said in a 2008 interview with the British music magazine Uncut.“I was trying to conjure a mood as much as tell a straightforward, girl-leaves-boy story,” he continued. “With the ceiling flying away and room humming harder, I wanted to paint an image of a scene.”Keith Stuart Brian Reid was born on Oct. 19, 1946, in Welwyn Garden City, north of London, one of two sons of a father from Austria and a mother who had been born in England to Polish parents. His father, who was fluent in six languages, had been a lawyer in Vienna but was among more than 6,000 Jews arrested there in November 1938. He fled to England upon his release.His father’s experiences at the hands of the Nazis left emotional scars that Mr. Reid said influenced his worldview, and his writing.“The tone of my work is very dark, and I think it’s probably from my background in some subconscious way,” Mr. Reid said in an interview with Scott R. Benarde, the author of “Stars of David: Rock ’n’ Roll’s Jewish Stories” (2003).In 1966, Mr. Reid was introduced by a mutual friend to Mr. Brooker, who was with a band called the Paramounts, whose members also included Mr. Trower and the drummer B.J. Wilson. Mr. Reid and Mr. Brooker became friends and started writing together; they, Mr. Trower, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Fisher would all eventually form Procol Harum.Mr. Reid, fourth from left, made a rare on-camera appearance when the 1970 version of Procol Harum posed for a group photo. With him were, from left, Gary Brooker, B.J. Wilson, Robin Trower and Chris Copping.Mike Randolph/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesProcol Harum never again scaled the heights it achieved with its first single, but it continued to be a major act through the mid-1970s, regularly releasing albums and scoring the occasional hit single; a live orchestral version of “Conquistador,” a song from the band’s first album, reached the Top 20 in 1972.Mr. Reid said he felt lost after the band broke up in 1977 (it would reform, in various incarnations, over the years). In 1986 he moved to New York, where he started a management company and composed songs (music as well as lyrics) for other artists.That year, he collaborated with the songwriters Andy Qunta, Maggie Ryder and Chris Thompson of Manfred Mann’s Earth Band on “You’re the Voice,” which was recorded by the Australian singer John Farnham, and topped the charts in several countries, although it made little impact in the United States.During the 1990s, Mr. Reid wrote songs for Annie Lennox, Willie Nelson, Heart and many others. He would eventually turn the focus on his own talents, releasing two albums by what he called The Keith Reid Project, “The Common Thread” (2008) and “In My Head” (2018), which included artists like Southside Johnny, John Waite and Mr. Thompson.Mr. Reid’s survivors include his wife, Pinkey, whom he married in 2004.Unlike the rock luminaries he came of age alongside, Mr. Reid did not bask in the lights of the stage. Even so, he experienced his own form of glory, gazing on as the members of Procol Harum brought life to his words at shows he refused to miss.“You wouldn’t expect a playwright not to attend the rehearsals of his play,” he told Melody Maker in 1973. “My songs are just as personal to me. They’re a part of my life. They are not gone from me.” More

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      Following a Folk Tale Through the Himalayas

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      In a high hamlet, a two-hour trek up a verdant slope beneath ice-clad Himalayan peaks, an argument erupted over a folk tale. Two brothers, Pralad Singh Dariyal, 60, and Hira Singh Dariyal, 77, heatedly debated which nearby village in the Johar Valley was once the home of the story’s heroine. Eventually agreeing on a few possible locations, Hira said that the story, which is sung as a ballad and which he remembered from childhood, was virtually unknown today among the area’s young people. “They’re the YouTube generation,” he explained with a shrug.“No one even knows how to sing it anymore,” Pralad added.The voice of Pralad’s wife, Sundari Devi, rang out from the kitchen into the courtyard, where I sat with the brothers and a couple of other people in front of clothing drying on a line and pieces of a butchered sheep drying on a neighbor’s stone-shingled roof. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she shouted. “Some people do remember how to sing it. Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s not important.”In the Kumaon region of the Indian state of Uttarakhand, where sky-scraping summits soar over a maze of sublime hills in a corner of the country that abuts Nepal and Tibet, the story known as “Rajula Malushahi” has been passed down orally for hundreds of years. A sprawling epic of adventure and true love that unfurls across a broad swath of the landscape, it’s long been recognized as Kumaon’s pre-eminent folk tale. Short versions were sung by parents to their children, while renditions lasting up to 10 hours were performed by hurkiyas, or traditional bards, who chanted and drummed alongside a handful of backup vocalists for local audiences, often as a way to pass cold winter nights, before televisions — and now smartphones — became ubiquitous.When I first learned about “Rajula Malushahi” on a previous visit to Kumaon, I was immediately intrigued. After reading as much of the literature about it as I could find, I decided on a recent trip to use it as a guide to traveling through the area, letting it take me places I might not otherwise think to go.While creating an itinerary, I realized that there was no definitive route to follow, since there is no definitive narrative. Before it was first written down in the 1930s, numerous versions were sung. Though they tend to share the same overarching plotline, there are many variations among them, including where certain episodes are said to have occurred. It seemed fitting that planning a trip around a centuries-old folk tale was more an act of creative interpretation than a strict adherence to a single text.A traditional Kumaoni house, built of stone.Morning mists rise from fields in the Gomati Basin.I headed first for the Johar Valley, which is where the story (according to most versions) begins. There, a girl named Rajula, who was so beautiful that the sun paled before her, was born into the Shauka tribe — one of the subgroups of shepherds generally known as Bhotias. Her father, Sunapati Shauk, was the richest trader in the region, shuttling goods over the Himalayas between India and Tibet on the backs of sheep and goats, the best animals for navigating the treacherous terrain. Historically, this once-lucrative route thrived for about a thousand years before collapsing in 1962 with the outbreak of a war between India and China and the closure of the border.In the story, Rajula grows into a clever and confident young woman. She meets Malushahi, the young monarch of the Katyuri Kingdom, which ruled Kumaon from around the seventh to the 11th centuries, and they fall in love. They are quickly separated, however, as her hand has already been promised by Sunapati to the son of a Tibetan king, an important trading partner. Rajula, rebelling, escapes from this undesirable arrangement, then travels through Kumaon to find Malushahi again, overcoming numerous obstacles with her courage and quick wits. After many dramatic twists, including deceptions, murder and sorcery, the lovers are finally reunited — either happily or in death, depending on the version.After initially arriving in Delhi at the end of last September, I traveled for a few days — first by rail, and then by road — to the Johar Valley’s main town, Munsiyari. My friend, the writer Shikha Tripathi, who is herself Kumaoni, happened to be there working on a story about climate change. Together, by S.U.V. and on foot, we traveled for most of a morning to the village of Paton, where we talked in the courtyard with the Dariyal brothers, as Shikha translated.Our conversation concluded when a village-wide feast began. A woman who had married a man with family in Paton was making her first visit — 13 years after their wedding. Everyone came out to welcome her, including people who now lived elsewhere and had returned for the celebration. Vats of rice, mutton and dal had been prepared, and we ate on flat rooftops with views of the valley walls slanting sharply into the clouds.When the feast wrapped up, Shikha and I went back to Pralad’s place to get our bags and shift to the house where we’d been offered accommodations for the night. I stepped into the kitchen to bid Sundari goodbye and found three other women sitting on the floor with her. Before I could say “thank you,” two of them began to sing, filling the low-ceilinged space with the resonant tones of the first verses of “Rajula Malushahi.”Nanda Devi Dariyal, in red, and Duri Devi Sailal, in blue, sing Rajula Malushahi in the kitchen of Sundari Devi Dariyal, who sits behind them.They sang for about five minutes, which was more than long enough to transform the dimly lit room into a musical time machine, transporting us beyond the temporal world into the wonder of the moment. It was Sundari’s gift to us — and was her way of conclusively proving the point she had made to her husband.The next day, Shikha and I hiked, drove and hiked (uphill again) to a village where Hira had told us that some of Rajula’s community had scattered after being cursed at the end of her story. Upon reaching Jimia, we learned that a celebration of the Hindu festival Dussehra was about to begin.Led by drummers and men carrying saplings adorned with flags and tufts of yak hair, a joyous procession descended from the homes at the core of the village to a small temple at its edge. Two sheep were sacrificed to the local goddess, Bharari Devi, a form of Durga, a major Hindu deity. The drumming surged with fevered intensity and the jagar — a ceremony in which the goddess enters into the body, or bodies, of one or more of those in attendance — began around a smoldering bonfire.A possessed woman staggered around like a zombie. A man named Gajendra Singh Quiriyal — the village’s grand pradhan, or leader — fell to the ground and convulsed on the fire’s edge, caking himself with ashes and embers. The goddess then settled into Rudra Singh Quiriyal, Gajendra’s brother. Blankly staring at something no one else could see, he flung rice over himself and into the crowd. Villagers shouted questions one atop the other, like a scrum of reporters at a chaotic news conference, seeking help with their problems. Most persistent was a middle-aged man desperate for his wife to have their first child. Bharari Devi promised to grant his wish.Led by Tulsi Devi Nuriram, at center, women sing and dance during Dussehra celebrations in Jimia.Ukha Devi Quiriyal, wearing traditional Shauka clothing, dances during Dussehra celebrations in Jimia.When the jagar was over, the pradhan, who’d brushed himself off, asked me to snap a picture of him with his wife and daughters and insisted that Shikha and I stay with them that night. Rice and meat from the sacrificed sheep was served to all. On a grassy terrace just above the temple, women danced in a circle while singing songs to welcome back to the village their sisters and daughters who had moved away after marrying men from other places. Some of the dancers wore traditional Shauka dress — including embroidered headscarves, black blouses, and black skirts.When we spoke to the women as they sat together following an hour or so of dancing, the elders among them said that they had all heard the tale of “Rajula Malushahi,” but only one remembered how to sing it. Encouraged by the others, Tulsi Devi Nuriram performed a few verses, surprising me with a completely different melody and rhythm than I’d heard the previous day.Everyone I would meet who knew the story line of “Rajula Malushahi” — the youngest of whom appeared to be in their 60s — spoke of it as though it was based on actual events, while well aware that it is a folk tale. It occupies a liminal space in the collective imagination, somewhere between fiction and fact, fantasy and reality — which was not unlike how I internalized my experience of that day.The following night, which Shikha and I spent at a homestay in the village of Darkot, a center of Shauka weaving, we met with a folk theater performer who was well-versed in much of the scholarship about the tale. After launching into a long, impassioned analysis of which elements of particular versions were most likely to be true, Lakshman Singh Pangtey concluded by saying, “There is no guarantee about anything I’ve said. After all, it’s a 500-year-old story.”Women at Bageshwar’s Bagnath Temple gather to observe Karwa Chauth, praying for long lives for their husbands.The Hindu ritual of arti is performed near the confluence of the Saryu and Gomati Rivers, in Bageshwar. A funeral pyre burns in the background.Shikha stayed in Munsiyari, and I continued on alone. I first went to Bageshwar, where Rajula once stopped to pray. The god Bagnath, a form of Shiva, was so overcome by her beauty that he attempted to extort her affections with threats and promises — a deal she angrily refused. When I visited the same site at the confluence of the Sarayu and Gomati rivers, where a 15th-century Chand-era temple stands, women had gathered to observe Karwa Chauth, praying for long life for their husbands. In the bustling, friendly town, scenes of life and death, commerce and worship, played out on the streets and riverbanks on a scale large enough to fascinate yet small enough to be absorbed without overwhelming.In the hills and villages of the Gomati Valley, women harvested winter fodder for their livestock, men turned fields with plows pulled by oxen, and everyone I met was happy to see a stranger and chitchat in Hindi. I was charmed by the town of Dwarahat, where Katyuri-era carved-stone temple complexes are tucked among brightly colored houses and gardens, near where Rajula was captured, beaten and left for dead in the forest. And I visited the riverside temple of Agniyari Devi in Chaukhutia, where Malushahi first laid eyes on Rajula, and she laughed at him for mistaking her for the goddess herself.Along the way, I happened to meet a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy who knew one of the last great hurkiyas of Kumaon. Before long, Nain Nath Rawal invited me to his home, in Sirola village, to hear him sing. I went with my friend, Shriyani Datta, who was staying near Almora, some two hours away.In the town of Dwarahat, Katyuri-era carved-stone temple complexes are tucked among brightly colored houses and gardens.Plowing a field along a tributary of the Gomati River.Rawal’s two-story stone house was set along a ridge atop cascading terraced fields with eye-popping views of the high peaks. He invited us into a room on the upper floor, with shelves of awards for his contributions to Kumaoni culture, and pictures of gods and goddesses encircled by flower garlands hanging on bright yellow walls. An 81-year-old farmer, he was taught to sing by his mother, who gave him lessons when he was young.When, among many questions translated by Shriyani, I asked why audiences root for Rajula when they wouldn’t approve of a young woman from their own community overtly disobeying her father, breaking a marriage contract and running away to find her beloved, he acknowledged that “today, her family would probably send the police after her.” But, he explained, Rajula and Malushahi were destined to be together, which meant that Rajula was doing the right thing. “If that happened now,” he added, “you couldn’t prove that fate was involved.” The story’s theme, he said, is “turning divine intention into reality through love.”Rawal sang while playing an hourglass-shaped drum, called a hurka, for over 20 minutes, accompanied by Baji Nath Rawal, who tapped on a stainless steel plate, while two vocalists, Mohan Nath Rawal and Chandan Nath Rawal, sang backup. Though he had made more than 120 recordings during his career, this was the first time he had recorded “Rajula Malushahi.”Nain Nath Rawal, left, sings the entirety of “Rajula Malushahi” while playing the hurka. Accompanying him, left to right, are Baji Nath Rawal, Mohan Nath Rawal and Chandan Nath Rawal.Rawal remarked that he used to perform the ballad around Kumaon at all-night festivals, but that they were rare events these days. “My generation is trying to keep our local culture alive, as much as we can,” he said, “but times have changed.”For now, at least for those who recall it, the story is still woven into the landscape, which conjures memories of a young woman who, ages ago, defied convention to follow her heart.“I hope this song survives,” Rawal said, as we headed downstairs.Michael Benanav is a writer and photographer whose most recent book, Himalaya Bound: One Family’s Quest to Save Their Animals and an Ancient Way of Life, was published in 2018.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2023. More

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      The New Black Canon: Books, Plays and Poems That Everyone Should Know

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      A guide to some of the undervalued 20th-century works that testify to the richness of the Black American literary archive.Fifty years ago, when college courses in Black American literature were rare; when Zora Neale Hurston’s novels were out of print and Toni Morrison was a book editor with one novel to her name, the job of shaping a Black canon was clear: Rediscover, anthologize, define the terms of a tradition. “The act of recovery means something different now,” says Kenton Rambsy, an associate professor of English and digital humanities at the University of Texas at Arlington, whose research uses data analytics to tell new stories about the Black literary past. Sometimes recovery demands peering into the shadows cast by towering canonical figures. “It might mean finding that writer who is just being overlooked because of the canonicity of, say, Toni Morrison,” Rambsy says. Sometimes it’s even simpler than that. “We don’t have to go deep into archives to find undervalued Black authors,” says the poet and U.C.L.A. English professor Harryette Mullen. In a recent essay, I look to such undervalued authors and works as the impetus for shaping a new Black canon.What follows is a list of 20 books — works of fiction, drama and poetry, presented chronologically by category — that testify to the richness of the Black American literary archive. You’ll encounter many of these works as recent reissues; others remain difficult to find or are out of print entirely. All were published last century. Their writers are genre fiction authors and experimentalists, nature poets and satirists, pulp fiction practitioners and trans-nationalists, writers of the weird, the quirky, the unsettled and unsettling. Together, they help to tell a story of Black American literature that reflects the infinite number of ways of being Black in America — and of being in the world.FictionPauline E. Hopkins, “Of One Blood” (1902-3)In Telassar, a thriving city hidden below the Nubian Desert, Hopkins’s protagonist, the biracial Harvard Medical student Reuel Briggs, encounters an advanced civilization with “specimens of the highest attainments the world knew in ancient days.” This sprawling work of speculative fiction resists paraphrase, but what’s important is that it helped spawn a vast contemporary tradition: “I like to say [this book] was ‘Black Panther’ before ‘Black Panther’, ” says Eve Dunbar, a professor of English at Vassar College. “It’s got something for everyone: Black sci-fi, a passing narrative, a back-to-Africa plot, and a plantation ghost story.” Hopkins published “Of One Blood” in serialized form in the pages of the Boston-based Colored American Magazine, which she edited. Embedded in her novel’s title is Hopkins’s rejection of the pseudoscientific conflation of race with blood, a myth used to buttress white supremacy and racial division.Chester Himes, “Lonely Crusade” (1947)A first edition cover of Chester Himes’s 1947 novel, “Lonely Crusade.”A 1946 portrait of Himes by Carl Van Vechten.Carl Van Vechten © Van Vechten Trust, Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale UniversityHimes’s revival in recent years has come on the strength of his noir crime fiction. Starting with 1957’s “A Rage in Harlem,” he wrote eight books that follow detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones through the New York underworld of the 1950s and ’60s. Himes knew something of crime and punishment himself, having served nearly eight years in prison for armed robbery. His body of work, though, defies tidy categorization. After emigrating to France in the mid-50s (he lived in Europe until his death in 1984), Himes wrote perceptively about the Black expatriate experience. He also wrote about Black-white labor movements, same-sex relationships, interracial marriage and racism. “Few African American writers had his sure-handed ability to depict the nitty-gritty of Black life,” Himes’s biographer Lawrence P. Jackson says. Jackson points to “Lonely Crusade” as “his classic text.” For evidence, he cites a passage in which Himes’s protagonist Lee Gordon listens to his father, not knowing it will be for the last time: “You’re just as good as any white person. Don’t let nobody tell you no different. Now all you got to do is prove it.” Himes takes readers into Lee’s mind as he ponders how his father intended those words — “whether sincerely or satirically Lee Gordon never learned.”Fran Ross, “Oreo” (1974)Ross’s only novel was lightly reviewed and largely overlooked. “Perhaps a book like ‘Oreo’ — though I know few — gets ignored or quite purposefully sidelined because it defies the reader, the reviewer, the cultural critic, the scholar and just about anyone else who dares position it,” the novelist Michelle Latiolais recently wrote. “Oreo” is satire and metafiction, a picaresque and a bildungsroman. (Ross herself described it as “cockeyed and nutty.”) The narrative action, such as it is, concerns a young biracial Black and Jewish protagonist’s search for her father. Most remarkable, though, is the novel’s mode of address. In 2015, the novelist Danzy Senna described the book as “a strange, uncanny dream about a future that was really the past.” As the literary critic Scott Saul points out, though, the novel is also very much of its time. “Oreo,” he writes, “is a queer novel, written by a gay woman who, while she traveled in gay circles and revered queer writers like James Baldwin and Djuna Barnes, opted not to disclose that side of her identity when she made her literary debut.”Alison Mills Newman, “Francisco” (1974)Alison Mills Newman began her creative life as an actor. Her credits include a recurring role on the late-’60s NBC sitcom “Julia,” starring Diahann Carroll, a groundbreaking series that portrayed everyday Black life during a time of national tumult. Soon thereafter, in her early 20s, Mills Newman wrote her first novel, “Francisco,” which chronicles a young Black woman’s love affair with an independent filmmaker. In her foreword to a 2023 reissue (the book, long out of print, was originally published in 1974 by R. C. & J., an independent press founded by the writers Ishmael Reed, Steve Cannon and Joe Johnson), the literary scholar Saidiya Hartman describes it as being in the style of a Künstlerroman: “a portrait of the artist as a young black woman trying to find a way back to herself.” The novel blends vernacular riffs with cameos from Reed and Muhammad Ali, Pharoah Sanders and Angela Davis, Melvin Van Peebles and Amiri Baraka. Writing of “Francisco,” the novelist William Demby observed that it’s “the song one would expect Love to be singing these troubled days of the 1970s — a song you cannot have heard before, off-key and haunting, disturbing even in its unfamiliarity.”James Alan McPherson, “Elbow Room” (1977)“There never was a nationwide coalition that looked unwaveringly at Black storytelling,” the cultural historian Wil Haygood tells me. Haygood — who’s written biographies of Sammy Davis Jr., Sugar Ray Robinson and Thurgood Marshall — understands the responsibility of telling Black American stories on the page and onscreen, not only in the United States, but around the globe. “You have a world market from Japan to Australia to France that has access to streaming services and wants to see Black stories,” Haygood says. That storytelling necessarily involves engaging history-shaping social and political movements: the civil rights struggle, the Black Power era, the recent uprisings for racial justice. But Haygood is also drawn to quieter, though no less radical stories, found in the fiction of the Black quotidian. He particularly likes this collection of restrained, elegant stories that find high drama among ordinary people. You should read McPherson’s stories, Haygood says, “because the Black characters do things that the outside world doesn’t think that they’d ordinarily be doing, like listening to and falling in love with country music.”William Demby, “Love Story Black” (1978)“By some unfortunate miscarriage of advertisement,” writes the scholar Nathan A. Scott Jr. in his foreword to the 1991 reissue of Demby’s second novel, “The Catacombs” (1965), “the fiction of William Demby over more than a generation has remained little known and is not today generally accorded the prominence in the canon of Afro-American literature that it deserves.” More than thirty years after Scott wrote those words and nearly ten years after Demby’s death at 90, the canon may finally be catching up to Demby. An international conference in 2018 at the University of Rome, La Sapienza, and a recent issue of the literary journal African American Review, both dedicated to his work, provide evidence. His third novel, “Love Story Black,” is at once a satire of the Black Arts Movement and a departure from the narrow dictates of social realist Black protest fiction in favor of a vision that allows for the uncanny, the humorous and the absurd. Asked to describe Demby, the writer Ishmael Reed, his near contemporary and a professor at California College of the Arts, put it plainly: “One of the great novelists of the last 100 years.”J. California Cooper, “The Wake of the Wind” (1998)Cooper’s dedication to “Wake,” her saga of slavery and freedom, says it plain: “I WILL NEVER BE ASHAMED OF MY ANCESTORS. IF YOU ARE … YOU ARE A FOOL.” In scope (it begins, “Once upon a certain year, 1764 or so, 200 years ago”), and in story (the book opens in Texas with two enslaved people falling in love, ignorant of the fact that the Civil War has brought slavery to an end), “Wake” is the perfect book to celebrate Juneteenth finally becoming a federal holiday. Though some critics have called Cooper preachy, many readers find her inspiring and profound. “Cooper always writes about love. This [book] is steeped in the power of family love, one of the things that no one could ever take away from Black folks,” the novelist and screenwriter Attica Locke says.DramaJean Toomer, “Balo” (1922)A circa 1925 portrait of Jean Toomer by Winold Reiss.National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian InstitutionThis year marks the 100th anniversary of “Cane” (1923), Toomer’s generically mutable masterpiece of fiction, poetry and drama. His one-act play “Balo,” written the previous year and staged by the Howard University Repertory Company during its 1923-24 season, is no masterpiece. However, its imperfections (most notably its tortured dialect) show a young writer endeavoring to capture his experience of unfamiliar places and voices. Both works are set in Georgia, where Toomer, who was raised in Washington, D.C., spent several weeks during the fall of 1921, on a trip to visit the birthplace of his estranged father. The play follows a day in the life of a Black sharecropper and his family, living amid the ruins of an old plantation, alongside a poor white family who reside in a decaying slave mansion. Whereas “Cane” often bends toward tragedy, “Balo” chooses reverie: “AUTUMN DAWN,” the opening stage directions read. “Any week day. Outside, it is damp and dewy, and the fog, resting upon the tops of pine trees, looks like fantastic cotton bolls about to be picked by the early morning fingers of the sun.”Eulalie Spence, “The Starter” (1923)Déja Denise Green and SJ Hannah in a scene from Eulalie Spence’s “The Starter” (1923), one of three plays in “She’s Got Harlem on Her Mind,” at the Metropolitan Playhouse in New York City through March 12.Kat duPont VecchioForgoing propagandistic “problem plays,” Spence modeled a style of politically and humanly engaged Black theater that paved the way for Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry and their contemporaries. After emigrating as a child from the Caribbean island of Nevis to New York in 1902, Spence absorbed the speech patterns of her adopted community and gave them expression in plays written in one act, to meet the requirements of the contests to which she often submitted her work. In “The Starter,” Spence stages a comic tale of courtship written in an eye dialect that calls out for gifted actors to make stilted symbols into natural speech: “Y’know, kid, I bin thinkin’ — Say, why don’t we get married? Huh?” asks T. J. of his beloved, Georgia. “Ah dunno, ’cept yuh never mentioned it befo’, ” Georgia replies. To appreciate these lines, one must hear them performed onstage. Fortunately, “She’s Got Harlem on Her Mind,” a production of three of Spence’s plays (including “The Starter”), is running through March 12 at the Metropolitan Playhouse in New York. The director, Timothy Johnson, says he enjoys how “in this one-act form she’s able to give you a whole life. … There’s such vibrant specificity about these characters that makes ordinary people extraordinary.”Lorraine Hansberry, “Toussaint” (1961)Above: Lorraine Hansberry in a 1961 clip from the series “Playwright at Work” discussing her play-in-progress, “Toussaint.”“A Raisin in the Sun,” which premiered on Broadway in 1959, is a work of such canonical consensus that it risks subsuming its creator. It marked the commercial and critical high point of a career cut short by illness. In her literary afterlife, Hansberry “becomes boxed into ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ in a way, which is both to her benefit and to her detriment,” explains Soyica Diggs Colbert, author of the 2021 Hansberry biography “Radical Vision.” “Raisin” remains an indispensable work; reading beyond it, however, one discovers the politically radical, formally experimental writer that Hansberry was becoming. In “Toussaint,” a completed 1961 scene from her play in progress about the Haitian general and freedom fighter Toussaint L’Ouverture, Hansberry claims her identity as, in Colbert’s words, a “freedom writer.” In critiquing the legacy of colonialism and understanding that this, too, is part of the Black American story, Hansberry offers an animating insight for her time and for ours.Charles Gordone, “No Place to Be Somebody: A Black-Black Comedy” (1969)The playbill from the 1969 Broadway production of Charles Gordone’s “No Place To Be Somebody.”© PlaybillIn 1969, Amiri Baraka (publishing as LeRoi Jones) released “Four Black Revolutionary Plays,” a series of one-acts obsessively, at times brilliantly, circling Black-white racial conflict. That same year, Gordone’s “No Place” debuted Off Broadway. The two works embody a fundamental tension: Baraka’s favors confrontation while Gordone’s displays a humanistic impulse to see dignity even in seeming degradation. Gordone peoples his play with pimps, prostitutes and hustlers, both Black and white. As Phyl Garland wrote in Ebony, Gordone “came equipped with a loaded pistol and a whole barrel of ‘MF’s’. ” Debuting at the Public Theater, founded by the towering New York theater figure Joseph Papp (a student of Eulalie Spence at Brooklyn’s Eastern District High School in the 1930s), “No Place” earned the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1970, becoming the first work by a Black playwright to do so. “No Place” blends comedy, tragedy and melodrama. In doing so, it shares with then-emergent Blaxploitation cinema a revolutionary sensibility that seeks not to counter Black stereotypes but rather to annex them, revealing the complexity beneath their distorting masks.Adrienne Kennedy, “An Evening with Dead Essex” (1973)The cast of “Ohio State Murders,” which was first published in 1991 and debuted on Broadway just last year, pays tribute to its playwright, Adrienne Kennedy, in December 2022.Michael Loccisano/Getty ImagesKennedy’s “The Ohio State Murders” (1991), which made its belated Broadway debut last December, closed early, on Jan. 15, after just 44 performances. In a video posted to Instagram, the play’s star, six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald, paid tribute to Kennedy. “More of her work deserves to be produced commercially,” the actor said, “and hopefully this will be the beginning of more and more awareness about … how incredible and poetic and profound and raw and revolutionary her work is.” Kennedy’s career spans seven decades, beginning with “Funnyhouse of the Negro” in 1964. Her style is often described as surrealist — a central quality, but only a part of her varied aesthetic. Among the most striking of her early plays is “An Evening with Dead Essex,” first performed in 1973 at the American Place Theatre in New York. The play joins documentary with imagination: It concerns the factual account of a Black Vietnam vet named Mark Essex who returns from war and commits a mass shooting, killing nine and injuring more before being shot by police. The play takes place in a film production studio, with Kennedy insisting that “actors use their real names and the director should get the actors to play themselves.” The action consists of the actors and filmmakers, all but one of whom are Black, reconstruing Essex’s life so as to make some sense of the violence of his death — and of the violence that surrounds us all.Andrea Hairston, “Lonely Stardust” (1998)In the stage directions to “Lonely Stardust,” Hairston describes how she wants her audience to relate to her play. “The Audience,” she writes, “should be embedded in a corner of this galactic wonder. … Occasionally comets whiz by. Periodic showers of Stardust should be arranged. The Traveler has journeyed billions of miles and landed in Springfield, MA, USA. …” Through this asymmetry of scale — the cosmos and a town in western Massachusetts — Hairston opens up points of entry into the everyday and the ineffable. A nameless traveler, searching for life at the end of his own, speaks in a hip vernacular: “When you spiral down that image of lonely, there’s the beginning. Or the end, actually. Buggin’ out.” Sheree Renée Thomas, author of numerous works of speculative fiction, including the short-story collection “Nine Bar Blues” (2020), sees Hairston as the too-often overlooked link between her generation and that of Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany. “Andrea Hairston has had her pulse on the science fiction community since the 1970s,” Thomas says. “She was always in that liminal space with her work: too Black for the science fiction community, and too science fiction for the Black drama community.”POETRYEsther Popel, “Flag Salute” (1934)Esther Popel’s poem “Flag Salute” on the cover of the November 1940 issue of The Crisis.Dickinson College Archives & Special CollectionsIn November 1940, a little more than a year before the United States entered World War II, The Crisis, the NAACP’s magazine, reprinted Popel’s “Flag Salute” on its cover. Popel’s poem intersperses phrases from the Pledge of Allegiance with an account of a Black man’s lynching. When it first appeared six years earlier, the poem was responding directly to the Oct. 18, 1933, murder of George Armwood, a 27-year-old Black farm laborer from Princess Anne on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, who had been arrested for “grabbing the arm” of a white woman on a public road. “Flag Salute” was newly relevant in 1940, The Crisis editors noted, because of the fact “that the federal anti-lynching bill had been killed in the Senate and that Negro Americans would be segregated and discriminated against in the U. S. armed forces.” Embodying the ambivalence of being both Black and American, Popel’s poem communicated across decades with Harryette Mullen, whose poems “Waving the Flag” and “Land of the Discount Price, Home of the Brand Name” bear its influence. “Popel was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania,” Mullen says, “where she lived near my great-grandmother, although I can’t be certain they were acquainted.” Reading Mullen’s poems beside Popel’s is a form of acquaintance, too.Bob Kaufman, “The Collected Poems” (1965-78)“When I die, / I won’t stay / Dead.” These three lines conclude Kaufman’s 19-line poem “Dolorous Echo,” first published in his book “Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness” (1965) and now included in the remarkable 2019 edition of Kaufman’s collected poems. The lines have proved prophetic. Kaufman died in 1986 at 60, in his adoptive city of San Francisco (he was born and raised in New Orleans), after struggling for decades with mental illness, addiction, arrests and housing precarity. A careful poetic craftsman, he could nonetheless be a reckless steward of his own work, scrawling poems in the narrow margins of newspapers, reciting words in coffee shops and at house parties. A founding member of Beatitude, the seminal Beat periodical, alongside Allen Ginsberg, John Kelly and others, Kaufman is sometimes shorthanded as the “Black Beat.” While he helped define the Beat aesthetic, Kaufman was also a surrealist, a poet of blues and jazz and a spiritualist (he practiced Buddhism). “Kaufman’s poems use the most far out and surreal tools to render frighteningly honest, terrifying and delicious portraits of people and the world,” the poet Danez Smith tells me.Gwendolyn Brooks, “In the Mecca” (1968)A 1960 portrait of Gwendolyn Brooks on the back steps of her home in Chicago.Slim Aarons/Getty ImagesBy some measures, Brooks is about as canonical as it gets. Her poem “We Real Cool” (1960) is a high school staple, likely because its brevity lends itself to classroom reading and because its sharp enjambments invite close analysis of form. “Most young people know me only by that poem,” Brooks once told an audience. “I would prefer it if the textbook compilers and the anthologists would assume that I had written a few other poems.” Among Brooks’s many other poems, her long sequence “In the Mecca,” featured in a collection of the same name, is among her finest. Released in 1968, after a nearly decade-long publishing hiatus and just months after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., “In the Mecca” is both intimately focused on domestic life and urgently engaged in the politics of the moment. The poet Major Jackson, who this year will publish a collection spanning his own two-decade career, says that the poem “reads like a contemporary ballad, where one discerns Brooks’s gift for incisive and stark language as well as a sweeping social vision married to modernist sensibilities.”Ishmael Reed, “A Secretary to the Spirits” (1978)A first edition cover of Ishmael Reed’s 1978 poetry collection “A Secretary to the Spirits,” illustrated by the artist Betye Saar.Betye Saar’s original cover illustration “A Secretary to the Spirits (from the series ‘A Secretary to the Spirits [for Ishmael Reed]’)” (1975).© Betye Saar. The Morgan Library & Museum, courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los AngelesThe richness of the 85-year-old Reed’s ever-expanding catalog (from his 1967 debut novel “The Free-Lance Pallbearers” to his play “The Conductor,” which premieres at New York’s Theater for the New City on March 9) is such that one might overlook the slender 17-poem, 42-page volume he published 45 years ago with NOK, a Nigerian publisher. Julian Lucas, who has written often about Reed, considers “A Secretary to the Spirits” to be “criminally underrated.” The book is long out of print and difficult to find; all of the poems, however, are available in Reed’s “New and Collected Poems” (2007). But if you’re lucky enough to find a copy of the 1978 original, you’ll experience them as Reed intended, in call-and-response with illustrations by the Black Arts Movement assemblage artist Betye Saar. Saar’s full-page panels depict Egyptian motifs juxtaposed with the Cream of Wheat chef, dancing Jazz Age silhouettes beside the Eye of Providence. Reed’s poems are sly and confrontational. In “The Reactionary Poet,” he claims that title in opposition to self-styled revolutionaries whose orthodoxy chokes out creativity and joy. He writes: “In your world of / Tomorrow Humor / Will be locked up and / the key thrown away / The public address system / Will pound out headaches / All day.”Dolores Kendrick, “The Women of Plums: Poems in the Voices of Slave Women” (1989)“The Women of Plums” is theater living inside poetry. Kendrick understood as much, adapting her collection for the stage, where it won the New York New Playwrights Award in 1997. She writes in dialect, but not in the caricatured deez and doze of the minstrel stage; instead, much as Toni Morrison did two years earlier in “Beloved,” she employs shifts in syntax, rhythm and diction to render speech that lives beyond the page. Kendrick wrote the poems as a kind of alternative history of the United States, from the Middle Passage to the Civil War, in the voices of 34 enslaved Black women. These voices are so strong that they have even been adapted as an opera, which opened in New York in the spring of 1995. “Soon I’ll go for a stroll / in my blue silk dress, / go into town / and buy myself a plum, / the blackest from the bush,” one of her speakers proclaims.Melvin Dixon, “Love’s Instruments” (1995)Dixon, a novelist, poet and scholar, published only one poetry collection in his lifetime, “Change of Territory” (1983). A posthumous collection, “Love’s Instruments,” released three years after his death at 42, is a playful and poignant tribute to the lives of gay Black men. In “Heartbeats,” Dixon uses line breaks to generate a syncopated rhythm that unfolds a narrative of regularity and revelation. This is how it begins:Work out. Ten laps.Chin ups. Look good.Steam room. Dress warm.Call home. Fresh air.Eat right. Rest well.Sweetheart. Safe sex.Sore throat. Long flu.Hard nodes. Beware.Test blood. Count cells.Reds thin. Whites low.Just months before Dixon died of complications related to AIDS, in 1992, he addressed the Third National Lesbian and Gay Writers Conference in Boston. He warned his fellow writers to “guard against the erasure of our experience and our lives” and to claim responsibility for the future of literature. “I come to you bearing witness of a broken heart,” Dixon said. “I come to you bearing witness to a broken body — but a witness to an unbroken spirit.”Ai, “Vice: New and Selected Poems” (1999)Born Florence Anthony in Albany, Texas in 1947, Ai chose a name that means “love” in Japanese, one of several lineages that the mixed-race poet could claim. Ai was part of a generation of post-Black Arts Movement figures who now occupy canonical places: Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Nathaniel Mackey and Harryette Mullen chief among them. Though Ai, who died in 2010, achieved distinction during her lifetime — she was the first Black recipient of the National Book Award for Poetry, for “Vice” in 1999 — she is less well-known today. None of her poems appear in the major anthologies of African American and American literature. Perhaps that should change: Ai is among the pre-eminent practitioners of the dramatic monologue — a persona-driven mode of poetic address exemplified in the work of Victorian poet Robert Browning. “I want to take the narrative ‘persona’ poem as far as I can,” Ai said. “All the way or nothing.” In “Vice,” she does just that, inhabiting the persona of a Black woman in love and trouble, writing past respectability to the hard truths of lived experience. More

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      With ‘Letters From Max’ Onstage, Sarah Ruhl Again Mourns a Poet’s Death

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      Through dialogue, poetry and ritual, the playwright revisits her correspondence with her former student, who died at the age of 25.About 10 minutes into “Letters From Max, a Ritual,” Sarah Ruhl’s new play about her epistolary friendship with the poet Max Ritvo, something akin to a sacred rite takes place: The lights dim, a spotlight illuminates center stage, and the actor portraying Ritvo walks toward a winged tattoo artist. For a few moments, they circle each other. Then the tattoo artist-angel removes the hospital gown that the poet is wearing and lifts him with grace. With a miming gesture, he offers a compact mirror to Ritvo so he might examine the birds newly adorning his back.“It’s dope,” Ritvo says of the tattoo, looking over his shoulder. “I really love it in this light.”But that quiet exchange was not dreamed up by Ruhl. It is actually a scene from a play that Ritvo wrote for Ruhl when he was a student at Yale in 2012, four years before he died of cancer at the age of 25. (After each surgery, he would acquire a new tattoo of a bird.) Before handing in the project, he told Ruhl, “I am adamant that something extravagant and silent happen.”With the Signature Theater production of “Letters From Max,” his desire for the work is now being realized in a way he might not have imagined.Ruhl’s play, adapted from a book she compiled of their correspondence during Ritvo’s chemotherapy, boils down to a single, yearslong conversation about poetry, love, mortality, the afterlife and soup. But this is not a traditional play. Poems and live music are interspersed between the dialogue, which comes from the letters, texts and voice mail messages they exchanged.Edelman, right, as a tattoo artist-angel, helping Pais remove his hospital gown in the play. The two actors alternate in the role of Max.Ye Fan for The New York Times“I don’t think of this play as ‘show business,’” Ruhl said in an interview, “but instead an encounter for the audience.” She hopes viewers will “bring their own grief or their own need for communal sadness,” she said, adding that the theater has been a place for catharsis dating back to the Greeks. “We’ve all been through so much in the last two years.”Though Ruhl feels her own grief in this production, which opens on Feb. 27, she has also found joy in sharing Ritvo’s work, and in seeing it move people the same way he did. “He was such a present, joyful person who made everyone around him laugh,” she said. There are other small tributes to Ritvo, too: A song he composed recurs throughout, and the titles of his poems are projected in his handwriting above the stage.There were no plans to adapt “Letters From Max” upon the book’s 2018 publication. But as Ruhl read sections at events — often with an actor reading Ritvo’s words — people asked, “Is this going to be a play?”Before distilling the 309-page book into a two-hour stage production, Ruhl consulted Ritvo’s literary executor, the poet Elizabeth Metzger.“She asked me long ago, ‘Do you think Max would want this?’” Metzger recalled, adding that she was “very, very certain that Max would.” For Ruhl, finding “the bones” within hundreds of pages of correspondence became a process of trial and error.She realized the first act is “about a teacher and a student getting to know each other and forming a friendship,” she said, “that would then reverse the teacher-student relationship” in the second act, which opens with a dialectic on the afterlife. “I was trying to offer Max a comforting view of the afterlife when he was afraid of death,” Ruhl said. “And he ultimately said, ‘Thank you. But no.’”Kate Whoriskey, who directed the New York production of Ruhl’s previous epistolary play, “Dear Elizabeth,” also about two poets exchanging letters, signed on to direct, and the actress Jessica Hecht was game to portray Ruhl, her longtime friend and collaborator. But casting Ritvo introduced a unique challenge. “I’m definitely sensitive to the fact that he had a huge reach and people are still in mourning,” Ruhl said.She said she was moved during auditions. “It was actually beautiful to see Max’s language inside a young person’s body again,” Ruhl said. Ruhl and Whoriskey liked the idea of a third body onstage — similar to the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” — who might “care-take the space” by delivering soup and poems to Ruhl and Ritvo. When the actors Ben Edelman and Zane Pais read for the role of Ritvo, Ruhl said, the team believed they “could do beautifully in both roles” by alternating nights. It turned out that Edelman plays the piano and Pais plays the guitar, so each composed music to perform while the other recites Ritvo’s poetry.“There’s some mystery, and it’s beyond words,” Ruhl said of the duality. “But it’s something about the spirit and the body, and the observer and the observed.” Not to mention, as Ruhl writes in the program note, the actors’ interchangeability demonstrates that Ritvo’s spirit and legacy is “bigger than any one actor.”“Max was many himself,” Metzger said. “Every time he read a poem, he read it differently, because he allowed the moment of the poem and the moment he was reading to merge.”When rehearsals began, Metzger texted Ruhl some guidance for the actors: “Reading the letters, the character is coming to face death,” she wrote, but “reading the poems, the character is not dying but being born, coming to life!” Metzger hoped the actors might “capture the shock of Max’s performance style, even the strange wild aliveness of the poems on the page.”Ritvo’s mother, Riva Ariella Ritvo, has been “an incredibly staunch supporter,” Edelman said, calling a video meeting she had with the cast members “one of the most intense experiences of my life.”He and Pais didn’t study Ritvo’s mannerisms. Instead, they aimed to embody his work. “Neither of us are trying to do an impersonation of Max at all,” Pais said.Hecht and Pais onstage during rehearsals at the Pershing Square Signature Center. Marsha Ginsberg’s spare set includes a white zoetrope that rotates to reveal scenes inside Max Ritvo’s childhood home, hospital rooms and a theater.Ye Fan for The New York TimesTo foreground the writing, the scenic designer Marsha Ginsberg kept the stage spare. The sole set piece is a white zoetrope that rotates to reveal scenes inside Ritvo’s childhood home, hospital rooms and the 13th Street Repertory Theater, where he accepted the 2014 Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America while wearing a pink kimono. At one point, during a silent sequence, the outside of the zoetrope becomes the window of an Amtrak quiet car. “We were trying to create a world where imaginative scapes could happen,” Whoriskey said. “So that a poem happens, and then suddenly, you’re seeing skeletons across a bridge, or a poem happens, and you’re seeing the shimmering of water.”Hecht didn’t work through the emotional arc of Ruhl’s character until the week before previews began. Though it’s easy to cry on command, she said, “I felt embarrassed to do that before we lived through the play for a while, and I really felt the weight of that story and that person coming into our lives.”For the past 30 years, Ruhl said, she has carried on an “intense” dialogue on life and art with Paula Vogel, her former professor. “When I met Max, it felt like he was one of those people that I would have that kind of dialogue with, had he lived that long,” she said. “It’s a comet-like thing. You might only meet those people once every … how often do comets circle?” Perhaps Ritvo made such an impact because he valued relationships. “He’s not a poet who just went inward and was exploring his own self and soul. It was always about talking to another person in a room,” Metzger said. “It was happening all the time, these little births and deaths of just being with a person in a room. I think that’s why he had so much intimacy with so many people. I’ve never met someone with as capacious of a soul.”When Ruhl attended the first preview performance of “Letters From Max, a Ritual” earlier this month, she could finally observe “how the humor landed,” how the emotional beats played out, and how Ritvo’s poetry “theatrically holds an audience.”But it wasn’t until intermission that the project came full circle. As part of the play’s “ritual,” she said, audience members sat at tables in the lobby to write letters to loved ones. A young woman approached Ruhl with an envelope addressed to her. The playwright opened it and drew out a note reading: “I have incurable brain cancer. And this production gave me hope.” More