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      Black Thought of the Roots Is Here for ‘The Gilded Age’ and ’1883’

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      Tariq Trotter, the Roots frontman and author of the new book “The Upcycled Self,” loves a period drama when it’s done right.Despite earning worldwide acclaim as the frontman of the Roots and achieving a degree of ubiquity when they became the house band for “The Tonight Show,” Tariq Trotter, also known as Black Thought, is an introvert and a bit of an enigma. There’s a good chance that fans who know every Roots verse still know little about the man behind them.That could change with the release this month of his memoir, “The Upcycled Self.” In it, Trotter, 50, reflects on growing up in Philadelphia during the 1970s and ’80s, zeroing in on how experiences like losing both parents by the age of 16 hardened him, and how his passion for the arts gave him much-needed direction. “The final frontier was to delve deeper into myself and become more introspective,” he said during a phone interview.Looking back, even to revisit his most painful memories, helped Trotter to move forward. He shared a few sources of creative inspiration, favorite works of art and timeless fashion pieces. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1DocumentariesThere’s a historical aspect to whatever story I’m telling, whether it’s my own or I’m talking about the world. My inspiration often comes from documentaries. Anything that Ken Burns touches — I just appreciate that style of storytelling. I’ll get a nugget from something in there that will spark the bar that leads to the song or whatever the composition evolves from. I recently watched “The American Buffalo,” and it makes you think about how much of the history of this country meets at that intersection.2‘The Source of Self-Regard’ by Toni Morrison“The Source of Self-Regard” is one of my go-tos. It really helped me get through the pandemic when the world shut down. It’s one of the first books that I took off the shelf, and in it, Toni Morrison said something about the role of the artist during turbulent times. It really put a battery in my back.3My Mom’s MusicGeorge Benson; Earth, Wind & Fire; Marvin Gaye. If I hear any of that stuff, or funk music like Parliament, Rick James, Teena Marie — anything post-disco through the ’80s is the music that really impacted me. The same stuff that I listen to when I’m making a meal, we’re having guests over or during a long drive, the sonic safe space for me is the music my mom used to play.4Stevie Wonder AlbumsIt’s definitely “Songs in the Key of Life” as an adult. But the Stevie album I heard the most growing up was probably “Hotter Than July.” Then, sometimes, you have to take a deep dive and do “Fulfillingness’ First Finale.” But in just talking about these three compositions, I appreciate the fact that there was space within the artist for all three to exist. The fact that that much range could exist within one person gives me hope as an artist and compels me to create more.5FunkI’m going to gravitate more toward Sly and the Family Stone and then maybe more toward Ohio Players. Midwest funk? Yeah. I think there’s something avant-garde; it’s almost like organized chaos. It feels very improvised and scattered sonically in a way that might seem all over the place to the untrained ear. But when you’re able to recognize those elements and tap all the way into them, it’s the ultimate liberty.6Historical Drama, When Done RightI really rock with shows like “The Gilded Age” or even some of the Westerns that are coming out. I’m not a huge “Yellowstone” fan, but I am a huge fan of both “1883” and “1923.” Because they’re done right, I feel like I’m transported to a place that I may have never seen.7Spike Lee JointsSometimes, I feel like “Mo’ Better Blues” is my favorite Spike joint. That, “Malcolm X,” “Do the Right Thing” and “Jungle Fever” are probably my favorites from him. You know how people say, “in no particular order”? If you asked me tomorrow, I might give you that exact same list in a different order.8Scorsese Movies Starring De NiroIf you’re talking about Martin Scorsese, strangely enough, “Cape Fear” is one of my favorites, if not the favorite. I’m also a huge Robert De Niro fan, and I feel he’s often underutilized. “Cape Fear” was a rare instance of us seeing De Niro moving in a different way. It was a much-needed curveball.9HeadwearI have a bunch of fedoras that were made by a brother named Isaac Larose who used to have a company called Larose Paris. The tan fedora that people see me wearing on that Funkmaster Flex freestyle? I have multiple versions.10Vintage ShirtsI’ve got this olive green military Gucci shirt with epaulets on the shoulders. It’s hand-painted with butterflies, flowers and all types of leaves. I’ve had it since 2000 and still rock it to this day. My wife does not like it, but I love it and feel like it’s never going out of style. More

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      George Brown of Kool & the Gang Dies at 74

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      Mr. Brown kept time for a group that combined funk, disco, R&B and jazz to create some of the most memorable pop songs of the 1970s.George Brown, a founding member and drummer of the group Kool & the Gang, who played on funk, disco and pop hits that featured prominently in movies and have been sampled numerous times, died on Thursday in Long Beach, Calif. He was 74.His death, at a hospital, was confirmed in a statement by the band’s publicist, who said the cause was cancer. Mr. Brown had said publicly that he had lung cancer.Mr. Brown, known as Funky, was a key contributor to several of the band’s biggest hits, including “Ladies Night,” “Jungle Boogie” and the party anthem “Celebration.”In a July interview with NPR, he described Kool & the Gang as “the sound of happiness.”In 1964, Mr. Brown linked up with Ricky Westfield and the brothers Ronald Khalis Bell and Robert “Kool” Bell, as well as other friends — Spike Mickens, Dennis “Dee Tee” Thomas and Charles Smith — to form a band that would combine jazz, funk, disco and R&B and create some of the most memorable pop songs of their era.Formed in Jersey City, N.J., the band first played jazz while members attended Lincoln High School. The band performed under several names, including the Jazziacs, but eventually settled on Kool & the Gang in the late 1960s.One of the band’s early names was Kool and the Flames but the group changed the Flames to the Gang to avoid confusion with James Brown’s group, the Famous Flames.Kool & the Gang in the 1970s. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesGeorge Brown was born on Jan. 15, 1949. His father, George Melvin Brown Sr., worked in the coal industry while his mother, Eleanor White Brown, was a maid in Fort Lee, N.J., and also worked as a key puncher.Both made music a constant part of Mr. Brown’s upbringing, Mr. Brown recalled in his memoir released this year, “Too Hot: Kool & the Gang & Me.”Mr. Brown, who took to drumming at a young age, wrote that he saved up from a newspaper delivery route to buy his first drum set.In a 2015 interview with Red Bull Music Academy, Mr. Brown described using butter knives as drum sticks when he first started playing.“Then I went down to a music store on Newark Avenue in Jersey City and took a $3 lesson from a gentleman who used to play with the Shirelles. He said, ‘Hey man, you’re a natural!’” Mr. Brown recalled. “So he gave me ‘Buddy Rich’s 16 Essential Snare Drum Rudiments’ book. I took one more lesson and never went back.”The band was signed by the producer Gene Redd to De-Lite Records 1969.The members were in an early recording session in New York for their instrumental debut album, “Kool and the Gang,” when Mr. Redd encouraged Mr. Brown and Ronald Bell to just “do something.” It led to a freewheeling recording session that produced songs like “Raw Hamburger” and the album opener, “Kool & the Gang.”“It just flowed. And we’re just grooving,” Mr. Brown told The New York Times in an interview last year.George Brown on drums in 1974.Getty ImagesThe sound carried over into the 1970s as the band found fame and added the vocalist J.T. Taylor.Songs like “Jungle Boogie” “Hollywood Swinging” and “Funky Stuff” became Billboard chart staples. “Celebration” — with its cheery chorus “Celebrate good times, come on!” — made it all the way to the top.The group would go on to release dozens of albums, tour worldwide and appeared on the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack, which won a Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1978.The group’s songs have frequently appeared on film and television soundtracks, including for “Pulp Fiction” in 1994.In 2015, the band was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.Mr. Brown was a producer on an album that the band released this year, called “People Just Want To Have Fun” in anticipation of the group’s 60th anniversary.Kool & the Gang had a broad influence, particularly in hip-hop.According to the website WhoSampled, the band has been sampled in almost 2,000 songs, among the highest of all time. The band’s song “Summer Madness” accounts for 249 samples, by artists including Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg and Mary J. Blige.Ronald Khalis Bell, a singer, songwriter and saxophonist for the band, died in 2020. Mr. Thomas, who played saxophone, died in 2021.Mr. Brown is survived by his wife, Hanh Brown, and five children: Dorian Melvin Brown, Jorge Lewis Brown, Gregory Brown, Jordan Xuan Clarence Brown and Aaron Tien Joseph Brown.Three years ago, Mr. Brown was diagnosed with lung cancer, according to an interview broadcast with the television station KCAL in Los Angeles. After surgery and chemotherapy, Mr. Brown recovered and returned to touring in 2022. But this year, the cancer returned.“I didn’t plan on being in a band known around the world, but I welcomed it when it came,” Mr. Brown wrote in his book. “I didn’t know where the music would lead me, but I knew that if I remained focused and persevered, it would happen as God had intended. And it did.” More

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      Who Is Cassie, the R&B Singer Suing Sean Combs?

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      The R&B singer was poised for a big breakout after her 2006 hit song “Me & U.” But her second album never arrived.Cassie, the singer, model and actress who is suing the music mogul Sean Combs for physical and sexual abuse, was supposed to be the next Britney Spears or Janet Jackson.Such a high bar for success was set by Combs, who in addition to dating the singer for more than a decade beginning around 2007 was also her label boss at Bad Boy Records until 2019. “Those two great artists have paved the way,” Combs said in 2008, while hyping up the singer’s much-anticipated second album.But it never came.After a promising start to her career in pop and R&B — including an infectious debut single, “Me & U,” that peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2006, and a well-reviewed first album — the singer, whose full name is Casandra Ventura, subsequently struggled for years to regain her footing as an artist. In pop music circles, she has long represented a “what if?” of unfulfilled artistic potential, even as she gained cult-favorite status among R&B obsessives and turned to releasing music independently.Ventura’s lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan on Thursday, may cast her abbreviated career in a different, darker light. According to Ventura’s claims, Combs, whom she met when she was 19, began a pattern of control and abuse that fused the singer’s personal and professional life as he plied her with drugs, beat her and forced her to have sex with male prostitutes while he watched and recorded. As their relationship was ending in 2018, the suit says, he raped her after pushing his way into her home.Through a lawyer, Combs, 54, has denied the accusations, calling the lawsuit “riddled with baseless and outrageous lies, aiming to tarnish Mr. Combs’s reputation and seeking a payday.”When they first became acquainted, Ventura, now 37, was an aspiring singer and sometime model from New London, Conn., while Combs was a larger-than-life hitmaker — known as Puff Daddy or Diddy — who was credited with developing the careers of the Notorious B.I.G., Mary J. Blige and more. In February 2006, according to the lawsuit, Ventura signed a 10-album deal with Bad Boy. That summer, her debut studio album was released, with writing and production from the R&B polymath Ryan Leslie.“Just what we need: a young singer and a young producer who want to be the next Aaliyah and Timbaland, or maybe the next Ciara and Jazze Pha,” the critic Kelefa Sanneh wrote in The New York Times, praising her minimalist R&B sound. “No, seriously: It is just what we need.”“Cassie,” released by Bad Boy and Atlantic Records, reached No. 4 on the Billboard chart, selling more than 100,000 copies in its first week. But promotional appearances on shows like MTV’s “Total Request Live” and BET’s “106 & Park” were rocky, with Ventura citing “significant performance anxiety” in her lawsuit.Combs, at the time, was her public defender, telling MTV, “It made me really appreciate what I really love about her: She’s a regular person.” He added, “You’ve got to understand that success for her is coming out of nowhere.”In the years that followed, despite singles featuring Lil Wayne (“Official Girl”) and Akon (“Let’s Go Crazy”), Ventura became known as much for her relationship and public appearances with Combs as for her music. A second album was routinely teased in the press — with Combs touting her artistic development: “she’s really cocooned into a butterfly” — but never materialized.Still, Cassie remained a pop culture presence. In 2008, she appeared as an actress and dancer in the film “Step Up 2: The Streets.” The following year, she signed a record deal with Interscope Records, in association with Bad Boy, but got even more attention for an experimental hairstyle in which she shaved half of her head. “I wanted to go all the way and kind of land in punk,” she said at the time.By 2012, with the release of the single “King of Hearts,” Ventura was still touting a comeback. “I’m just a laid-back person,” she told GQ of the six-year gap between albums. “Maybe laid-back to a fault.” She added, “It’s been too long, I know, but I got to start over and over again. It would be awesome to stay popular, but if I was only an underground artist, I would be OK with that.”In 2013, Ventura released a mixtape, “RockaByeBaby,” that was not promoted with the force of an official studio album, but was met with praise nonetheless. With appearances by the rappers Wiz Khalifa, Rick Ross and Meek Mill, the album showcased Ventura as “an on-mic presence that’s the equal to any of the rappers she’s recruited for features here,” a critic for Pitchfork wrote.It would be years before Ventura released music again. According to the singer’s lawsuit, on at least two occasions in 2009 and 2015, Combs beat her after seeing her speak to music managers at parties. “She had hoped speaking to this manager would allow her to further grow her career, and that Mr. Combs would be happy for her, but instead he became extremely angry,” the suit says of the 2009 incident.Following the filing of the lawsuit, two former Bad Boy artists expressed support for Ventura online. “Been trynna tell y’all for years,” the singer Aubrey O’Day, formerly of the Combs-backed group Danity Kane, wrote on Instagram. “Prayers up for this queen.” Dawn Richard, another former member of Danity Kane, wrote on X, “praying for Cassie and her family, for peace and healing. you are beautiful and brave.”In 2019, Ventura married the wellness consultant Alex Fine while pregnant with the couple’s first child; the “intimate backyard wedding,” with just 14 guests, was documented by Vogue. That year, Ventura also began releasing music again, putting singles online via her own Ventura Music label in what she called the Free Fridays Playlist.“I feel supported so I make decisions based on what’s best for me,” Cassie said in an interview about beginning a new creative phase as a mother. “I used to spend the most time overthinking the smallest things and always worrying about how people felt that I neglected how I really felt and what would make me happy. I wasn’t creating from the heart.”“The most valuable thing I’ve learned in starting a new chapter,” she added, “is that it’s OK to ask for help.” More

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      John Morris, Who Brought Rock Legends to the Stage, Dies at 84

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      As a coordinator of the Woodstock festival and the hallowed New York venue Fillmore East, he helped showcase the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.John Morris, who brought an element of spectacle to the rock explosion of the 1960s as a coordinator and M.C. for the era-defining Woodstock festival, and who also helped run the storied rock venues Fillmore East in New York City and the Rainbow theater in London, died on Friday at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 84.The cause was complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease following treatment for lung cancer, his longtime partner, Luzann Fernandez, said.A New York native, Mr. Morris got his start as a lighting designer — first for theater productions in his home city and on London’s West End, and later for rock concerts — before he began producing concerts himself. He gained prominence in 1967 when he organized a free concert by Jefferson Airplane in Toronto that drew some 50,000 people, and he went on to mount tours by that band, as well as by the Grateful Dead and others.In 1968, Mr. Morris cemented his place in rock lore when he helped Bill Graham, the powerful and feared West Coast rock impresario, open an East Coast answer to his hallowed Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. Fillmore East became a magnet for top acts like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and the Allman Brothers, who recorded a searing live album there, and was often called “the church of rock ‘n’ roll.”Still, no Fillmore East concert could come close to matching the impact of Woodstock, where legions of rock disciples turned a mass migration to a dairy farm in upstate Bethel, N.Y., into a pilgrimage that marked the apotheosis of the hippie era.The crowd on the first day of the festival. It was Mr. Morris who announced, as unanticipated masses converged on the festival, that Woodstock was “a free concert from now on.”Clayton Call/Redferns, via Getty ImagesMr. Morris served as the production coordinator for the three-day event, formally known as the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, which featured more than 30 acts. Organizers originally sold tickets for $18 (the equivalent of about $150 today), anticipating a crowd of about 50,000.Before the festival began, Mr. Morris helped the festival’s creators lure cutting-edge talent, using every means at their disposal given budgetary restraints. “We famously got the Who for $11,000 because that was all we had left in the budget,” he said in a 2019 interview with the music site Pollstar, “and we plied Pete Townshend with wine to get him to agree.” (Other sources give the amount as $12,500.)The festival, of course, became a signature event of the 1960s, a rain-soaked counterculture convention at which an estimated 400,000 people or more got high, listened to wailing guitars and lived communally in muddy fields, as memorialized in the Academy Award-winning documentary “Woodstock” (1970), directed by Michael Wadleigh.Mr. Morris, who usually worked behind the scenes, found his own taste of fame after Michael Lang, one of the festival’s organizers, without warning deputized him and Chip Monck, the lighting director, to serve as masters of ceremonies.It was Mr. Morris’s voice that echoed over the hillsides, in his famous announcement, as unanticipated masses converged on the festival, that Woodstock was “a free concert from now on,” to which he added: “That doesn’t mean that anything goes. What that means is that we’re going to put the music up here for free.”But, as he later clarified, it was Mr. Monck, not he, who made the equally famous announcement warning festival goers to avoid the unreliable batch of LSD known as the “brown acid.” “I did not do drugs,” he said, “because I was usually in charge and I didn’t feel I could. So me saying the brown acid is not particularly good would be very out of character, because I would not have the vaguest idea.”However transcendent Woodstock proved to be for the hordes of revelers, Mr. Morris had to deal with continual crises. “You can see me in that film announcing and coming as close to a nervous breakdown as humanly possible,” he said in a 2017 interview with The Malibu Times. “On Sunday, we had what was later on called a tornado that shot through the festival, poured rain, wind — the stage started sort of sliding, feeling dangerous.”However chaotic things got, Mr. Morris later expressed pride in pulling off the seemingly impossible.“We dealt with what became one of the largest cities in New York State at that point,” he said, and “managed to put on one of the best music concerts of all time.”Mr. Morris, center, shared his Woodstock memories at a 2019 panel discussion in Los Angeles with Bill Belmont, left, the festival’s artist coordinator, and Joel Rosenman, one of the festival’s producers.Alison Buck/WireImage, via Getty ImagesJohn Hanna Morris Jr. was born on May 16, 1939, in Manhattan, the elder of two sons. His father was a deputy New York City police commissioner and later an advertising executive. His mother, Louise (Edwards) Morris, had run national youth programs under the New Deal during the Great Depression.The family eventually settled in Pleasantville, a village in Westchester County. After graduating from high school in Somers, N.Y., Mr. Morris spent two years studying theater production at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh.Following his tenure at Fillmore East, Mr. Morris spearheaded the reopening of London’s Rainbow theater in Finsbury Park as a rock temple in its own right, starting with a fiery opening show by the Who in November 1971.In addition to Ms. Fernandez, Mr. Morris is survived by his brother, Mark.Mr. Morris continued producing concerts by major acts, including David Bowie, Pink Floyd and Stevie Ray Vaughan through the 1980s. He later produced antiques shows and was a dealer of Native American art and artifacts.For all his later accomplishments, he never stopped expressing pride in helping to make Woodstock, a festival created by the young and for the young (its principal organizers were in their 20s) an unlikely success.“I was the adult in the room, charged with keeping the thing running,” he told Pollstar. “I was older than most everybody else, all of 30 at that point.” More

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      12 African Artists Leading a Culture Renaissance Around the World

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      In one of his famed self-portraits, Omar Victor Diop, a Senegalese photographer and artist, wears a three-piece suit and an extravagant paisley bow tie, preparing to blow a yellow, plastic whistle. The elaborately staged photograph evokes the memory of Frederick Douglass, the one-time fugitive slave who in the 19th century rose to become a leading […] More

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      ‘The Stones and Brian Jones’ Review: Sympathy for a Founding Rocker

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      A new documentary looks back at Jones’s rise and fall, but also underlines his crucial strand in the Rolling Stones’ DNA.There’s a particular indignity to being dropped from the band you founded.In the annals of tragic pop mythology, Brian Jones’s ejection from the Rolling Stones has continued to reverberate long past his exit; Jones died at home in England just one month later, at age 27, in July 1969. Nick Broomfield’s latest documentary, “The Stones and Brian Jones,” looks back at Jones’s rise and fall, lingering on the intra-band power plays and fast living that helped bring him down.Mick Jagger and Keith Richards today enjoy rock immortality, but Broomfield underlines Jones’s crucial strand in the Stones’ DNA. Jones’s love for blues set a fire burning in the band’s soul, even as it shifted gears musically. The Stones bassist Bill Wyman is on hand to praise (and sweetly act out) his bandmate’s inspired instrumental touch, from slide guitar work to his fluttering recorder on “Ruby Tuesday.”But the interviews (many audio-only) lean decisively into Jones’s personal instability. His rebellious streak led his family to throw him out; later, he fathered children by multiple women. The tender twist to this film is that some of his exes — who included Anita Pallenberg and Zouzou, the French actress — help narrate much of his drug-aided decline, most with fondness. Zouzou Gallically muses that Jones pursued women who resembled him though he disliked himself.Despite Broomfield’s having made investigative docs about Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, and Biggie and Tupac, he doesn’t reopen the case of Jones’s drowning. His announcer-like voice-over and sometimes dishy interviews might evoke a “Behind the Music” exposé, but he seems most like a fan with a rueful sympathy for his devil of a subject.The Stones and Brian JonesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Es Devlin Imagines Worlds That Don’t Exist

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      Es Devlin is a British designer of memories and psychologies, ideas and dreams. She has created environments for operas, dance works and plays (her scenic design for “The Lehman Trilogy” won the Tony); designed concert tours for Beyoncé, U2, Kanye West, Adele and Miley Cyrus; worked on the opening ceremony of the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games and the closing ceremony of the London Olympic Games; imagined fashion shows for Louis Vuitton; and invented huge installations, centered around endangered species and endangered languages.Her cross-disciplinary work is category-defying, and so is her new monograph, “An Atlas of Es Devlin” (Thames & Hudson) — an exquisitely produced and immersive artwork in itself, containing photographs, texts, foldouts, pullouts, translucent overlays and cutout pages that reflect the intricacy and imaginative extent of Devlin’s processes, from concept to final iteration.Pop concerts, like Beyoncé’s 2016 Formation World Tour, are about achieving the intimacy of television “on a gladiatorial, sports arena scale,” said Es Devlin, the tour’s stage designer.Kevin Mazur/WireImage, via Getty ImagesAn example of Es Devlin’s scenic design, using the box motif, was “The Lehman Trilogy,” shown here at the National Theater in London in 2018.via Es Devlin StudioAn exhibition of the same name, based on “An Atlas,” opens at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum on Saturday, Devlin’s first major solo show in the United States. “In many aspects, it’s a three-dimensional manifestation of the book,” Devlin said in a recent interview at her home in south London, where a long refectory table in front of floor-to-ceiling glass windows was laden with books on climate change, economics and art.“There is no presumption that you know what my work is,” Devlin, 52, said, describing the exhibition, which will begin in a replica of her studio before a wall opens to reveal a series of apertures, inscribed with the names of everyone she has worked with.Devlin has “reinvented the wheel in every field she has been part of, whether theater, poetry, sculpture, climate or installation,” the art historian Katy Hessel said. She added, “I would define her as a visionary.”Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, said that Devlin’s gift is not just to unite “so many different talents, of design, architecture, writing, drawing, but that she has created an art form of collaboration. She creates a communal space for the rituals of theater, pop concerts or art.”Over several hours and a vegetable curry, Devlin picked favorite works in the book and the exhibition, speaking with characteristic verve about her past, her partnerships and her passions. “For me,” she said, “there is no hierarchy between the value of the opera ‘Carmen’ and Beyoncé.” Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. A series of teenage sketchesA sequence of drawings by Es Devlin, 1989: Studies of a female figure constrained within a box. She later translated the box into theatrical space.Es DevlinThis sequence shows six drawings of a female figure with a box or a cube, made when I was 18 years old, in 1989. I had just started an English literature degree at University of Bristol, and I would have been reading “Beowulf” and living in the library.I was very attracted to figures of speech that conjure unstable and impossible matter, where matter and language won’t sit together. All the great poets live in this place. As I was reading and writing, I became more and more eager to draw. I resisted going to art school because the people going there knew what they wanted to say, and I didn’t. I wanted to learn.In these drawings, a person is constrained within a box that is too small, or is static within the box, or manipulating it. The person holds on to it like an iceberg, uses it like a lookout post or a climbing frame. Of course the box translates into the theatrical space. I have made several works, like “Don Giovanni,” or “The Lehman Trilogy,” using a box as a structure for design. These sketches are a map or atlas of everything I have made since.2. A hand mapEs Devlin, “Redraw the Edges of Yourself,” 2023. After making observational drawings of endangered species in London, she made a poster that shows the porosity between her hand and their form, her knuckle and the edge of a bird wing.Es DevlinLast year, Hans Ulrich Obrist, who has been a real mentor for me, called to ask me to design a poster for a project at the Serpentine called “Back to Earth.” By the next day.At the time, I was working on a project called “Come Home Again,” for which I drew 243 endangered, nonhuman species living in London. I was inspired by the environmental activist Joanna Macy and other writers who speak to the continuity of the biosphere and the self. In other words, if you saw other species and the rest of the world as a continuation of yourself, you wouldn’t harm it.I was drawing insects, fish, plants, mammals, sometimes 18 hours a day, and in a slightly hallucinatory frame of mind. When Hans Ulrich called, I just put my hand on paper, drew around it, took photos of some of the drawings, and plunked them around the outline. When I did that, I felt that continuity between myself and the species I was drawing — between my knuckle and the edge of a bird wing, the veins on my hand and on a leaf. The species are a sort of tattoo composition on the hand. This drawing, which is a D.I.Y. pop-up, is placed inside the book, as a gift.3. A line of lightEs Devlin, “Morning I,” 2009. Photograph of a line of light between curtains.Es DevlinThis is a photograph I took, around 2016, of a line of sunlight coming in through curtains or blinds. Now, every day, when I wake up, I photograph the line of light and spend about 20 quiet minutes meditating on this. In the exhibition there is a voice-over about this, with the image.Lucio Fontana, whose work I saw at the Tate as a teenager, is obviously a huge influence here. The first film I worked on, in 2008, with the composer Nitin Sawhney and the choreographer Dam Van Huynh, was a story about a person entering a line of light; in art you can! I’ve used it in many other pieces — Alastair Marriott’s “Connectome” at the Royal Ballet, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Howie the Rookie” — and I know I’ll continue to do so.4. ‘Miracle Box’Es Devlin, “Miracle Box,” 2016. She built a box covered with projections of her hands trying in various ways to access a light at the heart of the rotating cube. The work was part of a series of revolving box sculptures including Beyoncé’s Formation Tour and “The Lehman Trilogy.”Es DevlinIn 2016, Hans Ulrich Obrist invited me to give a talk at the Serpentine. I thought of myself as a set designer, so I was excited to be welcomed in [the art] world, which can frankly be quite exclusive. I talked about the mechanics of the suspension of disbelief, and while I was talking, I built a box onstage — all very basic, Velcro and tape. But when I finished building it, the lights went off, music came on and the box turned, covered with projections of my hands trying in various ways — cutting through clay, paper and mirrored board — to access a light that appeared to be at the heart of the rotating cube.I have made a version of this in lots of different modes. For Beyoncé’s 2016 Formation Tour, I thought about how the art form of the pop concert is an attempt to achieve the intimacy that television, and now films, give to people, but on a gladiatorial, sports arena scale. When I first talked to Beyoncé, she had written a poem that had the line “an electric current humming through me.” I think what she was expressing in the poem was the sensation that she was a medium for her songs.When I was flying over to meet her, I made some sketches on the plane. I hadn’t heard the “Lemonade” album yet, but knew it was about a relationship and a crisis. I wanted to show something between the poster icon and [King Lear’s] “bare, forked” creature, a small figure, constantly in motion, magnified in the revolving cube.5. ‘Carmen’: The suspension of disbeliefDevlin’s opera set for “Carmen” in Bregenz, Austria, in 2017 was based on a scene where Carmen throws cards into the air.Es DevlinHands suspended between sea and sky, magic, illusion, the suspension of disbelief. This is one of my favorite things, the backdrop for the opera “Carmen,” in 2017 in Bregenz, Austria. This is an extraordinary venue for an opera festival. After the Second World War, Maria Wanda Milliore, a young set designer, suggested performances on a barge on the lake because the concert hall had been bombed. My design was the first by a woman in that spot since 1946.I was watching bull fights, wanted a big bull, but the director, Kasper Holten, said no. So we went back to the text and were looking at the scene when Carmen throws the cards into the air. As I imitated that action, Kasper said, “That’s it!”It’s really difficult to make work on a barge in a lake, to make the cards look like they are floating. One of the reasons the set is so beautiful is that there are no visible speakers. Here, whole chunks of the hands are made of gauze and are full of speakers, as are the cards. The whole thing is a big, 25-meter-high sound-emitting device.6. ‘Your Voices’Es Devlin, “Your Voices,” 2022, an installation at Lincoln Center created in collaboration with the Endangered Language Alliance.Es DevlinDuring the pandemic, when so much cultural work was extinct, I had an invitation to make a piece from the Champagne house, Moët & Chandon. If this sort of project is not truthfully approached, it can end up as an advert.I wanted to collaborate with the Endangered Language Alliance, which Brian Eno had introduced me to. The anthropologist Wade Davis said, “Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind”: When we lose a language we lose a library of cultural, historical and biological references.I felt the installation should be at Lincoln Center because New York is the city that is home to the most languages — 637 at last count. I used a compass as the basis of the design for an illuminated kinetic sculpture on the plaza, mapping the languages across the city, then stretching the 637 lines across the arc to connect with one another. You could stand inside the object and it was like being inside a musical instrument. At the same time, you heard recordings of the endangered languages all around you, speaking the E.M. Forster text, “Only connect,” and other poems. There were choirs from the Bronx, a Ukrainian and Russian choir, Japanese and African choirs. It was a deeply condensed version of being in New York City.7. The iris“An Atlas of Es Devlin” opens with several layered pages with circular apertures, an iris shape, with the names of collaborators.Es DevlinThis figure turns up a lot in my work, and it is the opening piece in the exhibition. It is based on a series of eight cutout, circular layered apertures at the start of the book. In the exhibition, the room is filled with a replica of these pages with holes through the center, built to the height of the room. The visitor walks through them, and becomes part the structure.In a circle around each hole are the names of all the people who I have worked with; it’s an atlas of participation. Any collaboration is about seeing through the lens of the designer, the composer, the choreographer, the playwright, the director. What I quite like is that the iris shape isn’t stable; there are a lot of currents clashing together and centrifugally holding. This is about trying to develop a muscle to see through the lens of others. More

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      Book Review: ‘Living the Beatles Legend,’ by Kenneth Womack

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      A new biography resuscitates the colorful, tragic life of Mal Evans: roadie, confidant, procurer, cowbell player.LIVING THE BEATLES LEGEND: The Untold Story of Mal Evans, by Kenneth WomackHe was a “gentle giant.” A “teddy bear” who once posed with a koala. A “lovable, cuddly guy.” Of all the people in the Beatles’ entourage, Mal Evans was indisputably the most Muppet-like.You may have seen the 6-foot-3 Evans looming over shoulders in “Get Back,” Peter Jackson’s blockbuster 2021 documentary. That was him in a green, suede, fringed jacket, helping Paul McCartney puzzle out “The Long and Winding Road,” and banging an anvil on “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” with boyish joy in his bespectacled eyes.He was with the band almost from the beginning — first as a bouncer at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, and then as their driver, roadie and general guy Friday — and all the way to the very bitter end. He was rarely called the fifth Beatle, as was his comrade in factotum-dom, Neil Aspinall, but certainly could have qualified as the sixth or seventh.Unlike Aspinall and so many other Beatles associates, however, Evans did not receive an obituary in The New York Times when he died at 40 on Jan. 5, 1976. Nor was there a news story about the sensational cause: a fusillade of bullets from the police, summoned after he, who idolized cowboys as well as rock stars, brandished a loaded Winchester rifle in his girlfriend’s Los Angeles apartment.At the time, Evans was under contract from Grosset & Dunlap to write a long-planned (and Beatles-authorized) memoir about his time with the group, originally called “200 Miles to Go” after the night he punched out a dangerously cracked windscreen and chauffeured his charges for hours through the freezing cold. Almost 50 years later, after the manuscript and other materials were discovered languishing in a storage basement by a publishing temp and returned to Evans’s family with Yoko Ono’s help, Kenneth Womack has finished the job, with rigor and care if not a sparkling prose style. (In his pages, emotions are always reaching a “fever pitch” and the “winds of change” can actually be glimpsed.) A practiced Beatlesologist, he cleans the floors nicely, but doesn’t dance with the mop.“Living the Beatles Legend,” its wan title taken with perhaps too much respect from a later iteration of the Evans project, is an interesting case study of two matters: the collateral damage of fame and the difficult process of life writing. Reprinted journal entries and previously unseen (at least by me) snapshots, like of McCartney sunning himself on a car in the Rocky Mountains, offer the voyeuristic excitement of leafing through a private scrapbook, though many of the stories are standards.Born in 1935, Evans was a little older and posher than the Fab Four. His family waited out the Blitz in Wales; he was issued a Mickey Mouse gas mask. Nicknamed “Hippo” during a shyness-plagued school career — “I didn’t mind,” he wrote, “because it always seemed to be a fairly amiable, vegetarian type of animal, not doing anybody any harm” — he already had a wife, toddler and respectable position as a telecommunications engineer for the General Post Office when he began visiting the Cavern.There, he’d request Elvis covers that the Beatles would dedicate teasingly — and cruelly, in retrospect — to “Malcontent,” “Malfunctioning” or “Malodorous,” before hiring him for 25 pounds per week, not all expenses paid.Evans would both revel in and chafe at his subordinate role, devoting himself completely to the whims of these infantilized musicians; John Lennon need only yell “Apples, Mal” at 3 a.m., for example, and a box of Golden Delicious would materialize from Covent Garden.George Harrison, who also gets a new biography this season, once recalled Evans — a determined athlete who was chased by a stingray and risked hypothermia playing Channel Swimmer in “Help!” — leaping from a boat to buy a “groovy-looking cloak” off the back of a fan. He’d go to spectacular lengths to recover Harrison’s treasured red guitar, “Lucy,” from a thief.Evans’s reward, and ultimate punishment, for loyal service to the Beatles was sharing in their sybaritic habits. In their orbit he met scores of celebrities: Marlene Dietrich, exposing her pubic hair; Burt Lancaster, whose swim trunks he borrowed; a trouserless Keith Moon. His responsibilities included occasionally spraying overzealous fans with a garden hose and tossing them over his shoulder before ejection and — more consistently — procuring women and drugs, of which he also partook.Like a Mary Poppins of vice, Evans came to carry around a doctor’s bag filled with plectra, cigarettes, condoms, snacks and aspirin. The gentle giant was also, Womack makes plain, a clumsy compartmentalizer. His long-suffering wife, Lily, would find notes (and sometimes knickers) from groupies in his suitcases. Their children once overheard him being fellated by his girlfriend after he sent a birthday message to one of them on recycled cassette tape. An illegitimate son he sired with a fan was given up for adoption. More than the other underlings, and irritatingly to some, he insinuated himself into public photographs. He became a fan favorite. “Everybody knew Mal,” Heart’s Ann Wilson, one of Womack’s many supplemental interviewees, observed of the roar when he came onstage to set up at a Seattle concert.Increasingly, he angled for recognition and promotion. Sometimes, he was cheated of credit, as in his contributions to “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”; sometimes, he overreached, claiming that he helped arrange songs on the debut album of the Iveys, later Badfinger. One of the great sadnesses of Evans — along with his oft-abandoned family — is that he longed to perform himself. “Road manager for the Beatles was, for me, the next best thing,” he wrote. Like the Will Ferrell character in the deservedly famous “Saturday Night Live” sketch about Blue Öyster Cult, he did get the chance to play cowbell, on “With a Little Help From My Friends.”There’s a poignant stiffness to the diaries Evans kept, possibly for posterity, and the poetry he attempted. An ordinary man who took an extraordinary ride that ended with a terrible crash — aspiring toward honor but submitting to appetites — he is here dusted off and given a proper salute, a place on the groaning shelf of Beatles books.Though tellingly, even if by accident, his name is left off the spine.LIVING THE BEATLES LEGEND: The Untold Story of Mal Evans | More