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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

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      Taylor Swift’s ’1989 (Taylor’s Version)’ Repeats at No. 1

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      Jung Kook of BTS’s solo album “Golden” debuts at No. 2 in another dominant week on the charts for Taylor Swift.Taylor Swift holds the top of the Billboard 200 album chart with her latest remake, while Jung Kook of BTS opens at No. 2 and a posthumous release by Jimmy Buffett lands in the Top 10.“1989 (Taylor’s Version),” a rerecording of Swift’s nine-year-old LP, stays at No. 1 for a second time after a huge debut, when the new edition topped the opening-week sales of the original. In its second week out, the remade “1989” had the equivalent of 245,000 sales in the United States, including 160 million streams and 122,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to data from the tracking service Luminate.Jung Kook, the latest member of the K-pop kings BTS to release a solo album during the group’s hiatus, starts at No. 2 with “Golden,” which notched nearly 42 million streams and sold 128,500 copies as a complete album, mostly on CD. Jung Kook — whose name is also sometimes spelled Jungkook — had a No. 1 single this summer with “Seven,” featuring the rapper Latto.Buffett, the “Margaritaville” singer who died of skin cancer in September at age 76, opens at No. 6 with “Equal Strain on All Parts,” which Buffett recorded this year and completed before his death. Featuring guest spots by Emmylou Harris, Angélique Kidjo and others — Paul McCartney plays bass on one song — “Equal Strain” arrived with 51,000 sales.Also this week, Drake’s “For All the Dogs” is No. 3, Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” is No. 4 and Bad Bunny’s “Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana” is No. 5. More

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      For Joan Armatrading, Classical Music Is Just Another Genre

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      The pioneering singer-songwriter is unveiling her first classical composition, Symphony No. 1, this month.Last year, Chi-chi Nwanoku, the founder and artistic director of the Chineke! Orchestra, received an email out of the blue from the singer-songwriter Joan Armatrading. She, the message said, had finished composing her first classical composition.They exchanged a few more emails about the piece, Symphony No. 1, and Nwanoku called to verify that she was talking with the real Armatrading, known for hits like “Love and Affection,” “Down to Zero,” and “Drop the Pilot.” She wanted to hear the music, with the idea of having Chineke! premiere it — which the ensemble will do on Nov. 24 in London.Rather than sending over a recording or a score, Armatrading decided that the only way forward was to visit Nwanoku’s home. The two sat at the kitchen table, and listened to the 30-minute electronic piano version of what would become the symphony through separate sets of headphones, with Armatrading watching Nwanoku carefully for any hints of a reaction.At one point, Nwanoku broke into a smile. Armatrading stopped the tape, assuming there was something wrong. But Nwanoku was just pleased by a moment of harmonic expansion, from total unison into flowing harmony.“I’ve never done that before, with a composer looking at my facial expressions,” Nwanoku said recently. “It’s very unusual.” More

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      boygenius on Its First Grammy Nominations and Keeping Rock Fun

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      Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus earned six nods for their debut LP, “The Record.” Texts from fellow nominees Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish followed.For boygenius, the indie-rock supergroup with a penchant for neckties and introspective songs, this fall has held the kind of firsts that prove a rock band has turned into a phenomenon: its first arena show at a Madison Square Garden packed with fans chanting every lyric, its first performance at the Hollywood Bowl, and soon, its first feature on “Saturday Night Live.”On Friday, there was another first — and second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth — with boygenius’s debut Grammy nominations as a band, a haul that included nods for two of the biggest contests: record of the year (for the ethereal and anthemic “Not Strong Enough”) and album of the year (for “The Record”).The recognition has capped off a whirlwind period for Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus, successful indie performers in their own right who turned an idea for a one-off collaboration in 2018 into a group that has captured the hearts of Gen Z fans and beyond, establishing a reputation for free-spirited onstage antics and the kind of wholesome bond not usually associated with touring rock stars.On a Friday afternoon video call, the trio discussed their nominations, songwriting and the future of their music from the basement of a New York City hotel where they were preparing for “Saturday Night Live” this weekend, a rack full of possible costume choices lined up behind them. It was in that hotel basement that they heard the good news, then, as Baker put it, “did a little screaming, hugging, jumping up and down,” before the texts started flowing — including notes from Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish, who also received six nominations each.“It’s like when kids cry on Christmas morning because I do feel so overwhelmed that I could just go to sleep,” Baker said.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.This has been a remarkable year of firsts for you. Has it changed your relationship to the album, playing in these large arenas?BAKER Not in a corny way you guys, but that’s the metric I return to. My relationship to it has stayed static, by making something that we preserved.BRIDGERS And it’s grown — I think of “True Blue” now as a kind of communal experience because that’s kind of the first moment in the set where the audience acts the same way every night. Lucy and I have pretty low voices and when people sing “True Blue,” they sing the octave up which is really funny.DACUS If I was doing “True Blue” for karaoke I would do the same thing.What about your relationships with each other? You’ve been around the world together at this point, in high-pressure situations — what’s different about your friendship?BAKER I’m proud of us. I think our communication has gotten better. We set out with a clear list of priorities in mind, and our excitement about the music and our genuine relationship with each other was at the top. That has stayed intact because we kept it as a priority. It’s being spoken into the project every day.BRIDGERS When you guys hit me up to have dinner the other night before we actually had to go into work, seeing you not at work first, I was like, this is so nice. We just got to talk about people and hang out.DACUS I’m not sick of you guys.Why do you think “Not Strong Enough” rose to the surface for the Grammys? You’ve talked about how it’s about mental illness, about self-hatred — is it the darkness that connected with audiences?DACUS I think the four-on-the-floor kick pattern connected with audiences. For me writing above everything is important, but you could switch out the lyrics of the song and I think it would be just as much fun.BRIDGERS I was like, we need a song that could be played on the radio, can we make one that’s like, really fun? And you guys understood the assignment.DACUS But “Not Strong Enough” is not a typical radio song, so it both fails the assignment but weirdly succeeded because it’s on the radio. Finneas said this too, it’s like you trying to copy your idols and failing is who you are. Something like that.BAKER And also “fun” is deep. Like you could retroactively dissertation explain what is just implicitly communicated by us having fun and writing lyrics in the way that we do. We put a breakdown in “Not Strong Enough” because it rocks; I want to have a good time!Has this past year made you want to dig deeper into boygenius or are you feeling like it’s time to return to your independent careers?DACUS We decided before it all started what the limits were, and that has allowed us to dig the deepest that we were willing to up until this point. We’ve put all of our energy into this knowing that there’s kind of a cap on this era of boygenius. We’re all going to make our own solo records after this — that’s fair to say, probably.BRIDGERS Or try.So you have six nominations as a band, but Phoebe has one extra (for a collaboration with SZA, “Ghost in the Machine”). Are you lording it over the other two?BRIDGERS All day. No, but it was the first one announced and Lucy was like, it would be so funny if we were all watching and it was only that. But I’m so proud of SZA.DACUS [whispers Bridgers’s section of “Ghost in the Machine”] I’ve had it stuck in my head all day.This year’s nominees are led by women — did that stick out at you at all watching it?BRIDGERS I noticed a lot of music I love.DACUS We’re excited for more pals to be getting recognized and the fact that we’re women isn’t the cool part — the music is the cool part.Have you been batting around any ideas yet for a Grammys performance? Nirvana suits?DACUS I haven’t thought about this at all because I did not think it was going to happen, so now it just opens up a whole world of having to think about things. More