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      She Was Deeply Moved by Refugees’ Stories. So She Told Them in Song.

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      “Song to a Refugee,” an inadvertent concept album from the singer and songwriter Diana Jones, strives to center the voices of migrant women.Diana Jones is known as a singer-songwriter of uncommon empathy, an astute observer of the human condition whose heart goes out to those who suffer and are oppressed.Since her 1997 debut, Jones has crafted indelible narratives from the point of view of, among others, a battered woman who contemplates turning a gun on her abuser and of a coal miner trapped underground while writing what would prove to be his last letter to his wife.Released overseas last year, her latest project, “Song to a Refugee” (due Friday), lends compassion to the struggles of immigrants fleeing terror and persecution in their homelands.Produced with David Mansfield, whose uncluttered Neo-Appalachian arrangements deepen the pathos of her lyrics and vocals, Jones’s record is an inadvertent concept album. It evolved rapidly, after a bout of writer’s block, during a flurry of songwriting triggered by the horrors she witnessed in news stories from the United States border with Mexico and beyond.“I was trying to make sense of what was happening, first of all for myself,” Jones, 55, explained. She was speaking by phone from her home in Manhattan’s West Village, describing her response to daily accounts of the treatment of immigrants, most of them people of color.“At the same time, I felt this responsibility to report on what was happening,” she added. “I wanted to boil things down to one small voice because the more personal something is, the harder it is to look away.”Jones, who was adopted at birth and raised on Long Island, N.Y., comes by her empathy naturally. “I was always searching for something, a face or a home, anything to connect with,” she said of her early pursuit of her family of origin. “I was also without a home when I was 15 years old. I never lost sight of what it means to have food to eat and a roof over my head. I have gratitude for physical safety every day.”Her latest project received unexpected early encouragement from someone with a very different background: the actress Emma Thompson. The two women met, coincidentally, in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, where they struck up a conversation about their mutual commitment to human rights. Shortly afterward, Jones wrote “I Wait for You,” a song about a mother from Sudan who seeks asylum in England, hoping to be reunited with her children eventually.“I wanted to boil things down to one small voice because the more personal something is, the harder it is to look away,” Jones said.Erinn Springer for The New York TimesThompson had served on the board of the Helen Bamber Foundation, a British organization originally established to care for Holocaust survivors that now serves victims of human trafficking and other atrocities.“It’s the people to whom we owe nothing, as Helen Bamber said, whose treatment reveals our humanity, our spirit, the quality of our social fabric,” Thompson wrote in an email. “I have an adopted son, a refugee from Rwanda, and what is most important to say about him is that his joining the family made us all immeasurably richer in every way.”The folk singer and activist Peggy Seeger, who appears on the album, said the power of Jones’s album is in its ability to paint vivid portraits. “It’s so easy to discount, when you see so many refugees, the individual story — and these are individual stories,” she said of the 13 songs on the album. “Diana’s record is a relentless hammering home of how we ignore a huge body of people who are living through the results of human cruelty and insanity.”Backed by Mansfield on mandolin and fiddle, the song “Where We Are” is narrated by the older of two brothers who were taken from their parents and detained at the border of the United States and Mexico: “My brother is a baby, he doesn’t understand at all/Freedom, there’s freedom outside the chain-link wall.”“We Believe You,” the album’s centerpiece, was inspired by congressional testimony from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, detailing the dehumanizing conditions she observed at the border.I believe your eyes are tired of cryingand all the reasons you said you came here forI believe you lost your mother and your fatherand there ain’t no sleeping on a concrete floorJones intones this lament in an unadorned alto, her words cradled by the tender filigrees of Richard Thompson’s electric guitar. Steve Earle, Thompson and Seeger take turns singing the stanzas that follow, only to return to bear witness alongside Jones on the song’s final verse and chorus.As Jones explained, “It’s important that we have people in our lives who believe us, especially for traumatized people — people who, in this case, are being demonized or ‘othered’ for wanting a safe haven and, eventually, a home.”Written from the underside of history, “Song to a Refugee” finds Jones steadfastly siding with the oppressed, much in the spirit of Woody Guthrie’s “Dust Bowl Ballads.” One of the most powerful things about the record is how, on tracks like “I Wait for You” and “Mama Hold Your Baby,” the voices of migrant women are centered. Talking about her protagonist in the song “Ask a Woman,” Jones asks, “What must it be like for a mother to have to pick up her baby and start walking to another border, through deserts and with no safety at all?”“Being a refugee,” Thompson wrote, “simply underlines and exacerbates the areas where all women are already challenged — not being heard, not being educated, not being paid, not having power.”Jones wrote and recorded the material for “Song to a Refugee” when President Donald Trump was in office. But the nightmarish realities the album evokes speak as poignantly today.“This is such a big problem that it has to be dealt with in small ways,” Seeger said, referring to the global migration crisis. “But the small ways are not small. This is not a small album.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Apocalypse ’45’ Review: Graphic Images of Wartime

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      Candid testimonies from World War II veterans accompanies vivid archival footage in this immersive documentary that showcases the myths we tell ourselves about war.At one point in “Apocalypse ’45,” the camera gazes over Tokyo from an American military bomber as the plane ejects a cluster of cylinders. For several beats, the bombs disappear into the air. Then we see the explosions: tiny bursts of orange far below.Startling images appear throughout “Apocalypse ’45,” a transfixing documentary that depicts the final months of World War II in rare detail. The film (streaming on Discovery+) combines vivid archival footage from war reporters with the accounts of an array of veterans. Its project is to immerse us in the horrors of warfare, and to convey the ways its witnesses cope with war’s psychic toll.The images, taken from digitally-restored film reels that sat in the National Archives for decades, are disturbingly graphic. A Japanese woman steps off a cliff in the Mariana Islands to avoid being taken hostage. Soldiers on Iwo Jima shoot flamethrowers into caves. Planes piloted by kamikaze plunge into ships near Okinawa. The director Erik Nelson adds realistic wartime sound effects to the silent footage, achieving an unsettling verisimilitude.But the veterans, whose candid testimonies are interwoven in voice over, are the movie’s shrewdest addition. Notably, Nelson declines to distinguish among the men, and instead patchworks their deep, breathy voices into sonic wallpaper. Without faces or names, their remarks cannot be individually condemned or celebrated. Rather, they blend into a collective, showcasing how people seek out myths — about war’s inevitability, Japanese conformity, or American might — to find reason where there may be none.When it comes to representing non-American experiences, the documentary is less equipped. Nelson calls on only one Japanese interviewee, a survivor of Hiroshima. His voice opens the documentary, and reappears later on to describe the atom bomb attack. The survivor’s perspective is vital, but offered alone, its inclusion feels perfunctory. “Apocalypse ’45” knows that war is hell for everyone. But it’s difficult to escape the sense that, in this film’s view of history, America is top of mind.Apocalypse ’45Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. Watch on Discovery+. More

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      in Television

      The Making of ‘High on the Hog,’ Bringing Black Food History to TV

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      The new Netflix series tapped years of scholarship and the life experience of its creators to chart how African Americans have shaped the country’s cuisine.There is a breathtaking moment near the end of the first episode of “High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America,” a new four-part Netflix documentary based on the 2011 book by the scholar Jessica B. Harris. More

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      The Conductor Who Whipped American Orchestras Into Shape

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      Toting a loaded gun on the podium, Artur Rodzinski turned ensembles into technical marvels in the 1930s and ’40s.“For those who grew to musical maturity with the concert life of the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, his name may still have an aura,” Halina Rodzinski wrote in her memoirs, almost two decades after the death of her spouse, the Polish conductor Artur Rodzinski.“For those who are younger,” she went on to lament, “my husband is a dry reference in a musical encyclopedia or a name on a record cover in the cut-rate rack of a discount store.”That was in 1976. And the decades since have not been kind to Rodzinski, leaving him remembered, if at all, for embodying “all that a real maestro was supposed to be,” a critic once wrote: “preening, arbitrary, dictatorial, unpredictable, driven by ambition.”Possessing an “enormous vocabulary of Polish profanity” that he unloaded on musicians, as Time magazine reported, Rodzinski was also rumored to conduct with a revolver in his pocket. True, Halina confirmed in her book — and it was loaded.Rodzinski conducting at Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic’s home during his tenure in the 1940s.Bettmann/CorbisBut there was a time when Rodzinski was among the most lauded conductors in the land. He may have been “no poet of the baton,” as the critic Virgil Thomson put it in October 1943, when Rodzinski became music director of the New York Philharmonic. But he was “a first-class orchestral craftsman” and a “master trainer,” Thomson wrote later that season.Arguably no man had more of a hand in turning American orchestras into the technical marvels they became in the mid-20th century — whether through those he led himself, or through the example he set. He jolted up the standards of some of the great ensembles of the radio age: the Philadelphia Orchestra (as an assistant from 1925 to ’29), the Los Angeles Philharmonic (as music director from 1929 to ’33), the Cleveland Orchestra (1933 to ’43), the NBC Symphony (which he created in 1937), the New York Philharmonic-Symphony, as it was then known (1943 to ’47) and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, for a single, tempestuous season after that.Flashier conductors would take those bands further: Leopold Stokowski, Rodzinski’s boss and booster, in Philadelphia; Otto Klemperer in Los Angeles; Arturo Toscanini, Rodzinski’s mentor, with the NBC; George Szell in Cleveland; Rafael Kubelik in Chicago. Their achievements were built on Rodzinski’s foundation, but their fame and commercial success far eclipsed his.Perhaps Rodzinski’s recordings might change our sense of him. With a rush of recent archival finds, for the first time since the LP era there is plenty to go on. Pristine Classical released a series of superb remasterings of Rodzinski’s studio work with the NBC, Cleveland and Chicago orchestras, as well as a few broadcast tapings from his New York period.Weightier still is a 16-disc box from Sony, which for the most part recovers 78s made with the New York Philharmonic from 1944 to ’46, filling a hole in the orchestra’s discography and offering a companion to Sony’s box, issued two years ago, of the Philharmonic recordings of John Barbirolli, Rodzinski’s widely derided predecessor.Wagner’s “Die Walküre” (New York Philharmonic, 1945)Sony ClassicalCompendiums such as these can bolster reputations, as long-silent work reaches fresh ears, or confirm legends born long ago. Sometimes, though, these box sets simply confirm the verdicts of history. And that, alas, is the case with Rodzinski.Here was a conductor capable of extraordinary feats of clarity and balancing, able to bring the lushest Romanticism to heel, whether in a sparkling Rachmaninoff Second Symphony, or in brisk, enthralling scenes from Wagner’s operas, including parts of “Die Walküre” with the soprano Helen Traubel.Perhaps surprisingly for such a turbulent character, objectivity was Rodzinski’s interpretive aim. He told Time for a cover story, just before his firing from the New York Philharmonic, that he hoped that “the music goes from the orchestra to the audience without going through myself.” (The very different Stokowski, he said with contempt, “plays music sexually.”)But if that literalism helped Rodzinski to train his orchestras in pinpoint precision, and brought out the best in intractable works like Sibelius’s Fourth, it could also bore — lacking the tension and vehemence of his idol and model, Toscanini.The New York Times critic Olin Downes admired Rodzinski’s technique, but he wrote in 1943 that he feared “a reticence approaching overrefinement.” Even Thomson — whose acclaim for Rodzinski surely had nothing to do with the conductor inviting Thomson, who was also a composer, to lead the Philharmonic in his “Symphony on a Hymn Tune” in 1945 — had to admit that guest conductors like Charles Munch made more of the orchestra Rodzinski had built.Perhaps surprisingly for such a turbulent character, objectivity was Rodzinski’s interpretive aim.Genevieve Naylor/Corbis, via Getty ImagesRodzinski was born on New Year’s Day 1892, in Split, and grew up in present-day Lviv, a city long fought over that was part of the Hapsburg monarchy and, later, Poland. While studying law in Vienna, he trained at the Academy of Music and, after suffering shrapnel wounds on the Eastern front in World War I, found a job as a cabaret pianist back in Lviv — relief from days spent inspecting meat shops. He made his debut leading Verdi’s “Ernani,” then moved to Warsaw. Stokowski heard him conduct Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” there, and offered to take him to Philadelphia.Filling in for Stokowski at Carnegie Hall in 1926, Rodzinski was already able to hold an orchestra “firmly in his grip,” Downes noted. Los Angeles and Cleveland followed — the latter a place where Rodzinski could add operas to the symphonic repertoire, not least the American premiere of Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” in 1935, a coup he scored against Stokowski’s Philadelphia.Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet” (Cleveland Orchestra, 1940)Pristine ClassicalWhen Toscanini resigned from the New York Philharmonic in 1936, Rodzinski was asked to conduct eight weeks of the following season, and was widely seen as a plausible heir to the maestro’s throne. He became Toscanini’s favored candidate after the Italian conductor heard him at the Salzburg Festival.But the Philharmonic took a gamble on the less experienced Barbirolli that December, before Rodzinski had a chance to prove himself, which he did with an “Elektra” of “historic intensity,” Downes wrote, the following March. Furious, Toscanini instructed NBC to have Rodzinski drill the orchestra it was hiring for the Italian’s sensational return to New York.After the Philharmonic corrected its error (at least as Rodzinski saw it) at the end of 1942, Rodzinski had the unanimous support of the critics; their venom was infinite for Barbirolli, whose highly subjective aesthetic appalled writers who had been entranced by Toscanini’s lean, driven style.“The orchestra needs overhauling in every way,” Downes insisted. Time reported that guest conductors referred to its “undisciplined and arrogant members as ‘the Dead End Kids.’” When Rodzinski had 14 musicians fired months before his arrival, including the concertmaster, it was taken as evidence of a seriousness that Barbirolli was perceived to have lacked.After Rodzinski’s first concert in October 1943, performing Barbirolli’s beloved Elgar in a conscious attempt to demonstrate how it ought to go, Thomson wrote, brutally, that it was “pleasant” to hear the Philharmonic play “all together.” By April, he was drolly reporting that the strings “now play in tune.”Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony (New York Philharmonic, 1945)Sony ClassicalGranted this kind of shade, Rodzinski could do little but shine. He focused on music of the previous hundred years and rarely went back beyond Schumann and Berlioz to Beethoven, Mozart or Haydn. In the Sony box, his Brahms symphonies push on without quite becoming overwhelming; his Tchaikovsky Sixth is rather cool — “too conventional, too objective and too civilized,” as Downes put it in a review of its corresponding concert.Contemporary music did play a significant role in the Rodzinski era, taking a spot on most of his programs. Trying to duke it out with Serge Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony Orchestra, Rodzinski competed to premiere the works of Shostakovich and Prokofiev, whose Fifth Symphony he was the first to release on record. Hiring Leonard Bernstein as his assistant conductor in New York, Rodzinski also supported American composers like William Schuman and William Grant Still. Morton Gould’s “Spirituals,” Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait” and Darius Milhaud’s “Suite Française,” all composed during World War II, receive convincing recordings in the Sony box.Morton Gould’s “Jubilee,” from “Spirituals” (New York Philharmonic, 1946)Sony ClassicalStill, for Rodzinski the Philharmonic ultimately became the conductors’ graveyard it had long been reputed to be — far more so than for Barbirolli, who went on to greater things with the Hallé in Britain. Despite uniform praise for the excellence Rodzinski enforced, his position was never secure.Contract negotiations with the Philharmonic’s manager, the powerful agent Arthur Judson, dragged on so interminably that Rodzinski’s lawyer, the future C.I.A. director Allen Dulles, gave up. The conductor was left to discuss terms on his own, as he grew more anxious about his lack of control over guest conductors — his rival Stokowski among them — and what they performed.The Chicago Symphony, rebuilding after Désiré Defauw’s brief postlude to the 37-year tenure of Frederick Stock, sniffed an opportunity, and offered a post around Christmas 1946. With that offer in hand, Rodzinski dressed the Philharmonic’s board down with an hourlong speech about his problems with Judson on Feb. 3, before leaking his resignation to the press that night. The board fired him the next afternoon, amid mutual recriminations.“New York,” Rodzinski vowed to a reporter, “will go down.”Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” (Chicago Symphony, 1947)Pristine ClassicalHe lasted just months back in the Midwest. Critics there gave by-now-familiar praise to the rise in the quality of playing, and there were operatic successes, but Rodzinski again came up against entrenched interests, racking up deficits and finding far less willingness to make changes of personnel. Chicago’s board fired him in January 1948.There would be no more prominent posts for Rodzinski, the perfectionist who set the standards for the post-World War II era. He would make more recordings in the 1950s, mostly with the Royal Philharmonic on the Westminster label, but his health declined, and he would never again appear with the New York Philharmonic. He died in 1958. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Our Towns’ Review: Across America, Signs of Life

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      In this companion piece to the book of the same title, James and Deborah Fallows search for revitalization in American cities that had fallen on hard times.The documentary “Our Towns” serves as a companion piece to the 2018 book of the same title, in which the authors, James and Deborah Fallows, chronicled their travels across the country in a single-engine airplane as they spent time in places they felt the national news media narrative had missed. One ground rule, James says in the film, was to “never ask about national politics, because that conversation goes nowhere.”The movie, directed by Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan, confounds easy distinctions between urban and rural settings and red and blue states. Even what counts as progress isn’t straightforward. (In this telling, Sioux Falls, S.D., owes some of its revitalization to the state’s elimination of a ceiling on credit card interest rates.) The film trails the Fallowses as they return to some of the cities from their book, gauging civic health through libraries, local newspapers, growing art scenes and proliferating breweries.There are regional variations. Students in Columbus, Miss., grapple with the legacy of slavery all around them while adults look to a future there less marred by racism. Members of the Flandreau Santee Sioux tribe discuss their efforts to keep the Dakota language alive. A teenager in Eastport, Maine, who works in the summer as a lobsterman plans ahead for a time when climate change will move the lobster business away.Deborah says that of the pair, James (the former Jimmy Carter speechwriter and longtime journalist for The Atlantic) is the historian, and she is attuned to what’s happening in the moment. They complement each other well. Still, as enjoyable as their writing can be, the filmmaking around them — aerial shots, time lapse photography, cuts to the couple looking engrossed — is less inspired than their project.Our TownsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More

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      in Television

      ‘A Sense of Belonging’ for Hispanic Children, With Puppets

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      “Club Mundo Kids,” a new TV series debuting on April 10, is the latest result of a push for programming that uses Spanish to reach Latino audiences.Standing outside a home, Romina Puga paints endangered animals, plants a garden, hosts guest experts and talks about the news. She is joined by two friends: Coco, a puppet shaped like a coconut, and Maya, a plush pink puppet.Maybe most important, Ms. Puga is as likely to speak in Spanish as in English.Those are scenes from “Club Mundo Kids,” a TV news show debuting April 10 on Televisa and April 11 on Universo, aimed at young, first- and second-generation Hispanic children in the United States, where the large Hispanic population is growing, diverse and often underrepresented in television and in movies.“There is very little content being created that is speaking to U.S. Hispanic, Latinx children and telling their stories,” said Ms. Puga, the show’s 31-year-old host. “The younger generation doesn’t really have anyone breaking things down and talking directly to them in a way that is digestible.”Latinos make up the largest minority group in the United States, accounting for 18.5 percent of the population, and more than one in four newborns are Latino, according to the Pew Research Center.But only 4.5 percent of all speaking characters across 1,200 top-grossing films from 2007 to 2018 were Latino, according to a 2019 study by the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.Broadcasters have occasionally tried to reach young Hispanic audiences, often with cartoon programming like Nickelodeon’s “Dora the Explorer,” about the adventures of a young animated Latina and her friends. In 2016, the Disney Channel introduced “Elena of Avalor,” an animated series praised for featuring Disney’s first Latina princess. Univision has “Planeta U” a Saturday programming block of animated and educational programs aimed at children ages 2 to 8.And for decades, “Sesame Street” has featured Rosita, a blue bilingual puppet from Mexico.“Club Mundo Kids,” in contrast, puts real people in front of the camera, including a host, children and guest experts, and makes a point of talking to children ages 6 and up about Latino life in a real-world context.“It’s a real opportunity to meet Spanish-speaking kids where they are and to help them build language and reading skills, like ‘Sesame Street’ and ‘Reading Rainbow’ has been doing for decades in English,’’ said Jason Ruiz, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Notre Dame.He added that the show, possibly alone among programs for children, “will be symbolically important for giving Spanish-dominant kids a sense of belonging by having a show aimed directly at them.”Hosted by Ms. Puga, a former ABC News correspondent, the series features a mix of live-action and animated segments that explain topics like where food comes from and why there are so many Spanish dialects.Ms. Puga said the show combines elements of the 1990s children’s programs that she watched growing up Chilean-Argentine in Miami, but with current trends, themes and explanatory segments. In an episode about agriculture, for instance, an animated cornstalk named Miguel Maíz explains how some foods act as fuel for our bodies, and Ms. Puga says the different Spanish words for corn (one being “maíz”).And in each episode, children can ask Ms. Puga and guest experts questions that relate to the show’s topic — like, why do our stomachs hurt after eating too many sweets?“Kids will see they can interact, they can be part of the conversation and that it’s also their world,” said Isaac Lee, an executive producer of “Club Mundo Kids.” Mr. Lee said he wanted to create a show where wanted Latinx kids and their friends could get accurate news and information about the country and the world in a way that reflects their realities.The goal, he said, was an “entertaining and engaging” program, said Mr. Lee, a former chief content officer at Univision and now the head of the production company Exile. The pandemic pushed filming into the backyard of a home in the Los Angeles area, but producers are using the setting to encourage children to go outside.Ms. Puga said she hoped the show would “spark curiosity and promote empathy and understanding for other cultures — all while having fun, of course.”Advocates of greater diversity in the entertainment industry praised the trend of media companies trying to reach Hispanic children with educational content that keeps them anchored in their heritage while building cultural bridges through bilingualism.One Latina advocate, Beatriz Acevedo, said the show provided an opportunity for parents who want their children to stay connected to their culture through language.“Hopefully ‘Club Mundo Kids’ will showcase the rich diversity and intersectionality of our Latinidad that the younger generations in our community desperately need to see,” said Ms. Acevedo, who has produced children’s programs and is a founder of LA Collab, a group that promotes the advancement of Latinos in the entertainment industry. More

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      in Music

      Itchy to Perform Again, Musicians Eye Return to Touring

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      For now, there may be just a trickle of events (a Dinosaur Jr. tour, the lineup for Bonnaroo in September), but many artists are said to be planning live announcements soon.Like many musicians, J Mascis, the leader of the stalwart alt-rock band Dinosaur Jr., has struggled through a year without touring.“I’ve never been home this long since, like, high school,” Mascis said in a phone interview from his home in western Massachusetts. “To have no idea when or if you can do anything again, just sitting around,” he added, trailing off. “My mental health has definitely suffered.”But a few weeks ago, Dinosaur Jr. took a step toward normalcy by announcing an extensive fall tour, with a handful of warm-up dates booked for as early as May.“We’re not naïve; we know we might have to reschedule,” Mascis said. “But just to have something on the books somehow makes things a bit more hopeful.”After a grueling year, blocked from what is often their most vital income stream, musicians are impatient to get back on the road, and fans are eager to experience live music again. While large-scale shows at arenas and stadiums may not come back full-throttle until 2022, promoters and talent agents, encouraged by the speed of vaccinations, have begun laying the groundwork for what may be a surprisingly busy summer and fall of concerts at clubs, theaters and outdoor spaces.Rhett Miller performing at the City Winery in Manhattan in 2019. He is set to play there again this weekend.Al Pereira/WireImage, via Getty ImagesCity Winery moved its tables in accordance with New York State’s rule that will allow entertainment venues to reopen with limited capacity starting Friday.Emon Hassan for The New York TimesFor now, there may be just a trickle of events. Starting Friday, New York State will allow entertainment venues to reopen at 33 percent of their regular capacity, up to 100 people for indoor spaces. Throughout the country, rules from local governments have kept many clubs and theaters closed, or allowed them to operate at reduced capacities — which for many of those places does not allow enough business to cover the basic costs of operating and of paying artists and employees, said Audrey Fix Schaefer of the 9:30 Club in Washington.“The only thing worse than being totally shuttered is being partially reopened,” said Fix Schaefer, who is also the communications director for the National Independent Venue Association.But many artists are said to be planning tour announcements soon, and hungry venue owners — buoyed by the prospect of $16 billion in federal relief through the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant fund, which they can apply for starting April 8 — are eager for the business.The relative handful of clubs and theaters set to reopen in the spring are doing so with altered seating plans, temperature checks and adjusted financial deals with performers. A recent rock concert in Spain, with extensive Covid-19 protections, drew 5,000 fans. These events are being watched closely by the concert industry, which went into 2020 anticipating its biggest year ever but ended up losing nearly $10 billion in box office revenue, according to data collected by Pollstar, a trade publication.Lizzo performing in Miami early last year. She’s among the artists on the bill for Bonnaroo, in rural Tennessee, now planned for September.Scott Roth/Invision, via Associated PressCity Winery, a restaurant and concert venue on Pier 57, on the West Side of Manhattan, is reopening Saturday with a performance by the singer-songwriter Rhett Miller; it has been gradually filling out a calendar of socially distanced shows, confirming some just days ago. (Rufus Wainwright, Steve Earle, Patti Smith and Stephin Merritt of Magnetic Fields are among those on the calendar.) Tables have been arranged to allow space between parties, and patrons, who must wear masks when not seated, will get their temperatures checked upon entry.“Even if it’s for 100 people, it takes on such a significance to be putting on a show,” said Michael Dorf, the venue’s founder. “It feels like a sacred job, putting on culture.”Miller, a regular performer at the dozen City Winery spots around the country, said that he had struggled with the forced grounding from Covid-19, though he also noted the silver lining of spending more time with his family. The idea of playing live again, he said, both excites and terrifies him.“I’ve been dreaming about it night after night, climbing up on a stage in front of people,” Miller said. “The dreams are fraught and weird. Half the time I’m trying to sing through a mask, or I’m in trouble for not wearing a mask.”Major tours, which typically require months of planning and the hiring of a large crew of workers, have largely punted to next year or even 2023. That should make the next couple of years an extraordinary time for live music, with dozens of superstar acts planning to reschedule postponed tours and make up for lost time. But it may also be a test of touring infrastructure and of fans’ willingness to buy tickets to multiple high-profile shows.“The amount of stadium activity in 2022 is something I’ve never experienced,” said Jay Marciano, the chairman of AEG Presents, one of the industry’s biggest promoters and venue operators. “Over a dozen major artists are actively holding real estate for next year.”Josh Lloyd-Watson, left, and Tom McFarland of the British electronic duo Jungle. They’ve announced fall tour dates.Anna Victoria BestThe fate of summer festivals, an important bellwether, is still uncertain. Some, like the Newport jazz and folk festivals, in Rhode Island, are planning to go on this year, with reduced capacities. Bonnaroo, in rural Tennessee, is planned for September, with Megan Thee Stallion, Lizzo, Foo Fighters and others; Summerfest in Milwaukee, a major urban concert series, is also planned for September. But whether Lollapalooza in Chicago will go forward is unclear.In New York, a smattering of clubs are also planning shows, like Bowery Electric and the Bitter End. But the majority are holding out for when they can reopen at full capacity, or close to it, many proprietors said. The industry has been placing its bets on summer or fall for that.Still, many artists and promoters report watching every news blip about infection spikes and virus variants with trepidation.The British electronic duo Jungle has announced a fall tour at large clubs like Avant Gardner in New York and the Anthem in Washington. Sam Denniston, the group’s manager, said that all signs have pointed toward that being feasible, as millions more people get vaccinated and more venues fully reopen. Yet uncertainty about the pandemic means that anything could happen.“It’s kind of like penguins sitting on the edge of a cliff, and they push one in to see if there’s a killer whale in the water,” Denniston said. “I kind of feel like we’re that first penguin. But someone’s got to take the risk.”While stadium-sized artists are counting on the pandemic coming under control and the full revival of a mothballed industry by the time they hit the road, for many others below the superstar level, a year without shows has simply been long enough.“I don’t know if I can wait another six months to a year,” Miller said, “to do my job again.” More