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    How Brandon Kazen-Maddox, an American Sign Language Artist, Spends Their Sundays

    Brandon Kazen-Maddox has always felt an affinity with mermaids.“We both straddle two worlds,” said Mx. Kazen-Maddox, 36, an American Sign Language dancer, choreographer and filmmaker who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns.Mx. Kazen-Maddox, like both their parents, is hearing. But they grew up living with their mother at her parents’ home in Washington State, where their maternal grandparents, both of whom are deaf, spoke with their hands.Soon, Mx. Kazen-Maddox learned to do the same. “I like to say my words are just along for the ride,” they said.Mx. Kazen-Maddox said they enjoyed spending time at Riverside Park, dancing and listening to music, near their home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesMx. Kazen-Maddox has been interpreting professionally since 2012 and has worked on the Broadway production of “Aladdin” and for former President Joe Biden, the composer Lin-Manuel Miranda and the actress Marlee Matlin.In a half-hour PBS special scheduled for Tuesday, “SOUL(SIGNS): Making Music Visible,” Mx. Kazen-Maddox documented the process of choreographing, filming and performing an A.S.L. music video for Morgan James’s “Drown,” shedding light on their own relationship with music and sign language.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Happy Traum, Mainstay of the Folk Music World, Dies at 86

    A noted guitarist and banjo player, he emerged from the same Greenwich Village folk-revival scene as his friend and sometime collaborator Bob Dylan.Happy Traum, a celebrated folk singer, guitarist and banjo player who was a mainstay of the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene of the early 1960s, recorded with Bob Dylan and had an influential career as a music instructor, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 86.His wife, Jane Traum, said he died of pancreatic cancer in a physical rehabilitation facility after undergoing surgery for the disease. He lived in Woodstock, N.Y.Known for his easy vocal approach and his prowess as a finger-style guitarist and five-string banjo player, the Bronx-bred Mr. Traum was an enduring presence in the folk world for more than six decades.“Revered by most in the musical know, he is easily one of the most significant acoustic-roots musicians and guitar pickers of his — and many other — generations,” Blues magazine observed in the introduction to a 2016 interview with Mr. Traum.Will Hermes of Rolling Stone described him as a “folk revivalist straight out of ‘Inside Llewyn Davis,’” a reference to the Coen brothers’ 2013 folk-world odyssey, in a four-star review of Mr. Traum’s album “Just for the Love of It.” It was the seventh of eight albums he released as a leader, starting with “Relax Your Mind” in 1975.In the late 1960s, Mr. Traum performed in a highly regarded duo with his younger brother, Artie Traum. The brothers performed at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island in 1969, toured the world and released five albums, starting with “Happy and Artie Traum” in 1970. Artie Traum died of liver cancer in 2008.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More