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☆ Alex Izenberg Was Almost a Teen Rock Star. His Second Chance Is Here.
▼ + stars: | 2024-07-21 | by ( Grayson Haver Currin | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

On his 12th birthday, in April 2003, Alex Izenberg went to Guitar Center to jam. He was the prankster of his Los Angeles public school, a high-strung and mischievous kid who hated class but loved rock ’n’ roll. At Guitar Center, his friends marveled at his best Hendrix, and he attracted a famous listener, too. When Izenberg chuckled and said no, Perry bought it for him, plunking down $5,000 for a “fiesta red” Fender Relic and a Marshall amp. She left her number, too, so he started calling, imploring her to see his preteen trio, Din Caliber.

Persons: Alex Izenberg, marveled, Hendrix, ‘, ’ ” Linda Perry, “ I’m, ” Perry, Where’d, Izenberg chuckled, Perry, imploring, ”, “, ’ Organizations: Guitar Center, Center Locations: Angeles

☆ Mavis Staples Is an American Institution. She’s Not Done Singing Yet.
▼ + stars: | 2024-06-25 | by ( Grayson Haver Currin | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

On a rainy April day in Chicago, Mavis Staples sat in the restaurant of the towering downtown Chicago building where she’s lived for the past four years. For two hours, she talked about the civil rights movement and faith. She’d heard rumors he would soon retire, finally wrapping his fabled Never Ending Tour. The Staple Singers became a gospel fulcrum of the civil rights movement and, later, a force for bending genres — mixing funk, rock and soul inside their spiritual mission, an all-American alchemy. The band’s mightiest singer and sole survivor since the death of her sister Yvonne in 2018 and brother, Pervis, in 2021, Mavis remained in high demand, a historical treasure commanding a thunderous contralto.

Persons: Mavis Staples, she’s, Bob Dylan, he’d, They’ve, She’d, Staples, Bobby, ” Staples, “, ‘ Don’t, ’ ” Staples, Roebuck Staples, Yvonne, Pervis, Mavis Organizations: Staples, Newport Folk Locations: Chicago

☆ The Encounter That Put the Pianist Kelly Moran on an Unexpected Path
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-25 | by ( Grayson Haver Currin | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

As spring 2022 bloomed, Irena Wang emailed the pianist Kelly Moran to ask for a mixtape. They had briefly met just days before — at the funeral of Wang’s partner of seven years and Moran’s high-school sweetheart in the little Long Island town where they grew up. “He was my first love, my first heartbreak, my first everything,” Moran remembered one evening after dark in Yamaha’s sprawling Midtown Manhattan piano studio in early February, a week before she turned 36. After the funeral, Wang sent her an email: “I really want to know you, but I need some time. Late last year, they moved in together; with Luka, Wang and Damian’s son, the members of this unorthodox trio have empowered one another past the shadow of grief.

Persons: Irena Wang, Kelly Moran, “, ” Moran, ”, Damian, Moran, Wang, John Adams’s “, —, Luka Organizations: — Locations: Midtown Manhattan, Los Angeles, Big

☆ How Shahzad Ismaily Became Musicians’ Favorite Musician
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-27 | by ( Grayson Haver Currin | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Shahzad Ismaily cannot regulate his body temperature. When he was a month old, his parents rushed him to the hospital because he was beyond feverish and struggling to breathe. “The hardest part of playing music with people is a kind of nonverbal, total empathetic awareness of how another person feels, how a room feels. I’m moving with the world around me. His Brooklyn studio, Figure 8, remains an affordable and inclusive hub for experimental musicians, even as Ismaily becomes a marquee session player.

Persons: Shahzad Ismaily, ectodermal, Ismaily, “, I’m, he’s, Bonnie “ Prince ” Billy, Yoko Ono Organizations: Brooklyn Locations: Netherlands, New York

☆ Tim Hecker Helped Popularize Ambient Music. He’s (Sort of) Sorry.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-25 | by ( Grayson Haver Currin | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Still, he admitted, the loss was “bound up in the melancholy of youth.”This multivalence seemed to follow Hecker. He would spend his collegiate summers in the British Columbia wilderness, planting as many as 4,000 trees each day in clear-cut forests. Later, frustrated by the exigencies of starting a band, like remembering what they’d played the day before, Hecker began experimenting with drum machines and samplers. “The original impulse was this awe-struck excitement,” Hecker said, recalling his titanic computer tower, gargantuan monitor and pirated software. “There are different feelings in those different moments, and they each have their own ecosystem,” he said.

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