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    Harlem House Where Billie Holiday Lived Is Damaged in Fire

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    The jazz legend lived in the five-story building on West 139th Street as a teenager with her mother.A four-alarm fire on Wednesday evening severely damaged a building in Harlem where the jazz legend Billie Holiday once lived.The Fire Department said it received the call at about 9 p.m. and extinguished the fire, which spread through all five floors of the building, shortly before 1 a.m. on Thursday morning. No civilians were injured, though four firefighters sustained minor injuries. The cause of the fire is under investigation.“Due to the structural stability of this building, as it was vacant for many years and the amount of fire, we had to pull our members out of the building and go to an exterior fire attack,” Kevin Woods, the Fire Department’s chief of operations, said in a news conference.A portrait of Billie Holiday at Carnegie Hall in 1946.Heritage Images, via Getty ImagesThe building is owned by the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which is responsible for maintaining the quality and affordability of housing, among other duties.“Even before the fire, HPD had been actively working with our partners to plan the complete rehabilitation of this building through our preservation programs, relocating tenants to safer housing as part of that process,” Natasha Kersey, a spokeswoman for the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, said in an emailed statement to The Times.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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      Irv Gotti: Key Milestones in the Life of the Rap Mogul

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      The producer, who died on Wednesday, built Murder Inc. into one of the most influential record labels of the early 2000s. His career was marred by a federal investigation and trial.Irv Gotti, who founded the record label Murder Inc. and helped shape the sound of hip-hop and R&B in the late 1990s and early 2000s when he shepherded the careers of Ja Rule and Ashanti, died on Wednesday at 54.Here is a brief look at how the rap entrepreneur and record executive worked his way from humble beginnings in Queens, N.Y., to the top of the charts before his momentum was marred by a federal investigation into the label in which he was charged with money laundering and acquitted.A Childhood in Queens, N.Y.Gotti was born Irving Domingo Lorenzo Jr. in Queens, N.Y., in 1970. He was the youngest of eight children, according to “The Murder Inc Story,” a documentary about his life that aired on BET in 2022. His family, which he described as one that didn’t have much money but had plenty of love, recalled him as a “clown” who loved performing, dancing and entertaining, sometimes even for small change.His foray into music began as a preteen, when he played for hours with a turntable and a mixer that his siblings had purchased for him. By the age of 15, he had begun to make a name for himself as a D.J. at local parties.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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      in Elections

      ‘Smurfs’ Trailer Shows Rihanna as Smurfette and Promises New Music

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      The first preview of the animated feature shows the singer in her “blue era” and assures fans that new songs from her will be featured on the soundtrack.Music superstar, beauty mogul, fashion designer and … Smurfette? Rihanna’s next big role may not be what you were expecting.On Thursday, Paramount released a trailer for “Smurfs,” giving us a first look at the singer as the elflike, blonde-haired, blue-skinned creature. In an animation style that blends smooth 3-D rendering with elements that evoke the classic hand-drawn cartoons, Smurfette leads her cohort into the real, live-action world on a quest to Paris to find Papa Smurf after he mysteriously disappears.The trailer begins with Rihanna, in human form, addressing the audience.“I can’t wait for you all to see it this summer,” she says, with sunglasses largely covering her Smurf-blue eye shadow. She had teased the trailer in an Instagram post on Wednesday, which was a short video captioned “in my blue era.”The animated movie also features an ensemble cast including Nick Offerman, Natasha Lyonne, Amy Sedaris, Nick Kroll and Dan Levy, and is directed by Chris Miller, who previously helmed “Shrek the Third” and “Puss in Boots.” It will be a musical-comedy reboot of ‘The Smurfs’ film franchise, which last had an installment with “Smurfs: The Lost Village” in 2017.In addition to playing Smurfette, Rihanna is a producer on the movie. But, in what will most likely be the biggest news for her fans, who have been clamoring for more music since her album “Anti” was released in 2016, the trailer ends with a message advising people to “presave” the movie’s soundtrack, which will feature new music from Rihanna.It also says the movie will include the song “Higher Love,” recorded by Desi Trill and featuring DJ Khaled, Cardi B, Natania and Subhi.“Smurfs” is set to release on July 18. More

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      in US Politics

      Rapper Rhymefest on Trump, Kanye and David Cameron: ‘There’s a political realignment happening in the US’

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      View image in fullscreenChe Smith is your favorite rapper’s favorite wordsmith. As Rhymefest, the Chicago native announced himself as a formidable battle rapper, verbally sparring with Eminem and other stars in the late 90s. He co-wrote some of Kanye West’s biggest hits, not least the Grammy-winning Jesus Walks, while carving out his own exemplary career as a conscious emcee. He won a Golden Globe and an Oscar for Glory, the Selma film soundtrack theme he co-wrote with John Legend and Common, a fellow Chicagoan.Even as the successes piled up, Smith, 47, never stopped thinking about his humanitarian obligation to his home town of Chicago, cut down to a metonym for urban violence and rot.This year, when Chicago held school board elections, the first in the city’s history, Smith decided to run as an independent because he believed his experiences and relationships in the art and music community could prove beneficial.“I had my eye on this,” says Smith, an imposingly sage presence who commands attention whether on the stage or the stump. “I knew how historic an elected school board would be to Chicago, the last major municipality that did not have the democracy of an elected school board.”Pitted against a pastor, a non-profit CEO and a former district principal, Smith won with 32% of the vote. Once sworn in, he hopes to use art to expand students’ horizons. “In terms of Stem – science, technology, engineering and math – why are we not adding arts to make Steam?” says Smith, a former teaching fellow at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics. “I know it sounds cliche, but if you’re taking a trigonometry class and learning angles, and you’re in art class learning angles, it could make you better at trigonometry.”Smith’s twinning of commercial artistry with activism separates him from his rap celebrity peers who’d sooner shovel money into a foundation and occasionally turn up to hand out school supplies.View image in fullscreenHe might have become one of those check-writing celebrities if West’s mother, Donda, hadn’t intervened. “One of my biggest teachers,” Smith says of the late mentor he called Miss Maya, for Maya Angelou. “We would [come to campus] and play music for her when we’re 14 or 15. When she would hear us talk about shooting or selling dope, she would ask, ‘Is that really who you are? And if you get famous, is that who you want to be? Because if that is who people perceive you as, you’re going to have to live inside that character for the rest of your life.’”Smith and Ye (as the artist is now known) have been friends since they were teenagers, bonding over music. They came of age as Chicago was emerging as a hive of socially conscious rap and hip-hop force to rival the coasts. With Common and the producer No ID as guides and Twista and Lupe Fiasco pushing them, Smith and Ye emerged as a dynamic duo – the former putting weighty words to the latter’s chipmunk soul beats, inspiring generations of homegrown talents that run from Chance the Rapper to Earl Sweatshirt.In 2011, Smith and Ye founded Art of Culture, a youth mentoring non-profit where Smith teaches writing and leads cultural retreats around the world. It was originally named Donda’s House. But differences of opinion over how the non-profit should be run drove a years-long rift between the two. Things are better between them now. “What we do have is brotherhood,” Smith says. “And I think we as human beings in America have to learn how to have brotherhood and village without always expecting somebody to make our dream come true.”View image in fullscreenSmith’s imagination has carried him quite a distance. Unlike Ye, who was raised middle-class, Smith grew up poor and was raised by a single mother who had him at 15. He recounts some of this in a 2015 Showtime documentary called In My Father’s House. In it, Smith is driven to reunite with his father, absent from his life since age 12, after purchasing his childhood home. Despite dropping out of high school to pursue music, Smith gravitated to Donda and other individual teachers in his neighborhood – not least the Rev Jesse Jackson, who opened up the south side headquarters of his Operation Push civil rights organization for Wu-Tang concerts and rap shows featuring local artists.After seeing that combination of song and social responsibility play out so seamlessly up close, with Donda’s “sage counsel” still ringing in his ears, Smith committed himself to a more practical brand of rap realness. “When you hear lines like ‘we all self conscious / I’m just the first to admit it’ [from Ye’s All Falls Down], that didn’t come from how brilliant we are as artists,” Smith says. “That came from teachers that trained us how to be authentic. We have great teachers here that work with you in art. And the same way that was done for me, it’s my duty to serve in that way for up and coming artists.”Chicago city politics are notorious for being a vipers’ pit of sharp-elbowed, take-no-prisoners wheeler-dealing, defined by major party crony favor-trading for the better part of a century. The standard was set by Richard J Daley, the imperious mayor fabled to have fixed the 1960 presidential election for John F Kennedy. Decades later the same political machine would put Barack Obama in the White House.It’s only in the last few years that the Chicago Teachers Union has emerged as a major political player, funneling more than $23m into Illinois candidate Pacs since 2010 – investment that culminated in the 2023 election of the mayor, Brandon Johnson, a former public school social studies teacher. In 2023 CTU and its affiliate unions spent nearly $6.5m on Chicago elections, more than any interest group.Smith wasn’t the strongest candidate to represent district 10 – a craggy south side outcropping where a handful of high-performing schools are sprinkled among the failing and condemned. His given name alone, Che, taken from the Marxist revolutionary, writes its own attack ads; his Muslim faith provides the exclamation point.“I have a brother that walked across 15 countries, through the Darién Gap, who lives in my house,” Smith says when I ask him how the immigration crisis is affecting city schools. “Chicago has been having low birth rates, 10,000 less children for the last 10 years. That means there are hardly any children to enroll in public schools.” The new arrivals, he argues, keep the schools filled and funded.Then of course there’s the matter of Smith’s music career, another potential reason for voters to not take him seriously. Broadly, Smith takes offense at the way musicians are treated in the political arena, as if they’re only good for kicking off rallies. It pained him to watch Lil Jon deliver Georgia’s roll call at this year’s Democratic national convention in Chicago. “Lil Jon’s father is an aerospace engineer and his mother is a military nurse,” Smith says. “He can relate to people whether they’re low information or high information, and he’s not the only one. Kanye is the son of a Fulbright scholar. Lupe’s mom was a community activist. Chance’s parents are political operatives in the city. Why wouldn’t you let them reimagine policy? It’s a missed opportunity, but we artists have to take it upon ourselves not to wait to be handed power.”Smith might have waited longer to make his move if Mark Ronson, a close collaborator and one-time label boss, hadn’t pushed him to write an open letter to the former British prime minister David Cameron after the then Conservative party leader took exception to the hip-hop-coded content on BBC Radio 1 in 2006, saying it “encourages people to carry guns and knives”.“David Cameron – someone who I have very little, if anything, in common with – inspired me to know what my influence was as an artist and leverage my cultural currency for social and political justice,” recalls Smith. “But he said something that made sense in our meeting: ‘I turn on the radio, and all I hear is sirens, gunshots and violent rhetoric. I thought it was a national emergency. What am I supposed to do with that as a political leader?’“I thought he had a point,” Smith goes on. But what I had to tell him is that his politics created that warning shot he heard on the radio.”View image in fullscreenHe believes one reason Cameron ultimately lost power is because he “was never really in tune with the people on the street”.Keen to live up to his independent tag, Smith put $100,000 of his own nest egg into his school board bid – which was notably not endorsed by the Chicago Teachers Union. He says his victory is a credit to a grassroots coalition that ran the gamut from “the streets” to former university students – whose votes he counted as a “‘very good’ professor rating”. He further appreciates that some of the same people who voted for him also voted for Donald Trump – a man who once disparaged Chicago as a “war-torn” city of Black people and Latinos “living in hell”.“Votes for Trump went up across the board in Black communities and Latino communities,” Smith says of the rightward shift in deep blue Chicago. “They voted for a deconstructor of systems. There’s a political realignment happening in America, and I don’t even think the institutions have caught up with it. There are a lot of people that long for the dismantling of the system for the opportunity to build it anew.”Smith has a lot he wants to tackle in his first term – busing, strategic partnerships, the district’s $1bn budget shortfall. That doesn’t seem like it leaves much room for making or performing music. But because school board politics is essentially pro bono work, he’ll have to find the time. “You have to ask yourself, why are these interests putting millions of dollars into running candidates for a job that doesn’t pay?” he says.There was a time in the not too distant past when Smith thought his raptivism could have lasting impact only if he were on a similar fame level to Ye, and not just a dope lyricist. But after his landmark victory, Smith feels like he’s finally meeting the political moment that was laid out for him long ago and is encouraging his industry peers to take similar authorship. “It’s not enough to make a song anymore,” he says. “You gotta make a song and then create a reality from it. It’s time to take all those raps and all those words and start to walk through them and create a better society from the imagination of the music. That’s what I’m doing.” More

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      Gibson issues cease and desist over Trump-backed guitars

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      Gibson, the maker of famous electric guitars, has issued a cease and desist order to the company behind a range of “Trump Guitars” endorsed by the US president-elect.Gibson told Guitar World, which first reported the story, it took action because the design of the instruments being sold as Trump Guitars “infringes upon Gibson’s exclusive trademarks, particularly the iconic Les Paul body shape”.Named for the American musician whom the Guardian once said “basically invented the electric guitar”, Gibson Les Pauls have been sold since 1952 and played by countless rock legends, among them the Edge of U2, Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin and Slash of Guns n’ Roses.Trump Guitars were announced last week, as the latest in a line of merchandise including Bibles, sneakers, watches and even digital trading cards.Multiple outlets reported that though Trump has been shown to own CIC Ventures, a company which has offered endorsed products, he does not appear to own or have a stake in 16 Creative, the company behind the guitars.Nonetheless, last week Trump posted to his social media platform a picture of him holding a guitar emblazoned with a US flag and a bald eagle, with the message: “Coming Soon! The Limited Edition ‘45’ Guitar. Only 1,300 of each Acoustic and Electric Guitars MADE – Some personally signed!”Trump was the 45th president of the US, between 2017 and 2021. On 20 January 2025 he will become the 47th president, as the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, failed to take the election this month. The only president previously to serve two non-consecutive terms was Grover Cleveland, a Democrat who served from 1885 to 1889 and 1893 to 1897.On Wednesday, a website for Trump Guitars featured a picture of the president-elect signing an instrument. Two models were marked sold out: American Eagle electric guitars (priced $1,500) and autographed American Eagle electric guitars ($11,500).Unsigned ($1,250) and signed ($10,250) acoustic guitars were also offered, each featuring Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again”, on its fretboard. The website also offered a Presidential Series guitar, in the Les Paul shape and with Trump’s name on the fretboard, and God Bless the USA acoustic guitars displaying that message, the title of a song by the country singer Lee Greenwood that is also affixed to Trump’s endorsed Bible.Trump did not immediately comment, whether through his transition team or the Trump Organization, his New York-based, much-penalized commercial company.Trump is not known to play guitar, though his series of digital trading cards does include an image of him dressed in the style of Elvis Presley, playing a guitar in the distinctive Gibson shape.As Guitar World pointed out, Gibson has not shown any tendency to tread softly when it comes to protecting its rights and products. A long-running dispute with Dean Guitars, over the Flying V and Explorer shapes Gibson also introduced in the 1950s, is heading for a retrial. More

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      At the Brooklyn Academy, Musical Journeys Through Minefields

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      The Silkroad Ensemble’s “American Railroad” and Alarm Will Sound’s “Sun Dogs” used music and images to engage with difficult topics.The completion of the transcontinental railroad was a herculean achievement. In 1850, the United States had 10,000 miles of track; by 1900, trains carried people, goods and ideas from coast to coast over 215,000 miles of track. Recently, historians have begun to tally the human cost of this construction project, especially among the people who performed the dangerous and backbreaking labor and the Native tribes whose lands and livelihoods were slashed through by the tracks.On Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Silkroad Ensemble brought this history to life in “American Railroad,” an evening of multimedia storytelling that probed collective scars while letting musical lineages tangle in beguiling ways. Carried by the joyful collaboration of brilliant improvisers, the performance proved that this ensemble has lost none of its verve since Rhiannon Giddens, a musical polymath and scholar of Appalachian music, became artistic director in 2020. (The ensemble was founded in 1998 by Yo-Yo Ma to celebrate the cultures along the ancient Silk Road.)A haunting tune from Appalachia, “Swannanoa Tunnel,” anchored the program. A work song created by incarcerated Black laborers, it describes the deadly cave-in of a railroad tunnel. Giddens sang it with a voice splintering with emotion over a background of harsh percussive thuds.Individual numbers paid tribute to dispossessed Native Americans, Irish famine refugees and Chinese laborers cut off from their families by racist immigration laws. While each time the cultural context was deftly sketched through specific sounds — a Celtic harp, a pentatonic tune — the interplay of instruments native to other regions revealed new affinities. Historical photographs, projected above the stage, added visual poignancy.Rhiannon Giddens, the artistic director of the Silkroad Ensemble, singing “Swannanoa Tunnel.”Ellen QbertplayaAt times, though, the program had a didactic streak that felt at odds with the polycentric spirit of the music making. The inclusion of an Indian-inspired segment with fiery tabla solos by Sandeep Das was a musical highlight. But the accompanying text slide, drawing links between the transcontinental railroad and industrialization in British-ruled India, brought an unnecessary whiff of the classroom. Silkroad is involved in curriculum design in middle schools in underserved communities across the country, and at moments like these, the desire (stated in its publications) to “reset the narrative” in historiography feels heavy-handed.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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      ‘The Interview’: K-Pop Trained Rosé to Be ‘a Perfect Girl.’ Now She’s Trying to Be Herself.

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      South Korean pop, known as K-pop, is not just a type of music — it’s a culture, where bold style, perfectly choreographed dance moves and ebullient earworms that draw from pop, hip-hop and traditional Korean music attract a huge and particularly devoted global fan base. The genre’s stars, known as idols, are trained, often for years, by entertainment companies that then place the most promising trainees in groups, write and produce their music and obsessively manage their public images. It’s a system that works for the idols who make it big, but it has also drawn criticism for its grueling methods, which some call exploitative.One of the biggest stars to come out of that system is Rosé. Born Roseanne Park, she trained for four years with one of K-pop’s largest agencies, YG Entertainment, eventually breaking through as part of the girl group Blackpink. Now at age 27, she is striking out on her own with her first full-length solo album, “Rosie,” which comes out on Dec. 6 from Atlantic Records. (The album’s first single, “APT.” a collaboration with Bruno Mars, is a true bop and has made history as the first track by a female K-pop artist to break into the Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100.) She is still a member of Blackpink, and the group re-signed with YG in 2023. But after years of singing other people’s songs and performing as Rosé, which she described to me as “a character that I really worked hard on as a trainee,” writing her own songs for this solo album has made her think about where she came from and who she is, separate from the system that turned her into a global phenomenon.Listen to the Conversation With RoséThe Blackpink star talks about striking out on her own, away from the system that turned her into a global phenomenon.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio AppYou’re about to release your first full-length solo album. Can you tell me what you’re feeling? Like I’ve been waiting to release this album for my whole life. I grew up listening to a lot of female artists. I used to relate to them, and they used to really get me through a lot of tough times. And so I would always dream of one day having an album myself. But I never really thought it would be realistic. I remember last year when I first began the whole process of it, I doubted myself a lot.It probably would be surprising to anyone who would look at Rosé, with all your success, with the enormous fan base that you have, to know that you doubted yourself so much. I don’t think I ever learned or trained myself to be vulnerable and open and honest. So that was the part I feared, because it was the opposite of what I was trained to do.You were born in New Zealand to South Korean immigrant parents and then you moved to Australia when you were 8. In 2012, when you were 15, you auditioned for a slot in YG Entertainment’s trainee program, which is basically a boarding school for becoming a K-pop star. It was your dad’s idea, right? Yes. More

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      Two Bee Gees Drummers Die Within Days

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      Colin “Smiley” Petersen, the original drummer, and Dennis Bryon, who played during the band’s disco heyday, died within four days of each other.Two drummers for the Bee Gees — one during the long-running Anglo-Australian pop group’s early days of hit-making ballads, the other during its white-hot disco superstardom — died four days apart, according to posts from a tribute band and former bandmates.Dennis Bryon, 76, the Bee Gees’ drummer starting in 1973, died on Nov. 14, according to Blue Weaver, who played in the band Amen Corner with Mr. Bryon. He announced his death on Facebook on Thursday, but gave no cause of death for Mr. Bryon.Colin “Smiley” Petersen, the band’s first professional drummer, died on Nov. 18 at the age of 78, according to Evan Webster and Sue Camilleri, who work on The Best of The Bee Gees Show, a tribute band. Mr. Petersen died from a fall, they said.Mr. Petersen, who joined the Bee Gees in 1967, played on the band’s first four albums. He started playing in the The Best of The Bee Gees Show five years ago, Mr. Webster said.Mr. Petersen played on a string of hit ballads from 1967 to 1970, including “Massachusetts,” “To Love Somebody,” “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You,” “I Started a Joke” and “Words.” He was also a child actor, known for his role in the 1956 film “Smiley,” which was the origin of his nickname, among a few other movies in the late ’50s.In a 2022 interview with The Strange Brew Podcast, Mr. Peterson said that the band would always create songs together in the studio.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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      Ella Jenkins, Musician Who Found an Audience in Children, Dies at 100

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      Performing and recording, she transformed what was seen as a marginal genre in the music industry into a celebration of shared humanity. Ella Jenkins, a self-taught musician who defied her industry’s norms by recording and performing solely for children, and in doing so transformed a marginal and moralistic genre into a celebration of a diverse yet common humanity with songs like “You’ll Sing a Song and I’ll Sing a Song,” died on Saturday in Chicago. She was 100. Her death was confirmed by John Smith, associate director at Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.Ms. Jenkins had no formal musical training, but she had an innate sense of rhythm. “I was always humming or singing and la-la, lu-lu or something,” she once said.She absorbed the everyday melodies of her childhood — the playground clapping games, the high school sports chants, the calls of a sidewalk watermelon vendor hawking his produce. As an adult, she paired such singsong rhythms with original compositions and sought not simply to amuse or distract children but to teach them to respect themselves and others.Against the sound of a kazoo, a harmonica, a variety of hand drums or, later, a baritone ukulele, Ms. Jenkins sang subtly instructive lyrics, as in “A Neighborhood Is a Friendly Place,” a song she wrote in 1976:You can say hiTo friends passing byA neighborhood is a friendly place.You can say helloTo people that you knowA neighborhood is a friendly place.Neighbors to learn to shareNeighbors learn to careA neighborhood is a friendly place.Over children’s steady clapping, she recorded the age-old “A Sailor Went to Sea”:A sailor went to sea, sea, seaTo see what he could see, see, seeAnd all that he could see, see, seeWas down in the bottom of the sea, sea, sea.For many parents and classroom teachers, Ms. Jenkins’s renditions of traditional nursery rhymes like “Miss Mary Mack” and “The Muffin Man” are authoritative.Still, from the beginning of her career in the 1950s, Ms. Jenkins pronounced her signature to be call-and-response, in which she asked her charges to participate directly in the music-making, granting them an equal responsibility in a song’s success. She had seen Cab Calloway employ the technique in “Hi-De-Ho,” and for her, the animating idea, veiled in a playful to-and-fro, was that everything good in the world was born of collaboration.In one of her most popular recordings, Ms. Jenkins sings out, “Did you feed my cow?” “Yes, ma’am!” a group of children trumpet back. The song continues:Could you tell me how?Yes, ma’am!What did you feed her?Corn and hay!What did you feed her?Corn and hay!As Ms. Jenkins repopularized time-honored children’s songs, she also gave the genre global scope. Before Ms. Jenkins, children’s music in the United States consisted primarily of simplified, often cartoonish renditions of classical music.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