NYC entertainers and creatives feel connected to LA. That link is driving cross-country fire relief
Michele Ganeless noticed Hollywood's response all the way from New York. She saw late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel turn his show's backlot into a donation center. The Largo, an intimate nightclub featuring A-list comedians, hosted benefit performances. Inspired, Ganeless saw an opportunity to help out from the nation's other cultural hub through 'Stand-Up for LA.'
'The goal was to help the New York comedy community give back,' Ganeless said of the March 3 comedy event including Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Ramy Youssef and Hannah Berner at The Town Hall in Manhattan.
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Yahoo
16-07-2025
- Yahoo
City of Sanctuary themes in new version of children's classic
THE beloved story of The Railway Children has been re-imagined for Bradford's City of Culture year, with a British-Indian family at the heart of the story. A special adaptation of Mike Kenny's Olivier award-winning stage production of E Nesbit's children's classic opens next week on the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway - the location of the much-loved 1970 film. Drawing on the story's themes of exile, compassion and kindness, Stand & Be Counted Theatre - an Associate Company of Bradford 2025 - is working with people seeking sanctuary to create a scene-setting audio experience for audiences as they journey to the show on the heritage railway. Audiences will board a steam train at Keighley station before watching the performance in an engine shed at Oxenhope station. The show features a real steam engine. The children move from wealthy Edwardian London to rural Yorkshire and find hope and friendship on the railway Stand & Be Counted Theatre - the UK's first Theatre Company of Sanctuary - co-creates work with and for people seeking sanctuary. Bradford, a City of Sanctuary since 2010, also received a designation of Cultural City of Sanctuary this year. Rosie MacPherson, Artistic Director and Joint CEO of Stand & Be Counted Theatre, says: "The Railway Children is a global story about new beginnings and creating a new home together, with themes that will resonate deeply with people of Bradford as a City of Sanctuary. Our Soap Box Collective, a group for young adults from all over the world who now call Bradford home, have been working hard to create an interactive audio experience to welcome passengers aboard the steam train!" Says Shanaz Gulzar, Creative Director, Bradford 2025: 'The Railway Children is about a family needing to move to somewhere unfamiliar, children coping with separation from a parent, and how people and places are connected and affected by global events. Our version, while keeping the original story and setting in 1905, is really going to heighten these themes, as our British-Indian family have journeyed even further than before to reach this small Yorkshire village. 'The genius of E Nesbit's novel, and Mike Kenny's adaptation, is to see big themes like exile, separation and unjust imprisonment from the perspective of three children just starting to understand the adult world." The cast of The Railway Children at Oxenhope Station Director Damian Cruden adds: 'Bradford is a wonderful example of a city that has welcomed people throughout its history, and this theme of welcome and global connection resonates through The Railway Children." Noel Hartley, KWVR Business and Operations Manager, says: 'We're delighted to be hosting this fantastic show during this special year. Our railway has been the home of The Railway Children since the 1960s, it's really special for the show to be held where it began on screen." Paul Crewes, CEO, York Theatre Royal, says: 'We are thrilled to be working with Bradford 2025 on this unique restaging of York Theatre Royal's award-winning production of The Railway Children. "The beautiful setting of Oxenhope Railway station will be such a wonderful backdrop for this classic story. Joyous, moving and above all, fun, we can't wait for audiences to have another opportunity to see the show as part of Bradford's year as UK City of Culture.' * The Railway Children is at Keighley and Worth Valley Railway from July 15 to September 7. Visit
UPI
13-06-2025
- UPI
Sly Stone's isolation shaped a generation of sound
Sly Stone turned isolation into inspiration, forging a path for a generation of music-makers The charismatic front man of Sly and the Family Stone died on June 9, 2025, at the age of 82. File Photo/David Silpa/UPI | License Photo June 13 (UPI) -- In the fall of 1971, Sly and the Family Stone's "There's a Riot Goin' On" landed like a quiet revolution. After two years of silence following the band's mainstream success, fans expected more feel-good funk from the ensemble. What they got instead was something murkier and more fractured, yet deeply intimate and experimental. This was not just an album; it was the sound of a restless mind rebuilding music from the inside out. At the center of it all was front man Sly Stone. Long before the home studio became an industry norm, Stone, who died on June 9, 2025, turned the studio into both a sanctuary and an instrument. And long before sampling defined the sound of hip-hop, he was using tape and machine rhythms to deconstruct existing songs to cobble together new ones. As someone who spends much of their time working on remote recording and audio production -- from building full arrangements solo to collaborating digitally across continents - I'm deeply indebted to Sly Stone's approach to making music. He was among the first major artists to fully embrace the recording environment as a space to compose rather than perform. Every reverb bounce, every drum machine tick, every overdubbed breath became part of the writing process. From studio rat to bedroom producer Sly and the Family Stone's early albums -- including "Dance to the Music" and "Stand!" - were recorded at top-tier facilities like CBS Studios in Los Angeles under the technical guidance of engineers such as Don Puluse and with oversight from producer David Rubinson. These sessions yielded bright, radio-friendly tracks that emphasized tight horn sections, group vocals and a polished sound. Producers also prized the energy of live performance, so the full band would record together in real time. But by the early 1970s, Stone was burnt out. The dual pressures of fame and industry demands were becoming too much. Struggling with cocaine and PCP addiction, he'd grown increasingly distrustful of bandmates, label executives and even his friends. So he decided to retreat to his hillside mansion in Bel Air, California, transforming his home into a musical bunker. Inside, he could work on his own terms: isolated and erratic, but free. Without a full band present, Stone became a one-man ensemble. He leaned heavily into overdubbing -- recording one instrument at a time and building his songs from fragments. Using multiple tape machines, he'd layer each part onto previous takes. The resulting album, "There's a Riot Goin' On," was like nothing he'd previously recorded. It sounds murky, jagged and disjointed. But it's also deeply intentional, as if every imperfection was part of the design. In "The Poetics of Rock," musicologist Albin Zak describes this "composerly" approach to production, where recording itself becomes a form of writing, not just documentation. Stone's process for "There's a Riot Goin' On" reflects this mindset: Each overdub, rhythm loop and sonic imperfection functions more like a brushstroke than a performance. Automating the groove A key part of Stone's tool kit was the Maestro Rhythm King, a preset drum machine he used extensively. It wasn't the first rhythm box on the market. But Stone's use of it was arguably the first time such a machine shaped the entire aesthetic of a mainstream album. The drum parts on his track "Family Affair," for example, don't swing - they tick. What might have been viewed as soulless became its own kind of soul. This early embrace of mechanical rhythm prefigured what would later become a foundation of hip-hop and electronic music. In his book "Dawn of the DAW," music technology scholar Adam Patrick Bell calls this shift "a redefinition of groove," noting how drum machines like the Rhythm King encouraged musicians to rethink their songwriting process, building tracks in shorter, repeatable sections while emphasizing steady, looped rhythms rather than free-flowing performances. Though samplers wouldn't emerge until years later, Stone's work already contained that repetition, layering and loop-based construction that would become characteristic of the practice. He recorded his own parts the way future DJs would splice records - isolated, reshuffled, rhythmically obsessed. His overdubbed bass lines, keyboard vamps and vocal murmurs often sounded like puzzle pieces from other songs. Music scholar Will Fulton, in his study of Black studio innovation, notes how producers like Stone helped pioneer a fragment-based approach to music-making that would become central to hip-hop's DNA. Stone's process anticipated the mentality that a song isn't necessarily something written top to bottom, but something assembled, brick by brick, from what's available. Perhaps not surprisingly, Stone's tracks have been sampled relentlessly. In "Bring That Beat Back," music critic Nate Patrin identifies Stone as one of the most sample-friendly artists of the 1970s - not because of his commercial hits, but because of how much sonic space he left in his tracks: the open-ended grooves, unusual textures and slippery emotional tone. You can hear his sounds in famous tracks such as 2Pac's "If My Homie Calls," which samples "Sing a Simple Song"; A Tribe Called Quest's "The Jam," which draws from "Family Affair"; and De La Soul's "Plug Tunin'," which flips "You Can Make It If You Try." The studio as instrument While Sly's approach was groundbreaking, he wasn't entirely alone. Around the same time, artists such as Brian Wilson and The Rolling Stones were experimenting with home and nontraditional recording environments - Wilson famously retreating to his home studio during "Pet Sounds," and the Stones tracking "Exile on Main St." in a French villa. Yet in the world of Black music, production remained largely centralized in institutionally controlled studio systems such as Motown in Detroit and Stax in Memphis, where sound was tightly managed by in-house producers and engineers. In that context, Stone's decision to isolate, self-produce and dismantle the standard workflow was more than a technical choice: It was a radical act of autonomy. The rise of home recording didn't just change who could make music. It changed what music felt like. It made music more internal, iterative and intimate. Sly Stone helped invent that feeling. It's easy to hear "There's a Riot Goin' On" as murky or uneven. The mix is dense with tape hiss, drum machines drift in and out of sync, and vocals often feel buried or half-whispered. But it's also, in a way, prophetic. It anticipated the aesthetics of bedroom pop, the cut-and-paste style of modern music software, the shuffle of playlists and the recycling of sounds that defines sample culture. It showed that a groove didn't need to be spontaneous to be soulful, and that solitude could be a powerful creative tool, not a limitation. In my own practice, I often record alone, passing files back and forth, building from templates and mapping rhythm to grid - as do millions of musical artists who compose tracks from their bedrooms, closets and garages. Half a century ago, a funk pioneer led the way. I think it's safe to say that Sly Stone quietly changed the process of making music forever - and in the funkiest way possible. Jose Valentino Ruiz is an associate professor of music business and entrepreneurship at the University of Florida. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Yahoo
The Singer Who Saw America's Best and Worst
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. It's a real American moment out there: battle lines drawn, tear gas drifting, charity and gentleness on their heels. Turn inward, inside ourselves, and it looks even worse, the mind's landscape pocked and blackened with destruction. Can somebody please bring the beautiful music, to carry us up and out? Someone like Sly Stone, who died on Monday at the age of 82. Sly was a born transcender, a natural synthesizer of situations, a raiser of elements to their highest state of possibility. Black, white; R&B, rock; politics, carnival; great taste, screaming excess; heaven and Earth: He put it all together. On a tight curve of musical euphoria, he led his people—which was everybody, or so he claimed—out of conflict. The opposing force was in him too, equally strong as it turned out: drag, downwardness, drugs, isolation. Who in the world would ever have the power to shut him down? Only Sly himself. It's remarkable that he lived as long as he did. But in his glorious and self-consuming prime—'68 to '71, roughly—he harmonized the energies that were tearing and would continue to tear this country to pieces. Dangerous work, highly exposed, but he made it look like a party. And in the floating jubilee that was his band, the Family Stone, he gave America a vision of itself: racially and emotionally integrated, celestially oriented, if not healed then at least open to healing. What to listen to, right now, as you're reading this? You could start with 1969's 'Stand!' A circus crash of cymbal, a burlesque snare roll, and away we go: 'Stand, in the end, you'll still be you / One that's done all the things you set out to do.' The vocals are airy, haughtily enunciated in the high hippie style, and embellished with happy trills; the melody chugs along with a nursery-rhyme simplicity that is somehow underwired by knowingness: innocence and experience conjoined. (The Beatles were very good at this too, but Sly's true peer in this area, oddly, was a later songwriter: Kurt Cobain.) And the lyrics are classic Sly: a pinch of psychedelic double-talk—'You have you to complete and there is no deal'—and an ounce of street knowledge. The song rises and falls, jogging on the spot as it were, but with a building gospel crescendo of a half-chorus—'Stand! Stand! Stand!'—that seems to presage or demand release. And release is granted, unforgettably. It comes out of nowhere, with less than a minute of music left: a sudden loop of chiming, uplifted, militant, and taut-nerved funk, resolving/unresolving, tension and deliverance together, guitars locked; the drummer, Greg Errico, is thrashing out an ecstatic double-time pattern on his hi-hat (and doing it, if you watch the live footage, with one hand). [Read: The undoing of a great American band] From 'Stand!' you might go to 1970's 'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).' Everything in America is one year worse, one year more violent and bummed-out, and although the music stays celebratory (with a finger-popping bass line from Larry Graham that famously invented the next two decades of funk playing), lyrically, Sly is darkening: 'Lookin' at the devil / Grinnin' at his gun / Fingers start shakin' / I begin to run.' He quotes himself, his own (very recent) hits, his own nostrums of positivity, in a charred-by-time kind of way, 'Different strokes for different folks' right next to a new observation, 'Flamin' eyes of people fear burnin' into you.' We're on course here for the Sly-in-ruins of 1971's There's a Riot Goin' On, his woozy sayonara to the years of greatness. Druggy and drum-machined, with a rippling American flag on the cover, Riot is the album that most directly connects him to the present situation. Decades of obscurity followed—which is a cliché, but he lived it, as durably and intensely as he had lived the cliché of superstardom. 'The pure products of America go crazy,' as William Carlos Williams said. And now he's left us, when once again brutality is massing behind its shields, and once again compassion has acquired the nobility of true folly. All very familiar to Sly the avatar. I can't stop thinking about these lines from 'Stand!,' so wistfully prophetic, so half-encouraging, so dead-on predictive of our mass retreat into the space behind our eyes: 'Stand, don't you know that you are free / Well, at least in your mind if you want to be.' Article originally published at The Atlantic
