Underneath stage lights, he sits at a piano and watches audiences burst into applause upon hearing opening notes — to songs he composed nearly 50 years ago.

It shocks him every time. And it happens all the time.

“‘How do these young people know this record?'” he said he often asks himself. “‘How many of them weren’t even born when I made those records?’

“But I guess they’ve somehow stood the test of time.”

(Yes, Mr. Hancock, indeed they have.)

Hancock, considered one of the best jazz musicians to play and influence the genre, and his All-Star Band will perform next Sunday at Chrysler Hall in Norfolk.

Hancock has 14 Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year in 2008 for “River: The Joni Letters” and a lifetime achievement award in 2016. Mentioning Hancock in his autobiography, Miles Davis wrote: “Herbie was the step after Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, and I haven’t heard anybody yet who has come after him.”

Hancock’s career began in childhood. As a child prodigy growing up in Chicago in the 1940s and ’50s, he performed a Mozart piano concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at age 11. He took up jazz in high school, and, after double-majoring in music and electrical engineering at Grinnell College, he worked for two years as a session musician before signing as an artist with Blue Note Records.

His first album, “Takin’ Off,” produced what is now considered a jazz standard, “Watermelon Man.”

Shortly afterward, Hancock joined Davis’ Second Great Quintet and played with the group for about five years — with other jazz legends too, including tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Tony Williams.

Hancock began composing scores and soundtracks for films such as the 1966 feature, “Blow Up.”

He left the quintet and formed the band The Headhunters. Their 1973 album, “Head Hunters,” was the first jazz album to go platinum — aided by the record’s hit single “Chameleon,” which will be featured in the Norfolk concert.

No two Hancock concerts are exactly alike, he said in a phone interview.

“It’s jazz,” he said. “It’s always improvisation.”

Still, there is a structure to the show, starting with what he calls “overture,” which incorporates melodies, bass lines, chords, and various parts and portions of songs he has composed. Riffing off the predetermined portions, the piece evolves differently every night.

A closing number features elements of “Chameleon.”

“And people — we’re lucky that — that, that they go crazy after hearing the beginning of that piece.”

Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8138, colin.warrenhicks@virginiamedia.com

___

If you go

When: 7:30 p.m. Sept. 22

Where: Chrysler Hall, 215 St. Paul’s Blvd., Norfolk

Tickets: Start at $36.75

Details: vafest.org

The announcement came in a letter addressed to the state of Virginia that was posted Friday afternoon across the music festival’s social media pages, beginning with:

“Dearest Virginia, I love you with all my heart. Nobody loves you more than I do. Virginia doesn’t deserve better, Virginia deserves THE BEST.”

The letter stated that the festival, scheduled for Oct. 12 and 13 at the Virginia Beach Oceanfront, “just isn’t ready yet” and that to “get this right” it would be postponed until next spring.

The announcement was made hours after tickets went on sale at 10 a.m. for Virginia residents and lines formed at the Veterans United Home Loans Amphitheater early Friday morning. Williams’ letter stated that passes purchased with a credit or debit card would be refunded. Cash purchases would be refunded at the box office.

Virginia Beach City Manager Patrick Duhaney emailed the City Council with news around 3:30 p.m. Friday. He stated that his staff would discuss the next steps with the council.  The postponement is also a hit for some businesses, such as hotels that will see a wave of canceled reservations. Hotelier and former City Councilman John Uhrin said that by canceling so close to the date “you then have turned down other business you could have had.”

Something in the Water was last held in April 2023 but was moved to the fall to coincide with the release of an animated Lego-themed movie about Williams’ life, “Piece by Piece.”

Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8139, colin.warrenhicks@virginiamedia.com

Stacy Parker contributed to the article.

The special “locals only” sale will begin at 10 a.m. and last through 5 p.m. Friday in person at the Veterans United Home Loans Amphitheater box office at 3550 Cellar Door Way in Virginia Beach. The festival lineup also is expected to be revealed Friday.

The festival, launched in 2019 by the Virginia Beach native Williams, will feature concerts Oct. 12 and 13 on the beach at the Virginia Beach Oceanfront. And on Friday morning, music fans with a Virginia ZIP code will able to purchase either a general admission two-day festival pass for $180 or a VIP two-day festival pass for $450. IDs will be checked.

Something in the Water was last held in April 2023 and featured headlining rappers such as Lil Wayne, A$AP Rocky and Busta Rhymes along with the popular folk group Mumford & Sons.

This year, the festival was moved to the fall to coincide with the release of an animated Lego-themed movie about Williams’ life, “Piece by Piece.”

Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8139, colin.warrenhicks@virginiamedia.com

She was 19 in March 2022 when she auditioned for “Les Misérables” and flew to New York City to sing for casting directors without any intention of trying out for a lead. 

“But I was told that I ‘looked like Fantine’ that day, whatever that means,” Dortch said, in an interview.” They asked me if I knew ‘I Dreamed a Dream.’ “

Yes, she said. She knew “I Dreamed a Dream” — one of the most recognizable theater songs of all time, sung by one of the genre’s most coveted characters — and knew it well. She sang, nailed it, started rehearsals that August. She was on the road by October.  

Dortch, the 22-year-old former musical theater major, plays Fantine in the national Broadway tour of “Les Misérables,” which opens Tuesday at Chrysler Hall in Norfolk and runs through Sunday.

Based on Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel, the show tells the fictional story of Jean Valjean, a convict on the run after breaking parole. In his new life, as a factory owner and mayor, he agrees to be the guardian of a young girl after her mother, Fantine, dies. Fantine — portrayed by Anne Hathaway in the 2012 film adaptation — is a young woman who has been forced into prostitution after backstabbers get her fired from her job at the factory.

“She’s resilient, very persistent, and she loves her child more than anything,” Dortch said.

“And she has the best song in the show — but,” she added, “I might be biased.”

Fantine sings “I Dreamed a Dream” in the first act. Even after two years and more than 650 performances, Dortch sings it as heart-wrenchingly as possible every time she’s on stage.

“It’s so true that each show is someone’s first experience with theater or somebody’s first experience with ‘Les Miz,’ and I can remember those exact first moments for myself,” she said, about formative experiences watching theater, “and how much they inspired me and meant for me, and especially as a person of color too — what that can mean for young artists of color who are coming to see the shows.”

Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8138, colin.warrenhicks@virginiamedia.com

___

If you go

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday; 8 p.m. Friday; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday; 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday

Where: Chrysler Hall, 215 St. Paul’s Blvd., Norfolk

Tickets: Start at $40

Details: sevenvenues.com

A correction was made on Sept. 11, 2024: Because of a reporting error, an earlier version of this article misstated that Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables” was set during the French Revolution. The novel was set in the early 1800s, after the French Revolution.

The source of a letter — written in 1945 by a serviceman stationed in Hampton Roads and found last month in Florida — has been identified.

Mike Meyer, 65, lives in Safety Harbor, Florida, and said he put the letter in the bottle and sent it out to sea earlier this year.

Meyer’s father was born in 1929 and was too young to join the military until the end of World War II but often wrote and received letters from older friends who’d left their Illinois hometown to enlist. One buddy, Jim Peters, wrote to Meyer’s father, Leroy, on March 4, 1945. The message was jotted in cursive underneath the letterhead “United States Navy, Amphibious Training Base, Little Creek, Virginia.”

That letter and bottle were found on the side of a Safety Harbor road last month by Suzanne Flament-Smith amid storm debris after Hurricane Debby. It had been washed back ashore not far from where it was let go.

The bottle also contained some sand, a bullet casing and a circular hunk of metal that Flament-Smith described as “about the size of a Whopper candy.” She quickly took to social media to share her discovery and a question: Where had it come from?

The Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post and dozens of other news outlets wrote or carried stories about the curiosity.

“I didn’t think it was that big a deal,” Meyer told The Pilot about the fuss over his dad’s old letter.

“I guess the first thing is …” he said, and then he unraveled the mystery. Leroy Meyer stored many of his wartime correspondences in a box that was passed down to his children after he died in 2001. The letters were stored at his daughter’s home until Mike got them several years ago.

Mike Meyer read and reread his father’s letters. Some had been sent from soldiers overseas. One was from a girlfriend working in a factory that made Lockheed P-38 Lightning airplanes. He came to consider them historical documents and a friend’s recent retirement sparked an idea of how to share them with the world.

“She had sold her business and was throwing away some rare inventory,” he said. “She had all these Message-in-a-Bottle kits.”

Keeping his 10 favorites, he put 40 of his dad’s letters into the kits — one letter per bottle — and this spring began launching them, a few at a time, several times a week, watching through a pair of binoculars as they floated out on the tide.

“I usually put something shiny in there so they were more likely to be seen.”

He put a shell casing and a ball bearing in a bottle on April 16 along with the March 4, 1945 letter.

“I just turned it loose.”

Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8138, colin.warrenhicks@virginiamedia.com

Pharrell has Something in the Water at the Oceanfront.

And now another member of Hampton Roads’ hip-hop royalty has his own thing, this time in the heart of downtown Norfolk.

The inaugural Cousinz Festival, a one-day music fest co-founded by artist Terrence “Pusha T” Thornton, will take over Scope plaza and Scope on Saturday.

The shows start in the early afternoon with VIP entry starting at 1 p.m. and the main gates opening at 2. DJs will perform through the afternoon on the plaza; those events conclude with a 6 p.m. set by hitmaker Jermaine Dupri, who’s collaborated with Mariah Carey, Destiny’s Child and Usher.

___

Scope plaza performances

• Norfolk State University Band, 1:45 p.m.
• DJ DC, 2 p.m.
• Izzy the DJ, 3 p.m.
• DJ Envy, 4 p.m.
• JAE Murphy, 5 p.m.
• Jermaine Dupri, 6 p.m.

Dupri, a rapper and producer, has been a music industry mover and shaker since the early 1990s, when he helped write rap duo Kris Kross’s single “Jump,” which reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. He founded So So Def Recording.

___

Scope arena performances

• Art of Noise RVA, 6:30 p.m.
• Lion Babe, 8 p.m.
• Larry June, 9 p.m.
• Erykah Badu, 10:15 p.m.

Badu is the festival’s second headliner. She’s known for her soaring and emotionally stirring vocal range; The New Yorker magazine once called her the “Godmother of Soul.”

Her song “Bag Lady” reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2000, and two years later, “Love Of My Life (An Ode To Hip Hop),” featuring Common peaked at No. 6.

Pusha T found commercial success in the early 2000s as half of the duo Clipse after signing to Pharrell Williams’ Star Trak Entertainment record label.

He called Badu “one of the queens of R&B”  and said it was “only right” to have an artist of her stature, and with such a strong fan base, headline the festival’s debut.

He co-founded the Cousinz Festival with his longtime friend and musical collaborator Nathaniel “Fam-Lay” Johnson and Antonio Dowe. Johnson, a former recording artist who lives in Chesapeake, and Dowe, a music management and marketing professional based in Norfolk, previously founded the R&B Block Party. It played its first show in Norfolk in 2022 and has been held 14 times locally and at venues across the country.

The Cousinz Festival, they said, is essentially an expanded version of the Block Party that they hope will embody the laid-back atmosphere of a “large cookout” at a “family reunion.”

“The name Cousinz is just a term of endearment to make sure our 757 community and beyond knows that this is a family affair,” Dowe said.

Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8138, colin.warrenhicks@virginiamedia.com

___

If you go

When: 1:45 p.m. Saturday

Where: Scope, 201 E. Brambleton Ave., Norfolk

Tickets: Start at $40

Details: cousinzfestival.com

The American public clamored for fresh reports about the latest death tolls in the Virginia port cities, where yellow fever struck with a 33% mortality rate.

The country was horrified by the devastation, now chronicled in a new book, “The Fever: The Most Fatal Plague in American History,” by Lon Wagner.

Wagner, who lives in Roanoke, documents how yellow fever silenced the bustling streets of two flourishing cities and forever altered the trajectory of Hampton Roads.

“Norfolk and Portsmouth both lost key people who would have been leaders for those cities for decades to come,” he said in an interview. “So it makes you wonder how it affected the fate of these two places at a key time of growth, when they were really building.”

On Thursday, Wagner will give a talk at Prince Books in Norfolk about the book, which began as a 14-part series he wrote as a reporter for The Virginian-Pilot in 2005. The book is a culmination of years of research, collecting and cataloguing historical accounts found in 1800s newspapers, personal stories preserved in diaries, and patient histories recorded during the 100-day epidemic by the Portsmouth Medical Center.

Wagner begins his narrative in the hold of the cargo ship Benjamin Franklin. The vessel, transporting coffee, fruit, sugar and passengers to New York City, docked at the Caribbean island of St. Thomas in May 1855 amid an outbreak of yellow fever there.

Yellow fever is believed to have originated in Africa and spread around the globe on board ships — “a curse” of the “international slave trade” — Wagner writes.

The illness begins with headache, muscle pain, vomiting and a fever before attacking vital organs. It shuts down the liver and, Wagner writes, the skin “turns an ashen yellow.”

Though the crew showed signs of illness, he writes, the captain of the Benjamin Franklin departed the Caribbean port for the United States.

When the ship stopped for repairs in Hampton Roads that June, he lied to health officers about conditions aboard, and the virus was released first into Portsmouth.

“The fever spread like a slow gas leak,” Wagner writes.

It had been 29 years since the last yellow fever outbreak in Hampton Roads, and almost no one here had immunity. When a mosquito that carries the virus bites a human, the human becomes a carrier and passes it to the next mosquito that bites — on and on it goes.

In Norfolk, people reported falling ill as early as July 16.

Norfolk and Portsmouth residents who could afford to flee did — about 75% of the population. The people who were left, the poor and enslaved, suffered the most.

Of the roughly 6,000 people unable to flee Norfolk, around 2,100 died. Of the 3,000 Portsmouth residents who stayed, around 1,000 died. Wagner could not find another U.S. epidemic with as high a mortality rate. Not since the Black Plague in 1300s Europe had a disease death rate been so terrible.

The Fever, Chapter 1: A killer sails into port

Wagner paints a picture of misery through the plight of his book’s characters — reconstructing personalities, based on archived letters and other writings — such as civic leaders, doctors, nurses and a Presbyterian minister, George Armstrong:

“The moment Armstrong stepped off the ferry in Portsmouth, he stopped in his tracks. An apocalyptic scene lay before him … The fleeing residents had dumped food, entrails, leftover milk and anything and everything else that was perishable at the edge of their properties. It hadn’t rained since the mass exodus, so the detritus lay rotting in the summer sun.”

But Wagner also gives readers heroes such as 26-year-old Annie M. Andrews, who traveled from Syracuse, New York, into “the teeth of calamity” to help nurse the sick.

“Though the work was grim, they wanted to get started right away.”

Read the 2005 series.

Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8138, colin.warrenhicks@virginiamedia.com

___

If you go

Lon Wagner will discuss “The Fever” and why the death toll of this epidemic was far higher than those of better-known epidemics.

When: 6:30 p.m. Thursday

Where: Prince Books, 109 E. Main St., Norfolk

Tickets: Free

Details: 757-623-9223, prince-books.com

For her stroll, she picked Bayshore Boulevard. The road runs along the water in Safety Harbor, about 5 miles outside of Tampa. Typically a scenic spot, it was not Aug. 7.

Flament-Smith found it littered with debris brought ashore by Hurricane Debby. Discarded cans, old sunscreen and waterlogged gunk lay in heaps.

Flament-Smith began filling trash bags, then spotted a peculiarity: An old-timey and weatherworn but clear and corked bottle amid the garbage. 

She leaned in and looked through the glass.

Oh wow, she thought, I think I’ve found something special!

She had. It was a message in a bottle, handwritten under the letterhead “United States Navy, Amphibious Training Base, Little Creek, Virginia.” The date on the letter: “3/4/1945.”

But Flament-Smith didn’t open it immediately. She waited, picked up her daughter, drove home for her husband to see and FaceTimed her son at Furman University before pulling the cork.

“Surprisingly, there was no smell,” she recalled in an interview.

Inside the bottle, the piece of paper was folded in thirds. With it were three other objects.

There was an empty bullet casing with no identifying markings or an engraved caliber.

A circular hunk of metal, the size of a bubblegum ball, rolled around the bottom.

And a thin piece of wood, similar to a coffee stirrer, leaned against the neck of the bottle.

Flament-Smith and her family tried to use the piece of wood to remove the letter from the bottle, gave up, broke the bottle and, reading the letter, were shocked by its date: March 1945.

In photos, the letter appears to have been written with a fountain pen. Fading, the uneven scrawl and occasional misspellings make parts of it hard to read.

But it began, “Dear Lee,”

“Recieved your letter yesterday, was glad to hear from you. So you got a little lit up the other day. Well that is a every day thing around here they have a bar and they have pretty good beer.”

“Bud,” the serviceman writes. Schlitz, perhaps. And “old fiful, Pale Ail.”  

“I get happy every night I’m on the base.”

The base — now known as Little Creek — was new, established in the early 1940s on the southern shore of the Chesapeake Bay as a training ground for amphibious craft and assault tactics. Sailors, soldiers and Marines trained there, a few hundred thousand of them, the Navy says, some ending up at Normandy.

The letter writer explains he’s now “in Radio School” before asking his friend about a liaison and, then, “Who is your dream girl now.”

“Well Lee,” he continues, “I have to fall out for school now but will write again to morrow, and tell you how I made out in Norfolk tonigh.”

He explains: “Boy I got a little Red haid boy she is all right.”

He closes: “Your pal, …”

The signature is difficult to discern.

“Jim,” perhaps.

Whether the letter has been afloat for nearly 80 years or was placed in the bottle long after it was written, the message reveals: Some topics of conversation, between old friends, are eternal.

Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8138, colin.warrenhicks@virginiamedia.com

“Very nice slope,” he said. “Very easy.”

He walked inside the building through a stylish new doorway, looked up at the open pipes and ductwork crisscrossing the lobby’s high ceiling and took in the industrial-style interior design.

“It smells new,” he said. “New smell. I love it.”

A renovation and expansion of the Perry Glass Studio is nearing completion, and this week, Alexander got a first look at the new facilities.

The mayor’s tour guide, Glass Studio Director Robin Rogers, pointed to a prominent spot on the wall, immediately behind a reception desk, where the names of donors will be displayed. Alexander glanced in its direction and gave an acknowledging nod.

The city committed $15 million over 10 years to help fund land acquisition and construction costs for the project, contributing to a museum-led $55 million capital campaign. Of that, roughly $30 million went toward construction. About $15 million will be used to endow future operational costs, according to Chrysler Museum officials.

Next door to the Chrysler Museum, the original Perry Glass Studio opened in 2011. It provided workspaces for artists as well as glassmaking demonstrations and classes. And it’s popularity has grown. As early as 2015, museum leadership began discussing expanding the space to meet demand.

The current project broke ground last year and has expanded the studio from 9,000 to 34,0000 square feet. Classes will begin Sept. 12 inside the studio’s new sections.

A renovation of the building’s older sections is expected to be complete early next year, with an official grand opening celebration scheduled for March.

Once fully complete, the Perry Glass Studio will have more than doubled its capacity for housing and creating art.

There will be 14 flameworking workstations where artists can use stationary torches to make small objects such as beads or pendants over open flames.

Artists will be able to create larger pieces in nine workstations devoted to hot glass.

A new flat glass workspace will allow them to create stained glass artworks, and a portion of the studio will be dedicated to the fabrication of neon, lit glass — the kind one might find blinking outside or advertising a beer inside at a dive-y bar.

On Thursday, Alexander was led into one of the new classrooms.

“That’s lit,” he said. “That’s good.”

Next on the tour was the studio’s recently constructed performance space. The large rectangular room had 45-foot ceilings, second-floor mezzanines and a balcony with 90 fixed seats. The mayor was told an additional 110 seats could be moved onto a first-floor seating area, from where audiences will watch concerts and dramatic productions that’ll incorporate the spectacles of glassmaking.

“Everybody, try out the chairs,” Rogers said, leading the tour.

Alexander walked some stairs to the balcony and plopped onto the red cushion of a fixed seat.

“Pat!” he called to City Manager Patrick Roberts. “Pat, they are very comfortable.”

A correction was made on Aug. 19, 2014: Because of incorrect information provided to The Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press, an earlier version of this article misstated the square footage of the expanded Perry Glass Studio and a type of artwork that artists will create there. The Perry Glass Studio will be expanded to 34,0000 square feet, and a new flat glass workspace will allow them to create stained glass artwork.

Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8138, colin.warrenhicks@virginiamedia.com

Every week, they get close to 15 million audio and video streams.

And despite having formed nearly 50 years ago, they still consistently reach an audience exceeding 80 million radio listeners each month.

Foreigner is one of the most popular rock acts in the world and is coming to Virginia Beach — perhaps, for the last time.

The band will play at the Veterans United Home Loans Amphitheater in Virginia Beach on Aug. 20 as part of its “The Historic Farewell Tour.”

Rock-and-roller John Waite — whose 1984 single “Missing You” peaked at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — will open the show and will be followed by the rock band Styx, before Foreigner takes over the stage and closes the night.

“People should expect a lot of great tunes that they already know performed at high energy with a crowd singing on their feet; it’s always an exciting, sort of festive, atmosphere,” said Michael Bluestein, the band’s keyboardist.

In an interview, Bluestein, who joined Foreigner in 2008, described the band’s farewell tour as bittersweet.

He’ll miss the music, but after 16 years of averaging 80 to 100 concerts per year, Bluestein added, he and his bandmates are looking forward to some respite from constant touring.

“We’re not disappearing,” he added, saying the band still plans on playing together. “But it’s just going to be a lot less.”

Foreigner was formed in 1976 by three Americans and three Brits, and their 1977 self-titled album produced the band’s first hits with “Feels Like the First Time” and “Cold As Ice.”

Foreigner remained popular through the 1970s and 80s, releasing well-known songs such as “Hot Blooded,” “Blue Morning, Blue Day” and “I Want To Know What Love Is.”

Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8138, colin.warrenhicks@virginiamedia.com

___

If you go

When: 7 p.m. Aug 20

Where: Veterans United Home Loans Amphitheater at Virginia Beach, 3550 Cellar Door Way, Virginia Beach

Cost: Start at $22

Details: foreigneronline.com