In Ethan Lipton’s musings on A.I., Mozart has a place alongside humpback whales.Are they not men? The members of the onstage combo in Ethan Lipton’s new show are, in fact, robots, despite looking like middle-aged male representatives of the human species. They may play tunes for the benefit of the audience members, but their main purpose, Lipton informs us, is to find out “what you want from your machines, so we can make your lives better.” (Lipton narrates the show and performs lead vocals.) The purpose of the evening, it appears, is for these sophisticated high-tech creatures in gray suits to undergo deep learning.And as the title “We Are Your Robots” implies, our humble servants are respectful of boundaries. “I know, for example, that it is illegal for a robot to tell a human being what to do with their own body,” Lipton says. “Because only other humans are allowed to do that.”That line is sneakily effective because Lipton’s wry delivery and hangdog mien have a way of softening blows and prompting double takes. The agreeable, light-on-their feet songs, have a similar effect, lulling us into the kind of complacent comfort that tech companies gamble on. But taken as a whole, the show, which is directed by Leigh Silverman, feels stifled by slightly monotonous whimsy.Produced by Theater for a New Audience and Rattlestick Theater, “We Are Your Robots,” which just opened at Polonsky Shakespeare Center, is described as a musical. But it is closer to a loosely articulated song cycle that feels like a souped-up evening at Joe’s Pub.Over the past couple of decades, Lipton has carved an idiosyncratic niche of one in the New York theatrical ecosystem with such shows as “No Place to Go” and “The Outer Space.” He is at his best with a firmer narrative structure, as in the zany western “Tumacho,” which had the tough luck of reopening in March 2020 after a short earlier run.“We Are Your Robots,” on the other hand, is held together not so much by its theme as by its retrofuturist space-age aesthetic; a clean-cut art pop redolent of They Might Be Giants and David Byrne’s literate, faux-naïf sensibilities; and Lipton’s turn as a ham-on-wry narrator. (Lee Jellinek did the set, dominated by a stylized visual that recalls both a face and a cassette tape; Alejo Vietti conceived the costumes; Nevin Steinberg handled the sound design.)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

A record featuring the singer’s digitally altered voice is expected to be released by next month, her father said.Nearly three decades after the singer Selena was killed, a new album featuring recordings by the Grammy Award-winning Tejano music star is expected to be released, her family has announced.In a video interview with Latin Groove News last week, Abraham Quintanilla Jr., the singer’s father, described the forthcoming album, expected to be available by next month, as a family effort. It will feature 13 songs, with new arrangements by her brother A.B., and artwork by her sister, Suzette, Mr. Quintanilla said.Three songs are new versions of previously released tracks, and at least one song will feature Selena’s upbeat soprano voice, recorded when she was 13 years old and digitally modified, Mr. Quintanilla said.“What’s unique about it is, not only is the music completely new arrangements, my son worked on Selena’s voice with computers and if you listen to it she sounds on this recording like she did right before she passed away,” Mr. Quintanilla said. “It sounds incredible.”In an interview last year with Tino Cochino Radio, A.B. said he remixed all of Selena’s vinyls and “detuned her voice,” rendering it deeper and closer to how she sounded in her 20s.Further details about the album are unavailable, including how much of it features Selena’s voice. A spokesman for Warner Music Group, which Mr. Quintanilla said is releasing the album, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.Joe Bennett, a forensic musicologist and professor at Berklee College of Music, said that digitally aging a voice was a simple process that could potentially require just an isolated recording of the singer and the appropriate digital software.Born Selena Quintanilla-Pérez in Lake Jackson, Texas, on April 16, 1971, the Mexican-American singer became a leading star of Tejano music — a blend of corrido, mariachi and polka music — with hits including “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom,” “Como La Flor” and “Amor Prohibido.” During her abbreviated career, she dominated the Billboard Latin music rankings.Before she was fatally shot on March 31, 1995, at age 23 by the president of her fan club, Selena was aiming for more mainstream success by recording a crossover album.Since her death, Selena’s popularity has grown. Fans continue to celebrate her music and emulate her signature style of red lipstick and wispy, curled bangs. Jennifer Lopez portrayed her in a 1997 movie, and a Netflix show about Selena’s rise to fame, titled “Selena: The Series,” was released last year.Her family has cultivated the public’s fascination with the singer, from collaborating on the Netflix show, to releasing an unfinished song of hers in 2015. Mr. Quintanilla told Latin Groove News said that soon after his daughter’s death, he committed to keeping her memory alive with her music.“I think that we have done that,” he said. “The public still remembers Selena. They haven’t let her go, and so they are waiting for a project like this to come out and I know that it will be well received by the public.” More

Listen to favorite songs by an adventurous musician who pushed the boundaries of jazz, selected by writers and musicians including Nailah Hunter, Kieran Hebden and the artist’s son Eagle-Eye Cherry.Of all the musicians we’ve featured in this series, Don Cherry might be the most adventurous. From his early days in the late 1950s playing with the saxophonist Ornette Coleman to his tinkering with electronic funk and R&B in the ’80s, Cherry proved himself a worthy anarchist, broadening the depth of his art through the wind of his pocket cornet, an instrument he popularized. Though with Cherry, there was a sense that he didn’t want to shift the genre as a whole. Instead, his music felt innocent and voyeuristic, like he colored outside the lines just because.Cherry grew up in a musical family; his grandmother played piano for silent films, and his mother played piano at home. His father owned a jazz club in Tulsa, Okla., then worked as a bartender at the Plantation Club, a jazz venue in the Watts section of Los Angeles. Cherry met Coleman around the mid-50s and started working with the bandleader; it was a creative partnership that spanned several albums. Coleman’s sound was so jarring that some called it “alien music.” But Cherry identified with Coleman’s atonality and dissonance, even if he himself played tight, expressive notes that didn’t inflict much chaos. When paired with Coleman’s saxophone, the whole thing felt tumultuous. “Some people loved it and some people hated it, didn’t like it, and there would be arguments and fights,” he once told NPR’s Terry Gross, referencing a famed 1959 show at the Five Spot Cafe that drew Leonard Bernstein and Thelonious Monk to the venue.Though Cherry earned favor as a member of Coleman’s band and a featured player on the albums “Something Else!!!!” and “The Shape of Jazz to Come,” he soon established himself as a formidable bandleader or co-leader. In 1960, he and John Coltrane recorded a number of Coleman’s compositions as a homage to their peer. Six years later, Atlantic Records released this collaborative LP under the title “The Avant-Garde.” As the ’60s became the ’70s, Cherry turned his attention to funk and other cosmic soundscapes, much like other jazz musicians of the time.In 1975, he released what might be the high-water mark of his solo discography, “Brown Rice,” a slight yet exhilarating blend of Indian raga and African rhythm with subtle electronic flourishes. Cherry spent the ’70s in Sweden with his partner, Moki, where the two would create what they called “organic music” with like-minded local artists. Then, on the 1985 album “Home Boy (Sister Out),” Cherry turned his attention to Paris. A downtown funk record influenced by that city’s sound, it achieved cult status there until the label WeWantSounds released it more widely in 2018.By the time of Cherry’s death in 1995, he was considered a torchbearer for avant-garde jazz. Here, we spotlight his work with 13 selections that tell the story of his free-spirited brilliance. You can find a playlist at the bottom of the article, and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Joy Guidry, musician“Hope”When thinking about Don Cherry’s music, his album “Organic Music Society” is always the first to come to mind. I often come back to this entire album for how it can always slow my breathing and open my soul to the other side. The colors he uses in this album paint a picture of many different forms of praise and worship, especially in the seventh track, “Hope.” There’s so much warmth and comfort throughout this entire song. I always see a ton of deep oranges, purples and yellows when listening to “Hope.” The singing, different percussion instruments, and the rhythm of the piano and flute come together to make an oasis of sounds for dancing, screaming or giving thanks and praise. “Hope” is a song that brings a lot of my deep emotions to the surface, and I come back to it a lot when I need to have a big release or when I’m feeling spiritually blocked up. “Organic Music Society” is one of the best master classes in improvisation I’ve ever run across.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

Hundreds of albums bore his name, notably reissues of classic material. And he helped make WBGO the biggest jazz radio station in the New York area.Bob Porter, who as a record producer guided the reissue of vast swaths of the classic jazz canon, and who as a broadcaster helped build WBGO into the largest jazz radio station in the New York City area, died on April 10 at his home in Northvale, N.J. He was 80.The cause was complications of esophageal cancer, his wife, Linda Calandra Porter, said.Rock ’n’ roll had mostly eclipsed jazz in the public ear by the time Mr. Porter produced his first album for Prestige Records, the organist Charles Kynard’s “Professor Soul” (1968), for which he also wrote the liner notes. Mr. Porter began regularly producing sessions for the label, mostly in the soul-jazz style of the day, including outings by the saxophonists Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt, the organists Jimmy McGriff and Charles Earland and the guitarist Pat Martino, among many others.He went on to take part in the creation of hundreds of albums as a producer and author of liner notes for a variety of labels. Much of that work was on boxed sets and reissues of archival material.He won a Grammy in 1978 for his liner notes to the five-disc “Charlie Parker: The Complete Savoy Studio Sessions,” which he also produced. He later won the best historical album Grammy in 1986, for producing the compilation “Atlantic Rhythm and Blues 1947-1974, Vols. 1-7.”Interviewed that year by Rolling Stone, Mr. Porter recalled putting together the Atlantic box alongside Ahmet Ertegun, the label’s famed co-founder. Some of Atlantic’s original master tapes had burned in a fire, so Mr. Porter drew upon his network of fellow vinyl collectors to track down original pressings. His main goal, he said, was accuracy and completeness.“We tried to list in copious detail everything we could about the original recording date — the singers, the bands, every piece of information we could unravel,” he said. “The most important thing in doing any work of this nature is that you get it right.”But he also wanted to make a historical point about how social history shapes genre. “We decided to stop in 1974 because that, in a sense, marked the end of an era,” he said. “When you get into disco and rap music, you’re really talking about something that’s very different. The conditions in the country were a lot different when this music was being made. I think that the demise of soul and R&B may ultimately be viewed as a casualty of integration.”In the 1980s, jazz’s commercial fortunes perked up, in thanks partly to the advent of compact discs, which led listeners to buy reissues of old albums. Working most often with Atlantic, Mr. Porter led the remastering process for CD reissues by the likes of Duke Ellington, Ray Charles and Lester Young.As soon as WBGO hit the airwaves at 88.3 FM in 1979, broadcasting out of Newark but reaching across New York City, Mr. Porter started volunteering as a host. Two years later he began a daily show, “Portraits in Blue,” which went on to be syndicated by NPR stations around the country and would continue for the next 40 years. He later hosted two additional shows: “Saturday Morning Function,” which focused on R&B and jump blues, and “Swing Party,” heard on Sunday mornings.On his own podcast earlier this month, Nate Chinen, the director of editorial content at WBGO, called Mr. Porter “a Mount Rushmore figure when it comes to Newark public radio — someone who was on the air, really, from Day 1.”Robert Sherwin Porter was born in Wellesley, Mass., on June 20, 1940, to David Porter, who ran the financial advisory firm David L. Babson & Company, and Constance (Kavanaugh) Porter, a homemaker. The eldest of four siblings, Bob attended Whittier College in California, where he studied English before serving in the Army, stationed in Fairbanks, Alaska.In addition to his wife, he is survived by his brothers, John and William Porter; a sister, Linda (Porter) Owens; a son from a previous marriage, David Porter; two stepsons, Michael and Rick Tombari; and a granddaughter.After his military service, he returned to Whittier to complete his degree. While still in school he began contributing to DownBeat magazine. His articles caught the attention of Bob Weinstock, the head of Prestige, who was impressed by Mr. Porter’s erudition and offered him a job with the label.Mr. Porter’s passion for the artistic and cultural history of African-American music stretched back to its earliest known recordings, and he was deeply knowledgeable about blues as well as jazz.He received awards from various music societies and foundations. In addition to his two Grammys, those included a 1986 W.C. Handy Award (now known as the Blues Music Award) from the Blues Foundation and a 2003 Community Service Award from the Bergen County chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. In 2009, he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame.Mr. Porter became a published author late in life, self-releasing “Soul Jazz: Jazz in the Black Community, 1945-1975” in 2016. That book gave a detailed history of the jazz musicians who were especially popular in Black communities just after World War II, but who at the time had rarely come under the gaze of white critics.A white writer himself, Mr. Porter felt compelled to redress the omission. “Black communities had their own heroes, and Black fans of jazz had their own way of responding to the music,” he wrote in the book’s preface. “I have helped dozens of researchers and writers through the years, and I always hoped that one of them would tackle this untold story. Nobody did, and now most of the greatest players are gone. Thus, I decided to do this myself.” More

Hear tracks by Bomba Estéreo featuring Yemi Alade, Saint Etienne, Dry Cleaning and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at [email protected] and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Silk Sonic, ‘Skate’With a new single, “Skate,” it becomes ever clearer that Silk Sonic — the collaboration of Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak — is a project in vintage reverse engineering, finding and recreating the sounds and structures of the era when 1970s soul melted into disco. “Skate” — invoking bygone roller discos — has the scrubbing rhythmic guitars, the glockenspiel, the Latin percussion, the back-talking string section and the rising bridge of late 1970s hits. Can young 21st-century listeners feel nostalgia for a time before they were born? JON PARELESBomba Estéreo featuring Yemi Alade, ‘Conexión Total’Bomba Estéreo’s new single, “Conexión Total,” is an effervescent blend of pan flutes, marimbas and drum loops featuring the Nigerian Afropop idol Yemi Alade, whose 2014 song “Johnny” remains an anthem in the genre. The Colombian duo’s maneuver adds to a growing list of collaborations between African and Latin American artists, a much-needed reminder of the links between Afro-diasporic sounds and their origins. Euphoric lyrics from the lead singer Li Saumet and layers of carefully placed air horns coalesce into a prismatic summer jam, like a cool, carbonated drink foaming to the surface. ISABELIA HERRERASaint Etienne, ‘Pond House’You’d be forgiven for assuming that the looped, airy voice at the center of Saint Etienne’s new song belongs to the group’s lead vocalist Sarah Cracknell — but it’s actually a sample of Natalie Imbruglia’s 2001 song “Beauty on the Fire.” The British pop icons’ forthcoming “I’ve Been Trying to Tell You” (their first sample-driven album since the 1993 classic “So Tough”) is a collage of sounds culled from 1997 through 2001; they’ve described it as something of a concept album about late-90s optimism and the collective delusions of pop-cultural memory. Heady and idea-driven as that may sound, though, “Pond House” is as light as a sea breeze, a steady, aquamarine undertow drawing you into its hypnotic atmosphere. LINDSAY ZOLADZLos Lobos, ‘Los Chucos Suaves’Through four decades of recording, Los Lobos have always chosen their occasional cover versions instructively. During the pandemic they made their new covers album, “Native Sons,” filled with songs from Los Angeles bands including the Beach Boys, War, Buffalo Springfield and Thee Midnighters, along with one new Los Lobos song. “Los Chucos Suaves,” originally released in 1949 by Lalo Guerrero y Sus Cinco Lobos (!), recognizes an emerging Los Angeles pachuco culture, with elegant, zoot-suited Mexican Americans broadening their tastes — and dance moves — to Cuban music. Los Lobos’s version places Cesar Rosas’s rasp atop a mesh of cumbia and mambo, with distorted guitar, brawny baritone sax and frenetic timbales celebrating an early Latin cultural alliance. PARELESBéla Fleck featuring Billy Strings and Chris Thile, ‘Charm School’The album due in September from the banjo innovator Béla Fleck — who has collaborated with jazz musicians and chased down the banjo’s African roots — is “My Bluegrass Heart,” billed as his return to bluegrass. “Charm School” uses a classic bluegrass quintet lineup, with Fleck on banjo, Chris Thile on mandolin, Billy Strings on guitar, Billy Contreras on fiddle and Royal Masat on bass. But “Charm School” is by no means a traditional bluegrass tune; it’s a speedy, ever-changing suite, vaulting through keys, meters and tempos. The quintet alights in a seemingly familiar bluegrass zone only to dart off someplace else entirely, again and again. PARELESBarry Altschul’s 3Dom Factor, ‘Long Tall Sunshine’Barry Altschul’s drumming, and especially his rambunctious ride cymbal, is a study in something more than contrast: He knows how to skip across the surface of a beat while also giving it serious heft; his pocket is magnetic, but he’ll just as soon dice it up or splatter it to bits. Over an almost six-decade career in jazz, he’s played on both sides of the aisle, avant-garde and straight-ahead, and in his running trio — the 3dom Factor, with Jon Irabagon on saxophones and Joe Fonda on bass — he lassos it all together. “Long Tall Sunshine” is the title track from the 3dom Factor’s new live album, and it’s classic Altschul: brimming and charging but holding back too (thanks especially to Fonda’s bass), with a harmonically rangy melody that sets up Irabagon for an uncorked solo. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLODry Cleaning, ‘Tony Speaks!’On its magnificently odd debut album “New Long Leg,” released earlier this year, the London band Dry Cleaning fused post-punk grooves with the deadpan musings of the frontwoman Florence Shaw, a sharp, dryly funny observer of modern life’s absurdities. But “Tony Speaks!,” one half of a double-A-side single the band released this week, is its most barbed and political track yet. The song is an unnerving meditation on the banal but weighty effect that systemic problems can have on individual psyches: “I’m just sad about the collapse of heavy industry, I’ll be all right in a bit.” But Shaw’s most piercing musings come when she widens her lens and ponders climate change; her reflections poised in a delicate balance between comedy and tragedy. “I always thought of nature as something dead and uninviting,” she mutters, “but there used to be a lot more of it.” ZOLADZAda Lea, ‘Damn’“Damn,” from the Montreal-based singer-songwriter Ada Lea, unfolds like a quiet epiphany: a gradual accumulation of feelings and frustrations that, in an instant, snap into a sudden clarity. Atop an understated arrangement of guitar and percussion, Lea (whose real name is Alexandra Levy) sings of gradually slipping into an emotional rut: “Every year’s just a little bit darker, then the darker gets darker,” she sings in a low, throaty drawl, “then it’s dark as hell.” But in the song’s closing moments, Lea recollects herself and summons all her energy into a spirited, defiant refusal of everything that’s gone wrong: “Damn the work, damn the music, damn the fun that’s missing.” It’s the sound of hitting bottom but finally looking up. ZOLADZEkyu, ‘Oh Dje’Ekyu, a songwriter from Benin, sings about destructive envy in “Oh Dje”: “When someone goes up, we want to take them down/When someone moves forward, we want to stop him.” His voice is husky and melancholy, with an electronic veil; the rhythm is ticking, ratcheting Afrobeats-meets-trap, while guitar licks and manipulated vocals ripple in the distance. Below them all are bassy, looming synthesizer tones, threatening, as the lyrics suggest, to drag down everything. PARELESNao, ‘And Then Life Was Beautiful’“Hope will come someday soon,” the English songwriter Nao (Neo Jessica Joshua) promises in her helium-high soprano in “And Then Life Was Beautiful,” the title song from her next album. To recover from the way “Change came like a hurricane” in 2020, she advises self-preservation, patience, contemplation and gratitude amid invigorating triplets, rising chromatic chords and airborne vocal harmonies. She’s determined to conjure a sense of uplift. PARELESSilvana Estrada, ‘Marchita’Silvana Estrada’s voice oozes quiet fury. It’s a quality that connects her to a long line of women in Latin America, whose voices are almost synonymous with the experience of suffering and abandonment: icons like Chavela Vargas and La Lupe. But unlike some of her forebears, the 24-year-old Mexican artist’s anguish is so quiet, so raw, it burns in her chest, smoldering under the surface. On “Marchita,” the rolling melismas of Estrada’s voice glide over the warmth of a Venezuelan cuatro, blooming into waves of violin and violoncello strings. “Me ha costado tanto y tanto/Que ya mi alma se marchita,” she weeps. “It’s cost me so much that my soul is withering,” she says. That is the kind of slow-burning despair that steals life from you. HERRERAGrouper, ‘Unclean Mind’Grouper, a.k.a. Liz Harris, effortlessly collapses the grittiest of emotions into simple jolts of sorrow. Though she is known for her hypnotic tape loops, breathy whispers and quiet piano arrangements, on “Unclean Mind,” Harris swaps the familiar, morose piano keys of previous releases for the strum of an acoustic guitar. Her harmonic vocals are weightless, almost imperceptible, but the sentiment is transparent. “Tried to hide you from my unclean mind,” she sighs, “Put it in a costume/Turning patterns with a perfect line.” We may not know what kind of relationship she refers to, but the enigmatic beauty of Grouper’s music is that it is immersive without being obvious, so potent it needs little explication to convey the trickiest emotions. HERRERADot Allison, ‘Long Exposure’The Scottish songwriter and singer Dot Allison has recorded, as leader and collaborator, with arty musicians like Kevin Shields, Massive Attack and Scott Walker beginning in the 1990s. Her new solo album, “Heart-Shaped Scars,” is her first since 2009. It’s largely acoustic and minimal, with songs that meditate on the unhurried growth of plants. “Long Exposure” intertwines Allison’s voice with steady guitar picking, single piano notes and a chamber-pop string section, but it’s far from serene. It’s an indictment of a partner’s gradually revealed infidelity that gathers pain and wrath from the realization that it went on so long. PARELES More