“I am planning to maintain as many of my professional commitments as possible,” the conductor said.Daniel Barenboim, the eminent conductor and pianist who stepped back from engagements in recent years citing health concerns, said Thursday that he has Parkinson’s disease.Announcing the diagnosis in a short news release, Barenboim, 82, said that he still planned to fulfill “as many of my professional commitments as possible,” including concerts with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, an ensemble he founded in 1999 to bring Israeli and Arab musicians together.“If I am unable to perform, it is because my health does not allow me to,” Barenboim said, adding that he was adjusting to “navigating this new reality” and that his focus “is on receiving the best available care.”Three years ago, Barenboim announced that he was suffering from a “serious neurological condition” that was affecting his work. In January 2023, he resigned as general music director of the Berlin State Opera because of poor health.A spokeswoman for the Daniel Barenboim Foundation said that the conductor was unavailable for interview. His next scheduled performance is in August as part of a West-Eastern Divan Orchestra summer tour, the spokeswoman said, adding that Barenboim was continuing to teach at the Barenboim-Said Academy, a music school he established in Berlin that brings together students from across the Middle East.Born to Jewish parents in Argentina, Barenboim has been a titan of classical music for almost seven decades, first as a piano prodigy and later as a conductor and music director. He took over the leadership of the Berlin State Opera in 1992 and transformed into one of the world’s leading houses, and he also held music director positions at the Orchestre de Paris, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Teatro alla Scala, in Milan.Since the 1980s, Barenboim has also been an outspoken political figure, as much as a revered musical one — a rarity for a conductor. In 1989, just days after the Berlin Wall fell, Barenboim led the Berlin Philharmonic in a concert for East Germans. A decade later, along with the Palestinian scholar and writer Edward Said, he founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in the belief that music could lead Israelis and Arabs to mutual understanding.In his statement on Thursday, Barenboim said he considered the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra his “most important responsibility.”“It is essential for me to ensure the orchestra’s long-term stability and development,” he said. More

With “Lives Outgrown,” her first album of her own songs in 22 years, the pensive voice of the trip-hop group confronts maturity and mortality.“All trying but can’t escape/All going to nowhere,” Beth Gibbons sings in “Floating on a Moment” from her new album, “Lives Outgrown.” It’s an acknowledgment of mortality, of limitations, of inevitable endings. It’s also an insight that can be grim or oddly comforting. Gibbons leans tentatively toward comfort; as the song ends, children sing, “All going to nowhere” while minor chords give way to major ones and Gibbons concludes, “All we have is here and now.”For three decades, Gibbons, 59, has made herself a voice of melancholy yearning and shattered hopes. With Portishead in the 1990s and 2000s, and on her own very occasional solo projects, she has sung about alienation, grief, doubt, loneliness, fear, betrayal and tormented love. Now, on “Lives Outgrown,” Gibbons has matured without becoming complacent. “The burden of life just won’t leave us alone,” she sings in “Burden of Life.”Portishead’s two 1990s studio albums, “Dummy” (1994) and “Portishead” (1997), were foundations of trip-hop. They deployed atmospheric samples to conjure a foreboding netherworld, where Gibbons’s vocals could sound anxious, jazzy, witchy or utterly bereft. Portishead’s return in 2008, “Third,” was uncompromising, dissonant and volatile, bristling against the ways trip-hop had been smoothed into background music during the group’s hiatus.In between, Gibbons collaborated on an album with Paul Webb, a.k.a Rustin Man, the bassist of Talk Talk. “Out of Season,” released in 2002, placed her voice in more naturalistic settings, with studio bands and orchestral arrangements. “Lives Outgrown,” 22 years later, is its latter-day sequel.The album was assembled gradually over the last 10 years, while Gibbons occasionally resurfaced with other projects: composing film scores, performing Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, collaborating with Kendrick Lamar on “Mother I Sober.”Produced by Gibbons and James Ford (of Simian Mobile Disco), “Lives Outgrown” relies on hand-played instruments, but it often juxtaposes them in surreal ways. Ford alone plays a huge assortment — guitars, dulcimer, keyboards, woodwinds, brasses, even musical saw — while the drummer Lee Harris (from Talk Talk), who shares some songwriting credits, uses all sorts of found percussion, including boxes and kitchenware. For the first time in her catalog, Gibbons allowed herself to layer on backup vocals, which materialize like a ghostly sisterhood.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 ‘7 Rings’ singer initially suggested to be a background artist for Demi on the new song ‘Met Him Last Night’ but the Disney alum insisted the former Nickelodeon star appeared on the track.

Apr 4, 2021

AceShowbiz –
Demi Lovato was so impressed with the song Ariana Grande wrote for her, she insisted she appear on the track.

The “Cool for the Summer” star gave Grande an early preview of songs she was working on for what has become her new album, “Dancing With the Devil… The Art of Starting Over”, and Ariana offered to go away and write a new tune for her pal.

The result was “Met Him Last Night”.

Ariana agreed to sing on the track, but suggested she should just be a background artist.

“She was like…, ‘I’ll be like mystery, harmony lady,’ ” Lovato tells Sirius XM’s “The Morning Mashup”, “and I was like, ‘I feel like the world would love to hear us together, like we should do that.’ And she was like, ‘Are you sure?’ And I was like, ‘Yes.’ And so she added her vocals and, she’s just so talented, so great. I’m so grateful to have a friend like her.”

  See also…

Grande isn’t the only guest on the new album, which dropped on Friday (02Apr21) – Saweetie, Sam Fischer, and Noah Cyrus also feature.

The album was released following the premiere of a new documentary where Demi got candid about her personal journey including her struggles with drugs.

She dropped bombshells about being raped when she was a teen and sexually assaulted by her drug dealer the night she suffered the near-fatal overdose.

She has since pulled herself out of addiction, but she admitted she’s not completely sober. She still drinking and smoking weed in moderation and gets monthly injections of Vivitrol to prevent from relapsing.

“I haven’t been by-the-book sober since the summer of 2019,” she explained. “I realised if I don’t allow myself some wiggle room, I go to the hard (expletive). And that will be the death of me.”

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His expertise on the electromechanical Mellotron helped define the band’s progressive sound in the 1960s and ’70s on albums like “Days of Future Passed.”Mike Pinder, the last surviving founding member of the Moody Blues, whose innovative use of the Mellotron — a predecessor of the sampler — helped make the band a pioneer of progressive rock, died on Wednesday at his home in the Sacramento area. He was 82.His son Dan confirmed the death. He said that his father had breathing difficulties and had been in hospice care for a few days.The Moody Blues were formed in 1964, with a lineup of Mr. Pinder on keyboards, Denny Laine on guitar, Graeme Edge on drums, Ray Thomas on flute and Clint Warwick on bass. The group’s “Go Now!,” sung by Mr. Laine, rose to No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100.The Moody Blues at the house they shared in South London in 1965. From left: Ray Thomas, Denny Laine, Graeme Edge, Clint Warwick and Mr. Pinder.Chris Ware/Keystone Features, via Getty ImagesMr. Laine and Mr. Warwick left after the release of the band’s first album, “The Magnificent Moodies” (1965), and were replaced by Justin Hayward and John Lodge. The change in personnel set the stage for a change in direction: from R&B-tinged rock to the psychedelic, orchestral sound that the Moody Blues vividly showcased on their breakthrough 1967 album, “Days of Future Passed.”Mr. Pinder had worked as a tester in the Mellotron factory in Birmingham, England, before the Moody Blues formed. Playing the company’s Mark II model for the first time was “my first ‘man on the moon’ event,” he told the British music website Brumbeat.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

The 25-year-old has become a streaming star without releasing a full album. He just wrapped his first shows in the United States, and hopes to take his music even further.On the ninth stop of his first world tour, the Egyptian rapper Wegz finished soundcheck at the Howard Theater in Washington, D.C. and relaxed on a worn black leather couch wearing a gray Carhartt fleece jacket and cream New Balance 990 sneakers. In his unflashy attire, passers-by might not have recognized one of the biggest artists in the emerging Arabic music scene calmly awaiting his set time.“That’s what I’m trying to do,” Wegz, 25, said. “Just revert people back to minimalism.”His numbers, however, have been growing. Wegz has been the most-streamed artist on Spotify in Egypt since 2020. In 2022, he was named the most-streamed artist on the platform across the entire Middle East and North Africa, and became the first Egyptian artist to perform at the FIFA World Cup final. He sold out concerts in London and Berlin before arriving in the United States last month as the first Arab artist with a global tour backed by the concert giant Live Nation.“He has been one of the pioneers who have taken Egyptian rap to a different place,” Salam Kmeid, head of content marketing at the regional music platform Anghami, said in a video call from Dubai. (Wegz’s track “El Bakht” is now the most streamed song of all time on the service.) “As an Arabic hip-hop movement, he has taken it to a different scale.”In the middle of his current tour — after the European leg had wrapped up but before his first dates in North America — the war between Israel and Hamas began. Wegz, who has been outspoken in support of Palestinians, has made it clear that he has no intent of soft-pedaling his views as he works to reach a broader global audience. He recently posted a video on Instagram of a pro-Palestinian rally in New York City, and announced that a portion of the proceeds from his tour will go to relief efforts in Gaza.“I will raise awareness about the cause along the way and condemn the dehumanizing and killing of Palestinians,” Wegz said in an interview. “I’m hoping to try to heal from all the horrific images I’ve seen in order to start seeing a better life so we can sing and dance and get back to enjoying what we do.”His rise has coincided with a wave of attention and appreciation for Arabic music. The Palestinian-Algerian rapper Saint Levant’s “Very Few Friends” and the Palestinian-American Lana Lubany’s “The Snake” both went viral on TikTok. On television, shows like Hulu’s “Ramy,” Netflix’s “Mo” and Disney+’s “Moon Knight” heavily feature Arabic music in thoughtful ways.“I think there’s a lot of talented people around the globe,” Wegz said, speaking in English. “I might be very talented as well.”Wegz performing at the FIFA World Cup final in 2022. He was the first Egyptian artist to take the stage at the event.Fareed Kotb/Anadolu Agency, via Getty ImagesSince his debut single “Batalo Fake” (Arabic for “No Longer Fake”) arrived in 2017, with an appearance from his fellow Egyptian M.C. Hesham Raptor, Wegz has been praised for his lyrics, which exude self-confidence while exploring themes around identity and the socioeconomic reality for youth in Egypt’s urban neighborhoods. While hip-hop with trap beats remains his foundation, his tracks also dabble in dancier production and Afropop. His most successful song to date, the uncharacteristically vulnerable “El Bakht” (“The Luck”), features a melodic rap about a brokenhearted lover over a syncopated beat, strings and plucked acoustic guitar.Despite his strong streaming numbers, Wegz still hasn’t released a full album, though he insists he’s working on one that he plans to put out after his tour. He attributes his success as a singles artist to being a lifelong student of his craft — a voracious listener nerding out about global music cultures.“I see myself as someone who’s here to show people things they might not have known about because my passion is the research of things, basically,” he said. “I want to know how you guys started this. I just keep digging and digging.”Born Ahmed Ali and raised in the coastal Egyptian city Alexandria, Wegz grew up in a modest area with his father, a math teacher, and his mother, a nurse and head of a children’s foster home. He has six siblings — some from different marriages — and last year told the Emirati entrepreneur and interviewer Anas Bukhash that he moved frequently as a child but made new friends fast. He added that he had been eager to take risks when his family urged caution (though his mother encouraged him to explore, which expanded his worldview).He developed a love of books at an early age, and wrote short stories and poems. His first exposure to music came from being surrounded by religious anthems, but as a teenager he branched out on his own, seeking secular music.“I tried to go online and go to internet cafes and listen to YouTube,” he recalled in the basement of the Washington venue. Wegz has said he grew up listening to American rappers including Young Thug, Future and the duo Mobb Deep, as well as the Egyptian singers Ahmed Adaweyah, Dalida, and Mohamed Mounir, and the Algerian musician Cheb Mami.His taste is eclectic, he pointed out, noting that he has “had a phase of every type of music in my life at least once.” (His current passion? Yemeni music, which emphasizes narratives: Even if an artist is “just staring at the tree, there’s a song for it where you can actually tell us how you feel about this tree and how you feel about being outside today.”)After some attempts at writing music, Wegz recorded his first song at 17 to have something private he could “share on his phone” with a handful of his friends. Working in a studio for the first time “was amazing,” he said. “It was what I wanted.”Just a few years later, he was getting attention in Egypt with “T.N.T.”, a haunting track produced by fellow Alexandrian rapper L5VAV that blends heavy trap percussion with Egyptian mahraganat, a style that combines low-fi, minimalist synths and edgy, heavy bass. (“I’m a big boss shaking up this great hall/I go heavy on that beat like I’m Rick Ross,” Wegz boasts in the song.) In 2020, “Dorak Gai” (“Your Time Is Coming”) — an aggressive but subtle diss track produced by the powerhouse Egyptian musician Molotof — put Wegz on the map throughout the Middle East and North Africa.Wegz gave credit to L5VAV, a frequent collaborator who appears on their hit “Khod w Hat” (“Take and Give”), for helping him hone his lyrical skills and navigate his early rise. “He helped me take music seriously,” Wegz said, with affection. “It was very motivating being around such an inspiring character.”Now he’s set his sights on reaching listeners beyond the Arabic-speaking world while still emphasizing genuine Arabic sounds and rhythms in ways that push the culture forward. “If the global eye is on you right now,” he said, there’s an opportunity to spotlight “the old things that we always had.”Kmeid, of the streaming service Anghami, said Wegz plays a vital role in Arabic music, and beyond. “He is actually the voice of his generation,” she said. “We do see how the Egyptian scene specifically sees Wegz as that young artist who came out of whatever background or history he had, a very simple person who really believed in his dream.”Wegz has plans to expand his brand beyond music, looking toward designing merchandise and a career in acting. Arabs have a rich history as traders, he explained, and that’s something he’s always kept in mind.“For now, I’m making music because I really love it and I have fun doing it,” he said.“People have fun listening to it, and I’m making money out of it. This is amazing.”“Overall,” he added, “I hope to always use my voice for good as long as I live.” More