Aurelia Butler

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    Branford Marsalis and Steve Lehman Rethink the Jazz Cover Album

    Marsalis leads a take on Keith Jarrett’s 1974 LP “Belonging,” and Lehman interprets “The Music of Anthony Braxton,” revealing fresh lessons.Great jazz composers are legion. But the list of great jazz composers whose work gets played by other artists with any regularity? That’s a far more exclusive club.So when a jazz musician devotes an entire record to the work of a less-celebrated figure, it reads like a deliberate, even courageous, act of advocacy. The soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy did this for Thelonious Monk in 1959, releasing “Reflections,” the first-ever tribute album to the pianist, which paved the way for a wider engagement with Monk’s sui generis songbook; likewise, in the ’80s and ’90s, the pianist Misha Mengelberg, the trombonist Roswell Rudd and the collective known as the Herbie Nichols Project each made strong cases on record for the work of the once obscure Nichols.Two new jazz releases find a pair of saxophonists taking similar stands. On “Belonging,” Branford Marsalis leads his working quartet through a full-album take on Keith Jarrett’s 1974 LP of the same name. And on “The Music of Anthony Braxton,” Steve Lehman and his longtime trio mates, with the guest tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, play a live set heavy on material by Braxton, the unorthodox, genre-transcending visionary who was also Lehman’s personal mentor and former collaborator. Both records showcase the potency of the material at hand while achieving a certain kind of expressive liftoff that makes them more than just rote covers.Jarrett’s “Belonging” places unusual demands on the would-be interpreter. It’s an album of emotional extremes that encompasses ecstatic exuberance and prayerful yearning. It also seems almost inextricable from the idiosyncrasies of its maker, revered as an improviser but still undervalued for his prolific writing, which peaked in the ’70s with bespoke works for both a stateside quartet and the European one heard on “Belonging.”Marsalis has tackled imposing jazz masterworks before, covering the entirety of John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” in the studio and onstage in the early 2000s, but at its best, his “Belonging” goes deeper. On the original album, the title track is a brief, reflective interlude, played as a solo-free duet between Jarrett on piano and Jan Garbarek on tenor. Marsalis takes his time with the piece, stating the theme on soprano saxophone and leaving space for the rhythm section — the pianist Joey Calderazzo, the bassist Eric Revis and the drummer Justin Faulkner — to set up a lovely rubato ballad texture. Re-entering, Marsalis starts out playing gentle, aqueous phrases, then steadily crescendoes to a piercing intensity for the final theme statement, the band swelling to match him as his tone grows ever more urgent. It’s a performance that both honors and amplifies the somber beauty of the source material.“The Windup” represents the other pole of “Belonging.” A rollicking, acrobatically twisty theme, it suggests boogie-woogie gone prog, conjuring a mood of infectious delight. Marsalis’s quartet has embraced it as a favorite in recent years, and an earlier version appeared on the band’s 2019 live album, “The Secret Between the Shadow and the Soul.” Like in that performance, Faulkner is the driving force on the new studio take. Here he pushes even harder, complementing the opening piano-and-bass vamp with a busily festive beat marked by a barrage of syncopations on snare and cowbell.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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    Hamdan Ballal, Palestinian Director of ‘No Other Land,’ Is Attacked in West Bank, Witnesses Say

    Hamdan Ballal was assaulted by masked attackers in his home village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, witnesses said. The Israeli military said he had been detained for questioning.A Palestinian director of the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land” was beaten bloody near his home by Israeli settlers and detained by the Israeli authorities in the occupied West Bank on Monday evening, witnesses said.The director, Hamdan Ballal, was set upon in Susya, his home village, by at least 20 masked people, mostly teenagers armed with rocks, sticks and knives, according to Joseph Kaplan Weinger, 26, who said he had come upon the attack after it began. Mr. Weinger is part of a volunteer initiative that provides protection in areas vulnerable to settler violence.It was not clear what prompted the attack, but Mr. Weinger, who is also a doctoral student in sociology at the University of California in Los Angeles, said the group had descended on Susya, which is south of Hebron, and assaulted West Bank residents as they were breaking the fast during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan. Some mockingly shouted holiday blessings as they did so, he said.Mr. Weinger said that he began honking the car horn in an attempt to alert nearby Israeli soldiers to the attack, but that the Israeli forces prevented him and two companions from reaching Mr. Ballal’s home.“Soldiers just stood around,” he said. “Later, when we got there, we saw his blood on the ground.”Mr. Ballal, 37, was one of three Palestinians detained, according to witnesses and the Israeli military. Leah Zemel, a lawyer representing the detainees, said that she had been informed that they were being held in a military center for medical treatment ahead of questioning, but that she did not know the reason for their detention.The Israeli military said in a statement that “several terrorists” had hurled rocks at Israeli citizens, damaging their vehicles near Susya and prompting a “violent confrontation” that involved “mutual rock hurling between Palestinians and Israelis.” The military said that when its forces and the police arrived, “terrorists” threw rocks at them.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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    NewJeans Had Planned a Rebirth. The Performance Ended in Tears.

    K-pop’s most imaginative group has been battling its powerhouse label. Our critic watched as its first concert in months was upended by a court ruling.For most of the last three years, the most clever, artful and progressive act in K-pop has been NewJeans, a five-member girl group — Danielle, Haerin, Hanni, Hyein and Minji — with an almost preternatural musical and aesthetic sophistication. With one elegantly rendered chart-topping single after another, the artists, who range in age from 16 to 20, seemed invincible.Which is why the group’s announcement, last November, that it wished to terminate its contract with its label and management agency, Ador — a sublabel of the K-pop conglomerate Hybe — was such a watershed moment. NewJeans said that its differences with the company were irreconcilable, and that it would move on separately.Ador took exception, leading to back-and-forth legal fusillades. (A lawsuit about the validity of the contract will begin with a hearing on April 3.) Last month, NewJeans’ members announced they were taking on a new name, NJZ, and that the group would perform for the first time under that moniker at ComplexCon Hong Kong, which took place this past weekend.Two days before the performance, though, the Seoul Central District court approved an injunction requested by Ador that precluded NewJeans from participating in or initiating any new commercial activity as NJZ. A representative for the group said that it would appeal.Ominously, a statement from Ador said it would have representatives at the Hong Kong show: “We will be fully present at ComplexCon this weekend to guarantee the performance is presented under the NewJeans name. We eagerly anticipate meeting with the artists for a heartfelt conversation at the earliest opportunity.”Minji performed Upsahl’s “Smile for the Camera,” a charged pop-rock song about chafing at authority. Lam Yik Fei for The New York TimesWe 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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    Wild Up’s Darkness Sounding Festival: The Power of Tuning

    The Los Angeles collective Wild Up brought its Darkness Sounding festival to New York, with some of the event’s appeal lost in transit.The subject of tuning in music tends to attract two kinds of enthusiasts: scientists and poets.Scientists speak in ratios, fractions and cents, a unit of measurement that captures tiny distances between pitches. For them, the question of temperament — how to space out the steps of a scale so that its component notes ring out in tune with one another — is a beautiful mathematical riddle.For the poets, the subject is rich in metaphors. It is about relationships, of one string on the violin to its neighbor. When affinities line up perfectly, you can hear the sound glow with sympathetic resonance. The impurities that creep into certain intervals under the Western system of equal temperament reveal truths about conflict and compromise.Last weekend, 92NY became a laboratory for exploring both the mystical and the physical dimensions of alternate tunings as part of the festival Darkness Sounding, presented by the Los Angeles-based collective Wild Up under the direction of Christopher Rountree. “In music, tuning sets the stakes and the boundaries of our world,” Wild Up’s program notes said. “It is the carbon we build mountains with and the oxygen we breathe in; it is our environment, and within the duration of a piece, it becomes us.”The three-day festival included world premieres, 20th-century works and a rare complete performance of the “Rosary” Sonatas by the 17th-century composer Heinrich Biber. It offered a vibrant spectrum of sound worlds, from booming drones amplified at earsplitting levels to placid pools of shimmering textures. As a luxury-cast demonstration of the expressive power of tuning, the concerts were a ringing success. But as an immersive listening experience — as a “space for reflection and transformation where sound becomes landscape, ritual, and revelation,” as the program described it — the festival fell short of its ambitions.The composer and violinist Andrew McIntosh performed a marathon of Biber’s “Rosary” Sonatas.Joseph SinnottDarkness Sounding started out in California as a winter ritual that mixed innovative programs with novel settings, such as moonlit serenades and sound meditations for listeners seated in circles. In New York, Wild Up’s innovative programs were shoehorned into a traditional concert setting. This contrast felt especially jarring during Friday night’s opening concert at Kaufmann Concert Hall, which consisted of three long, static works that ask a listener to surrender control and allow time to dissolve into physical sound, but that would have benefited from a more mindful setting.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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    Do You Know the Classic Works That Inspired These Popular Family Movies?

    “The Lion King,” first released as an animated film in 1994, has spawned multiple adaptations and sequels, including Julie Taymor’s 1997 Broadway production and a soundtrack companion album by Beyoncé for the 2019 computer-enhanced movie version. The plot of the story, about a young lion finding his place in the world, has been compared to which play by William Shakespeare? More

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    Marty Callner, Director of Comedy Specials and Music Videos, Dies at 78

    At HBO in the late 1970s, he established the template for presenting stand-up on the small screen. He then became a mainstay of MTV in its early days.Marty Callner, a pioneering director of comedy specials who set the template for the genre at HBO in the 1970s before going on to make music videos infused with humor during the early heyday of MTV, died on March 17 at his home in Malibu, Calif. He was 78.His son Jazz Callner said the cause was not yet known.Over a half-century, Mr. Callner worked with some of the biggest names in popular culture, including Jerry Seinfeld, Madonna, Robin Williams, George Carlin, the Rolling Stones and Chris Rock.Mr. Callner, who preferred to stay in the background but was far from shy, “might be the most successful director you have never heard of,” Jason Zinoman of The New York Times wrote in 2022.One day in the early 1980s, Mr. Callner had an epiphany. While watching television at his home in Beverly Hills, he found himself enraptured by a music video. It was Kim Carnes’s “Bette Davis Eyes” — and he couldn’t take his eyes off it.“I said, ‘This is unbelievable,’” he recalled on the “HawkeTalk” podcast in 2021. He called it “the most artistic and entertaining thing I’ve ever seen” and recalled thinking, “I’ve got to go do this.”Marty Callner in his home office in 2022 with a Sports Emmy Award that he won for the football reality series “Hard Knocks.”Peter Fisher for The New York TimesWe 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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    Brian James, Pioneer of Punk Rock, Is Dead at 70

    As the guitarist and main songwriter for the Damned, he helped spark an explosion on the British music scene in the 1970s.Brian James, who helped spark the punk-rock revolution in Britain in the 1970s as the lead guitarist and chief songwriter of the British band the Damned, bringing a rare degree of musicality to a genre known for its chain-saw attack, died on March 6. He was 70.His death was announced on his Facebook page. The announcement did not cite a cause or say where he died.Mr. James formed the Damned in London in 1976 with Dave Vanian, a former gravedigger, on lead vocals; Captain Sensible on bass, and Rat Scabies on drums. The band was part of Britain’s original punk vanguard.The Damned never shook British society, or the rock world at large, like the Sex Pistols, who sneered at the queen, hurled obscenities on television talk shows and had pundits mulling the collapse of Western values. Nor did they play the part of political revolutionaries like the Clash, who were billed as “the only band that matters.”Nevertheless, the Damned made history. They were the first British punk band to release a single: “New Rose,” written by Mr. James, in October 1976 (the Sex Pistols’ anthemic “Anarchy in the U.K.,” soon followed); the first to release an album, “Damned Damned Damned,” in 1977; and the first to tour the United States.The Damned in 1977, from left: Captain Sensible, Mr. James, Dave Vanian and Rat Scabies.Jorgen Angel/Redferns, via Getty ImagesWe 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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    Sasha Stone, an Original Oscars Blogger, Takes on Hollywood

    Sasha Stone, who has been covering awards season since the ’90s, has recast herself as a voice against what she perceives as the industry’s liberal status quo.Earlier this month Sasha Stone watched the Oscars alone at her home in a town outside Los Angeles. For someone who has spent more than two decades as one of the premier chroniclers of awards season, it was a notably unglamorous way to take in the ceremony. But she was thrilled that “Anora,” the frantic story of a New York stripper’s romance with a young Russian man, took top honors as part of a historic haul.Stone believed the film had the virtue of not pushing a partisan agenda, which has become one of the top criteria for her when judging a movie. When she made her name as an Oscars blogger, Stone believes she fit neatly into the Hollywood status quo and the brand of liberalism it represented — often onscreen. She says now she sees the error of her old ways, even if she continues to understand the old ways better than conservatives who were never part of that world.“Here is where I run into problems with the right,” Stone said in an interview the day after the ceremony. “They’re never going to give any credit to the Oscars or Hollywood. I knew the script was going to be, ‘The Oscars suck,’ and I was going to have to stand apart from that.”Stone’s advice to the right: Take the win. And after some Monday-morning carping, it collectively did. The ceremony drew praise from conservatives for its largely apolitical content (just one brief comment about President Trump by the host, Conan O’Brien) and for Kieran Culkin’s acceptance speech, in which he publicly asked his wife for more kids — “relatable to any middle-American,” said a Daily Caller writer.Mikey Madison in the Oscar-winning “Anora,” a favorite of Stone’s. NeonStone, 60, is that increasingly familiar figure in conservative life: an apostate from the mainstream, in recovery from her earlier liberalism. During the 2010s, as popular culture appeared to be moving to the left, she had been out in front, celebrating pathbreaking Oscar winners like “Moonlight” and “Parasite.” She also publicly supported Democrats including Hillary Clinton and Joseph R. Biden Jr.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