Aurelia Butler

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    Tyla Avoids a Bad Romance, and 9 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Olivia Rodrigo, Gary Clark Jr. featuring Stevie Wonder, Four Tet and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Tyla, ‘Safer’Following her worldwide 2023 hit “Water,” the South African songwriter Tyla has now released her self-titled debut album, merging African rhythms with English lyrics and R&B delivery. The album’s songs toggle between approach — like “Water” — and avoidance. In “Safer,” Tyla pulls away from temptation. The song harnesses the log-drum beat and sparse, subterranean bass lines of South African amapiano as Tyla worries that “This feels too good to be true” and decides, “As bad as I want you, I know that it’s danger.” Choral call-and-response vocals carry South African tradition into the electronic wilderness of 21st-century romance. JON PARELESOlivia Rodrigo, ‘So American’Olivia Rodrigo knows all too well how susceptible a young woman can be to physical attraction and a good line. With the speedy, pumping new wave rock and breathless vocals of “So American” — from the extended version of her 2023 album, “Guts (Spilled)” — she sums up a guy with “hands that make hell seem cold” who “laughs at all my jokes and says I’m so American.” For three frantic minutes, self-consciousness is no match for pheromones. PARELESRemi Wolf, ‘Cinderella’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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    N.Y. Philharmonic Adds 2 Premieres to a Diet of Classics

    Jaap van Zweden, the orchestra’s music director, led new works by Joel Thompson and Tan Dun amid pieces by Mozart, Beethoven and Mendelssohn.When Jaap van Zweden, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, led the orchestra at the beginning of the year, the program featured repertory hits: a Wagner prelude, a Beethoven piano concerto and a Brahms symphony. Last week he returned with more of the same: a Mendelssohn overture, a Mozart piano concerto and a Beethoven symphony.This felt a little like “let Jaap be Jaap,” with van Zweden — whose short Philharmonic tenure ends in a few months — finally freed of the burden of presenting new works and past rarities, and able to focus wholly on the standards that have been at the center of his conducting career.But on Thursday at David Geffen Hall, he — or at least the administrators who have encouraged more adventure in his choices — offered a reminder that his time in New York had not been entirely without variety. In fact, the concert offered something unusual in the orchestral field: In a mixed program that will be repeated on Saturday and Sunday, the two (two!) premieres on the first half together lasted longer than the Mendelssohn symphony (yes, more Mendelssohn) after intermission.It was too bad that neither of those new pieces made a positive impression and that performing them together worked against both.First came Joel Thompson’s “To See the Sky,” obscurely subtitled “an exegesis for orchestra.” Two years ago, the Philharmonic premiered Thompson’s sumptuously moody song cycle “The Places We Leave.” Now 35, he has largely specialized in vocal music, and the 20-minute “To See the Sky,” heard for the first time on Thursday, is his longest instrumental work; you got the sense of a young composer trying to figure out how to fill such a substantial span.The titles of the piece’s three sections together form a quotation from the musician Cécile McLorin Salvant: “Sometimes/you have to gaze into a well/to see the sky.” From its beginning, with a series of soft rumbles that explode into violent bursts, much of the work alternates sections of loud and bumptious rhythms, like a parody of hip-hop beats, with periods of subdued lyricism. But these repetitive assertive-then-reticent cycles don’t accumulate interest or tension — though there are nice touches, like the sound of a trumpet flecked with harp.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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    ‘Art Talent Show’: A Documentary Celebration and Sendup

    “Art Talent Show” follows students applying to a prestigious Czech academy. The film is both a tribute to the contemporary scene and a sendup.Have you ever stood in an art gallery, contemplating a vacuum, wondering if it’s art or if the maintenance staff just forgot to put it away? I love this feeling. To me, art is supposed to leave us re-evaluating everything we think we know about the world. But it does underline how knotty and capricious judging art can be — a matter also taken up by “Art Talent Show.”Directed by Tomas Bojar and Adela Komrzy, “Art Talent Show” (opening this week in theaters) follows hopeful applicants to Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts, the oldest art college in the Czech Republic. When the film was on the festival circuit, it garnered comparisons to the movies of Frederick Wiseman: patient, witty observational portraits of institutions that coax audiences to draw conclusions about their ultimate theses. In this case, the subjects are the young artists in the process of grueling entrance exams. That includes being grilled by faculty who sometimes seem bent on messing with them just a little, whether it’s prodding a student into saying smoking might be good for the environment because it kills humans, or challenging their views of the art market.The teachers are hardly rigid traditionalists, but they are of a different generation from the students. That means conversations about gender and sexuality, as well as commodification and what truly counts as provocative, are all part of the film. But the movie smartly situates the whole process inside the larger institution, with the receptionist in the lobby providing a riotous counterbalance to all the artiness therein.“Art Talent Show” is itself provocative but also hilarious, both a sendup and a tribute to the complexity of contemporary art. It reminded me of another favorite documentary: Claire Simon’s “The Competition” (2016, streaming on Metrograph at Home), which follows would-be filmmakers hoping to be admitted to the prestigious Parisian school La Fémis. They also face panels of faculty grilling them about their views and aspirations, and the results are equally revealing.Admittedly, both of these films made me very happy to have finished school long ago. But what I loved most was how they spotlight complex attitudes about the relationship between identity, craft and art, even in highly progressive contexts — and how fun they are to watch while they do it. More

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    ‘West Indies’: The Slave Ship Musical You Didn’t Know Existed

    “West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty,” a 1979 African movie musical, has quietly built a devoted fan base. Now, it’s back in a restoration.It’s safe to say that the Mauritanian French director Med Hondo’s “West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty” is a unique film. That might be the only safe thing about it.The first African movie musical, it traces nearly four centuries of French colonialism with unsparing clarity and relentless creativity, shot entirely on a replica of a slave ship built within an abandoned Citroën factory in Paris.Since its wonky release in 1979, it has quietly built a group of devoted fans, including the Oscar-winning filmmaker Barry Jenkins, who placed it at the top of his list of the greatest films of all time for Sight & Sound magazine in 2022. But a new 4K restoration and a weeklong run at Film Forum might finally land it in the wider canon.That lack of recognition has been neither accidental nor surprising. When Hondo’s feature debut, “Soleil Ô,” a docudrama about Black immigrant life, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1970, it landed him at the vanguard of the still-nascent African cinema, but its subject matter made future financing difficult to secure. He raised money for “West Indies,” an adaptation of Daniel Boukman’s play “The Slavers,” through African private investors and a loan from Algeria’s public broadcasting organization; many cast members were his friends and worked without pay.“When you watch his films, which speak truth to power in a very direct, albeit extremely artful, way, you can see why this is not a filmmaker who was widely accepted by the mainstream,” said Ashley Clark, the curatorial director of the Criterion Collection, a sister company of Janus Films, which is distributing the touring restoration.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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    LSU’s Flau’Jae Johnson Drops New Song With NLE Choppa As NCAA Tournament Starts

    The sophomore guard is prepping collaborations with hip-hop heavyweights like Lil Wayne and NLE Choppa as she helps L.S.U. defend its basketball title in the N.C.A.A. tournament.When Flau’jae Johnson helped lead the Louisiana State University women’s basketball team to a national championship last April, in her first season on the squad, she ascended to the top of the sport. The win, the school’s first title, also vaulted her as a hip-hop artist, lifting a career that has found her teaming up with rap royalty.At least twice in the past year, Johnson staged rap performances within 24 hours of a game or a practice, in one instance opening for the chart-topping rapper and singer Rod Wave in Atlanta after traveling from Louisiana on a day off from the court. She walked offstage to body cramps after another performance in November; she had scored 17 points in a game hours before her show.“I know this is what I’m supposed to be doing,” said Johnson, 20, a sophomore guard who averages 14.2 points per game and over 62,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. “If you want to be a legend at something, you’ve got to do something nobody has done before and execute it at a high level.”Johnson’s two careers went into overdrive over the past year, and she’s balancing both as L.S.U. prepares to defend its title in the N.C.A.A. tournament, starting with its first-round game on Friday. The same day, Johnson plans to release “AMF (Ain’t My Fault),” her new song with the rapper NLE Choppa, who last year asked her and her L.S.U. teammate Angel Reese to appear in the video for his single “Champions”; they made cameos alongside other top athletes including the boxers Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Mike Tyson. Johnson then asked NLE Choppa to collaborate on “AMF,” which will premiere on Snapchat through a partnership with the social media platform.Johnson often composes lyrics during flights to away games and records songs in between basketball practices.Carly Mackler/Getty Images“She’s redefining and showcasing the renaissance and the revolution that is possible in women’s sports,” said Ketra Armstrong, a professor of sports management at the University of Michigan. “She’s showing not only how you do it, but how you do it masterfully without compromising one for the other.”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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    Insooni Breaks Racial Barrier to Become Beloved Singer in South Korea

    Born to a South Korean mother and a Black American soldier, she rose to a pioneering stardom in a country that has long discriminated against biracial children.When she took the stage to perform at Carnegie Hall in front of 107 Korean War veterans, the singer Kim Insoon was thinking of her father, an American soldier stationed in South Korea during the postwar decades whom she had never met or even seen.“You are my fathers,” she told the soldiers in the audience before singing “Father,” one of her Korean-language hits.“To me, the United States has always been my father’s country,” Ms. Kim said in a recent interview, recalling that 2010 performance. “It was also the first place where I wanted to show how successful I had become — without him and in spite of him.”Ms. Kim, born in 1957, is better known as Insooni in South Korea, where she is a household name. For over four decades, she has won fans across generations with her passionate and powerful singing style and genre-crossing performances. Fathered by a Black American soldier, she also broke the racial barrier in a country deeply prejudiced against biracial people, especially those born to Korean women and African-American G.I.s.Insooni at a concert in Seoul in March.Woohae Cho for The New York TimesHer enduring and pioneering presence in South Korea’s pop scene helped pave the way for future K-pop groups to globalize with multiethnic lineups.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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    Julie Robinson Belafonte, Dancer, Actress and Activist, Dies at 95

    With the singer Harry Belafonte, she was one half of a celebrated (and sometimes denounced) interracial power couple who pressed the cause of civil rights in the 1960s.Julie Robinson Belafonte, a dancer, actress and, with the singer Harry Belafonte, one half of an interracial power couple who used their high profiles to aid the civil rights movement and the cause of integration in the United States, died on March 9 in Los Angeles. She was 95.Her death, at an assisted living facility in the Studio City neighborhood, was announced by her family. She had resided there for the last year and a half after living for decades in Manhattan.Ms. Belafonte, who was white and the second wife of Mr. Belafonte, the Black Caribbean-American entertainer and activist, had an eclectic career in the arts. At various times she was a dancer, a choreographer, a dance teacher, an actress and a documentary film producer.Ms. Belafonte with Harry Belafonte, whom she married in 1957 shortly after he and his first wife divorced. They had been introduced by Marlon Brando. via Getty ImagesMs. Belafonte traveled the nation and the world with her husband and their children during Mr. Belafonte’s sellout concert tours in the late 1950s and ’60s, presenting an image of a close interracial family that was otherwise rarely seen on television or in newspapers and magazines.She was at Mr. Belafonte’s side when they planned and hosted fund-raisers for civil rights groups, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the more militant Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.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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    Amnon Weinstein, Who Restored Violins From the Holocaust, Dies at 84

    Many had been left behind by victims of the gas chambers. He let the instruments be heard again in melodic tributes through his organization, Violins of Hope.Amnon Weinstein, an Israeli luthier who restored violins belonging to Jews during the Holocaust so that musicians around the world could play them in hopeful, melodic tributes to those silenced in Nazi death camps, died on March 4 in Tel Aviv. He was 84.His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his son Avshalom Weinstein.Mr. Weinstein was the founder of Violins of Hope, an organization that provides the violins he restored to orchestras for concerts and educational programs commemorating the Holocaust. The instruments have been played in dozens of cities worldwide, including Berlin, at an event marking the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.“Violins of Hope, it’s like a huge forest of sounds,” he said in a 2016 PBS documentary. “Each sound is standing for a boy, a girl and men and women that will never talk again. But the violins, when they are played on, will speak for them.”There are more than 60 Holocaust-era violins in his collection.Some belonged to Jews who carried them in suitcases to concentration camps, and who were then forced to play them in orchestras as prisoners marched to the gas chambers. Others were played to pass the time in Jewish ghettos. One was tossed from a train to a railway worker by a man who knew his fate.“In the place where I now go, I don’t need a violin,” the man told the worker, in Mr. Weinstein’s telling. “Here, take my violin so it may live.”Mr. Weinstein in his Tel Aviv workshop. He himself was the son of a violin repairman.Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — 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