Aurelia Butler

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    SZA’s ‘Saturn,’ and 8 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Rhiannon Giddens, Norah Jones, Les Amazones d’Afrique 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 sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.SZA, ‘Saturn’The song SZA introduced in a commercial during the Grammy Awards, “Saturn,” has now been separated from its credit-card plug and released to streaming services in multiple versions; one, the sped-up version, brings out its clear pop structure. But the real-time version is better. The song is about a longing for the better place that her karma has earned: “Stuck in this paradigm/Don’t believe in paradise,” she sings. Arpeggios glimmer around her; a boom-bap beat brings an undertow. Her vocal lines argue with the beat as she joins generations of Afrofuturists like Sun Ra, looking beyond Earth and insisting, “There’s got to be more.” JON PARELESLes Amazones d’Afrique, ‘Musow Danse’“Musow Danse” (“Women’s Dance”) is the title track of the jubilant new album by Les Amazones D’Afrique: a Pan-African, proudly multilingual alliance of singers and songwriters carrying feminist messages to dance floors. “Musow Danse” is propelled by gritty distorted electronics and traditional drumming; it features Mamani Keïta from Mali, Fafa Ruffino from Benin, Dobet Gnahoré from the Ivory Coast and Kandy Guira from Mali, singing (respectively) in Bambara, Fon, Bété and Mooré, and sharing the chorus, “Rise up African woman!” PARELESA.G. Cook, ‘Britpop’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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    Review: A Case for Understated Majesty at the Philharmonic

    A new piano concerto written for Emanuel Ax, and an old symphony by Rachmaninoff, reward close listening in a program conducted by Eun Sun Kim.I always wince when people say they like classical music, “but not the new stuff.”Comments like that are not only shortsighted — the old stuff was, in its time, of course new and often radical — but they also don’t take into account how varied contemporary music is, and how much of it is actually quite easy to love.Take Anders Hillborg’s second piano concerto, “The MAX Concerto,” which had its local premiere with the New York Philharmonic on Thursday. Programmed somewhat arbitrarily between works by Sibelius and Rachmaninoff, it was more entertaining than either of them, and just as well crafted.First performed in October in San Francisco, the concerto acknowledges the lineage of its genre with playfulness and reverence, and showcases Emanuel Ax, the soloist for whom it was written, by matching and pushing his brand of modest, underrated virtuosity. Likable without being eager to please, thrilling without shameless dazzle, it is, like Ax, enjoyable simply because it’s excellent.And, crucially, Hillborg’s concerto works regardless of how familiar a listener is with his music, or any classical music for that matter. You could be aware of the piece’s form — its nine evocatively titled sections, performed as a single, 21-minute movement — or smile at “MAX,” a contraction of “Manny Ax.” You could pick up on the opening passage’s nod to Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, or a later suggestion of Bach. Or you could just sit back and sense, intuitively, the genial majesty and pleasure coursing through it all.One of the great nice guys in music, Ax is a pianist who, over his five-decade career, seems to have made no enemies while sitting quietly, comfortably near the top of his field, whether as chamber partner to Yo-Yo Ma or as a champion of contemporary works premiering a new concerto by John Adams — “Century Rolls,” whose section “Manny’s Gym” is one of the single most beautiful movements written in our time.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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    How to Watch the 2024 SAG Awards: Date, Time and Streaming

    The awards, which are streaming live on Netflix for the first time, will offer a preview of some key Oscars races. Barbra Streisand will be on hand, too.Cord-cutters rejoice: Normally, watching an awards show involves subscribing to a live TV service (or remembering which of your email addresses you haven’t already used for a free trial).But on Saturday, for the first time, Netflix will be streaming the annual Screen Actors Guild Awards, potentially bringing them to a much wider audience.The 15 awards, which are voted on by actors and other performers who belong to the SAG-AFTRA union, honor the best film and television performances from the past year. They can be a bellwether for the Oscars, happening this year on March 10. (Since 1996, 83 of the 112 stars and films that won Oscars for best picture or acting first won a SAG Award.)This year’s ceremony is shaping up to be a “Barbenheimer” rematch: The two summer blockbusters — “Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s biopic about the physicist known as the father of the atomic bomb, and “Barbie,” Greta Gerwig’s unique spin on the Mattel doll — each picked up a pack-leading four nominations and will be competing for the guild’s top prize, best ensemble.There’s also intrigue in the best film actress race: Lily Gladstone, who plays an Osage woman married to a white man involved in a murderous conspiracy in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” has blazed a trail through awards season, taking home honors from the Golden Globes, the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle. But Emma Stone, who plays a grown woman with the mind of a child in the “Frankenstein”-inspired black comedy “Poor Things,” came out on top at the BAFTAs and the Critics Choice Awards (and won her own Globe in the musical or comedy category).Now, on Saturday night, we’ll get our strongest indication yet as to which way academy voters are leaning. We’ll also get an appearance from Barbra Streisand. Here’s how to watch.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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    In This Heroes’ Tale, Real People Risk Their Lives to Get to Europe

    Matteo Garrone’s Oscar-nominated feature “Io Capitano” dramatizes the harrowing journeys made by thousands of Africans each month looking for a better life in Europe.At the end of “Io Capitano” (“I Captain”), Matteo Garrone’s harrowing contender for best international film at next month’s Academy Awards, a map tracks the journey taken by the film’s two teenage protagonists: over 3,500 miles from Dakar, Senegal, to Sicily, via the scorching Nigerien desert, horrific Libyan prisons and a nerve-racking Mediterranean crossing aboard a rickety vessel.Such perilous voyages, taken each year by countless Africans seeking a new life in Europe, is “one of the great dramas of our times,” Garrone said in a recent interview, and “Io Capitano” is framed as an epic, modern-day Odyssey, with protagonists no less valiant than Homer’s hero.“It’s a journey that’s an archetype so that anyone can identify with it,” said Garrone, who is best known to international audiences for the hyper-realistic 2008 drama “Gomorrah” and his dark and fantastical “Pinocchio” (2019).“Io Capitano” is also, he said, a “document of contemporary history.” This month alone, over 2,000 people reached European shores by crossing the Mediterranean, while at least 74 died, bringing the number of people who have gone missing in that sea in the last decade to more than 29,000, according to the International Organization for Migration, a United Nations agency.Many Europeans learn of these landings, and deaths, from short news segments, often accompanied by clips of lawmakers pledging to stop illegal migration. Garrone’s film, which won the Silver Lion for best directing at last year’s Venice Film Festival, goes beyond the statistics with a plot based on stories of real people crossing the Mediterranean.Garrone said that the migrants’ stories he heard called to mind the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad.via Cohen Media GroupWe 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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    Documentaries That Examine Russia’s War in Ukraine

    After the death of Russian dissident Aleksei A. Navalny, these four movies examine the war in unexpected ways.Veselka, the Ukrainian diner on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, is one of the few restaurants in the city that truly deserves to be called venerable, even iconic. Mention it to most anyone — especially those of us who were here around the turn of the 21st century — and it provokes pierogi- and borscht-inflected rhapsodies, happy memories of a late-night tuck into a steaming plate of Ukrainian comfort food.Veselka has also become a center for New York’s support for embattled Ukrainians, as shown in Michael Fiore’s new documentary, “Veselka: The Rainbow on the Corner at the Center of the World.” (David Duchovny narrates.) Veselka’s third-generation proprietor, Jason Birchard, is of Ukrainian ancestry, and many of the staff are from the country as well. When war broke out, the restaurant started collecting money and clothing to send to the front; what’s more, Birchard began helping staff sponsor family members in their efforts to move to safety in America.The film (in theaters now) starts as a fun story about a New York institution, and its tone is resolutely hopeful and convivial. But it rapidly becomes a demonstration of a community’s efforts to support loved ones under siege, and that makes it much richer and fuller than it might otherwise have been. If you know Veselka, you might choke up a bit.I happened to be watching “Veselka” the day news broke of dissident Aleksei A. Navalny’s death in a Russian prison, which is not the same story but certainly related. I wrote about “Navalny,” Daniel Roher’s Oscar-winning documentary that covers his opposition to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, and thought of other films that help illuminate the war in Ukraine years into the struggle.“Donbass” (streaming on the Criterion Channel and Kanopy) is Sergei Loznitsa’s darkly absurd comedy that elliptically pokes miserable fun at the way ordinary people become caught up in propaganda, violence and systems of repression, specifically in eastern Ukraine. “Donbass” isn’t technically a documentary (there are actors and a script), but Loznitsa often makes nonfiction, and elements threaded throughout this film blur lines between fiction and nonfiction, making you wonder what you’re actually looking at.“A House Made of Splinters” (rent on most major platforms), directed by Simon Lereng Wilmont, was nominated alongside “Navalny” at last year’s Oscars. It’s an observational film, set in an eastern Ukraine home for children who are separated from their parents. Through their eyes, we gain a new view of the bleak human factors that spring up in wartime — violence, drugs, poverty — and that suggest, with an almost unbearable gentleness, the generational repercussions to come.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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    Cartier’s Perfumer Creates Scents for ‘Prometheus’ Music

    Mathilde Laurent, Cartier’s perfumer, has created a scent poem that enhances the experience of Scriabin’s synesthetic score for “Prometheus.”It was time to smell Scriabin’s “Prometheus: The Poem of Fire.”This music, from 1910, has an element of synesthesia in its score, which calls for a color organ — a keyboard instrument that projects lights of a dozen hues — along with a full orchestra, a piano soloist and a choir. But in October at Davies Symphony Hall, the home of the San Francisco Symphony, the piece was being prepared with an additional sense in mind.A group had gathered in the auditorium to test an almost unheard-of idea: that a performance could be accompanied by something like an olfactory poem, a narrative series of perfumes released through diffusers between seats and a set of futuristic cannons, called vortexes, that were developed for this occasion to shoot out rings of scented smoke.Onstage, the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet practiced his solo part in “Prometheus,” which the San Francisco Symphony will perform March 1 through 3, while the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen listened attentively to the wooden vortexes as they were being tested; the sound they made while emitting smoke, he noticed, was nearly a G.Mathilde Laurent, Cartier’s longtime perfumer, who had designed the scents, double-checked notes on her iPad. For this day’s test, without the orchestra, she wanted to be sure the diffusers were timed to match the music. So they were going to play a recording overhead.They had settled on one that Claudio Abbado made with the Berlin Philharmonic and the pianist Martha Argerich in the 1990s. After the Breton engineers who had designed and assembled the vortexes told everyone to take their seats, the “Prometheus” team quieted down, and waited.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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    ‘Mea Culpa’ Review: Who’s Really to Blame, and for What?

    The tagline of Tyler Perry’s new movie is “everyone’s guilty of something,” but the responsibility for this willfully steamy, decidedly silly thriller is all his.Is creating a guilty pleasure something a director can — or even should — aim for? That’s one of the questions wafting over the writer-director Tyler Perry’s willfully steamy thriller “Mea Culpa.”Cast for sizzle, the movie stars the singer-actor Kelly Rowland as Mea Harper, a Chicago defense attorney, and Trevante Rhodes (“Moonlight”) as a successful painter accused of killing his girlfriend. Her body has yet to been found, but there were skull fragments in one of his paintings.The assistant district attorney Ray Hawthorne (Nick Sagar) hopes to leverage the case for a mayoral run. He’s also Mea’s brother-in-law. In the firm clutches of the matriarch Azalia (Kerry O’Malley), the Hawthornes are an ambitious clan who appear to have borrowed much of their dialogue from the daytime soaps of yore. Among Mea’s reasons for taking this case is the Hawthorne family’s condescension and the excessive deference her husband, Kal, (Sean Sagar) shows his mother. (In case the family isn’t close enough, the actors Sean and Nick Sagar are brothers).Rowland commits to the thankless task of playing a smart woman gone stupid. Rhodes can’t do much with Zyair, whose affect is more flat than seductive. Or, as Mea’s private investigator and friend Jimmy (RonReaco Lee, a bright spot) quips: Zyair’s either a great liar or a psychopath.While the movie teases with its “is he or isn’t he a murderer?” quandary, the soundtrack boasts killer tunes, including Isaac Hayes’s cover of “Walk on By,” playing like a caution the first time Mea visits Zyair’s loft. The warning goes unheeded, and the two embark on a possibly dangerous and decidedly silly liaison, one that taps into spousal angst and features plenty of soft-core intrigue.Mea CulpaRated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, language, some violence and drug use. Running time: 2 hours. Watch on Netflix. More

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    Manslaughter Trial Begins of ‘Rust’ Armorer in Alec Baldwin Shooting

    Prosecutors said the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, was responsible for the presence of live ammunition on the set and for failing to check the gun; the defense said she was a scapegoat.The involuntary manslaughter trial of the armorer who loaded the gun Alec Baldwin was rehearsing with on the set of “Rust” when it fired, killing the movie’s cinematographer, began on Thursday with prosecutors accusing her of performing “sloppy and incomplete” safety checks of the weapon and of being responsible for the presence of live rounds on the set.During opening arguments one of the prosecutors told the jury that the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, had treated gun safety protocols on the film set “as if they were optional,” leading her to miss the fact that she had loaded a live round into an old-fashioned revolver she was preparing for Mr. Baldwin.The gun went off as he practiced drawing it at a blocking rehearsal, killing the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins.“We believe that it was the negligent acts and failures of the defendant, Ms. Gutierrez, that resulted in both the acts that contributed to Ms. Hutchins’s death and to the live rounds being brought onto the set,” the prosecutor, Jason J. Lewis, said in the First Judicial District Courthouse in Santa Fe, N.M., as the trial began.Mr. Baldwin is being tried separately on an involuntary manslaughter charge. He has pleaded not guilty.On the day of the fatal shooting — Oct. 21, 2021 — the crew was setting up a tight frame of Mr. Baldwin drawing a revolver ahead of a gunfight when the weapon fired a live round, striking Ms. Hutchins and then hitting the movie’s director, Joel Souza, who survived.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