Aurelia Butler

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    Jay Schwartz’s Music Reflects a Past of Oceans and Deserts

    The composer’s latest work, “Theta,” born of the pandemic, loss and long swims in open water, is premiering in Germany.In early March 2020, the composer Jay Schwartz traveled to San Diego from his home in Cologne, Germany, to attend the funeral for Don Bukovich — his stepfather and the only person in his extended family with an affinity for classical music.Bukovich was especially fond of music by Bach. And, when the pandemic hit and Schwartz got stuck in San Diego and stayed with his brother, he found himself playing Bach’s “Komm, süßer Tod” (“Come, Sweet Death”) over and over at the piano. He also went for long swims in the Pacific Ocean, far from the shoreline.“You reach a kind of euphoric state,” Schwartz said in an interview. “You’re in the ocean and you’re euphoric because of the natural beauty, but also because you’re on the cusp of extreme danger.”As Schwartz swam, he thought about musical ideas: an unusual chord progression in the Bach piece; glissandos, the sliding from one note to another; and an aural illusion known as the Shepard tone, the sonic equivalent of a barber’s pole.“I started to superimpose those things in an intuitive way, not thinking it was a concept,” Schwartz said. “It just happened while in the ocean.”By June 2020, Schwartz had finished a new piece for orchestra based on those ideas. He called it “Theta,” after the Greek letter once used as a symbol for death.No one had commissioned the work. But a week after it was completed, Schwartz received a call from the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra. Its music director, Teodor Currentzis, was planning a program built around Gustav Mahler’s final, incomplete Symphony No. 10, and wanted Schwartz to compose a piece.Schwartz considered writing something new. But, as he researched the end of Mahler’s life, Schwartz realized that the symphony and “Theta” had both been inspired by Bach works related to death. The pieces also shared an interest in mortality’s release: As he composed, Mahler wrote in a poem to his wife, Alma, that he hoped for “the bliss of death in the most painful hours.”On Thursday, Currentzis and the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra will premiere “Theta” and other responses to Mahler’s Symphony No. 10 in Stuttgart, followed by performances in Hamburg, Freiburg and Berlin. The concerts are a milestone for Schwartz, 58, an artist with no formal composition training who has forged a career largely parallel to the structures of contemporary classical music in Germany.Schwartz, behind at right, at a recent rehearsal led by the conductor Teodor Currentzis, at the podium.Felix Broede for The New York TimesDespite — or, as Schwartz sees it, because of — his lack of academic education, his music is unmistakable. All his pieces include glissandos, which he uses to create arresting parabolas of texture. “There is no glissando without dissonance,” Currentzis said in an interview. “Always he puts a note that keeps, and then the glissando creates the nirvana of the dissonance, of falling apart.” At key moments, these tendrils of sound alight on major and minor chords: familiar harmonies rendered new.Schwartz’s pieces have clearly audible forms and stark climaxes, taking obvious pleasure in sound. “Musical events happen that achieve a kind of breathing or wave-shaped forms,” Bernd Feuchtner, a writer and the artistic director of the Handel Festival in Halle, Germany, said in a phone interview. He added that when he hears a new Schwartz piece, “I’m always sitting on the edge of my seat.”The conductor Matthias Pintscher has said of Schwartz, “For me, he’s a Schubert of our time.”SCHWARTZ’S FATHER was a boxer turned pool maintenance worker; his mother, a homemaker who later worked as a schoolteacher. Schwartz, who was born in San Diego, showed musical talent early: At 4, he would pick out snatches of the easy listening music his parents liked on his plastic toy piano. At 7, he began formal lessons.His parents divorced in 1979, and his mother moved Schwartz and his two brothers to Deming, N.M., whose desert landscape he loved. He began practicing to become a classical pianist. Schwartz studied music at Arizona State University, where he won his first and only piano competition.“The best art, at least that I’ve done, I don’t feel like I’m inventing it,” Schwartz said. “I find it, in the sense of excavating, going into something, and digging something up.”Felix Broede for The New York Times “I was taught that that was the thing I should be doing: playing Rachmaninoff concerti, and not making them up myself,” Schwartz said. “I actually did play a Rachmaninoff concerto with the college orchestra. And at the end it was like, ‘Did that, got the T-shirt. I’m out of here.’”In 1989, Schwartz traveled to the university town of Tübingen, Germany, for what was supposed to be a one-year exchange program as part of his graduate school studies in Arizona. He has lived in Germany ever since.Schwartz considered studying musicology, but a professor, citing his then-rudimentary German, discouraged him. Instead, Schwartz practiced the language and worked on the assembly line of a Mercedes-Benz factory. “I was either listening to German grammar or to music, because the job was super boring,” he said. “You could sit there for hours and not have a single part come by.” (He now speaks German so fluently he sometimes needs a moment to find an English word.)In 1990, Schwartz became an assistant in the musical archives of the Stuttgart State Theater, where he did what he described as “menial tasks.” Later, the theater noticed his composition skill, and hired him to write small pieces of incidental music. The job wasn’t for him. “I don’t like being subordinate to some director saying, ‘I need four bars of minor’ and those kinds of ridiculous demands,” Schwartz said.But he did take advantage of free tickets to everything at the theater. He saw opera, ballet or theater nearly every night, and listened to contemporary music on public radio. He made some of his closest friends in those years. Still, it was a time of soul-searching. “An identity crisis comes with entering a foreign country,” Schwartz said. “And that whole identity crisis is super important for forming an artist. I had years when I couldn’t compose. When it did happen, it was a flood.”His catalog includes 16 pieces of chamber music, five vocal works, an opera, a recent recomposition of Schubert’s “Winterreise” for voice and saxophone ensemble, a piece for voices and orchestra, and eight pieces in the series “Music for Orchestra,” of which “Theta” is the most recent.Schwartz began the “Music for Orchestra” series in 2002, when a cellist friend asked him to write a piece for 12 of his students and a semiprofessional string quintet, “Music for 17 String Instruments.” A year later, the artistic director of the German National Theater in Weimar commissioned him to compose incidental music for a stage adaptation of Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” with a full orchestra at Schwartz’s disposal.“He wanted me to copy Tchaikovsky, which I did,” Schwartz said. “At the same time, I looked at the recording plan, and I had a ridiculous amount of time in the recording studio.” He took the opportunity to orchestrate “Music for 17 String Instruments” and record it.“I put it on their stands, and they did it, like, ‘This is part of the play,’” Schwartz said. “It never entered the play.”That work became the first “Music for Orchestra.” In a phone interview, Eric Marinitsch, the former head of promotion for Universal Edition, Schwartz’s publisher, described hearing the music as a “big bang.”“The piece was so clear in its dramaturgy,” Marinitsch said, “and yet composed with such complex means.”Composed over the past two decades, the pieces of “Music for Orchestra” evoke the austere, ominous beauty and subtle gradations of the environments where Schwartz was raised: the ocean and the desert. “The best art, at least that I’ve done, I don’t feel like I’m inventing it,” he said. “I find it, in the sense of excavating, going into something, and digging something up.”In late November, Schwartz traveled from Cologne, where he lives with his husband, to rehearsals for “Theta.” In an early rehearsal, Schwartz and Currentzis worked to make the individual parts coalesce into a unified texture. “I hear fragments,” Currentzis told the timpanist as he tried to smooth out a long, slow glissando.Working together with visible joy, the conductor and the composer added Mahlerian touches — winds playing with their bells up, a dramatic hammer stroke — to the piece. They sang bits of “Komm, süßer Tod” to demonstrate musical shapes.In a section of frothy trills, Schwartz addressed the woodwinds. “Realize,” he told them, “that you’re part of the wave.” More

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    Humberto Leon’s Making of a Girl Group

    Last year, it became Humberto Leon’s job to shape the appearances of 20 young women, whose ages ranged from 14 to 21.He decided what kind of clothing, shoes and jewelry they would wear. He told them how their hair should be cut and their makeup applied.“You have to imagine, with 20 girls, I want each and every one of them to stand out,” Mr. Leon said.Still, young women do not always take kindly to being told how to dress. There were tears. “That’s not how I like to do my hair,” some of them told Mr. Leon.“I said, ‘I know, but trust me. I’m helping you own your personality,’” Mr. Leon recalled. “They think they know what’s best for them. And I have to give them an objective opinion of what I think would look great on them.”Professionally, it was in their best interest to listen to Mr. Leon. Under his guidance, they could become the main characters in their own makeover montage — a tradition stretching from “Pygmalion” to “The Princess Diaries” to, perhaps more relevant to this group, “The Hunger Games.”Mr. Leon rose to prominence in the aughts with Opening Ceremony, which he founded in 2002 with Carol Lim, a college friend. After the pandemic, he decided to expand his horizons.Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York TimesThese 20 girls were in direct competition with one another. Six of them would eventually be named members of a new pop group. Upon its debut, this group would already have the support of Hybe, the company that brought K-pop to the world, and Universal Music Group, the world’s largest record company. The competition would also be the subject of a Netflix documentary series.Throughout it all, the contestants’ public image would be in the hands of Mr. Leon, a 48-year-old fashion designer who rose to prominence in downtown New York during the 2000s with his store Opening Ceremony — a popular boutique for up-and-coming labels — then was recruited to reinvigorate a luxury brand in Paris, then started opening restaurants with his family during the pandemic in Los Angeles.In September 2022, he was brought on as creative director for this girl group competition — a partnership between Hybe and Geffen Records, which is owned by Universal Music Group — in which 120,000 applicants from around the world were narrowed down to 20 contestants, or “trainees,” all of whom were relocated to Los Angeles to train intensively in singing and dancing.When those contestants were announced in August, Mr. Leon dressed them for their first group photo shoot in matching gray schoolgirl uniforms. They wore blazers bearing the name of their competition: Dream Academy.By November, half of this group was eliminated through a combination of fan voting and judges’ evaluations. The culling was chronicled on YouTube. (“We’re not forming a friend group, we’re forming a girl group,” one young woman said during a particularly tense elimination round.)For the final photo shoot before the six winners were announced, Mr. Leon dressed the trainees now as “elevated” schoolgirls. This time they showed more skin in tailored gray sets, trading their chunky white socks for black mesh, looking like more polished, modern versions of Britney Spears in “ … Baby One More Time,” the music video that made a 16-year-old girl a star.One morning in Hollywood, I watched as Mr. Leon oversaw these final portraits. He reminded one 17-year-old contestant, Megan, to correct her stance. She had a tendency to stand with her legs wide apart, which Mr. Leon had nicknamed “the Megan.” As in, “Don’t do ‘the Megan,’ Megan.”Later, while the 10 remaining trainees filmed a music video, I noticed that Megan had a way of staring down the camera with a cool, come-hither expression — similar to the seductive one Ms. Spears adopted. (Megan, of course, was not yet born when “ … Baby One More Time” was released.)This tendency was not corrected.When it came to being sexy, Mr. Leon said he had always told the girls, “Whatever you’re doing, do it for yourself, because you want to feel that way.”A “Dream Academy” trainee poses at a Hollywood studio days before the final six winners were announced.Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York TimesK-pop, But Not“Dream Academy” was not Mr. Leon’s first time working with a girl group.In 2021, he met the Linda Lindas, a punk quartet that went viral after performing at the Los Angeles Public Library. At the time, its members were between 10 and 16 years old. They had come to eat at Mr. Leon’s restaurant Chifa, named for a Chinese restaurant his mother, Wendy, opened in Peru in the 1970s before the family moved to the United States. When Mr. Leon offered to direct their first music video, the group said yes. “Growing Up” showed the four girls and four cats shredding in a suburban home, dressed in 1970s-inspired outfits.When she saw the video, Michelle An, now president of creative strategy at Interscope Geffen A&M, said she thought it was “so cute and so innovative and so appropriate for their age.” She was particularly taken with the illustrations of cats painted on the girls’ closed eyelids.The final 10 trainees rehearse an original song, “All the Same.” Their outfits, hair and makeup choices were directed by Mr. Leon and his team.Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York TimesMs. An’s job is to help her labels’ artists, like Billie Eilish, with “visual world building,” she said. “You make this music — what imagery do you want out there to help your fans understand what this song is trying to say?”Geffen had an unusual project in the works with Hybe, a Korean entertainment powerhouse. What began as a conversation about music distribution ended with Bang Si-hyuk, the chairman of Hybe, proposing that they build a group together. Hybe would bring elements of K-pop’s famously rigorous training and development program — the same system with which Hybe built BTS — to the United States for the first time, filling it with trainees from various regions, not just East Asia.One hurdle, though, was the Americans’ concern that the group could seem too factory-produced. “K-pop has a reputation of being manufactured,” Ms. An said. Even outside K-pop, the history of boy bands and girl groups reeks of “not being as organic and real,” said John Janick, the chief executive of Interscope Geffen A&M, pointing to glossy reality shows of the 2000s, like “Making the Band.”In order to make the group feel real, the executives said, the girls had to feel real. Their personalities couldn’t be forced; there would be no extreme archetypes, no Posh or Sporty or Baby Spice. They needed someone who could draw out the girls’ distinct backgrounds and abilities but also make them cohere visually as a group. They were convinced Mr. Leon could be that person.“In the entertainment business,” Mr. Janick said, “everybody wants to have taste, but not all people do.”‘A Curious Mind’Instead of going to fashion school, Mr. Leon likes to say, he worked at the Gap for 10 years.At 14, he was hired at a store in West Covina, Calif., and learned he had a skill for designing windows. He continued working on visual displays for Gap while attending the University of California, Berkeley. After graduating in 1997, he accepted a corporate job with Old Navy in San Francisco.In 2000, Mr. Leon left for New York, working at Burberry as the director of visual merchandising. Mr. Leon called Lara one of the most “fashion savvy” of the group.Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York TimesA selection of shoes. Some trainees were more confident performing in heels than others.Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York TimesIn 2002, he founded Opening Ceremony with Carol Lim, a college friend.“We have a similar approach to life,” said Ms. Lim, who was the business-minded chief executive to Mr. Leon’s creative director. “A curious mind,” she called him.A decade later, having cultivated a Midas-touch reputation for coolness, the duo became design directors at Kenzo, a LVMH-owned brand in Paris.At Kenzo, Mr. Leon took a particular interest in marketing visuals. Mr. Bang, the Hybe chairman, called a 2016 fragrance advertisement starring a frenetic dancing Margaret Qualley, directed by Spike Jonze, one of his “favorite fashion artworks.”Mr. Leon and Ms. Lim left Kenzo in 2019, then sold Opening Ceremony and closed its stores in 2020, moving to the same neighborhood in Los Angeles to raise their families.Around this time, Mr. Leon said he had an epiphany: Even if he was “good” at it, he didn’t have to keep working in fashion. “I was able to create a feeling, and a feeling can transfer,” he said. “I decided to open up my world a bit.”Sometimes Mr. Leon still designs clothes; recently he got a call from the choreographer Justin Peck about creating costumes for a spring performance of the New York City Ballet. But what appeals to him now is making things not for runways but for culture. For example, when Heidi Bivens, the costume designer for “Euphoria,” was working on the teen drama’s first season, she sourced several outfits from Opening Ceremony. The “‘Euphoria’ effect” became a phenomenon, inspiring trends in fashion and beauty.The label hoped that given Mr. Leon’s experience raising daughters, he would be sensitive in guiding the young women, here with Megan, through the competition.Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York Times“I went to them, and I said, ‘For Season 2, let’s design this from scratch, so everything you see on ‘Euphoria’ is something we’ve never seen before,’” Mr. Leon said. Consumers could then directly buy the clothes they saw onscreen.That pitch didn’t work out, but it’s an idea Mr. Leon still wants to explore. .‘Trust Me’In November, Mr. Leon showed me a video of his twin daughters at their 10th birthday sleepover. In matching pajamas, the girls recreated choreography from a “Dream Academy” mission. (Missions were essentially live music videos in which the trainees’ singing and dancing skills were tested.) Five of the trainees had participated in a rump-shaking cover of “Buttons” by the Pussycat Dolls.The twins had become invested in who would win the competition. So had fans around the world, some of whom paid for billboards in an effort to drum up votes for their favorites, like Sophia (20, Filipina) and Manon (21, Swiss-Ghanaian).Still, during the 12 weeks that the competition unfolded on YouTube, “Dream Academy” did not exactly become an international phenomenon. Just three of the trainees’ 15 missions cracked more than one million views — somewhat underwhelming by K-pop viewership standards.Next year, around the time the six winners will release music under their new name, Katseye, the project has another chance to break through. In summer 2024, Netflix will release a documentary series about the competition by Nadia Hallgren, who directed the Michelle Obama documentary “Becoming.” This may be the ideal format for capturing the drama, major and minor, of the process.When the 20 contestants were introduced in August, Mr. Leon dressed them for a group photo in matching gray schoolgirl uniforms.HYBE x Geffen RecordsThe six winning members of Katseye come from the United States, South Korea, the Philippines and Switzerland: Daniela, Yoonchae, Lara, Sophia, Manon and Megan.Kanya IwanaWithin just an hour on set, I watched a trainee in a silver paillette minidress with tendinitis in her knees fight back tears, take after take, while filming a video for an original song called “Dirty Water.” I watched another in a tube top and reflective wide-leg pants be told to exert better control over her hair flipping.I also watched the adults in the room engage in a delicate dance of evaluating, correcting and handling these young women, while trying to be sensitive to the fact that they were young women. (The youngest was 15.)“Tell the girls it’s us, it’s not them,” the director of one music video instructed an assistant during a technical delay.In hiring Mr. Leon for the project, Ms. An hoped his experience raising two girls would help in this regard. His first self-appointed task was interviewing each contestant individually before making any decisions on their new looks.“I wanted to look in their eyes,” Mr. Leon said. “I wanted to ask them the hard questions about their upbringing.”He told the trainees who came in wearing heavy makeup to take it off. “I want you to look gorgeous and beautiful, and I want you to be yourself,” Mr. Leon recalled saying.“I think it’s hard for people to see themselves,” Mr. Leon continued. “You need somebody to tell you that you look amazing without much.”To assist in the makeovers, he brought in stylists who worked on the “The Idol” — an HBO show about the relationship between a pop star and a cult leader. He brought in the hairstylist to Bella Hadid.To the 14 trainees who didn’t make the final group, he seemed to want to send a message: “I did the best thing I could for you. And you have to trust me.” More

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    5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Jazz Flute

    The flute is one of the more overlooked instruments in jazz, but it’s been making an impact on improvised music for more than 50 years. Let 10 experts take you on a guided tour.We’ve taken you through the great jazz pianists, the vocalists, the careers of Alice Coltrane and Ornette Coleman and Mary Lou Williams. This month, we thought we’d go down a less-trodden path, taking a look at one of the more overlooked instruments in jazz: the flute.Sure, we were prepared for a few Will Ferrell jokes to crop up in the comments (or maybe jump up on the table?), but we had no idea that this piece would land in the biggest cultural moment the instrument had seen in years. Then André 3000 dropped his flute-laden album, “New Blue Sun,” and our timing became all too perfect.The flute doesn’t have the gravitas or the boisterous sound of a saxophone or a trumpet, and it didn’t fully infiltrate the realm of improvised music until the 1960s, with the likes of Yusef Lateef, Eric Dolphy, Herbie Mann and Hubert Laws — not to mention the salsa and pachanga scene in New York, where the flutist, bandleader and record executive Johnny Pacheco was a major presence.Since then, as you’ll see below, the instrument has found a home everywhere from the avant-garde to fusion to straight-ahead. Read on for a guided tour of the flute’s role in jazz, brought to you by 10 writers, musicians and educators. You’ll find a playlist at the bottom of the article, and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Melanie Charles, flutist and vocalist“Land of Passion” by Hubert LawsWhen I think of incredible flute playing, I think of the great Hubert Laws, and specifically his playing on his original composition “Land of Passion,” released in 1979. The song grooves very hard with a modern drum feel and a sparse yet precise vocal melody. You wonder where the flute will fit in all of this sauce. After the opening verse, the way is cleared for Hubert to “sing.” His playing begins conversational, showing off his round sound and in-the-pocket phrasing. As the solo continues, however, he opens up the portal with what every flute lover craves: complex trills and runs that display his dexterity and crazy classical chops. Laws’s playing on this tune is a beautiful example of what happens when you combine a warm tone, unmatched technique, an undeniable groove and swag. Many of my fave artists such as Mndsgn and Ari Lennox have sampled this piece as it’s a specimen of all the best elements of Black American music.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Nicole Mitchell, flutist and composer“Sophisticated Lady” by James NewtonCan the flute pour out gut-wrenching blues, penetrate with sonic sunlight, sing multi-phonics and then dart from Buddy Collette’s swag to Eric Dolphy’s virtuosity? My main flute inspiration, James Newton, makes it happen. His flute artistry is charismatically innovative and timeless. So, if you take the winding path from André 3000’s and Shabaka’s meditative multi-flute excursions down the way through Lizzo’s trills, from there, at the edge of Douglas Ewart’s wondrous bamboo forest is Newton’s magical echo canyon of endless possibilities. His breathtaking solo tribute to Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady” says it all. Sound truth and power.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Ron Scott, jazz critic“Yesterdays” by Yusef LateefThe first time I heard Yusef Lateef’s rendition of “Yesterdays” on flute, it took my breath away. His tonal fluctuations reflect the haunting notes of a lonely soprano voice in the wind, or a soothing tenor falsetto sighing of lost love in an empty tenement hallway. “Yesterdays” is an emotional state of rhythmic swing, it’s the blues, a peep of Africa at sunrise — all that jazz. It is by no means a sad song. But haunting? Yes. The tune drifts quietly through the ear canal, tingling your entire body right down to the “souls” of your feet. The flute is a mesmerizing instrument, a serene babbling brook of beautiful infinite tones — highs, lows and many in between. Lateef’s exquisite playing is only enhanced by the tapestry of delightful romps by the pianist Kenny Barron, the melodic lyricism of the bassist Bob Cunningham and the dusting brushes of the drummer Albert Heath.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Jamie Baum, flutist and composer“You Don’t Know What Love Is” by Eric DolphyEric Dolphy recorded “Last Date” in 1964, for a radio program in Hilversum, the Netherlands, and many believe it was his actual last, as he died shortly thereafter. His performance of “You Don’t Know What Love Is” shows clearly his singular style on the flute. With only the acoustic bass accompanying him, there’s plenty of space to hear his very personal and expressive sound. He starts off interpreting the melody, embellishing it and the chord changes with his “in-and-out” chromatic approach, while making use of the entire range of the flute. He continues this when the piano and drums enter on the bridge, taking advantage of a cadenza at the end to express his ideas even further.At that time there were relatively few “dedicated” jazz flutists (those who specialized on flute), including Herbie Mann and Hubert Laws, though both had initially also played sax (Hubert even recorded with Mongo Santamaria on tenor); almost all recorded jazz flutists were sax players who “doubled” on flute. While there were several who took the flute seriously and played well, most did not master the entire range in sound and variety of articulation, or use the advanced harmonic approach, that Eric Dolphy did. He continues to be an influence in the trajectory of modern jazz flute playing.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Marcus J. Moore, jazz writer“Just a Love Child” by Bobbi Humphrey“Love child, falling off your cloud, for just a minute. Running around love, and then you’re in it.” I keep coming back to this line as a reset for life in general: The first half contextualizes our existence. We’re all here, floating around and doing stuff for a little while. Now take the whole bar: You’re so focused on said stuff that love sneaks up on you, reshaping your focus. I’ve always loved this song because it exemplifies the tenderness that Bobbi Humphrey must’ve felt in the moment. The way it morphs and slowly ascends, building utopia. While Humphrey was a flutist, the song conveyed her aptitude as a singer and arranger, and introduced her as a well-rounded musician, not just an instrumentalist. That’s not to deny the flute solo here: Around the song’s midpoint, Humphrey arises with upper-register chords that bend around the track, almost nudging the piano and percussion to intensify. A great song on an excellent album, “Just a Love Child” is a master class of entry points and emotions. Not quite soul, not quite funk and not quite jazz, it synthesizes all these genres while accentuating Humphrey’s singular voice.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆T.K. Blue, flutist“Cherokee” by James MoodyI started playing flute as a student in high school on Long Island, and under the guidance of Eddie Jefferson (a close friend of my mentor, the tap dancer Little Buck) I was instructed to travel to New York City for my first “jazz” flute lesson. When I arrived at a hotel in Midtown, I was greeted by none other than Master James Moody! Having an obeisant attitude toward my elders I listened quite ebulliently as Moody spoke with encyclopedic erudition of jazz performance and all its major innovators. Though he was quite prosaic in his approach, he shared tremendous insight regarding flute improvisational technique. This experience changed my life forever! Please check out Moody’s rendition of the standard “Cherokee” from 1968. It’s nothing short of splendiferous! Moody’s warm tone, impeccable articulation with execution, creative ideas, high velocity, and dexterity on the flute puts him on Mount Rushmore! Not to mention he was the very first I heard use the circular breathing technique on flute, which is a herculean task indeed!Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Gabrielle Garo, flutist“Obsession” by Dave Valentin and Herbie MannThe flute is a diverse voice, in my eyes. Through various genres and settings, the flute can be utilized in any capacity. It can paint pictures in classical, jazz and Latin jazz, for example. And that’s what Dave Valentin has done. He has managed to draw a connection between melody and percussion through his expressive approach and soft tone. From quite literally singing into the flute, to his piercing notes that cut through the octave, to his crisp flutter-tongue technique — Valentin’s ideas have been endless, always reshaping the perception of how a flute can be played. These concepts can be heard in this rendition of “Obsession” from the duo album “Two Amigos” of Valentin and another wonderful flutist, Herbie Mann.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Giovanni Russonello, Times jazz critic“Winter in America” by Gil Scott-Heron and Brian JacksonAs half of one of the most meaningful musical duos of the 1970s, the flutist, pianist and composer Brian Jackson co-wrote many of Gil Scott-Heron’s famous songs of social awareness and resistance. Not “Winter in America” — the poet-singer penned this one himself, in spring 1974, as the Watergate scandal dragged toward a close and major American cities went bankrupt — but Jackson still made it complete: with a somber-yet-graceful arrangement, coasting on a pair of quivering flutes. Jackson’s and Bilal Sunni-Ali’s trills become “the robins perched on barren treetops,” or maybe that “noble piece of paper,” the Constitution, fluttering in the wind as it “died in vain.” After Scott-Heron sings his devastating chorus for the second time (“Ain’t nobody fighting/’Cause nobody knows what to save”), Jackson’s flute solo emerges, dug into the groove but rising, tracing a strand of hope through the bleak panorama.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Amber Navran, vocalist and flutist“As You Are” by Taylor McFerrin featuring Elena PinderhughesAnything Elena Pinderhughes touches turns to golden velvet! You can hear her play with fellow greats from jazz, hip-hop and R&B like Common, Terrace Martin, Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, Terri Lyne Carrington, and this track’s collaborator, Taylor McFerrin. Pinderhughes’s sound, melodic sense, phrasing and feel are perfection over every and any blend of Black American music. Although her flute flourishes are often in the background behind vocals, a la Erykah Badu and Dwayne Kerr, this track features her front and center over a lush bed of warm, enveloping synth sounds and delicious, grooving drums. I especially love the moments where it breaks down to drums and flute, giving her velvet tone and rhythmic melodies a chance to shine.This song is a gorgeous display of everything I love about both Elena Pinderhughes and Taylor McFerrin. They are a dream team for your day dreaming! I could listen to it on repeat no matter what the vibe — soaking up the sun shining through the leaves on a nature walk, sipping drinks and swaying to the beat in a dimly lit bar, or sitting down with a fresh notebook and a hot coffee to dream and scheme for the future.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Fernando Brandao, flutist and professor“Mai Pinheiros!” by Maiara Moraes with Teco CardosoThis captivating recording captures the magic of Maiara Moraes’s live concert, featuring Teco Cardoso as a guest, so it’s really a two-in-one flute experience. Jazz improvisation in Brazilian music is mostly associated with the bossa nova genre. This particular piece spotlights a genre less known to the American audience: frevo, a traditional vibrant dance and rhythm from the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco, brought to life here with fervor and expertise. A fusion of European and African musical influences, frevo has its dance roots in the Brazilian martial art capoeira. This genre, whether presented vocally or instrumentally, demands a remarkable level of technical skill. Similar to choro and samba, frevo serves as an artistic school for young musicians. It’s not just music; it’s a celebration of cultural richness and artistic prowess.Maiara Moraes and Teco Cardoso close this concert with a high-energy, intricately arranged composition where jazz meets street carnival music. Maiara improvises on flute and Teco on piccolo. Both players masterfully and creatively display the frevo phrasing and style combining developing motifs with through-composed passages. The culmination sees the theme brought back with the two playing dueling piccolos, evoking the frenzied energy of a celebrative Brazilian carnival, and creating a memorable and immersive musical experience for the audience.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆ More

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    The World Loves Corridos Tumbados. In Mexico, It’s Complicated.

    Inspired by a century-old genre from the Mexican countryside, the latest pop music phenomenon is drawing thousands of young fans — and criticism for its violent references.In many Mexican towns where wars between drug cartels continue to wreak havoc, the sight of a young man at night dressed in black and donning a balaclava would be terrifying. On a recent Saturday in Mexico City, Peso Pluma strutted across the stage in the same outfit, to excited cheers: It was time for the corrido tumbado concert.The 24-year-old breakout star, who makes a modern take on traditional Mexican music, wore a glamorous Fendi version of a sicario (or hit man) uniform. He faced a stadium full of fans and shouted, “Are you ready to witness the most warlike concert of your life?”The crowd roared back: It was ready. Later, during “El Gavilán,” the audience sang in unison, “I’m of the people of Chapo Guzmán,” a reference to one of Mexico’s most notorious drug lords.Peso Pluma, along with acts like Natanael Cano, Grupo Firme, Eslabon Armado and Banda MS, is at the forefront of a musical movement that has found growing audiences this year in the United States and beyond. The artists perform corridos tumbados (or trap corridos), which combine singing and rapping familiar to fans of hip-hop and reggaeton with instrumentation and melodies common to traditional Mexican music, along with lyrics inspired by narcocorridos — songs that tell stories of the drug trade.But even as Peso Pluma racks up millions of streams and Grupo Firme tours arenas in the United States, these artists often find themselves in contested territory at home, where the drug war isn’t a dramatic fantasy but a bloody daily reality.“They are striking a nerve of Mexican culture,” said Camilo Lara, 48, a music producer, composer and former label executive with extensive film credits. He cited how the artists have tapped into “the relationship with violence, the relationship with the street, with politics, with what’s happening with fashion,” and added, “It’s the most exciting moment in Mexican music in 20 or 30 years.”Peso Pluma’s stadium show at Foro Sol, a venue that holds more than 60,000 people, was the last of his concerts in his home country after several cancellations over security threats. Days earlier, authorities in Tijuana had banned corridos tumbados in all public spaces with fines of up to $70,000.While the sounds and the faces may be fresh, these artists are heirs of a musical tradition that has long attracted controversy. In 1987, the governor of Sinaloa asked local news media to stop the broadcast of music that made reference to drug trafficking. In 2002, radio stations in the border state of Baja California agreed not to play songs that exalted narcos and asked their U.S. counterparts to do the same. In 2010, conservative Mexican lawmakers presented a bill that would have sent artists who glorified criminals to prison.Natanael Cano onstage at Coachella in April 2022. Cano is known as a pioneer of corridos tumbados, which contain many elements of old-fashioned corridos.Scott Dudelson/Getty Images“The decision to ban these corridos tumbados is to protect the mental health of Tijuana’s children,” the city’s mayor, Montserrat Caballero Ramírez, said last month through a spokesman. In May, Cancun banned public shows “that foster violence,” saying such events contradicted the pursuit of peace and security; Grupo Firme canceled a concert there shortly after. Two months later, Chihuahua’s City Council voted unanimously to fine public shows promoting violence.Officials contend it is not censorship. “They can sing whatever they want,” Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, said this summer, “but we are not going to keep quiet when they say that Ecstasy is good, that they have a .50 caliber gun and the most famous narcos are their idols.” A month later, perhaps in tacit recognition of the influence of corridos tumbados, the government released its own kind of tumbado: a song warning of the dangers of fentanyl.The artists have pointed out that their lyrics aren’t aimed at children. “I know sometimes it’s not OK for kids to see or hear this,” Peso Pluma said in an interview, “but it’s a reality.”The reality is also that this type of music, once very locally rooted and associated with an older generation, is attracting global attention for its catchiness and cachet. The songs are not only fixtures of radio stations in Los Angeles, but are draws for concertgoers in Lima and Madrid and have made fans of celebrities like Mike Tyson and the band Maneskin.“I heard it at a wedding,” said Javier Nuño, a partner at Indice, a company that has licensed Peso Pluma’s and Cano’s songs for HBO. Once you cross over into wedding D.J. playlists, “you are at another level,” he added.At Peso Pluma’s Mexico City show, kids arrived in droves — mostly teenage boys dressed in Air Jordans, oversize hoodies and outfits featuring Nike, Gucci, Fendi and Burberry logos in models, colors and materials Nike, Gucci, Fendi and Burberry have probably never manufactured. Some dared to sport Peso Pluma’s signature mullet.Oliver Medrano, 35, said his 9-year-old, Sofía, had asked for tickets. The two gave up their seats close to the stage and watched instead from the bleachers after the girl’s mother protested. “They say the songs are too war-driven,” Medrano said. Sofía said she had become hooked on “El Belicón” (“The Belligerent”), Peso Pluma’s song about a man who boasts of owning sports cars, bazookas and Kalashnikovs.“I was a bit worried about security,” Medrano said. But mid-concert he felt confident enough to ask the couple next to him to watch his daughter while he made a quick bathroom run.Leonardo Manuel, 12, attended the show in a blue velour tracksuit with rhinestones arranged in the Fendi logo with his aunt, Elizabeth Rubí Cruz, who works at a jewelry store; she said there was a high demand for Cuban-style chains, thanks to the influence of Peso Pluma. Clients “like how he dresses,” she said. The pair’s favorite song? “Lady Gaga,” about a dealer hanging out with influencers (“none of them post to Instagram”), with mentions of Cartier, pink cocaine and Louis Vuitton.The excitement, and controversy, surrounding the lyrical content of corridos tumbados in Mexico in many ways mirrors decades of debate in the United States over the real-life implications of rap lyrics. From N.W.A to Jay-Z and Rick Ross, many of the most popular hip-hop artists have relied on the imagery of drug kingpins for both glitz and grit. Beginning with the gangster rap of the 1980s and ’90s and continuing through the 21st-century hip-hop subgenres of trap and drill, lyrics that document — and some say glorify — the drug trade, its attendant violence and its spoils have remained a cultural and political battleground. Currently in Atlanta, music by the rapper Young Thug is being used in court as evidence of his membership in a criminal street gang.“You see these guys partying with these luxuries and suddenly it’s, ‘How can I get this?’ especially in this country, our country, which has some very strong social limitations,” said Graciela Flores, a professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila.Dr. Flores, who specializes in 19th-century crime and justice in the Mexican borderlands, organized a series of events this past fall at the university focused on corridos tumbados at the behest of one of her students. She was overwhelmed by the attendance. “People were eager to talk about what they had seen” in terms of daily violence in their communities, she explained. The songs had moved people to share their experiences, something that Dr. Flores found “valuable, but at the same time very disturbing.”This past spring, the steps of the National Auditorium in Mexico City were filled with mothers waiting while their children attended a Natanael Cano concert. Cano, 22, is recognized as a pioneer of corridos tumbados, which absorb many elements of old-fashioned corridos: nasal voices, tololoche, accordion or brass instruments, strummed guitars.“At the beginning I was freaked out a bit” by the lyrics, said Dolores Saldívar, 47, who sells balloons. “But now I like them.” She had paid about $120 each for her two teenage children to attend.Juan Bosco de la Cruz Rangel, 23, the student who had urged Dr. Flores to put on the conference, said that when he and his friends started listening to tumbados, he looked up the artists online and found them relatable — skinny guys who liked to party and saw the police as hostile — to a point: “We’re literally them,” he said. “We’re their age, but without money, bands and that life.” Though he faces daily dangers, he finds songs about gangs and guns provocative and unsettling. Still, he added, he understands where the lyrics are coming from. Critics of the genre “that have never been hungry, it’s easy for them to say ‘there’s a different way’” to make a livelihood, he said.Bringing Cano to the stage in Mexico City, Peso Pluma proclaimed that his fellow artist had “paved a road so all of us could be here” to wild cheers. Just a few days earlier, Peso Pluma had notched another milestone: his first ever Grammy nomination. More

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    They’re Great Songs. Are They Christmas Songs?

    Nine tracks from Barbra Streisand, the 1975, Fleet Foxes and more get put to the Lindsay Test.Barbra Streisand, another (unlikely) queen of Christmas.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press, via Associated PressDear listeners,What makes a Christmas song … a Christmas song? Sleigh bells? Yuletide imagery? A certain indefinable, know-it-when-you-hear-it sense of reverence and good cheer?My personal standard might sound a bit humbuggy: To me, a true Christmas song is one that I would not want to hear any month other than December. Even a song as brilliant and beloved as “All I Want for Christmas Is You” loses some of its power in March or August. With all due respect to Mariah Carey, please wait until all the Thanksgiving leftovers have been consumed.But what about those cuspy, sort-of-Christmas songs? Well, at least they’re fun to argue about. “River” by Joni Mitchell — which begins with a melancholic piano interpolation of “Jingle Bells” — might be the quintessential example, and I believe with all my heart that it’s not a Christmas song, not only because it’s about feeling unable to get into the holiday mood, but also because it passes my test: I can, and do, listen to it during any and all months of the year. (Plus, it’s perfectly sequenced on “Blue,” which is definitely not a seasonal album.) The Waitresses’ “Christmas Wrapping,” on the other hand? Also a song I love, but one that I am only in the mood for one-twelfth of the year.Some songs really do have it both ways, though: Christmas-appropriate, but also perennially listenable. For today’s playlist, I’ve picked nine tracks that I’m calling Questionable Christmas Songs.Some tell stories that happen to take place around the holidays (“If We Make It Through December,” “’Tis the Damn Season”) and others have simply experienced a gradual shift in public perception so that, for some reason, people now consider them seasonally appropriate (“Holiday Road,” “Hallelujah,” “My Favorite Things”). All of them might be Christmas songs, depending on whom you ask, but they also might not be because I will not get mad if I hear any of them in April. Consider it my early gift to you: something to apolitically argue about at the holiday dinner table.Also, speaking of Christmas songs: Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” officially hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100! If you read Friday’s Amplifier, you will understand how exciting this is — and you’ll be able to impress your friends by name-dropping a bunch of other great Brenda Lee songs. Congrats to Little Miss Dynamite!Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Merle Haggard & the Strangers: “If We Make It Through December”OK, this one might be a Christmas song because it appears on a Christmas album (“Merle Haggard’s Christmas Present”; please note the cover art), but Merle Haggard only decided to cut that album after the success of this stand-alone single — the biggest pop crossover hit of his entire career. There’s mention of gifts under the tree (or rather, a lack thereof), but the true subject of this melancholy tune is the plight of the down-and-out working man, meaning it is, first and foremost, a Merle Haggard song. (Listen on YouTube)2. Lindsey Buckingham: “Holiday Road”This delightful ditty was written for the 1983 film “National Lampoon’s Vacation” — not “Christmas Vacation.” But thanks to some version of the Mandela Effect, plus the fact that the word “holiday” is right there in the title, some confused people have started to insist that “Holiday Road” is a Christmas song. The country singer Chris Janson is vocal among them; he performed his cover of Lindsey Buckingham’s track on last year’s “Opry Country Christmas” broadcast, and he’s since released that cover with an extra festive lyric video. (Listen on YouTube)3. Fleet Foxes: “White Winter Hymnal”When a non-holiday song is suddenly reclassified in the cultural imagination as a holiday song, often, one must blame Pentatonix. On its popular holiday albums, the a cappella group has Christmas-ified such classics as “God Only Knows,” “Hallelujah” and, most recently and most puzzlingly, “Kiss From a Rose.” (We must resist this with all our might. We are not going to let Pentatonix convince us that “Kiss From a Rose” is a Christmas song.) The group’s version of this admittedly wintry 2008 Fleet Foxes tune appeared on “That’s Christmas to Me,” a 2014 Pentatonix album with an appropriately subjective title, but (can you tell?) I prefer the original. (Listen on YouTube)4. The Handsome Family: “So Much Wine”I have Phoebe Bridgers to thank for this one: It was her pick last year in her annual Christmas covers series. I’d never heard the original, and when I went back to check it out, I found that I actually preferred it to Bridgers’s more mournful rendition. Her version of this ballad of seasonal alcoholism is an out-and-out tear-jerker, but the Handsome Family manage to tell the same story with some dark comic relief. (Listen on YouTube)5. Taylor Swift: “’Tis the Damn Season”I believe it was my colleague Joe Coscarelli who, on an episode of Popcast, came up with one of my favorite Taylor Swift conspiracy theories: That “Evermore,” her second and decidedly more wintry 2020 album, was originally supposed to be a Christmas-themed release. This finely wrought ode to hometown what-ifs and temporarily rekindled romance is probably the strongest argument for that case. (Listen on YouTube)6. The 1975: “Wintering”Here’s another song about regressing at one’s parents’ house for a long weekend, a curiously season-specific track on the 1975’s excellent 2022 album “Being Funny in a Foreign Language.” I often appreciate the details in Matty Healy’s writing, and there are some particularly vivid ones here: a precocious, vegan sister; a fleece that doesn’t warm as well as advertised; a mother with a sore back who objects to being mentioned in the song. “I just came for the stuffing, not to argue about nothing,” Healy sings. “But mark my words, I’ll be home on the 23rd.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Barbra Streisand: “My Favorite Things”Written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein for the 1959 Broadway production “The Sound of Music,” “My Favorite Things” didn’t begin life as a holiday song. Julie Andrews performed it on a 1961 Christmas special, though, and since then its mentions of mittens, snowflakes and brown paper packages tied up with strings have made it sound at home on many a Christmas album — including Barbra Streisand’s. (Listen on YouTube)8. Leonard Cohen: “Hallelujah”Speaking of famous Jews singing are-they-really-Christmas songs, the endlessly over-covered, richly poetic, mordantly hilarious “Hallelujah” is in so many ways one of the most misunderstood songs in popular culture — so of course some people have turned it into a holiday standard. But as Stereogum’s Chris DeVille wrote in a 2019 essay, vehemently and correctly, “Whatever context it belongs in, Christmas ain’t it.” (Listen on YouTube)9. The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl: “Fairytale of New York”This is probably the only true Christmas song on the list, but it’s certainly an unconventional one — and of course I had to include it in honor of the Pogues’ Shane MacGowan, who died last week. Over the weekend, Rob Tannenbaum (a journalist with a very appropriate name for this purpose) published a fascinating piece about the making of the song, and the push to send it to the top of the charts in the United Kingdom. Might “Fairytale” be the next Christmas song to belatedly hit No. 1? (Listen on YouTube)I get home on the 23rd,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“I’ll Have a Questionable Christmas” track listTrack 1: Merle Haggard & the Strangers, “If We Make It Through December”Track 2: Lindsey Buckingham, “Holiday Road”Track 3: Fleet Foxes, “White Winter Hymnal”Track 4: The Handsome Family, “So Much Wine”Track 5: Taylor Swift, “‘Tis the Damn Season”Track 6: The 1975, “Wintering”Track 7: Barbra Streisand, “My Favorite Things”Track 8: Leonard Cohen, “Hallelujah”Track 9: The Pogues, “Fairytale of New York” More

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    Under Pressure, English National Opera Will Move to Manchester

    Urged to develop a new model by Arts Council England, the opera company will move its base out of London, but it still plans to present opera there.For decades, English National Opera, the acclaimed British opera company, has made its home in London. There, it has drawn audiences, nurtured singers and developed a host of major productions, many of which have traveled the world.But facing financial woes — and pressure from Arts Council England, which cut off its vital government subsidy last year and urged it to develop “a new business model” that might include a move away from London — English National Opera announced on Tuesday that it would move its main base about 200 miles north to Manchester by 2029.The company said in a news release that it would still present a “substantial opera season” at the London Coliseum, its home since 1968, which it owns and operates. But it will now work to develop new audiences and programs in Manchester.Jenny Mollica, interim chief executive of English National Opera, said the company and Manchester shared a vision of working to “open up new possibilities for opera in people’s lives.”“We look forward to embarking on new adventures with partners, artists and audiences across Greater Manchester as we create a range of operatic repertoire at a local, national and international scale,” she said in a statement.English National Opera has been in a state of flux since Arts Council England announced last year that it was shutting off its grant to the company, which was worth 12.4 million pounds a year, or about $15.6 million. The Arts Council instead gave it one-time grant to help it develop a new model, possibly away from London.At the time, English National Opera’s leaders, as well as many artists and audience members, voiced opposition to the idea of relocating the company, which traces its roots to 1931, when Lilian Baylis, a theater owner, established the Sadler’s Wells Opera Company to bring the art form to a wider audience. In 1945 the company gave the premiere of the groundbreaking Benjamin Britten opera “Peter Grimes.” The company found a way to serve audiences, even while competing with the bigger Royal Opera.The move out of London was resisted by many. Stuart Murphy, who served as English National Opera’s chief executive until the end of August, initially described the plan as “absurd” and “insane,” the BBC reported last year.The uproar soured relations with officials in Manchester, which made the short list for the company’s new base, along with Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool and Nottingham. It revived debate about whether smaller cities could support a major opera company.Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, said last year that English National Opera was not welcome if the company was having doubts.“If they think we are all heathens here, that nobody would go, I’m afraid it doesn’t understand us and therefore it doesn’t deserve to come here,” Burnham was quoted as saying in a report in The Guardian.But the company and Manchester eventually found a path forward. Burnham on Tuesday described English National Opera as “one of the most exciting cultural institutions in the country.”“We’re immensely proud to be able to bring them to a new home here,” he said in a statement. “Greater Manchester’s world-renowned history of radical art, activism and affecting change, and the cultural renaissance taking place across our towns and cities, makes it the ideal home.”English National Opera has long played an important role in the global opera industry. After the cuts by the Arts Council were announced last year, dozens of leading cultural figures — including Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager, and Yuval Sharon, the artistic director of Detroit Opera — signed a letter to The Times of London, warning of a wider impact.The company has faced leadership churn in recent years. In October, Martyn Brabbins, English National Opera’s music director since 2016, resigned suddenly. He said that he could not “in all conscience continue to support the board and management’s strategy for the future of the company,” including cuts to the orchestra and chorus. More

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    What to Read After Watching ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

    Now that the Scorsese epic is on demand, you can catch up with the drama from home, then go down a rabbit hole with our guides.“Killers of the Flower Moon,” Martin Scorsese’s telling of the terrible history of the killings of at least 60 Osage people in the 1920s by white neighbors who coveted their oil money, has been part of the film conversation since it was first unveiled at the Cannes Film Festival in May. This month, New York Times critics named it their top movie of 2023. Now that it’s available on demand (and is expected to reach streaming later this month), here’s a guide to what to read about the drama:The HistoryThe film is based on David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction best seller of the same title, which examined both the horrifying murder plot and the birth of the F.B.I. The Times said of the book, “It will sear your soul.” Here’s the review.The movie largely jettisons Grann’s F.B.I. angle and focuses on the wealthy Osage woman Mollie Kyle (played by Lily Gladstone); her white husband, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio); and his uncle, William King Hale (Robert De Niro), the ringleader of the conspiracy. Here’s a rundown of the facts behind the drama.The ProductionInitially the film was going to follow the book more closely and track an F.B.I. agent as he investigated the mystery. But “I think Marty and I just looked at each other and we felt there was no soul to it,” DiCaprio told our columnist Kyle Buchanan. So they started over again. Here’s what the stars and director had to say.In the wedding scene, Mollie wears what looks to be a soldier’s uniform with a tall hat as her bridal outfit. In fact, the look was based on military dress and hewed closely to Osage tradition, according to designers and members of the tribe. Here’s a closer look at the costumes.The film is stocked with cameos from musicians like Jason Isbell, comedians like Tatanka Means and even a filmmaker (we won’t give it away here). Find out who’s who in the cast.The ReactionThe Times’s chief film critic, Manohla Dargis, called the film a “heartbreaking masterpiece” and “a true-crime epic that Scorsese — with grace, sorrow and sublime filmmaking clarity — has turned into a requiem for the country.” Here’s the review.The Times’s two film critics both named “Killers of the Flower Moon” the best film of 2023. “Manifest Destiny makes a hell of a gangster movie,” Dargis wrote. And Alissa Wilkinson wrote that Scorsese proceeds “from the firm belief that guilt is generational, just like grief.” Here are their Top 10 lists.DiCaprio’s Burkhart is unlike any Scorsese protagonist because, well, he’s dumb as rocks. And that changes the film in a fundamental way. Here’s a critic’s notebook explaining why.Scorsese has long been identified with ornately edited, violent set pieces. In “The Irishman” and now “Killers,” those flourishes have given way to blunt truth, argues one writer. Learn how Scorsese has rethought violence. More

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    15 Classic Christmas Movies to Stream over the Holidays

    Our list of classics is broad, from warm Old Hollywood favorites to the sort of boozy, vulgar entertainments that parents can watch after putting the kids to bed.Does a Christmas movie have to be about Christmas? If it merely takes place around Christmas, how prominently does the holiday have to feature for it to qualify? And really, must it be a merry Christmas? The Grinches and Scrooges of the world have streaming subscriptions, too.With a more elastic conception of the holiday in mind, we picked 15 Christmas movies of a broad variety, from warm Old Hollywood favorites to family-friendly modern comedies to the sort of boozy, vulgar entertainments that parents can watch after putting the kids to bed. (And yes, the oft-debated “Die Hard” did make the list. When is it ever a bad time to watch “Die Hard”?) These films are either on streaming services or available to rent on major platforms. Also, “Die Hard” returns to theaters Dec. 8.‘Christmas in Connecticut’ (1945)Stream it on Max. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Having established herself as a master of melodrama in “Stella Dallas,” a closet romantic in “The Lady Eve” and a duplicitous femme fatale in “Double Indemnity,” Barbara Stanwyck combines all three qualities into a winning performance in “Christmas in Connecticut,” a screwball holiday comedy with heart. Stanwyck plays a single New Yorker who’s been posing as a wife and mother from rural Connecticut to make her food column more appealing to American housewives. When asked to host Christmas dinner for a dashing war hero (Dennis Morgan), she scrambles desperately to sell her made-up persona, but amid the confusion over her fake husband and baby, she winds up falling for her guest.‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ (1946)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video. Rent it on Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Released to mixed reviews and disappointing box office — particularly by the standards of the director Frank Capra, who was seen as a hitmaker after films like “It Happened One Night” and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” — “It’s a Wonderful Life” has become the undisputed star atop the holiday-movie tree. But what makes it so enduring ties into why it took a while to catch on: The joyful, tear-jerking ending is exceptionally hard-won, following a Christmas Eve that’s a dark night of the soul for George Bailey (James Stewart), a man whose despair nearly drives him to the brink. It’s only after meeting his guardian angel that George sees his value to his family and community.‘A Christmas Story’ (1983)Stream it on Max. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Jeff Gillen, left, and Peter Billingsley in “A Christmas Story.”Warner Bros.As if to compensate for making the holiday-themed slasher classic “Black Christmas” nine years earlier, the director Bob Clark turned to this nostalgia-soaked comedy, which has become a seasonal favorite, though it’s not without its horrors. The Parkers are the most disaster-prone family in their 1940s Midwestern town, and embarrassment is always around the corner for poor Ralphie (Peter Billingsley), who wants nothing more than a Red Ryder air rifle for Christmas, but is constantly told, “You’ll shoot your eye out.” In the lead-up to his big gift, Ralphie has an awful encounter with a mall Santa, decodes a disappointing secret message from Ovaltine and is forced to wear the pink bunny onesie his Aunt Clara got him. But Ralphie won’t be a put-upon kid forever.‘Gremlins’ (1984)Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV+, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.An ideal double feature with “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Joe Dante’s mischievous comedy throws a Capraesque small town into chaos when an exotic Christmas present spawns the green marauders of the title. While in Chinatown on business, an eccentric inventor discovers a cute little animal called a mogwai and sneaks it back home to his family. But the new caretakers don’t follow important instructions, like keeping the mogwai away from water and not feeding it after midnight. It mutates into the innumerable creatures of the title, who take a juvenile delight in creating mayhem. Part monster movie, part live-action Looney Tunes, “Gremlins” leaves a trail of destruction through its snow-capped holiday idyll.‘Die Hard’ (1988)Stream it on Hulu. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Bruce Willis and Bonnie Bedelia in a scene from “Die Hard.”20th Century Fox, via Getty ImagesThere should be no argument over whether “Die Hard” is a true Christmas movie, given that John McClane (Bruce Willis) flies out to Los Angeles to spend the holiday with his estranged wife (Bonnie Bedelia), battles an armed band of European thieves who have taken over an office party and even dresses one unfortunate henchman in a Santa suit. Plus it’s a useful excuse to rewatch this impeccably crafted and influential action movie, which emphasizes McClane’s vulnerability as much as his resourcefulness and guile in outwitting a criminal mastermind (Alan Rickman) and perhaps saving his marriage in the process.‘The Muppet Christmas Carol’ (1992)Stream it on Disney+ and Hulu. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.He may be surrounded by singing, dancing, mischief-making Muppets, but Michael Caine gives the role of Ebenezer Scrooge, the heartless miser of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” every bit the gravity of screen antecedents like Alastair Sim, Basil Rathbone and Albert Finney. This allows “The Muppet Christmas Carol” to position him as the ideal straight man, a grouchy counterpoint to the silliness of Kermit the Frog’s earnest Bob Cratchit, Miss Piggy as a typically brassy Emily Cratchit and the three offbeat ghosts who show Scrooge the path to redemption. The film proves it’s possible to honor Dickens while paying a visit to Fozzie Bear’s rubber chicken factory.‘Tim Burton’s the Nightmare Before Christmas’ (1993)Stream it on Disney+. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Jack Skellington (voiced by Chris Sarandon) in “Tim Burton’s the Nightmare Before Christmas.”Touchstone PicturesOn paper, “The Nightmare Before Christmas” sounds like a cynical proposition, an animated studio musical with a plot that covers both Halloween and Christmas, giving it a solid three-month window where it’s seasonally appropriate viewing. Yet Henry Selick’s stop-motion fantasy, made in collaboration with one of its producers, Tim Burton, has a dark, personal, idiosyncratic style that dispels any thought of commercial calculation. It has earned a legitimate cult following over the years. As the Pumpkin King of Skeleton Town, Jack Skellington (voiced by Chris Sarandon) inadvertently discovers the joys of Christmas Town and tries to bring the magic back home, with predictably demented and chaotic results.‘The Ref’ (1994)Rent it on Amazon, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.The premise of this dark comedy sounds a little like the Humphrey Bogart noir “The Desperate Hours,” in which escaped felons hole up in a suburban home and take a family hostage. Only the twist of “The Ref” is that the crook, a cat burglar (Denis Leary) abandoned by his partner in the middle of a job, winds up captive himself to his hostages, a Connecticut couple (Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis) who cannot stop arguing. It becomes a Christmas Eve to survive when other members of the family turn up and the would-be felon takes on the role of reluctant counselor.‘Eyes Wide Shut’ (1999)Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in “Eyes Wide Shut.”Warner BrothersThe marital odyssey in Stanley Kubrick’s dreamlike final film is book ended by Christmas backdrops that underline the state of a bourgeois marriage that threatens to collapse. After a fashionable party where his wife (Nicole Kidman) flirts shamelessly with a well-heeled Hungarian, a doctor (Tom Cruise) starts a fight with her about jealousy and temptation. From there, he embarks on a nocturnal adventure that leads to several frustrating encounters with other women, culminating in an exclusive sex party that he tries to attend without an invitation. Given the threat to this superficially stable and happy family, the holiday setting, rendered in warm lights and festive colors, stands out in sharp relief.‘Elf’ (2003)Stream it on Hulu and Max. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.There was no more ideal choice to play an orphan raised by North Pole elves than Will Ferrell, whose ungainly, up-for-anything rambunctiousness had made him a breakout star on “Saturday Night Live.” “Elf” has the quality of an extended sketch, as Ferrell’s overgrown Buddy leaves Santa’s Workshop for New York City to find his real father (James Caan), an ornery children’s book publisher who works in the Empire State Building. His comic naïveté and relentless good cheer turn “Elf” into a fish-out-of-water comedy of disarming warmth, thanks largely to an ace supporting cast that includes Emily Deschanel, Ed Asner, Mary Steenburgen and Bob Newhart.‘Bad Santa’ (2003)Stream it on Paramount+. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.For those who greet the holidays with dread — or simply like their eggnog extra-spiked — Terry Zwigoff’s dark comedy is the ultimate in Christmas counterprogramming, a relentlessly vulgar provocation that does have a heart if you squint hard enough to see it. Billy Bob Thornton stars as an alcoholic mall Santa who uses his access to rob department stores at the peak of the shopping season, provided he can stay sober long enough to crack the safe. His latest job is complicated by a sweet, outcast boy whose belief in Santa is unshakable, even when his hero is a grump with conspicuously foul breath.‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’ (2005)Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Robert Downey Jr., left, and Val Kilmer in “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.”Warner Bros.Since breaking into Hollywood with his script for “Lethal Weapon,” the writer Shane Black has set six of his films during Christmas in Los Angeles, where it’s too temperate to find obvious evidence of the season. His directing debut, the spiky neo-noir buddy-action comedy “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” loads up the soundtrack with a mix of traditional and irreverent Christmas songs. Its murder mystery starts at a fancy party where the most intriguing guest, an aspiring actress (Michelle Monaghan), appears in a deconstructed Santa outfit. Robert Downey Jr. plays a hilariously snarky thief who stumbles into an audition for a detective role, gets the part and then shadows a real-life private eye (Val Kilmer) on a case.‘A Christmas Tale’ (2008)Stream it on Mubi. Rent it on Amazon and Apple TV.The premise for this French ensemble piece sounds like a heartwarming holiday treacle: Playing the matriarch of a large family, the screen legend Catherine Deneuve gathers her three adult-age children and their significant others to announce that she has leukemia and needs a bone-marrow transplant. But the director, Arnaud Desplechin, who broke through with a three-hour film titled “My Sex Life (Or How I Got Into an Argument),” isn’t the sentimental type. “A Christmas Tale” exposes the many fault lines in this wildly dysfunctional family but it’s a disarmingly affectionate film, too, with a first-rate cast that includes Mathieu Amalric, Anne Consigny, Melvil Poupaud and Emmanuelle Devos.‘Carol’ (2015)Stream it on Netflix. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett in “Carol.”Wilson Webb/The Weinstein CompanyDuring the Christmas rush at Frankenberg’s department store in 1952 Manhattan, a moment is shared by two women — one an aspiring young photographer (Rooney Mara) logging time as a clerk in a Santa hat, the other a wealthy married woman (Cate Blanchett) in a glamorous mink. What follows is a forbidden affair that bridges a chasm in age and class. The morality clause in the older woman’s marital contract threatens her financial security and her status as a mother. Yet “Carol” has a powerful romantic spirit all the same, buoyed by a wintry holiday backdrop that’s suggestive of a new home these women seek to find in each other.‘Le Pupille’ (2022)Stream it on Disney+.A deserving nominee for best live action short at the 2023 Oscars, Alice Rohrwacher’s charming and evocative 37-minute film takes place at an all-girls Catholic boarding school over Christmas during World War II. As the head nun keeps strict watch over these adorable, mischievous kids — they get their mouths soaped for grooving to a pop song on the radio — a young woman arrives with a scrumptious red custard cake, asking them to pray for her unfaithful boyfriend. The nun presents the kids with a cruel challenge: Can they prove their devotion to Jesus by resisting the temptation of this Christmas Day treat? More