Aurelia Butler

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    The Gospel Star Tasha Cobbs Leonard Takes a New Leap: A Studio Album

    Inspired in part by a book she published last year, the singer and songwriter reveals more of herself on “Tasha,” an album blending gospel and pop.“Tasha,” the new album from the gospel music star Tasha Cobbs Leonard, tucks messages of salvation, hope and encouragement into songs shaped by hip-hop, R&B and even bluegrass. Guest appearances include a gospel music icon and an EGOT winner.But fans of the singer and songwriter, 44, will be most surprised by what the LP, releasing July 25, doesn’t feature: the sound of an audience. Since her major-label debut 13 years ago, Cobbs Leonard has only released live albums. As a worship leader, she is most comfortable singing in front of a gathering, whether in a church or in Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium.“I’ve been doing this for almost 13 years,” she said during a recent video interview. “What keeps me relevant is stretching myself and doing the uncomfortable thing — not something completely new, but building on the foundation.”Walter Thomas, the senior vice president of Motown Gospel and TAMLA Records, said the goal was giving audiences a more three-dimensional picture of Cobbs Leonard. “We wanted to showcase who Tasha is outside of church,” he said. “There’s a pop side, there’s a fun side, there’s a family-oriented side. This body of work reflects that.”Cobbs Leonard has been slowly revealing herself for years. She’s a busy touring musician, a mother of a blended family of four and a pastor of the Purpose Place Church in Spartanburg, S.C., with her husband, the music producer Kenneth Leonard Jr. Chatting from her living room, wearing a baby-blue short-sleeve top that was nearly the same color as the walls behind her, a flourish of flaxen curls cascading across her forehead, Cobbs Leonard spoke candidly, smiling and laughing with the same infectious and welcoming enthusiasm she brings to her singing.“I’ve been doing this for almost 13 years,” Cobbs Leonard said. “What keeps me relevant is stretching myself and doing the uncomfortable thing.”Will Crooks for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Weird Al Is Enjoying His Rock-Star Moment

    At 65, Weird Al still commands the stage like a natural-born rocker, with high kicks and the panache to pull off what few other artists can (including a fat suit). During “Eat It,” a riff on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” audience members — many in Hawaiian shirts and sporting curly locks — were on their feet. Even a seen-it-all security guard danced. For “White & Nerdy,” Weird Al arrived via scooter, to the thump of Chamillionaire’s “Ridin’.” Father-son pairs, arm-in-arm, knew every lyric. More

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    Putting Stars in the Sky With a Halftime Stage

    Global Citizen, which organizes charity musical festivals and is producing the halftime shows for FIFA, quickly learned some lessons for next summer, when 48 nations compete throughout the United States, Canada and Mexico. Hugh Evans, Global Citizen’s chief executive, said it must keep the performers cooler (temperatures were over 80 degrees) and improve the exposure of cameras because of the sun. But he was pleased overall, shedding a tear after watching the show. More

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    Billy Jones, Baby’s All Right Owner and NYC Nightlife Impresario, Dies at 45

    He opened Baby’s All Right and three other nightclubs, a restaurant and a record store in a dozen years, helping the city maintain its cultural verve.As a recent college graduate in the early 2000s, Billy Jones lived with his parents in Richmond, Va., but his fantasy life was elsewhere: in Williamsburg, the Brooklyn neighborhood that had become the world capital of indie rock. The closest he could get was visiting his local Barnes & Noble, where he would read magazines covering New York’s music scene.Then one day in 2002, he made the leap: He was leaving home, he told his father. He and the high school friends who made up his band, Other Passengers, had decided to try to make it big in New York.In Williamsburg, Mr. Jones began working as a barista, with dreams of indie-rock stardom. It wasn’t so far-fetched. At a cafe down the block, another barista, Kyp Malone, would soon gain renown as a singer and guitarist with the group TV on the Radio.There was passion in the moans of Mr. Jones’s singing, but he did not become a rock star. In time, the Williamsburg concert venues that had launched some of his peers — clubs like 285 Kent, Glasslands, Death by Audio — all closed. Rents in the neighborhood had skyrocketed. Aspiring young musicians left.And instead of achieving his own dreams, Mr. Jones wound up doing something else: He made it possible for other people to keep dreaming.In 2013, he and a friend, Zachary Mexico, opened Baby’s All Right, a club at 146 Broadway in Williamsburg. It became, as The New York Times wrote in 2015, the “nightlife preserver” of the neighborhood. It was a small enough venue to offer major acts an indie spirit that they could no longer find elsewhere in New York City, yet big enough to make unproven musicians feel that they had made it.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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    Songs for the Heat of Peak Summer: Welcome to Lizard Season

    Hear 10 songs from yeule, Momma, Four Tet and more.yeulePatrick LeDear listeners,A week ago, I went to two backyard barbecues and two rooftop hangs in the span of 24 hours. This past weekend, I crisscrossed from a block party to the beach to an outdoor concert to a different block party.In general, it has been a gray and mild summer in New York City, which has felt like treachery. We’re not supposed to do mild here. So I’ve relished the occasions this month when days of unfettered sun have trailed one after the other. Endorphins from UV rays gallop through my bloodstream. Blue skies hypnotize me out of my inhibitions. Agendas slip away like steam from a hot spring. At last, Lizard Season.Lizard Season, to borrow a term from my friend Morgan, is that stretch of mid-July and August when summer is at full force. Those of us who celebrate feel our moods soar along with the sun’s highest and longest route across the sky. Embracing Lizard Season means welcoming its sweet, hot sting against your skin; leaning into the melt; basking in the too-muchness, knowing that one day soon there won’t be nearly enough.This week, as guest host filling in for my culture desk colleague Lindsay Zoladz, I’ve made a playlist of 10 new songs that channel the spirit of peak summer. Tracks by Fade Evare, Wishy and yeule shimmer with the languorous luxury of an afternoon picnic. It closes out with more up-tempo jams by Georgie & Joe, Deki Alem and deBasement — music for dancing on a rooftop under a 9 p.m. sunset.Find me outside,ReggieListen along while you read.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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    Damiano Michieletto Is Bringing ‘West Side Story’ to Rome

    It was the morning of the dress rehearsal for Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story,” at the Baths of Caracalla, the ancient ruins that are the traditional summertime venue for the Rome Opera, and the show’s director, Damiano Michieletto, was concerned.“Some of the Jets have problems with precise pronunciation,” he said.After deciding to do the musical in English rather than in translation, he did not have the funds to hire a full American cast for the Jets, a gang rumbling to take the streets of New York. You could tell, he fretted. (The diction was less of a problem with the Sharks, the rival Puerto Rican gang, he said, “because Italian, you know, that works.”)That might have been his least concern. This year, Michieletto was given free rein to come up with the program for the Rome Opera’s summer Caracalla Festival, which runs until Aug. 7, keeping in mind that 2025 is a Jubilee year for the Catholic Church expected to draw millions of pilgrims with varying musical tastes to Rome. In a break from past programming, he decided that the first major new production would be “West Side Story.” A musical — gasp — was headlining one of Italy’s most highbrow cultural stages and was an unusual choice in a country where musicals are considered a minor genre and often dismissed.A musical headlining one of Italy’s most highbrow cultural stages is an unusual choice in a country where musicals are often dismissed.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesThat did not faze Michieletto, who over the past 20 years has built a reputation as a visionary, nonconformist, at times over-the-top, director whose work is in demand across Europe. In September, he will make his debut at a major American opera house with Rossini’s “Il Viaggio a Reims” at Opera Philadelphia. There he will be presenting a revival of a much-lauded version first staged in Amsterdam in 2015 and reprised several times since.For his new work at the Caracalla Festival — which this year is titled “Between the Sacred and the Human” because it casts a wide musical net, from a staged production of Handel’s oratorio “The Resurrection” to “West Side Story” — he opted to focus on the electric energy of a work that was directed and based on an idea by Jerome Robbins, one of the great choreographers of his generation.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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    Salzburg Festival Welcomes Peter Eotvos’ Opera “Three Sisters”

    Peter Eotvos’s “Three Sisters,” based on the 1900 play by Anton Chekhov, is at the festival this year for the first time.On a hot, drizzly afternoon in late June, a rehearsal of Peter Eotvos’s “Three Sisters,” one of the four new opera productions at this summer’s Salzburg Festival, erupted in dainty tinkling.The opera’s cast members sat in the middle of a rehearsal room and tapped spoons against empty teacups. The conductor Maxime Pascal, flanked by two pianos, nodded approvingly at the sounds of clinking, clattering and rattling. On the large copy of the score that lay in front of him, each tap was precisely notated, and there was a visual key illustrating different techniques: tapping with the tip or the stem of a teaspoon, continuous stirring, and setting a spoon down on a saucer.“Peter wrote this moment because it’s a bit boring,” Pascal explained with a slight chuckle during a break in the rehearsal. “The three sisters are very bored, and there is this kind of melancholy.”Based on Anton Chekhov’s 1900 play about siblings in a Russian provincial town who dream of a better, more fulfilling life in Moscow, the opera is unconventional in ways that are, by turns, playful and daring.The four main female characters — Olga, Masha and Irina as well as their sister-in-law, Natasha — are performed by countertenors, the highest male voice type. In addition to china and cutlery, the score calls for two musical groups: a pit band (referred to as the ensemble) of 18 instruments that are identified with specific characters, and a 50-piece orchestra that plays from elsewhere in the theater. (For the Salzburg performances, the orchestra will play from a large hidden balcony that is behind and above the rows of seating in the Felsenreitschule, a cavernous indoor theater that is carved into a cliff.)Alphonse Cemin conducting instrumentalists during a “Three Sisters” rehearsal. Eotvos wrote the score for two musical groups, a pit band featuring 18 instruments, and a 50-piece orchestra that plays elsewhere in the theater.Matteo de Mayda for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Asmik Grigorian Brings “A Diva Is Born” to the Salzburg Festival

    Asmik Grigorian will return to the role of Lady Macbeth in Verdi’s “Macbeth” and present her pop-infused comic recital “A Diva Is Born.”When the soprano Asmik Grigorian took on the title role of Strauss’s “Salome” at the Salzburg Festival, in 2018, the summer event found a new reigning diva.With a voice of lush power and a raw authenticity that shines through in every character, the Lithuanian artist has become one of today’s most sought operatic performers, in Vienna, currently her home city; London; Milan; and beyond.But she has flouted conventions of stardom and challenged audiences’ expectations. Onstage, she pushes well-known characters to dramatic extremes; offstage, she often stares into the camera with a defiantly non-glamorous expression.In August, she will return to Salzburg as Lady Macbeth in Krzysztof Warlikowski’s staging of Verdi’s “Macbeth,” first seen there in 2023. And on Aug. 24, with the pianist Hyung-ki Joo, she will present the comic recital “A Diva Is Born.”The “Diva” show debuted in May of last year at the Vienna State Opera — where it will return this December — and was recently performed in Vilnius, Lithuania, where Grigorian was born and raised.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