Aurelia Butler

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicWelcome to Popcast (Deluxe), a new weekly video show hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli that breaks down essential pop culture. This week’s episode includes segments on:Morgan Wallen, the country singer who continues to top both the Billboard album chart and the Hot 100 despite the postponement of several dates on his stadium tour because of a vocal cord injuryThe Dare, a rising star of New York neo-electroclashThe Hulu documentary “Queenmaker,” about early 2000s It Girls and the blogs that alternately fawned over and savaged themThe season finale of “Survivor,” in which a gaggle of star-level outcasts made it to the end of the gameNew songs from YoungBoy Never Broke Again and Lana Del Rey More

The group, formed in Zambia, blended psychedelic funk with African influences. At 71, its leader, Jagari Chanda, is putting out his first LP with the band in four decades.During a feverish performance last fall at Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, Emmanuel Chanda (who uses the stage name Jagari) paused to preach what he called “the philosophy of positivity.”“When a woman doesn’t love you or when someone does you wrong, it’s all right,” the frontman of the Zambian rock band Witch said, flashing a wide smile. “It’s always all right.”For Chanda, “It’s Alright” — the title of a Witch song from 1974 — isn’t a cheap bromide or a rank cliché. It’s an enduring ballast in a life that has encountered an uncommon number of tragedies and hardships, as well as dreams long deferred.In his 71 years, Chanda has seen his landlocked African country experience waves of political turmoil and economic meltdowns as well as the scourge of AIDS in the ’80s and ’90s, which took the lives of every other original member of Witch. At the same time, he has enjoyed a vaunted reputation at home and with cult audiences abroad as a pioneer of the Zamrock movement that exploded in the 1970s when his country, flush from the spoils of its chief economic source — copper mines — provided young musicians access to European and American music, and created a unique sound.At its root, Zamrock melded fuzz-toned psychedelia, chugging garage rock and roiling funk with a broad mix of African cadences and beats. In its heyday, Witch drew thousands of local fans to its shows, enlivening a scene that included bands like Musi O Tunya (led by the Zamrock mainstay Rikki Ililonga), the Ngozi Family, and Amanaz.Between 1972 and ’77, Chanda recorded five albums with Witch (its name stands for We Intend to Cause Havoc) that initially had no impact outside the Zambia region. That began to change in 2010, when reissues and compilations appeared in Europe and the United States. Fans responded passionately enough to support tours by a fresh band that Chanda assembled six years ago featuring mainly young, European musicians. (The keyboardist Patrick Mwondela played in an incarnation of Witch after Chanda departed in 1979, and is the only other Zambian in the current group.)A recent documentary about the band, titled “We Intend to Cause Havoc,” generated more attention, which has helped Chanda finally fulfill one of his greatest dreams: to record new Witch music. This week the band releases “Zango,” the first album to appear under its name since 1984 and the first in over four decades to feature its frontman.Chanda in the documentary “We Intend to Cause Havoc,” which brought renewed attention to the band.Pantheon Pictures“To me, this is a resurrection,” Chanda said in an interview at a Williamsburg coffee shop the day after the concert. “It’s like I went into oblivion, and then was pushed out to continue what I was created to do.”In the years since Witch first made an impact, younger musicians have been paying attention. Sampa the Great, a 29-year-old Zambian rapper with international reach, said she connected “to the defiance and the edginess” of Witch’s music. “To have traditional music and infuse it with rock, that’s what I do with hip-hop,” she added. She collaborated with Witch on a track from her 2022 album “As Above, So Below” and appears on one of the band’s new songs.Ahmed Gallab, a Sudanese American musician whose group, Sinkane, plays a progressive brand of funk, said that Chanda’s role in Witch “showed me how to be an African rock star to the max.”In some ways, Witch’s new music picks up right where the original band left off. Desert Daze Sound, which signed the group in partnership with Partisan Records, insisted that it record at DB studios in Lusaka, Zambia, where the act cut its most vaunted set, “Lazy Bones,” in 1975.“We have the original gear from those records and the same sound engineer,” said Jacco Gardner, the band’s current bassist, who hails from the Netherlands. But, according to Stefan Lilov, the band’s Switzerland-based guitarist, “some of the equipment was in terrible shape. We had to have a guy solder the guitar pedals together as we were recording.”Despite the vintage touches, it’s the band’s mix of European and African players, as well as its contrast in generations (with all the European members in their 30s and the Zambians decades older), that has infused the new music with fresh rhythmic and melodic flourishes.Onstage in Brooklyn, Chanda easily outpaced his younger bandmates, headbanging, jittering and shaking throughout the night. (His old nickname was Jagger, as in Mick, for his stage moves.) “I didn’t want to be in another man’s shadow,” Chanda said, explaining why he added an “i” to the end of his adopted first name to make it Jagari, which means a brewer of brown sugar in a local language. “I Africanized it!”Bands like the Rolling Stones entranced Chanda from an early age. He first heard their music, as well as that of Grand Funk Railroad and Black Sabbath, on jukeboxes at bars and via radio stations based in Zimbabwe. To young Zambians like Chanda, the bold sound of Stratocasters symbolized the feeling of freedom their country had finally won from Britain in 1964. “Every town had a band or two,” the singer said. “My town had five or six.”Chanda learned guitar from a friend’s brother. In 1971, while in high school, he joined Witch, which mixed Western rock with local kalindula rhythms, helping set off the Zamrock movement. “Not to take anything away from the other great Zambian rock bands, but Witch was on another level,” said Eothen Alapatt, who heads Now-Again Records, a U.S.-based label that reissued its classic work. “Over the course of five records, they showcased tremendous range and development.”Chanda put it simply: “Witch was the band everyone wanted to join.”Witch’s mix of European and African players, as well as its contrast in generations, infused the new music with fresh rhythmic and melodic flourishes.Magdalena Wosinska for The New York TimesBut the Zamrock renaissance was short-lived. By the late ’70s, Zambia’s economy had cratered with tumbling copper prices. Conflicts in neighboring countries spilled over into Zambia, leading the government to declare curfews and blackouts that made concerts rare. “Music became a luxury people couldn’t afford,” Chanda said.Then came AIDS, which decimated large portions of the population. With a new family to support, Chanda quit playing music and began teaching it at Lusaka College. Later, he became a civil servant, but he was fired after being accused of picking up a shipment of drugs at an airport in the mid-90s; the charges were later dropped. To keep his family going, he worked in the mines, and got sober and became religious. Even with the influx of money from touring in recent years, Chanda still digs for gemstones in rough earth to make ends meet. “At this age, it’s hard work for me,” he said, “especially in Africa where it’s hotter.”The chance to tour and create fresh music with new musicians has reinvigorated him. “Jagari wasn’t saying, ‘You have to make the exact Zamrock sound,’” Gardner said. “He said, ‘Make it your own.’”Chanda’s new lyrics, which he delivers in English and several languages local to Zambia, cover both personal and political topics. “Stop the Rot,” sung in Bemba, criticizes those who still practice witchcraft in Zambia. “It’s detrimental to a developing country,” he said. “Message From Witch” features entreaties to halt a host of prejudices, including antisemitism and homophobia — a proclamation that represents a considerable risk in Zambia, where gay sexual activity can draw prison sentences of 15 years or more.Given the escalating demand for Witch to tour — the group completed three jaunts in 2022 — Chanda has big dreams for the future. He hopes to make enough money to afford an excavator to ease the toil of his mining, and he wants to fund a music school back home. He admitted that he sometimes thinks back to his fallen bandmates. “I do wish that group was here,” he said.At the same time, his philosophy of positivity and stalwart faith has inspired him to focus on his new chance. “I’m not here because I’m clever,” he said with his reliable smile. “It’s God. His grace has allowed me to live again.” More

Julia Wolfe’s latest in a series of increasingly political, oratorio-like works, “unEarth,” premieres this week at the New York Philharmonic.Julia Wolfe, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and co-founder of Bang on a Can, has a way with words.In “Anthracite Fields,” the coal-dark highlight of a series of folklike, oratorio-adjacent works in which Wolfe, 64, has been putting American injustices under her unsparing sonic microscope, she lists the men named John with single-syllable surnames who can be found on an index of Pennsylvania mining accidents — a litany hundreds of Johns long.Her memorial to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory disaster, “Fire in my mouth,” concludes with an ethereal incantation of the 146 workers who died, their names drifting in sound, as if into the smoke of history. “Her Story,” a reflection on women’s rights, quotes some of the choicest insults that were spat at suffragists a century ago, as if to ask whether they sound familiar today.Now comes “unEarth,” a confrontation with climate change that premieres on Thursday at the New York Philharmonic, with Jaap van Zweden leading the soprano Else Torp, the men of the Crossing and the Young People’s Chorus of New York City, in a staging by the director Anne Kauffman. It starts, and ends, with words sung by the children who helped write them.Wolfe’s “Fire in my mouth” at David Geffen Hall in 2019.Caitlin Ochs for The New York Times“Of course, it’s so important for everyone but particularly poignant for younger people,” Wolfe said of the climate crisis in a recent interview. “A lot of the leadership right now, a lot of the feisty leadership is coming from young people, particularly from young women.”The texts that Wolfe uses in “unEarth” have a sense of literary adventure familiar from her earlier oratorios. She read widely to research it, and noted the influence of such writers as Sami Grover, Peter Wohlleben and Elizabeth Kolbert, a friend. The libretto draws on Emily Dickinson and the book of Genesis; in the second movement of three, “Forest,” the word tree is translated into myriad languages, which she pounds into a celebration of all things arboreal, backed by conga drums.“She is always taking kernels of text that have a lot of resonance in the stories of the world we live in,” Donald Nally, the conductor of the Crossing, said of Wolfe. “Honestly, at some point, you start to stop thinking about the words and you drift off into larger ideas.”Many of Wolfe’s compositions — another, an orchestral work called “Pretty,” will premiere at the Berlin Philharmonic next week, under its chief conductor, Kirill Petrenko, a Wolfe admirer — have had political themes. But the larger ideas of “unEarth” are more directly delivered than those of any of her other socially conscious but primarily historical oratorios, dating back to “Steel Hammer” more than a decade ago.The impulse to speak plainly comes not just from the subject matter, but from Wolfe’s chosen collaborators. When she decided to involve the Young People’s Chorus in the work, as she had in “Fire,” she sought the input of its singers; she and Kauffman asked its conductors to lead the choristers in discussions about the climate crisis, and recorded them.“Something that I remember is everybody agreeing on this sense of urgency,” Ryoko Leyh, 16, said of the conversations she took part in. “Everybody was saying something like ‘I’m scared,’ or ‘I’m always thinking about it, it’s always on my mind and making me anxious.’ So I feel like we all had different ideas of what is actually going on and what we can do to stop climate change, but we all had that collective sense of dread.”The children of the chorus come from all kinds of educational backgrounds, said Francisco J. Núñez, its artistic director. For many of them, the discussions were a learning opportunity; some were as young as 8.“It really made me think on how impactful learning about climate change and global warming itself can be on the young population,” Irene Cunto, 12, said, “because at the end, we’ll be the ones that’s facing it.”Wolfe’s works in this vein have grown increasingly political. “I can be poetic, poetic, poetic,” she said, “but then at a certain point it’s like, what are we doing here?”Amrita Stuetzle for The New York TimesThe process was instructive for Wolfe, too. She was amazed at the subtlety of the conversations, and decided to use parts of them in the piece. It begins with a quotation of one of the most junior participants, who saw global warming as “like a monster devouring the Earth.” The work ends with another quotation, this time of an older singer, as their phrase “hope requires action” is chanted like a mantra, before the chorus and the soprano demand that the audience “act,” with an insistent, if fearful and minor-key, final crescendo.“We just feel powerless because of this idea that we’ve inherited all these problems and now it’s our responsibility to fix everything,” Leyh said, pointing to the importance of the chorus singing words its members have written themselves. “It’s like we’re being given a platform that we don’t usually have, literally, to say what we want to say in a way that we know is going to be heard.”Making the Young People’s Chorus the voice of hope in “unEarth,” and ensuring that the audience would have to look at them “in the face,” as Wolfe put it, offered the composer something of a way through the dilemmas involved in creating explicitly political art, a challenge that climate-conscious composers are finding becomes more acute as catastrophes grow. Wolfe said that she was trying not to be too didactic, but that she was content with her solution in the final movement, “Fix It,” which lists a number of ways in which individuals can make a difference — Meatless Mondays, No Mow May — as well as broader policy concepts, like “reforestation” and “solarification.”“I can be poetic, poetic, poetic,” Wolfe said, “but then at a certain point it’s like, what are we doing here?”The Philharmonic commissioned “unEarth” after the success of “Fire in my mouth” four years ago, and is presenting it on the first of two programs that make up “Earth,” a climate mini-festival. The second program, next week, includes the belated local premiere of John Luther Adams’s “Become Desert,” which debuted in Seattle five years ago.“In the end, music is about emotion,” said Deborah Borda, the president and chief executive of the Philharmonic, “and Julia is able to combine, in that way that we cannot quite explain, a combination of beauty and emotion. It carries an even stronger message as a result.”Each of Wolfe’s oratorios has offered a different answer to the question of where the balance of poetry and politics lies, though she sees a progression through them. “Anthracite Fields” was not exactly shy about its views — it sets a speech by John L. Lewis, the militant leader of the United Mine Workers — but, as one listener pointed out to her, it does not explicitly mention protest. “Fire,” partly as a consequence, has an entire, thumping movement called “Protest.” “Her Story” is more of an inquiry into change than an indictment of the past, but as Wolfe put it, “it’s a little sassier.”“UnEarth,” though, includes lines like “the house is on fire,” and “clean up your corporation.” It goes further, and with good reason.“The others were more reflective. ‘Who were we?’ ‘Who are we?’” Wolfe said. “And this is like: ‘Guess what. We have to do something.’” More

After a triumphant house debut in 2019, the bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny brought power and clarity to the title role in “The Flying Dutchman.”On Tuesday night, four years after being hailed as the breakout star of a revival of Wagner’s “Ring” at the Metropolitan Opera, Tomasz Konieczny returned there to headline “Der Fliegende Holländer,” or “The Flying Dutchman.” It was worth the wait.Konieczny’s Dutchman, cursed to ride the seas endlessly in a ghost ship with black masts and red sails, seemed to channel supernatural forces as he emerged from the bowels of François Girard’s unremittingly dark production. Konieczny possesses an instrument of granitic power and brassy resonance, combining the depth of a tuba with the brightly penetrating cast of a trumpet. He can also cover his voice and fill it with pitiful tears. For such a sizable instrument, his attack is astonishingly clean; he inflates a straight tone to a vibrating roar and makes it sound like an exquisite cri de coeur.Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, offered the role to Konieczny, a Polish bass-baritone, in 2019 when Gelb heard Konieczny’s company debut as Alberich in the “Ring” that year. Konieczny brought unusual charisma and nobility to the designated villain of Wagner’s epic tetralogy, and his Dutchman is likewise a complex creation.A tragic figure whose stoic demeanor masks a writhing pain within, Konieczny’s Dutchman rises above earthly concerns but rages with focused fury against the ever-fresh torments of his Sisyphean predicament. His invincibility has made him disdainful of humans and desperate for death, and yet he harbors a romanticized fixation upon love. The Dutchman comes ashore once every seven years in search of a woman who can redeem him with her fidelity and break his curse. (Of course, the premise contains passive-aggressive misogyny — that a man in search of a faithful woman is doomed to look for her forever.)As Senta, the woman who returns the apparitional captain’s obsessive attention, Elza van den Heever sang with a ductile soprano. In “Senta’s Ballad,” she catapulted into high-lying phrases with strength and point and drew her voice into a slender thread for beautifully formed pianissimo high notes. As infatuation consumed her, van den Heever summoned the tonal amplitude to fill out Wagner’s portrait of a love that is annihilating in its totality.The clear thrust of Eric Cutler’s tenor gave the role of Erik, Senta’s abandoned lover, unusual poignancy. The bass Dmitry Belosselskiy effectively rendered Daland, Senta’s venal, easily dazzled father, as a strong yet foolish man who would trade his daughter for riches.Girard’s production — like his recent “Lohengrin” — attempts to get a lot of mileage out of a few ideas. It’s long on ambience, with billowing fog and undertones of sickly, hallucinogenic greens, and short on storytelling.Fortunately, the 29-year-old conductor Thomas Guggeis, making his Met debut, added depth to the atmosphere of roiling fantasy. The overture came alive with stormy eddies and pulsating vigor, even as video projections of a maelstrom and cracks of lightning felt redundant. The strings, in particular, found imaginative colors: Their throbbing vitality, unabashed romance and otherworldly shrieks covered the range of a work that swings from bel-canto influences to the enthralling mythmaking that would become Wagner’s signature. There were some missed opportunities — such as the dark timbres that color the Act II duet for Senta and the Dutchman — but overall, Guggeis was a confident, sensitive, decisive presence.At times, Girard’s abstract staging still seems to distrust the material, but kinetic conducting and a richly characterized central performance show that it may simply have been waiting for a few artists to redeem it.Der Fliegende HolländerThrough June 10 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

Jonathon Heyward will succeed Louis Langrée as music director of the center’s revered summer ensemble.Jonathon Heyward, the rising young conductor who this fall will become the first Black music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, has been tapped to lead Lincoln Center’s summer ensemble, a reimagined version of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, the center announced on Wednesday.Heyward, 30, will start a three-year contract with Lincoln Center next year. His appointment is part of the center’s changes to the revered Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, by giving it a new name, embracing a wider variety of genres and bringing more racial, ethnic and gender diversity to the stage.“If a 10-year-old boy from Charleston can fall in love with this music, then anyone can,” Heyward said in an interview. “It has everything to do with accessibility and presentation.”Heyward succeeds the orchestra’s longtime music director, Louis Langrée, whose contract expires this year. During Langrée’s 21-year tenure, he has helped rejuvenate the ensemble and cement its reputation as an acclaimed interpreter of the music of Mozart and the Classical repertoire.“The orchestra musicians and I have developed a unique bond that I will treasure forever,” Langrée said in a statement. “I wish Jonathon as many joys as those I experienced during this extraordinary journey.”Under Henry Timms, Lincoln Center’s president and chief executive, the organization has worked to appeal to a younger, more diverse crowd. Its efforts have led to some complaints from audience members, who say the center is not doing enough to promote classical music — which was once a fixture of the season and festivals there, but has been reduced significantly.Since the pandemic, the future of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, established in 1973, has been uncertain. The festival whose name it bears — once one of Lincoln Center’s premier summertime events — no longer exists. In its place is “Summer for the City,” featuring a wider variety of genres, including pop music, social dance and comedy.Shanta Thake, Lincoln Center’s chief artistic officer, said that the rethinking of Mostly Mozart was aimed at “opening this up and really saying that this is music that belongs to everyone.”“It’s a necessary evolution,” she said. “This is an orchestra that I think has a big place in the hearts and minds of New York City, and we want to keep it that way.”The Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra will get a new name when Heyward takes the podium next year. Thake said that its longtime moniker felt “a little myopic right now.”“We’d love to just open up that conversation and have this orchestra be something more than just one composer, or mostly anything,” she said.The center and the orchestra are negotiating a new contract — the previous agreement expired in February — and discussing issues including auditions, the process for hiring substitutes, diversifying the ranks of the ensemble and promoting community engagement.Heyward, who made his Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra debut last year and will return this summer, said that he would work to broaden the ensemble’s repertoire, including by programming more works by contemporary composers. He mentioned Hannah Kendall, a friend, as an example of an artist he was eager to explore.“We have to continue the lineage and the storytelling of today in order to really grow the art form,” he said.Heyward said he would also seek to preserve the ensemble’s heritage. “I just don’t see that just completely disappearing overnight,” he said. “It won’t, simply.”“I don’t plan on just throwing out the Beethoven symphonies, the Schumann symphonies or Mozart,” he added. “That’s not the approach to take, and that’s not what I believe in.” More