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    Voletta Wallace, the Notorious B.I.G.’s Mother, Dies at 78

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    She played the rapper music as a child, stood by his side during his meteoric career and navigated the legal and artistic questions that arose after his killing.Voletta Wallace, the mother of the Brooklyn rapper the Notorious B.I.G., whose stewardship of her son’s career and legacy after he was killed in 1997 helped cement him as a hip-hop legend, died on Friday. She was 78.Ms. Wallace died in hospice care at her residence in Stroudsburg, Pa., according to a news release from the Monroe County coroner, Thomas Yanac. A cause was not specified.A middle-class immigrant and single mother from Jamaica, Ms. Wallace was forced into the hip-hop spotlight after the Notorious B.I.G., born Christopher Wallace and also known as Biggie Smalls, was killed at 24 in a Los Angeles drive-by shooting.Biggie’s death came just six months after the Las Vegas slaying of the rapper Tupac Shakur, a onetime friend turned bitter rival, with the killings abruptly ending a formative and fruitful moment in mainstream gangster rap amid a tangled East Coast-West Coast beef that went far beyond music.For decades, both cases remained unsolved, fueling an ongoing ecosystem of true-crime books, documentaries, articles and more that have attempted to explain the possible links between the two killings, including the involvement of national gangs and crooked cops. (In 2023, prosecutors in Las Vegas charged Duane Keith Davis, a former gang leader known as Keffe D, with murder in the Shakur case; he is set to stand trial later this year.)Ms. Wallace, a preschool teacher, took on the mantle of her son’s career almost immediately. Biggie’s second album, “Life After Death,” came out two weeks after he died; six months later, Ms. Wallace accepted the MTV Video Music Award for best rap video (“Hypnotize”), telling the New York crowd, “I know if my son was here tonight, the first thing he would’ve done is say big up to Brooklyn.”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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      Coming Soon to Trump’s Kennedy Center: A Celebration of Christ

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      President Trump took control of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington only last week. But his administration is already making plans for reshaping the institution’s programming.Chief among them: a celebration of Christ planned for December. Richard Grenell, whom Mr. Trump named as the Kennedy Center’s new president, told a conservative gathering on Friday that the “big change” at the center would be that “we are doing a big, huge celebration of the birth of Christ at Christmas.”“How crazy is it to think that we’re going to celebrate Christ at Christmas with a big traditional production, to celebrate what we are all celebrating in the world during Christmastime, which is the birth of Christ?” Mr. Grenell said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Md.The Kennedy Center has long held Christmas-themed events.Last December, the center hosted “A Candlelight Christmas” by the Washington Chorus; “A Family Christmas” by the Choral Arts Society of Washington; and “Go Tell It,” a Christmas celebration by the Alfred Street Baptist Church, a prominent Black church in Virginia. (On Sunday, the church said it would cancel its Christmas concert there this year because the Kennedy Center’s new leaders stood in opposition to the “longstanding tradition of honoring artistic expression across all backgrounds.”)Mr. Grenell’s comments were his first public remarks in which he discussed his plans as the Kennedy Center’s new leader. His appointment was part of a series of extraordinary actions Mr. Trump took to solidify control over the Kennedy Center, which has been a bipartisan institution throughout its 54-year history.Mr. Trump, who stayed away from the Kennedy Center Honors during his first term after some of the artists being honored criticized him, stunned the cultural world when he decided this month to purge the center’s board of all Biden appointees and install himself as chairman, ousting the financier David M. Rubenstein, the center’s largest donor. The new board fired Deborah F. Rutter, the center’s president for more than a decade, and the post was given to Mr. Grenell, a Trump loyalist who was ambassador to Germany during the president’s first term.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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      Tate McRae Dances in and Out of Love, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Ledisi, Perfume Genius featuring Aldous Harding, Smerz and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Tate McRae, ‘Revolving Door’A lack of instantly recognizable, stylistically defining hits — aside from the slinky, irresistible 2023 smash “Greedy” — has somehow not stopped the 21-year-old singer and dancer Tate McCrae’s star from rising over the past few years. She dips into a more promising and vulnerable sound on the moody, pulsating “Revolving Door,” the latest single from her just-released third album, “So Close to What.” “I keep coming back like a revolving door,” she sings on a chorus that thumps like an anxious heartbeat, “saying I couldn’t want you less, but I just want you more.” A McCrae single is still only as good as the choreography in its accompanying music video, and by that measure, it’s one of her strongest yet. LINDSAY ZOLADZPerfume Genius featuring Aldous Harding, ‘No Front Teeth’Perfume Genius (Mike Hadreas) and Aldous Harding share “No Front Teeth,” a surreal excursion that seesaws between pretty folk-Baroque pop and noisy, neo-psychedelic rock. Perfume Genius sings about being shattered; Harding answers him with a high, angelic call for “better days.” The video just adds more layers to the conundrum. JON PARELESHurray for the Riff Raff, ‘Pyramid Scheme’On this heartfelt one-off single, Alynda Segarra returns to the gentle folk-rock sound they honed on “The Past Is Still Alive,” the excellent album they released last year as Hurray for the Riff Raff. “This is not a scene, it’s a pyramid scheme,” they sing, pointing to a larger feeling of social collapse that, as the song progresses, dovetails with personal struggle. “I don’t know who you want me to be,” Segarra sings. “And I don’t know, and that terrifies me.” ZOLADZSleigh Bells, ‘Bunky Pop’The latest blast from the Sleigh Bells album due in April, “Bunky Becky Birthday Boy,” memorializes Alexis Krauss’s dog, who died in 2023. “Nights are long here without you,” she sings. But the song is manic and upbeat, swerving from electro to power-chorded pop, with eruptions of thrash drumming and tangents of dissonance — mourning by celebrating. PARELESMamalarky, ‘#1 Best of All Time’Mamalarky makes musicianly antics sound nonchalant on its new album, “Hex Key.” The singer and guitarist Livvy Bennett breezes through the self-satisfaction of “#1 Best of All Time,” declaring, “I always win even when I fall.” Her voice stays casual (and doesn’t worry about being a little flat) while the beat hurtles ahead and the chords take unlikely chromatic turns. The biggest boast is making it sound so easy. PARELESWe 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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      Jerry Butler, Singer Known as the Iceman, Dies at 85

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      Jerry Butler, the graceful singer and songwriter who served as the first leader of the Impressions before launching a long, hit-heavy solo career, died on Thursday at his home in Chicago. He was 85.His death was confirmed by his assistant, who said that Mr. Butler had Parkinson’s disease.Mr. Butler’s resounding baritone voice, though gritty in timbre, was animated by gentility and charm; he approached a lyric with an almost courtly level of sensitivity. His poise explained, in part, how he came to be known as the Iceman.Mr. Butler scored his first hit in 1958 with “For Your Precious Love,” a song he recorded with the Impressions and wrote with two other members of the group. It reached No. 11 on Billboard’s pop chart. Its lyrics stressed perseverance and loyalty, themes Mr. Butler would revisit throughout his career.Immediately after leaving the group in 1960, he reached the Billboard Top 10 with “He Will Break Your Heart,” which he wrote with his bandmate Curtis Mayfield and Calvin Carter. The song proved durable: A reworked version by Tony Orlando and Dawn, “He Don’t Love You (Like I Love You),” would become a No. 1 hit more than a decade later.Mr. Butler’s version of “Moon River,” the Henry Mancini-Johnny Mercer song from the movie “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” climbed to No. 11 on the pop chart in 1961. The next year, his interpretation of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Make It Easy on Yourself” reached No. 20.Two years later, he reached the Top 10 again with “Let It Be Me,” a duet with Betty Everett. It performed even better than the Everly Brothers’ version, widely considered a classic: The Butler-Everett version reached No. 5, two points higher than the Everlys had reached in 1960.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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      A Playlist Packed With Crossword Clues

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      Sia! Abba! ELO! Let us help you solve some puzzles with this compilation of songs by crossword-famous musicians.Sia, pictured without cheap thrills.Kevin Winter/BBMA2020, via Getty ImagesDear listeners,In 2012, shortly after the death of the legendary blues musician Etta James, the writer Matt Gaffney provided a somewhat unconventional eulogy on the website Slate, remembering James as “a woman whose handy, four-letter first name has gotten us out of many tough corners and spared us countless painful rewrites.”Gaffney is a crossword puzzle writer, and in this article he amusingly defined a specific type of renown: James was a perfect example of someone who was “crossword-famous.”If you do enough crossword puzzles (as I certainly do; shout out to my esteemed colleagues in The New York Times Games department for enabling my habit), you start to see certain names over and over. (Brian) Eno. (Yoko) Ono. And yes, Etta (James). Why these and not others? Gaffney explained, “short groupings of common letters are the lifeblood of crosswords, and you’ll need a lot of them if you want to make things work. For that reason, crossword-famous names are likely to be three, four or five letters long, with as many 1-point Scrabble letters as possible.”Today’s playlist is a compilation of songs by crossword-famous musicians. You’ll hear the aforementioned Eno, Ono and Etta, as well as a few more recent entrants into the pantheon of crossword fame: Sia, Adele and Ariana Grande. A certain Guthrie is also on this playlist, though avid crossword solvers know that the most famous folk singer with that last name is not necessarily the most crossword-famous.If you’re new to the art of solving crossword puzzles, I hope today’s playlist gives you some pointers — along with some enjoyable tunes. And if you’re more of an advanced puzzler who doesn’t pay much attention to popular music, this playlist should teach you a thing or two. Grab a pencil (or if you’re feeling especially confident, a pen), load up today’s New York Times crossword and press play.I feel like I win when I lose,LindsayWe 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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      Seong-Jin Cho Tackles a Ravel Piano Marathon in New York

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      Performing in New York, Seong-Jin Cho presented a marathon survey of Ravel’s solo piano works and appeared in Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto.A skilled musician can play pretty much anything. But notes on the page of a score are just a starting point. Beyond that, what makes an artist well suited to a specific sound or style? Age? Personality? Experience?These are complicated, elusive questions that loomed over the young pianist Seong-Jin Cho’s recent appearances in New York. Earlier this month, he played a marathon of Ravel’s complete solo piano works at Carnegie Hall, and on Thursday he joined the New York Philharmonic at David Geffen Hall as the soloist in Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto. (The program continues through Saturday.)If these concerts share anything, it’s sheer athleticism. The Ravel survey makes for a three-hour evening of intense focus and finger work; the Prokofiev concerto probably crams the same amount of notes into about 35 minutes.The similarities end there, though. And it’s in the differences that Cho revealed the state of his artistry at 30, a decade on from his career-making first prize at the International Chopin Piano Competition.There was a remarkable difference, too, between his readings of the Ravel works in concert and his recording of the same material, released on Deutsche Grammophon last month to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth. (A related album of his, of Ravel’s two piano concertos with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, came out on Friday.) His interpretations of these wide-ranging pieces were freer and more expressive at Carnegie; it would be interesting to hear Cho revisit them again.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: Vikingur Olafsson and Yuja Wang, Side by Side

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      Vikingur Olafsson and Yuja Wang appeared at Carnegie Hall with a unified approach to works by Schubert, John Adams, Rachmaninoff and more.When two pianists appear together in concert, the usual setup is for the curves of their instruments to hug in a yin-yang formation. The musicians face off across the expanse, some nine feet apart.But when Vikingur Olafsson and Yuja Wang brought their starry duo tour to Carnegie Hall on Wednesday evening, just inches separated them. They sat side by side, their pianos splayed out in opposite directions like the wings of a butterfly, with the players in the middle.Olafsson and Wang didn’t look at each other much during the performance, and Wang, who was closer to the audience throughout, did feel like the dominant presence and sound in this duet. But their physical closeness registered in a consistently unified approach to their richly enjoyable program.There was balanced transparency in even the most fiery moments of Schubert’s Fantasy in F minor. Olafsson and Wang’s rubato — their expressive flexibility with tempo — felt both spontaneously poetic and precisely shared in the passage when serenity takes over in the first movement of Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances,” with the yearning melody that’s given to the alto saxophone in the work’s fully orchestrated version.Their styles were distinguishable, even if subtly. In sumptuously vibrating chords in the first movement of Schubert’s Fantasy, Olafsson’s touch was a little wetter and more muted, Wang’s percussive and as coolly etched as a polygraph. Cool, yes, but she could also be lyrical, as in the delicate beginning of Luciano Berio’s “Wasserklavier,” which opened the concert.Short, gentle, spare pieces by Berio, John Cage (the early “Experiences No. 1”) and Arvo Part (“Hymn to a Great City”) gave the program a meditative spine. Those were interspersed with three substantial anchors: the “Symphonic Dances,” which Rachmaninoff set for two pianos as he was writing the orchestral version; the Schubert Fantasy; and John Adams’s “Hallelujah Junction.”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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      Drake’s Tentative Comeback, Plus: New Music From the Weeknd and More

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeLast week saw the release of “Some Sexy Songs 4 U,” the collaborative album from Drake and the Toronto R&B singer and songwriter PartyNextDoor, a longtime collaborator. For the most part, the sound is a vintage one for Drake, feeling something like a retreat to a comfort zone: moody heartbreak soul bathed in self-loathing and suspicion.It’s an album that, from a distance, appears to exist in a space totally parallel to the dominant narrative of his last year, which is the toxic and very popular beef he’s had with Kendrick Lamar, which seemed to culminate this month with Lamar’s five Grammy wins for “Not Like Us,” followed by his performance of the song at the Super Bowl halftime show.But there are a handful of songs on this new album that suggest Drake is already looking at musical pathways forward, or away, from that bumpy stretch.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Drake’s post-Kendrick predicament and the ways he might move on. Plus: a host of promising new albums that have brightened up the beginning of the year from artists like the Weeknd, Central Cee, Oklou, Skaiwater and OsamaSon.Guest:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica.Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. More

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      At Kennedy Center, Trump Inherits a Tough Job: Fund-Raising

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      For the arts institution, which receives only a small portion of its budget from federal funding, the perennial challenge is to raise additional revenue through ticket sales and private donations.In just one week, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington has been completely transformed.President Trump purged the center’s board of all Biden appointees and installed himself as chairman, ousting the financier David M. Rubenstein, the center’s largest donor. The new board fired Deborah F. Rutter, the center’s president for more than a decade. At least three other top staff members were dismissed.Performers have dropped out in protest amid fears that Mr. Trump’s call to rid the center of “woke” influences, drag shows and “anti-American propaganda” will result in a reshaping of programming too narrowly aligned with the president’s own tastes.This concern — that the center’s tradition of pluralism, free expression and classical art forms is in jeopardy — has dominated conversation about its future. But just as relevant, experts say, are questions about its financial stability.Though the abrupt takeover by the new administration might suggest the center is an arts adjunct of the federal government, it is actually a semi-independent nonprofit.It operates under the Smithsonian Institution as a public-private partnership, and only a small portion of its $268 million budget — about $43 million, or 16 percent — comes from the federal government. That subsidy is not spent on programming but is earmarked for operations, maintenance and repairs of the property, which is federally owned.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