Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      A New Opera Mashes Up Monteverdi and W.E.B. Du Bois

      by

      “The Comet/Poppea” radically pares down a classic and blends it with a premiere by George E. Lewis for an original show that will travel widely.Morality takes a hike in Claudio Monteverdi’s final opera, “L’Incoronazione di Poppea.” Bold in its satire and explicit in its sensuality, even more than 350 years after its creation, the work gives its ruthless lovers, Nero and Poppea, everything they desire.A decadent exploration of Nero’s Rome, “Poppea” might seem to share little with “The Comet,” a W.E.B. Du Bois short story from 1920. Using tropes of sci-fi catastrophe, Du Bois, the famous Black sociologist, asks what it would take for a racially equitable civilization to emerge. But, like Monteverdi’s opera, it has an amoral, ice-cold finish: After the merest possibility of interracial love, the status quo of segregation returns.On Friday, both the opera and the story will be brought together, united by their common denominator of jaundiced cynicism, in “The Comet/Poppea,” which is premiering at Geffen Contemporary, a warehouse-style space at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. (There are already plans for it to travel to Philadelphia this fall, to New York next year and to the Schwarzman Center at Yale University in 2026.)Yuval Sharon, center, the director, with the singers Joelle Lamarre, left and Davóne Tines.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAmanda Lynn Bottoms, seated, and Nardus Williams, lying on the floor, during a rehearsal for the show, which adapts a W.E.B. Du Bois story from 1920.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesePresented in Los Angeles by MOCA and the director Yuval Sharon’s company of operatic experimenters, the Industry, “The Comet/Poppea” was commissioned by the American Modern Opera Company. Over a 90-minute run time, it alternates between a radically pared-down “Poppea” and an adaptation of Du Bois’s story by the librettist Douglas Kearney and the composer George E. Lewis, for a mash-up featuring stark transitions — and superimpositions — between Monteverdi’s Baroque style and Lewis’s high-modernist states of frenzy.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

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Françoise Hardy, Moody French Pop Star, Dies at 80

      by

      Françoise Hardy, an introspective pop singer who became a hero to French youth in the 1960s with her moody ballads, died on Tuesday. She was 80.Her death, from cancer, was announced by her son, Thomas Dutronc, in a post on Instagram, saying simply, “Mom is gone.” No other details were provided.With songs like her breakthrough 1962 hit, “Tous les Garçons et les Filles” (“All the Boys and Girls”), and later “Dans le Monde Entier” (“All Over the World”); her lithe look, prized by star fashion designers; and her understated personality, Ms. Hardy incarnated a 1960s cool still treasured by the French.“How can we say goodbye to her?” President Emmanuel Macron of France said in a statement on Wednesday, a play on the title of Ms. Hardy’s 1968 hit “Comment Te Dire Adieu” (“How Can I Say Goodbye to You?”).She was the only French singer on Rolling Stone’s 2023 list of the 200 best singers of all time.Ms. Hardy in 1969. Her singular look — tall, long brown hair, a natural reticence — catapulted her into the worlds of fashion and film. Joost Evers/Anefo, via The National ArchivesWe 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

    • 75 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Françoise Hardy: A Life in Photos

      by

      The French pop star Françoise Hardy, who died on Tuesday at the age of 80, was celebrated for her beauty and style, always striking the perfect pose whether she was doing a fashion shoot or had gotten caught in a candid picture. Hardy’s self-possession could be intimidating, but her songs created a sense of intimacy, pulling listeners close by exploring emotional depths, and she earned the love and loyalty of pop aficionados, devoted aesthetes and lonely souls.In these images we gathered, notice how she sometimes seems to be looking at us, even though we are looking at her. Notice also what is not there, besides any bad angles: no come-hither poses, no inviting décolleté, no exposed gams, and almost no teeth — Hardy’s smiles were of the closed lips, amused kind, not open-mouthed beams. In a photo captured on a motorboat, she’s the only one not wearing a bathing suit as she turns her face to the sun in what looks like serene bliss.Hardy was no prude and enjoyed fun — she was prone to fits of laughter, her close friend the singer Étienne Daho remembered in a brief eulogy — but she led her life and career while remaining true to herself, on her terms: watching the world with curiosity, artistically exacting, a little aloof and a little curmudgeonly, and always passionate.Hardy in London, where she did some of her recording, in 1963.Reporters Associes/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty ImagesHardy with Sheila, a fellow pop star, on the French Riviera, circa 1960. Hardy’s first big single was released in 1962.Reporters Associes/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty ImagesHardy and Claude François (center left) congratulate the winners of a twist dance competition in Paris, 1964.Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty ImagesHardy evolved into the kind of performer who unleashed emotion even as she refused to over-emote.Sam Falk/The New York TimesHardy at the Savoy Hotel in London, 1965. Jean-Marie Périer, in the background, photographed many of the yé-yé singers (as the rocking and twisting French singers of the era were known).Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty ImagesHardy on the set of the film “Grand Prix” in London, 1966.Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty ImagesHardy performing at the Savoy Hotel in London, 1967.Keystone/Hulton Archive and Getty ImagesHardy wearing a silver suit by the designer Paco Rabanne in London, 1968.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive and Getty ImagesCalle Hesslefors/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesHardy on the streets of London in 1968.Chris Ware/Keystone Features and Getty ImagesBack in Paris, 1969.Reg Lancaster/Daily Express/Hulton Archive and Getty ImagesHardy, the actress Mireille Darc, and Liza Minnelli in the front row at Yves Saint-Laurent in Paris, 1969.Keystone-France/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty ImagesHardy rehearsing with her early singing teacher Mireille at a recording studio in Paris, 1969.Yves le Roux/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty ImagesHardy and the crooner Tino Rossi signing autographs at a campaign to support medical research in Paris, 1970.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHardy at the drums in 1970. Her main instrument was the guitar.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive and Getty ImagesHardy with the French singer-songwriter Julien Clerc in Lyon, 1974.Picot/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty ImagesHardy appeared on the German TV show “Liedercircus” (“Song Circus”) in 1977. Hardy stopped giving live concerts in the late ’60s.Impress Own/United Archives, via Getty ImagesHardy on the beach at Cannes, 1974.Gilbert Giribaldi/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty ImagesEtienne Daho and Hardy at the French music awards show Victoires De La Musique, in 1986.Bertrand Rindoff Petroff/Getty ImagesHardy with Mireille again, at an event in Paris in 1996.Eric Feferberg/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHardy with her son, Thomas Dutronc.Stephane Cardinale/Sygma, via Getty ImagesJacques Morell/Sygma, via Getty Images More

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      Popcast (Deluxe): What’s an Aging Rapper to Do?

      by

      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeThe first segment of this week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes discussion of:Eminem’s new single, “Houdini”Eminem as a dedicated fan of rap musicJ. Cole’s collaboration with Cash Cobain, “Grippy,” and being in on the J. Cole-rapping-about-sex jokeDrake’s appearance on the SoundCloud novelty song “Wah Gwan Delilah”How rappers like Common and Method Man are grappling with hip-hop’s generation gapThe new Will Smith movie, “Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” and the actor’s extensive, post-Slap press tour, including “Hot Ones”Whether Will Smith need his “Bad Boys” character as a safe place to act outConnect 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. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Listen to 8 Songs From the Bewitching Françoise Hardy

      by

      From her start in the yé-yé 1960s to the depths she plumbed as a singer-songwriter, Hardy, who died Tuesday, continued to entrance new generations of listeners.When she first broke through in the early 1960s, the bewitching French pop star Françoise Hardy, who died on Tuesday at 80, was initially lumped in with the yé-yés, the commercially minded rocking and twisting French singers of the era.She later came to see many of her early recordings, including her first hit, “Tous les Garçons et les Filles,” as sappy and lightweight. Hardy went on to forge her own path, becoming one of the rare singer-songwriters of her generation (and even rarer women in that category) — an immediately identifiable performer who unleashed emotion by, counterintuitively, refusing to over-emote.Her brand of cool has continued to beguile new listeners. A new generation of arty-minded Americans was introduced to her when the Wes Anderson film “Moonrise Kingdom” (2012) prominently featured her hit “Le Temps de l’Amour,” with its catchy, sinewy bass line.Here is a selection of songs — some of them famous, others less so — that provide entry points into Hardy’s extensive career.“Et Même” (1964)It bears repeating that Hardy was an anomaly in the 1960s as a female pop star writing and performing her own material. Starting in the 1970s she tended to stick to lyrics, but in the previous decade she often also composed the music, as on this gem from her 1964 album, on which she wrote or co-wrote almost all the tracks.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

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Who Am I Without My Voice?

      by

      The serious trouble started on Christmas Eve, upstate with family. The Puerto Rican side does not alternate talking and listening — each is done in spirited unison. I was speaking too loudly over other stories and my own glass of wine, fighting a head cold and getting gravelly. My boyfriend, Benjamin, caught my eye across the room, touched his hand to his throat and made his face into a question mark, What’s wrong with your voice? But we’d brought a homemade cake — he baked, I decorated — that people were freaking out about, and I didn’t want to leave before the compliments were over. I’m a professional touring musician, so I miss a fair share of the holiday gatherings, and this was the first meeting between the boyfriend and most of the assembled relatives. He’s 10 years older but boyish — tousled hair, slender, animated, a mess of bad tattoos — and I wanted to spin him around for all to see how clever and how kind.Listen to this article, read by DessaMy voice degraded in the couple of hours between family goodbyes and bedtime. Usually, I’m an expressive, flexible alto. But the pitch started sinking, the volume dimmed and syllables began to drop out like a radio not quite tuned to frequency.I had bouts of laryngitis in the past: a few days when I sounded like one of Marge Simpson’s sisters and pantomimed smoking cigarettes with both hands to entertain friends. But my voice had been uncharacteristically unreliable in recent months. Before a gig in Seattle last October, it got so raspy that I had trouble holding a tune. For a singer and rapper performing her own material, there is no understudy. (If you live in the continental United States, I’ve probably played a city near you, and you probably didn’t hear about it. Lots of independent musicians operate under the mainstream radar — itinerant bards sharing rooms at the Ramada.) Hoping to save the show, I found a service online that dispatched a nurse to my hotel room to administer an IV drip marketed as a restorative cocktail of B vitamins. I felt pretty sure this was nonsense, but panic dissolves your commitment to empiricism. I also got a prescription for prednisone, a steroid that tamps down inflammation quickly, sometimes within hours, allowing irritated throat tissue to function smoothly. Neither the prednisone nor the infusion saved the day, and I had to call off the performance, a decision that sent shock waves of disappointment in all directions. Band members, bartenders, sound techs, openers and the merch seller had all been expecting a night of work. Fans already had tickets and babysitters. The venue had already spent promotional dollars. I’ve only canceled a handful of times in nearly two decades onstage. It feels awful.Christmas morning my voice was worse than at any time I could remember — as if it had been lit on fire and left to burn down to powder-fine ash. My next tour was scheduled to begin in three weeks: an important run along the West Coast to support my most recent record, “Bury the Lede.” Scrapping a whole tour would mean losing tens of thousands of dollars in earnings, much of which was already spent on flights and hotel rooms or promised to other people. At my level, a serious hit.I committed to strict vocal rest: no talking, no singing, no whispering (which is hard on the voice), no vocalization at all. I was eager to observe it dutifully — desperate to recover and perform — and would have been hard-pressed not to: I could generate very little sound at all. I communicated with Benjamin chiefly via charades, a little American Sign Language that I learned as a kid and an app called BuzzCards that I saw a deaf Lyft driver use to type his side of conversation. I drank lakes of tea and swallowed a few tablets of leftover prednisone, hoping every morning to wake up healed. More

    • 50 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Diplo’s Port Antonio, Jamaica

      by

      Diplo, born Thomas Wesley Pentz, fell in love with Jamaica, particularly its Portland parish on the northeast coast, nearly 20 years ago. “I was D. J.ing on a cruise ship, got off in Ocho Rios, and drove through Port Antonio to get to Kingston,” said the 13-time Grammy nominee who has collaborated with Dua Lipa, Sturgil Simpson, Snoop Dogg, Shakira, Bad Bunny and countless other musicians. “Portland is sort of like Costa Rica, all jungly and waterfalls. And Port Antonio is this quaint little town where I’d go on a sort of retreat, “Mr. Pentz added. About eight years ago he bought some farmland and built a house there.Mr. Pentz thinks Port Antonio is a calmer option than Ocho Rios or other popular tourist spots on Jamaica for people who enjoy nature, hiking, waterfalls and, of course, beaches. It’s also for those who seek a more authentic experience. “It’s the sort of city where you’re mixing with the locals, and I think that’s what special about it,” he said.Diplo, the Grammy-nominated D.J. born Thomas Wesley Pentz, fell in love with Jamaica nearly 20 years ago and built a house there about eight years ago. Cambron LylesBorn in Mississippi and raised in Florida, Mr. Pentz has traveled extensively and D.J.ed on every continent, including Antarctica. A livestream of his D.J. set there, which took place on the helipad of Atlas Ocean Voyages’ World Voyager, was posted on YouTube in January.Recently, Mr. Pentz has become a runner. He ran the Los Angeles marathon and competed in the Malibu Triathlon, but found that something was missing from the experience: a post-run celebration. So, he launched Diplo’s Run Club, a series of 5K runs — the inaugural events take place this fall in Seattle and San Francisco — culminating in afterparties, with D.J. sets from Diplo and friends, at the finish line. When he’s not running or traveling for work, he spends time at his home in Jamaica.Here are five of his favorite places in and around Port Antonio.1. Geejam HotelGeejam Hotel has private villas, cabins and a main building with rooms that are often occupied by working musicians.Alfonso Duran for The New York TimesOne of the hotel’s cabins, which are tucked into the garden.Alfonso Duran 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

    • 75 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      Julius Rodriguez Fuses Styles on ‘Evergreen’

      by

      The multi-instrumentalist Julius Rodriguez hones a bigger, more audacious sound on his second album, “Evergreen.”Sitting outside a bar in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn one recent Sunday afternoon, Julius Rodriguez spoke with characteristic straightforwardness describing music that is anything but. The composer and bandleader, who has played with the rapper ASAP Rocky and style-bending artists like Kassa Overall and Meshell Ndegeocello, articulated the central challenge of his work, an amorphous blend of jazz, funk, gospel and R&B he simply calls “the music.”It’s not about the notes, he explained, it’s about the emotions behind them.“How do you describe the color orange to someone?” Rodriguez said, his tone warm yet flat. “How do you describe the taste of salt to someone who’s never tasted salt? You don’t know that you’re there until you’re there. You don’t know what it feels like until you feel it.”Rodriguez, 25, has been lauded for his tremendous sense of harmony and virtuosity across piano, drums, bass and whatever else he feels like playing any given week. He can hold his own at a psychedelic free jazz show in Brooklyn, a stadium-size rap concert in Los Angeles, a stately supper-club gig on the Upper West Side. “He’s what we call auxiliary,” Ndegeocello said in a phone interview. “He plays everything.”On “Evergreen,” out Friday on Verve Records, Rodriguez funnels sounds into a 40-minute collage of electric-acoustic arrangements steeped equally in tradition and disruption, convention and audacity coming through in big, clean sound seemingly inspired by 1970s jazz fusion. It’s a sharp detour from “Let Sound Tell All,” Rodriguez’s 2022 debut album, which was indebted to the jazz and gospel he grew up playing in churches and small clubs.Rodriguez calls his blend of jazz, funk, gospel and R&B “the music.”Erik Carter for The New York TimesLong before Rodriguez burst onto the New York jazz scene, he was a precocious kid in Westchester. When he was 3 or 4, he took piano lessons from a family friend, Audrey McCallum, the first Black student to attend the Peabody Preparatory, who gave Rodriguez his first keyboard and encouraged his parents to buy a piano. “At the same time, I’m learning about tempo and time signatures, how to read music on a staff, and where the notes are on a piano,” he said. “All that while learning how to read and write English.”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