Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      A Celebration of Frank London’s Music Will Be Missing One Thing: Him

      by

      The trumpeter, composer and bandleader who helped revitalize klezmer is battling cancer. But his work hasn’t slowed, and his longtime associates are rallying around him.Frank London is one of those musicians who somehow seems to be everywhere, participating in a bit of everything. At 66, the trumpeter, composer, arranger and bandleader has collaborated with everyone from Mel Tormé to LL Cool J. A founding member of the Klezmatics, a band that helped to revitalize the klezmer style during the late ’80s, London has worked for decades at a fertile crossroads where Jewish music meets downtown jazz. With two new albums involving both styles arriving imminently, he arranged to throw a party, and invited dozens of friends and colleagues to play.The celebration, happening on Monday at the Brooklyn venue Roulette, features the Klezmatics alongside three of London’s bands: Conspiracy Brass, a buoyant, funky horns-and-percussion aggregation; the Elders, a soulful, hard-swinging quintet of seasoned jazzers; and Klezmer Brass Allstars, who meld traditional Yiddish and Hasidic music with electronic beats.The only thing missing will be London himself, now hospitalized for treatment of a rare cancer he became aware of four years ago. During unrelated medical testing in 2020, doctors detected signs of myelofibrosis, a chronic leukemia characterized by a buildup of scar tissue in the bone marrow. The median survival rate for the disease is six years.“I didn’t tell anyone much about it, because this is a very weird disease,” London said during an interview before his hospitalization, in the cozy East Village apartment he shares with his wife, Tine Kindermann, an artist and musician.“Some people die within a year,” he said. “Some people live with it for 30 years. I’m in this statistical norm where it’s like, after three to five years it starts to get worse. So for the last four years, I’ve just been leading my life.”For London, that meant taking care of business. In addition to wrapping up his two new albums, “Brass Conspiracy” by Conspiracy Brass and “Spirit Stronger Than Blood” by the Elders, he delivered a Klezmer Brass Allstars album, “Chronika,” last December. He wrote music for an independent film, completed a score for a forthcoming Karin Coonrod production of “King Lear,” and recorded a commissioned set of niggunim — Jewish spiritual melodies — with a starry ensemble of fellow iconoclasts.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

    • 175 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      Wu-Tang Clan Album ‘Once Upon a Time in Shaolin’ Will Be Played in Tasmania

      by

      The sole known copy of the album “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” was not to be heard by the public until 2103. Some fans will be able to hear a selection of the 31 tracks at a museum in Hobart, Tasmania.A decade ago, the Wu-Tang Clan issued a sole copy of a CD-only album, secured it in an engraved nickel and silver box, locked it away in a vault and said it could not be heard by the public until 2103.The move was seen as a protest against the devaluation of music in the streaming era. But a year later, the album, “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin,” got caught up in the very capitalistic endeavors that Wu-Tang had tried to avoid, when it was purchased by Martin Shkreli, the disgraced pharmaceutical speculator who was convicted of fraud in 2017.He bought the album at auction for $2 million, only for it to be seized by the government and sold in order to pay off Mr. Shkreli’s nearly $7.4 million debt.As these things go, an NFT collective purchased the album for $4 million in 2021. And soon, if you can get yourself to the island of Tasmania off the southern coast of Australia in two weeks’ time, you might be able to hear what RZA and the producer Cilvaringz created 79 years before it was meant to go public — or a part of it anyway.From June 15 to June 24, the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania’s capital, will host a series of private listening events where visitors will be able to “experience” a selection of the 31 tracks from the group’s seventh studio album. “You hear talk about once-in-a-lifetime opportunities,” the museum wrote on the exhibit page. “This is probably one of them.”Free tickets, “if you are lucky enough to secure” them, the museum said, can be reserved starting Thursday.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

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Who Plotted to Sell Graceland? An Identity Thief Raises His Hand.

      by

      A person using an email for the company seeking to foreclose on the former home of Elvis Presley says his ring was behind the threat to sell the beloved landmark.The writer said he was an identity thief — a ring leader on the dark web, with a network of “worms” placed throughout the United States.In an email to The New York Times, he said his ring preyed on the dead, the unsuspecting and the elderly, especially those from Florida and California, using birth certificates and other documents to discover personal information that aided in their schemes.“We figure out how to steal,” he said. “That’s what we do.”Recently, the writer suggested, the group had turned its attention to a major target: the estate of Lisa Marie Presley, which last week faced a threat that Graceland was about to be foreclosed on and sold by a mysterious company, Naussany Investments & Private Lending LLC.Media outlets often receive unsolicited emails from people who make outlandish claims. But this email arrived Friday in response to one sent by The Times to an email address that Naussany listed in a legal filing sent to a Tennessee court reviewing the foreclosure case.In its email, The Times referred to the company’s claim that Ms. Presley had borrowed $3.8 million from it, using Graceland as collateral. In the responses, which came from the email address The Times had written to, the writer described the foreclosure effort not as a legitimate attempt to collect on a debt, but as a scam.“I had fun figuring this one out and it didn’t succeed very well,” the email writer said. He said he was based in Nigeria and his email was written in Luganda, a Bantu language spoken in Uganda. But the filing with the email address was faxed from a toll-free number designed to serve North America; it was included in documents sent to the Chancery Court in Shelby County, Tenn., where the foreclosure case is still pending.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 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Bill Walton’s Long, Special Relationship With the Grateful Dead

      by

      “It wasn’t like he was a fan,” the drummer Mickey Hart said. “He was part of our family.”Bill Walton played 604 basketball games in college and the N.B.A. over the course of his Hall of Fame career. But Walton, who died Monday from cancer at 71, wrote in a 2016 autobiography that he had attended more than 869 concerts by his most beloved musical act, the Grateful Dead.“He loved the Grateful Dead I believe as much as we in the Grateful Dead have loved the Grateful Dead,” Mickey Hart, one of the band’s two drummers and a good friend of Walton’s, said in an interview.“It wasn’t like he was a fan,” added Hart, who is currently performing a residency with a successor act, Dead & Company, at the Sphere in Las Vegas. “He was part of our family.”Walton grew up in San Diego and first became famous for his basketball skills at U.C.L.A., where he won two national titles under the legendary coach John Wooden. Over a professional career attenuated by injuries, he earned a Most Valuable Player Award and championship titles with the Portland Trail Blazers and the Boston Celtics.Walton and the Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart at a 2011 N.B.A. game in Sacramento. Rocky Widner/NBAE, via Getty ImagesHe stayed famous, including as a prolific television commentator, thanks to a winningly oddball style and crunchy interests, like cycling and left-leaning politics. And his personality seemed perfectly suited for — and summarized by — his lifelong love of his fellow California institution, the Grateful Dead.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

    • 88 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Music’s Most Neglected Day of the Week

      by

      Seven songs for Tuesdays from Stevie Wonder, iLoveMakonnen and more.Stevie Wonder, a bard of TuesdayChris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated PressDear listeners,The day after Memorial Day — or any day that directly follows a beginning-of-the-week holiday — is one of those Tuesdays that feels like a Monday. A certain temporal fog lingers and will continue to confuse you all week: “Wait, what day is it again?” Well, today it is Tuesday. And I am here to offer you a sonic cure for that fog, something to ground you in the present: a playlist of Tuesday songs.Friday, Saturday and Sunday are all perennial muses of popular music; even the dreaded Monday (Monday) has its memorable anthems. Tuesday, though, tends to get short shrift — or at least it did until 2014, when the rapper iLoveMakonnen released a ubiquitous ode to clubbing on the most banal day of the week. But Makonnen’s “Tuesday” certainly wasn’t the first song to pay tribute to (or shake a fist at) the second day of the traditional workweek. Decades earlier, Stevie Wonder and Lynyrd Skynyrd both used it as a backdrop for heartache, and it also inspired the moniker of a fictitious Rolling Stones heroine, in a song later covered beautifully by the recently departed folk singer Melanie.All those songs are featured on today’s playlist, along with tracks from Blood Orange, the Pogues and, of course, the ’80s new-wave act ’Til Tuesday. If you find yourself wondering what day it is, just hum one of these tunes and all will be well. As long as they don’t stick in your head until tomorrow …Yesterday don’t matter if it’s gone,LindsayListen along while you read.1. Stevie Wonder: “Tuesday Heartbreak”It’s bad enough to be heartbroken — but being heartbroken on a Tuesday? Stevie Wonder understands the double indignity of that situation on this jazzy number from his great 1972 album “Talking Book”: “Tuesday heartbreak seems to be unfair, ’cause you say that you found another man.”▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeWe 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

    • 163 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Taylor Swift Prevails Over Billie Eilish for a Fifth Week at No. 1

      by

      In a tight battle that had fans hustling to support their favorite star, “The Tortured Poets Department” outsold “Hit Me Hard and Soft.”Taylor Swift holds the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s latest album chart for a fifth consecutive week, after an intense contest with Billie Eilish in which both stars released a blizzard of “versions” of their LPs to lure fans.Eilish fought for “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” her third album, with release-week arena listening events in New York and Los Angeles. In an era of supersized track lists as a strategy to maximize streaming yield, the LP had just 10 songs. But fans were given a long menu of options to buy it, including nine colored vinyl editions. There were also four CDs, among them a “splatter” variant for which Eilish herself decorated the covers with splashed paint (“each one is unique,” her website said).But Swift may have fought harder, or at least hurled more product at the marketplace. Since “The Tortured Poets Department” was released last month, it has come out in more than 20 iterations, according to Billboard, with enough track list variations, media pigments, bonus tracks and collectible goodies like autographs and magnets to keep fans coming back.Over the last week, both artists’ camps launched new items like cannonballs. On the day Eilish released “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” Swift put out three limited digital editions of “Tortured Poets” featuring “first-draft phone memo” bonus tracks; then came a remix of her hit “Fortnight”; then, on Thursday, with just hours left in the tracking week, three additional digital versions of the album arrived with live tracks from her recent Eras Tour performances in Paris.Eilish, for her part, released three “deluxe” digital albums, adding versions of her LP’s songs featuring isolated vocals or in sped-up or slowed-down form. The day after Swift’s “Fortnight” remix, Eilish put out a remix of “L’Amour de Ma Vie.”Fans acted as foot soldiers in this war, clicking for streams or buying up as many album variations as they could. Many also complained on social media, accusing Swift of ruthlessly raining on another star’s parade, or taking Eilish to task for comments in a recent interview in which she criticized “some of the biggest artists in the world” for excessive vinyl production.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 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Florentina Holzinger Brings Roller-Skating Nuns to the Opera House

      by

      The choreographer Florentina Holzinger’s shows feature circus performers and abundant nudity. Now, she’s bringing her experimental approach to opera.In a rehearsal last week at the Mecklenburg State Theater in Schwerin, northeastern Germany, Fleshpiece, a shirtless performer with tattoos and purple hair, strode to the front of the main stage and delivered an impassioned monologue.“This opera house, this is our church,” Fleshpiece intoned. “We continue to nail you to the present, just as Jesus was nailed to the cross.”Supervising the scene was the experimental choreographer Florentina Holzinger, wearing a black baseball cap and a T-shirt printed with a picture of two nuns engaged in B.D.S.M. play.Her previous works, including “Ophelia’s Got Talent” at the Volksbühne in Berlin and “A Divine Comedy” for the Rührtriennale festival, were boundary-pushing, peripatetic shows in which nudity, profanity, onstage helicopters, onstage ejaculation and performers hanging from their teeth have shocked and awed audiences. “Ophelia’s Got Talent” jointly won Germany’s Faust prize for best dance production last year, cementing Holzinger’s status as one of Europe’s rising theater stars.In the German-speaking world, that kind of profile brings invitations to direct opera — and Holzinger’s work, which matches music with powerful, stage-filling spectacle, certainly has operatic qualities. Yet a gilded opera theater still seems an unlikely home for Holzinger, 38, whose anarchic works are collaged from new and old text and music, often with sharply contrasting styles.Holzinger is known for her boundary-pushing experimental shows.Gordon Welters 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

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Jaap van Zweden’s Brief, Fraught Time Atop the New York Philharmonic

      by

      On a balmy spring morning, after a breakfast of coffee and plain yogurt at a luxury Manhattan hotel, Jaap van Zweden grabbed his bag of conducting batons and scores by Mozart and Gubaidulina and set out for Lincoln Center through the wilds of Central Park.“I love the air, I love the trees,” he said. “Everybody can do whatever they want here. This is freedom, absolute freedom.”Van Zweden, 63, will leave the New York Philharmonic this summer after six seasons as its music director, the shortest tenure of any maestro since Pierre Boulez, the eminent French composer and conductor who led the Philharmonic in the 1970s. Van Zweden helped the orchestra emerge from the turbulence of the pandemic; shepherded it through a trying, nomadic season when its home, David Geffen Hall, was undergoing a $550 million renovation; and led the orchestra when it reopened the sparkling, reimagined hall ahead of schedule, to the delight of musicians and audiences.But throughout his tenure, van Zweden, an intense, exacting maestro from Amsterdam, faced persistent questions about whether he had the star power, creative drive and strong connection to New York needed to lead the Philharmonic.During the pandemic, he spent more than a year at home in the Netherlands, which fractured his nascent relationship with the ensemble. And in 2021, he announced that he would step down from his post, far earlier than many people expected.Van Zweden said he felt no other Philharmonic music director had faced such profound challenges.“We had to start all over again,” he said. “I feel like we are still in the process of getting to know each other.”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