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      Was 1968 the Grammys’ Best Year Ever?

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      Before the 2024 awards on Sunday, revisit a ceremony where the Recording Academy got it right, honoring the Beatles, Bobbie Gentry, Aretha Franklin and more.In 1968 the Beatles won their first and only album of the year Grammy for “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” PA Images, via Getty ImagesDear listeners,The 66th annual Grammy Awards take place on Sunday, and this year’s lineup of performers is pretty exceptional. I mean, Joni Mitchell is performing! For the first time ever at the Grammys! I could really just stop there, but Billy Joel, Billie Eilish, SZA, U2, Olivia Rodrigo, Burna Boy, Luke Combs, Dua Lipa, Travis Scott and more are scheduled to grace the stage. Will Joel and Eilish take this opportunity to start a supergroup called the Billies? Will SZA and U2 start an all-caps collaborative side project called SUZA2? Will Travis Scott meet Joni Mitchell, and if so, what will they talk about? The possibilities of this year’s ceremony are endless, and a little weird.To kick off Grammy week, I thought it would be fun to take a look back at another exceptional-if-slightly-odd year in Grammy history: the 10th annual ceremony, which took place on Feb. 29, 1968 and honored the music of 1967.The Grammys, infamously, do not always get it right. Sometimes their slights are laughably egregious (like when Metallica lost the 1989 award for best hard rock/heavy metal recording to … Jethro Tull); other times, they play things annoyingly safe (see: Beyoncé’s last three losses for album of the year). But just as a broken clock is right twice a day, sometimes justice actually is served at the Grammys. And 1968 was one of those years.Consider that album of the year went to a release that pushed the format forward into the future, and one that’s still often (and rightly) mentioned in lists of the greatest albums of all time. Some incredibly worthy artists won their first-ever Grammys that year: Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin and Tammy Wynette. Many of the songs and artists awarded have — gasp — actually stood the test of time.Today’s playlist is culled entirely from the winners of the 10th annual Grammys. Feed your meter, inflate that beautiful balloon and prepare to hop in a time machine ready to take you up, up and away.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?  More

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      Study Tracking Women’s Music Credits Has a Surprise: Good News

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      The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s latest report finds that women’s involvement in the biggest hits of 2023 was greatly improved over previous years.Each year since 2018, the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has tracked the number of women credited on the music industry’s biggest hits, and the numbers have usually been dismal — year after year, female artists, songwriters and producers have been crowded out by men, sometimes by extraordinary margins.In their latest report, however, the study’s researchers found some good news. Women’s involvement in the biggest hits of 2023 was greatly improved from previous years, and in some measurements reached higher proportions than the researchers have found in more than a decade of data.For example, of last year’s most popular tracks — as defined by Billboard’s year-end Hot 100 singles chart — 35 percent of the credited performing artists were women. That is a higher number than U.S.C.’s researchers have found for any year going back to 2012, and only the second time (after 2022) that the number has been over 30 percent.And for the first time in the study’s research window, a majority of the year’s 100 most popular songs — 56 percent of them — had at least one female songwriter.Stacy L. Smith, an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the study’s lead author, was cautiously celebratory of the findings. While the latest numbers are up, she noted, women still represented an average of only about 23 percent of performer credits on all surveyed songs since 2012. (Some years that figure has been as low as 17 percent.)“For the second year in a row, the percentage of women artists on the popular charts has increased,” Dr. Smith said in a statement. “This is a notable milestone and worthy of celebration. However, it is still important to recognize that there is room to grow. Women filled less than one-quarter of artist roles across all 12 years examined, and these figures are still far from representing the 50 percent of women in the population and the music audience.”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?  More

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      Jaap van Zweden, New York Phil Maestro, Takes Podium in Seoul

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      The conductor officially began his tenure as the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra’s new music director, months before he is to step down in New York.In New York, Jaap van Zweden, the New York Philharmonic’s music director, is preparing to say goodbye: Farewell concerts under the banner “Celebrate Jaap!” are planned over the next few months before his brief, pandemic-interrupted tenure ends this summer.But in Seoul, where van Zweden officially began a five-year term as the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra’s music director this month, a new chapter is taking shape. Last week he led sold-out performances of Beethoven and Mahler with the ensemble, his first concerts as music director.“We had this feeling of trying to go to the next level,” van Zweden said in an interview from Seoul.Van Zweden was greeted as a celebrity, his face plastered on advertisements that declared the start of a new era. Fans snapped photos in front of his portrait in the lobby of the Seoul Arts Center. His inaugural concerts drew high-profile figures in culture and politics, including the mayor of Seoul, Oh Se-hoon, who appointed van Zweden, and the former South Korean president Lee Myung-bak.Critics praised van Zweden’s intensity and focus. The Korea Economic Daily, one of the country’s large business newspapers, said his music was as “impactful and engaging as an IMAX movie.” Another writer said he was “elegant and skilled, as if dancing.”Taking a snap at the Seoul Arts Center with an image of van Zweden and the South Korean phenom Yunchan Lim.Chang W. LeeWe 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?  More

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      At 80, the Modest Queen of Contemporary Music Keeps Exploring

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      The pianist Ursula Oppens will celebrate her birthday at Merkin Concert Hall with a program drawn from the large catalog of works written for her.On a cold afternoon in early January, the pianist Ursula Oppens was making an album at Brooklyn College.At 79, Oppens is a little fragile, tiny and stooped. But when she sat down at the piano — shoes off, Diet Coke on the floor — out came playing of power and technical aplomb.Most of the time, at least. Oppens was setting down the first recording of an early, unpublished sonata by the uncompromising modernist Charles Wuorinen, and, like much of Wuorinen’s music, it was treacherously thorny. She had been studying it, on and off, for a year, but it was still slow going.“I played a couple of correct notes,” she said after an early take, “but not many.”That kind of modesty has been mixed in with mastery throughout Oppens’s long, distinguished career. With crystalline lucidity, warm sensitivity and utter authority, she has guided generations of listeners through the seductive complexities of Wuorinen and Elliott Carter, Anthony Davis and Conlon Nancarrow, Frederic Rzewski and Joan Tower, and on and on. She is “the queen of contemporary music,” said Tania León, one of the many composers who have written for her over the last 60 years.Born on Feb. 2, 1944, Oppens will officially celebrate her 80th birthday at Merkin Concert Hall in Manhattan on Saturday. But — again, that modesty — this isn’t exactly an Ursula Oppens recital. She will be joined by seven pianist colleagues in a concert focused less on her than on the music she has helped bring into the world: eight pieces from her dizzying catalog.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?  More

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      5 Places to Visit in Tucson, Arizona, With Singer Linda Ronstadt

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      In the course of becoming a Rock & Roll Hall of Famer, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winner and the subject of a forthcoming biopic set to star Selena Gomez, Linda Ronstadt has packed theaters around the globe. But her favorite sits on a one-way side street in Tucson, Ariz.Ms. Ronstadt in Tucson in September 2022. She still makes occasional trips to the city, where she was born and raised.Cassidy Araiza for The New York TimesWith a courtyard draped in vines and string lights and a main stage the size of “a good little opera house,” the 1927 Temple of Music and Art is “just magic,” said Ms. Ronstadt. Before the onset of progressive supranuclear palsy — a Parkinson’s-like disorder that ended her singing career in 2009 — she could fill the auditorium with her unamplified voice (little surprise to anyone who’s ever heard her belt out “Blue Bayou” or “Long Long Time,” for the legions who may have just discovered her on “The Last of Us”). She also loves the theater’s proscenium: a stage-framing arch that instantly focuses the eye — “like that fireplace,” she explained, gesturing toward a wall near the sofa where we chatted in her cozy San Francisco living room.At 77, Ms. Ronstadt now lives in the Bay Area, close to her kids, but the Sonoran Desert borderlands where she was born and raised will always be home. And despite the changes she sees when she returns every six months or so, plenty of familiar local pleasures remain, for starters: bubbling-hot cheese crisps at El Minuto Cafe, ice-chilled shrimp cocktail at Hotel Congress, giant saguaros at every turn and live entertainment of all kinds at the Fox Tucson Theater, where her father — a businessman with a renowned baritone — used to perform as Gil Ronstadt and His Star-Spangled Megaphone.The Ronstadts have been part of the Tucson music scene since her grandfather arrived from Mexico in 1882 and helped found the Club Filarmónico Tucsonense civic band. And perhaps no place highlights the family’s cultural legacy like the former Tucson Music Hall, rechristened the Linda Ronstadt Music Hall in May 2022. The naming ceremony took place during a mariachi spectacular that featured Jesús “Chuy” Guzmán, who’d recorded with Ms. Ronstadt on the 1987 “Canciones de Mi Padre” — still the best-selling non-English album in U.S. history. This ode to the borderland classics she’d grown up on was remastered and rereleased last fall, and there may be no better soundtrack for exploring her hometown.Here are five of her favorite places to visit in Tucson:1. Barrio BreadMs. Ronstadt always stops at the artisanal bakery Barrio Bread on her way from the airport when she visits.Cassidy Araiza 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?  More

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      If It Isn’t Perfect, Is It Still K-Pop?

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      Musical acts like Balming Tiger are challenging the idea that K-pop is nothing but polished, perfectly synchronized boy bands and girl groups.What comes to mind when you hear the word “K-pop”? Is it the global boy band phenomenon BTS, wearing studded jackets and dancing in perfect sync? Or the girl group Blackpink, performing at Coachella in trendy fashions and perfectly curled hair?How about an “independent music collective” of casually dressed people, crowded around a mixing board in a one-room studio, across the street from a Seoul restaurant specializing in fried chicken?“Give me some more bass,” said Omega Sapien, a vocalist with electric-green hair and grills, swaying his hips and grunting to the beat. The studio was cluttered with art, vinyl records, dumbbells and other odds and ends. Another singer lay prone nearby, nursing a bad hangover.For Balming Tiger, this is daily life as an alternative K-pop band. Their music, a fusion of diverse genres from electro to hip-hop, is funky and edgy. Their look, unkempt and grungy, is far from the professional styling of the groups that most of the world associates with K-pop.“Even if we wanted to be like idols, we can’t,” said Chanhee, far left, a vocalist with Balming Tiger. Other members are, from left, Mudd the Student, Unsinkable, BJ Wnjn, Omega Sapien and Sogumm. Woohae Cho for The New York TimesBut they claim that label, too. K-pop is any music that comes out of South Korea, according to Omega Sapien. “Everything in that realm is K-pop,” he said.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?  More

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      Radiohead Spinoff the Smile Gets Wonderfully Stranger

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      A spinoff of Radiohead, the trio of Jonny Greenwood, Tom Skinner and Thom Yorke pushes further from the solid ground of pop on its second studio LP, “Wall of Eyes.”“Don’t think you know me,” Thom Yorke intones near the end of the Smile’s second studio album, “Wall of Eyes.” He adds, “Don’t think that I am everything you say.” With its new LP, the Smile makes itself increasingly elusive. It’s now a band intent on destabilizing structures and dissolving expectations.The Smile is still unmistakably a Radiohead spinoff. It’s the trio of Yorke and Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead, with the British jazz drummer Tom Skinner. Yorke’s tormented voice has stayed upfront, and the songwriting leans into Radiohead’s dissonances, odd meters and fully enveloping aura of anxiety.The Smile’s 2022 debut album, “A Light for Attracting Attention,” and its live recordings introduced what was mostly a stripped-down, cerebrally twisted funk band — akin to Yorke’s 2012 project Atoms for Peace, which had Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers on bass. But on “Wall of Eyes,” the Smile questions and undermines its grooves. The band often lets them emerge only gradually, then deflates them or obscures them in complexly hazy productions.In the Smile’s new songs, solid ground — verbal or musical — is rare and precarious. The priority is atmosphere, not legibility. Yorke’s lyrics are fragmentary and bleak, full of apocalyptic tidings. “Soon you’ll be there/in all that fire and ice,” he croons in “Teleharmonic,” over chords that keep sliding out from under him. The album’s most coherent narrative, “Bending Hectic,” is the last words of a driver steering along the hairpin turns of an Italian mountain road, then “letting go of the wheel.” The track is an eight-minute exercise in suspended time, meditating on two slowly alternating chords before plunging into a cacophony of hard-rock guitars.Greenwood has long had a sideline scoring film soundtracks — among them “There Will Be Blood,” “Phantom Thread” and “The Power of the Dog” — and the Smile’s new songs allow themselves to be as amorphous and open-ended as film music. They’re not about hooks or choruses. Melodies recur while arrangements change radically around them; songs suddenly leap into entirely new territory.“Read the Room” begins with prickly guitar arpeggios and a sputtering beat, veers into a pretty bridge that doesn’t stay that way and spends its final two minutes seething over an entirely different riff. “Under Our Pillows,” which may be a reproach of social media — “You give yourself freely/Nowadays everyone’s for sharing,” Yorke chides — starts with crisp cross-rhythms: hopscotching guitar picking and a contrapuntal bass line over Skinner’s stop-start drumming. But the momentum shifts, the odd meter turns into a motoric 4/4 and then recedes into un-metered, breathy spaces. For a full minute, the track is nervous but ambient. Throughout the album, the Smile’s music feels molten and improvisatory, though it’s clearly premeditated.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?  More

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      21 Savage Holds Off Green Day for a Second Week at No. 1

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      The rapper’s latest, “American Dream,” easily outstreamed the veteran pop-punk band’s 14th studio album, “Saviors.”21 Savage, the London-born Atlanta rapper, easily fended off a challenge from Green Day to hold at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart for a second week.“American Dream,” 21 Savage’s latest album, featuring guest spots by Doja Cat, Travis Scott, Lil Durk, Young Thug and others, remains atop the Billboard 200 chart with the equivalent of 78,000 sales in the United States — down 40 percent from its debut — including 103 million streams, according to the tracking service Luminate. “American Dream” is the first new title to reach No. 1 on the chart in 2024, after holdovers by Taylor Swift and Morgan Wallen.Green Day’s “Saviors,” the veteran pop-punk stars’ 14th studio LP, opens at No. 4 with the equivalent of 49,000 sales; the majority of that, 39,000, came from traditional album sales, while songs from “Saviors” also garnered about 12 million streams. Green Day’s first appearance on the Billboard album chart was almost exactly 30 years ago: “Dookie,” the band’s breakthrough classic, made its chart debut in February 1994, at No. 127, and eventually rose to No. 2.Also this week, Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” is in second place, Drake’s “For All the Dogs” is No. 3 and Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” is No. 5. More