Music

There has been much ado about whether the pop singer will travel across the globe to the big game. Here’s what we know so far, and answers to other Taylor-related questions.On Sunday, the Kansas City Chiefs will be making the team’s fourth Super Bowl appearance in the last five seasons. While some N.F.L. players go their entire career without playing for a championship, one of Kansas City’s newcomers had their ticket punched after only 12 games.As Nicole Auerbach of The Athletic said on X, shortly after the Chiefs’ championship win: “Taylor Swift makes the Super Bowl in her first year in the league. Elite.”Ms. Swift, who has been dating Travis Kelce, Kansas City’s star tight end, has changed the N.F.L. conversation all season, attracting a new audience for the league and inspiring strong emotions (both positive and negative) among fans. Her critics as well as her detractors may have some burning questions ahead of the game. First and foremost: Will she be there?The Big QuestionsHas Taylor hinted at her Super Bowl plans?But wasn’t she in Tokyo … last night?Why is this getting so much attention?If she makes it to the game, who might she sit with?This is Taylor, surely there’s some numerology involved?Has Taylor hinted at her Super Bowl plans?Ms. Swift, as you may have heard, is good at keeping secrets. Her plans, beyond concert dates, are rarely announced in advance. That has led some to devise their own methods for figuring out what she’s up to. Ahead of a Kansas City game in October, for example, an NBC producer said he had a spotter plane searching the area around MetLife Stadium for police escorts in hopes of alerting the television crew if she showed up (she did).Mr. Kelce was inundated with questions about Ms. Swift last week, and while he said he had heard some of her upcoming album — spoiler: he likes it — he did not offer any details about whether she would be at the game.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

Oasis and Sade will appear on the ballot for the first time, alongside Dave Matthews Band, A Tribe Called Quest, Mary J. Blige and others.Cher, Mariah Carey, Sinead O’Connor, Oasis and Sade are among the first-time nominees for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s class of 2024, which were revealed Saturday.Other new names on the hall’s short list include Foreigner, Peter Frampton, Kool & the Gang and Lenny Kravitz. Also on the list are Dave Matthews Band, Mary J. Blige, Jane’s Addiction, A Tribe Called Quest and Eric B. & Rakim, each of whom has been nominated at least once before. Ozzy Osbourne, who is already part of the pantheon as a member of Black Sabbath, has gotten the nod as a solo artist for the first time.“This remarkable list of nominees reflects the diverse artists and music that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame honors and celebrates,” John Sykes, the chairman of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, said in a statement. “Continuing in the true spirit of rock ’n’ roll, these artists have created their own sounds that have impacted generations and influenced countless others that have followed in their footsteps.”The 15 cited artists are the first batch of nominees since the abrupt departure last year of Jann Wenner, the Rolling Stone editor and co-founder of the Rock Hall, who had long held a powerful sway over the awards process.In September, Wenner was ejected from the hall’s governing board just one day after the publication of an interview in The New York Times in which he justified the subjects for his interview collection “The Masters” — all of them white and male — with comments that were widely condemned as racist and misogynistic. Female artists like Joni Mitchell, he said, were not “philosophers of rock,” and Black performers like Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye “just didn’t articulate at that level.”It is also a little more than a year after Jon Landau, the former Rolling Stone critic who became Bruce Springsteen’s producer and manager, stepped down from his longtime perch as the chairman of the hall’s deliberately secretive nominating committee.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

The rapper formerly known as Kanye West has been mired in controversy after making a string of antisemitic remarks. Thousands showed up to hear “Vultures 1” on Friday night.Adidas severed ties with him. His talent agency dropped him. But on Friday night, an arena on Long Island was filled with thousands of people who most certainly had not turned their backs on Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West.Shortly before releasing “Vultures 1,” his first album since making a string of antisemitic remarks that cost him business deals and drew widespread condemnation, Ye previewed his new collaboration with the R&B singer Ty Dolla Sign at a listening party at UBS Arena, further testing the boundaries of his fandom with lyrics that did not tiptoe around the controversy.“‘Crazy, bipolar, antisemite,’ and I’m still the king,” Ye raps in “King,” the final song on the LP, which drew a modest wave of cheers.Ty Dolla Sign and Ye appeared a bit before 11 p.m. on a smoke-filled stage — at least, that was the impression, though it was hard to confirm who was there. Wearing a full mask, the rapper, designer and longtime provocateur never showed his face as he exulted in his new music, which included samples from Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” and the Backstreet Boys (“Yeezy’s back, all right!”).Originally slated to come out in December, delays and false starts pushed the release of “Vultures 1” to early Saturday morning, soon after the hourlong listening party had ended.Fans awaiting entry to the “Vultures 1” listening event at UBS Arena in Elmont, N.Y.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

Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy, partners onstage and off, began to play as a duo in school. Now, they are dedicating their careers to it.It looked like some kind of grand music exam. The pianists Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy sat down at their instruments onstage at Wigmore Hall and began to play for an audience of two.The rest of their listeners were online. It was June 2020, and Kolesnikov and Tsoy were, like virtually every other musician at that time, playing a livestreamed concert. Despite the hall’s chilly emptiness, there was something heartening: Here were two musical and romantic partners sharing a bit of their domestic lives as they worked through a messy pile of sheet music spread out on a single Steinway piano.Now, things are more or less back to normal. When they sat for an interview at their elegant northwest London home recently, Kolesnikov had just returned from Copenhagen as a replacement soloist in Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto, and was about to jump in — in Copenhagen again — to play Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. (He could be heard frantically recapping the piece as he walked down the street. “It’s not something you can just pull out of your pocket,” he said.)The pandemic forced Kolesnikov, 34, and Tsoy, 35, to recalibrate. After so much time spent at home together, returning meaningfully to the genre of four-hands music — through which they had met — they emerged with a desire to dedicate themselves to playing as a duo. They signed to new management as both solo artists and partners last October, and will make their duo debut at Carnegie Hall on Feb. 13, with their first album together to follow this summer.“I consider this possibly the hardest form of chamber music,” Kolesnikov said of the piano duet. “This genre is a very interesting merge of something that is extremely homely, extremely intimate and private. Then one thinks, how do you take that onstage?”A Domestic Art FormThe piano duet has always been closely tethered to the home. Grove Music describes it as a “modest, essentially domestic branch of music,” more frequently associated with a student’s early experiences than with the public-facing openness of a concert hall.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

The richest music catalog deal to date would give Sony half of Jackson’s recorded music and songwriting rights, valuing the total collection at $1.2 billion or more.Sony has agreed to acquire half of Michael Jackson’s catalog from the star’s estate, in what is likely the richest transaction ever for a single musician’s work, according to two people briefed on the agreement.The deal, which has been gossiped about in the music industry for months, is said to involve Sony purchasing a 50 percent stake in Jackson’s recorded music and songwriting catalogs. That includes not only the estate’s share of megahits like “Beat It” and “Bad,” but also the music publishing assets that are part of Jackson’s Mijac catalog, among them songs written by Sly Stone and tracks made famous by artists like Ray Charles and Jerry Lee Lewis.The deal is said to value Jackson’s assets at $1.2 billion or more, according to the two people, who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about it. Even so, it leaves some of the estate’s interests in other lucrative Jackson-related businesses off the table, like the Broadway musical “MJ,” Cirque du Soleil’s Jackson-themed shows, and a biopic in the works that is set to star Jaafar Jackson, a son of Jackson’s brother Jermaine.The transaction is said to leave the estate a significant degree of control over the catalog. That contrasts with many other blockbuster catalog deals in recent years, like those with Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Paul Simon. While those sales sometimes include finely negotiated parameters over how an artist’s work can be used in the future — say, in commercials or political endorsements — they generally hand over management of songs to a buyer.Representatives of Sony and the Jackson estate declined to comment on the deal, which was first reported by Billboard. When asked about the news of the deal, John Branca, who was Jackson’s entertainment lawyer in life and has been the co-executor of Jackson’s estate, said: “As we have always maintained, we would never give up management or control of Michael Jackson’s assets.”Primary Wave, a music company that owns a minority stake in Jackson’s music publishing interests, was not a party to the transaction; a representative of Primary Wave declined to comment.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

He was a mainstay of the group that was known for hits like “Could It Be I’m Falling Love,” from its inception in 1954 until his retirement last year.Henry Fambrough, the last surviving original member of the hit-making R&B vocal group the Spinners, died on Wednesday at his home in Herndon, Va. He was 85.His death was announced by a spokeswoman for the group, Tanisha Jackson. She did not specify a cause.Mr. Fambrough died less than a year after he announced his retirement, and just a few months after the Spinners’ classic 1970s lineup of Mr. Fambrough, Billy Henderson, Pervis Jackson, Bobbie Smith, Philippé Wynne and John Edwards was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.That same year, the group donated 375 of its performance outfits to the Motown Museum in Detroit. Touring Motown’s Studio A that day, Mr. Fambrough told reporters that he “used to dream about this place” before the Spinners began recording there in the 1960s — and that he sometimes had to convince his wife that he was going to the studio when he left the house in the middle of the night.The Spinners in an undated photo, from left: Bobby Smith, Billy Henderson, Pervis Jackson, Mr. Fambrough and Philippé Wynne.Echoes/Redferns via Getty ImagesOriginally known as the Domingoes, the Spinners were formed in 1954 in Ferndale, Mich., a northern suburb of Detroit. The group joined the Motown roster a decade later but had only one big hit for the label, “It’s a Shame,” which was co-written and produced by Stevie Wonder and peaked at No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1970.They hit their artistic and commercial stride after they signed with Atlantic Records in 1972 and began working with the producer Thom Bell. The ensuing string of hits began with the Top 10 singles “I’ll Be Around” and “Could It Be I’m Falling in Love” and included “Then Came You,” a collaboration with Dionne Warwick that reached No. 1 on the Hot 100 in 1974. Their last hit was a medley of “Cupid” and “I’ve Loved You for a Long Time” in 1980.The Spinners were nominated for six Grammy Awards, though they never won. They were inducted into the National Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame in 2015.Mr. Smith and Mr. Wynne handled most of the group’s lead vocals, but Mr. Fambrough took or shared the spotlight on a few songs, notably “Ghetto Child,” a No. 4 R&B hit in 1973.Henry Lee Fambrough was born in Detroit on May 10, 1938. His survivors include his wife of 52 years, Norma Fambrough; a daughter, Heather Williams; and a sister, Martha.Like many other groups of their era who no longer have any original members, the Spinners have continued touring. After Mr. Fambrough announced his retirement in April 2023, he said in a statement: “The Spinners are still here and still singing for our people who want to hear us. And that’s not going to change. We’ll still be there for them.”The New York Times contributed reporting. More

Ozawa, who died this week at 88 years old, left behind a catalog made with orchestras in Boston, Chicago and elsewhere. Listen to highlights.Seiji Ozawa, the eminent Japanese conductor whose death, at 88, was announced on Friday, was a force at the podium. He toured the world’s leading concert halls and helped break barriers for Asian classical musicians.He also left behind an extensive and varied discography: recordings of warhorses like Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which he led for 29 years, as well as of more obscure pieces, such as Henri Dutilleux’s “The Shadows of Time.” While his live performances sometimes drew mixed reactions from critics, many of his recordings — from Boston, Berlin, Japan and elsewhere — are considered standards.“Even at my age, you change,” Ozawa, then in his 70s, told the author Haruki Murakami. “And practical experience keeps you changing. This may be one of the distinguishing features of the conductor’s profession: The work itself changes you.”Here are eight albums that offer an introduction to his music.Berlioz: ‘Symphonie Fantastique’Ozawa often spoke about feeling liberation in the music of Berlioz. “His music is crazy!” he once said. “Sometimes I don’t know what’s going on, either. Which may be why his music is suited to being performed by an Asian conductor. I can do what I want with it.” That freewheeling approach can be heard in this recording of “Symphonie Fantastique” with the Saito Kinen Orchestra, which he helped found in Japan in 1984.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

Hear nine standout songs by members of the Grammy-winning trio: Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus.The trio boygenius, from left: Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers.Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated PressDear listeners,It’s been a big week for boygenius, the singer-songwriter supergroup of Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus. On Sunday, the band won its first three Grammys: best rock song and best rock performance for the single “Not Strong Enough,” and best alternative album for its full-length debut, “The Record.” But last Friday, during a Los Angeles concert, boygenius also announced that the group was going on hiatus. “This is our last show,” Dacus told the crowd, “and we’re feeling it.”Is it weird to say I wasn’t mad about this news? No disrespect to boygenius, but I’m also a fan of the solo music made by all three artists, and I’d been wondering when, say, we’d be getting a follow-up to Bridgers’s 2020 breakout album, “Punisher,” which is nearing its fourth birthday. “The Record” itself had been an unexpected bonus, since boygenius initially seemed like a one-off project that wouldn’t last longer than a six-song EP and a subsequent tour. But the runaway success of “The Record” also means that some people are more familiar with boygenius than with the three accomplished solo artists who make up the group.Today’s Amplifier hopes to change that. It’s a celebration of both the individual work of Baker, Bridgers and Dacus (which sounds like a law firm that I would definitely hire) and also the magic that happens when they put their Captain Planet powers together and become boygenius.Although all three artists share a subgenre (lyrically vivid, passionately sung indie-rock), each also has a distinct personality and sonic sensibility that comes through in their solo music. Bridgers has a darkly comic perspective and a dreamy, mirror-fogging delivery most effectively employed on tracks like boygenius’s bittersweet “Me & My Dog” or on “Garden Song,” a droll reverie from “Punisher.” Dacus has a honeyed deadpan and has a short-story writer’s eye for humanizing detail, as heard on “Night Shift,” her 2018 chronicle of a breakup. And Baker is an artist who’s not afraid to plumb her darkest depths (as she does on the arresting “Appointments”) or belt to the rafters (see her anthemic 2021 song “Ringside”).I hope the members of boygenius once again join forces someday in the not too distant future — and I’m confident that they will. But I’m also excited for people to get more acquainted with their solo work, and hopefully get more of it soon.Somebody roll the windows down,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