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      Becky G’s Revenge Fantasy, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by PinkPantheress, the Rolling Stones featuring Stevie Wonder and Lady Gaga, and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Becky G featuring Chiquis, ‘Cuidadito’Becky G, an American singer with Mexican roots, has racked up millions of streams with hits in pop styles from across the Americas. On most of her new album, “Esquinas,” she latches onto the rising popularity of regional Mexican music, reviving ballads by Vicente Fernández, the revered Mexican ranchera songwriter, and collaborating with current regional Mexican hitmakers including Peso Pluma, Yahritza y Su Esencia and, on “Cuidadito” (“Be Careful”), the Mexican singer Chiquis. In a bouncy duet, they detail the kind of revenge they’re ready to take on a husband seen with another woman the night before: no breakfast, slashed tires, eviction. Spoiler: It was just a dream, but he’s been warned. JON PARELESDebby Friday, ‘Let U In’The Canadian electronic-pop songwriter Debby Friday, who just won Canada’s Polaris Prize, collaborated with the Australian producer Darcy Baylis on this new single. Over a double-time break beat and calmly pulsing synthesizers, Friday sings about an obsession that keeps her awake, even if the devotion may not be entirely mutual. She wonders, “Is the big heart my only sin?” PARELESPinkPantheress, ‘Mosquito’The latest single from the British pop star PinkPantheress is a sugary confection with a gothic edge. “I just had a dream I was dead, and I only cared ’cause I was taken from you,” she sings in her signature lilt, hopscotching across a skittish beat. Produced with Greg Kurstin, the track retains the dreamy charm of PinkPantheress’s homespun bedroom-pop but adds a glittery sheen. LINDSAY ZOLADZJaja Tresch featuring Coco Argentée and Denis Dino, ‘Nonji Chom’Here’s a burst of sheer jubilation. Jaja Tresch and two fellow Cameroonian singers, Coco Argentée and Denis Dino, trade verses on a track that hurtles along on six-beat rhythms, drawing on bikutsi and other styles original to their country. The lyrics, in the Meta’ language, tell young people to heed their parents and to persevere. As guitars, drums, balafons (marimbas), flutes and whistles all pile into the track, the music soars. PARELESThe Rolling Stones featuring Stevie Wonder and Lady Gaga, “Sweet Sounds of Heaven”The absolute high point of “Hackney Diamonds,” the first album of new Rolling Stones songs since 2005, is “Sweet Sounds of Heaven.” It starts as a loose, gospelly song that just happens to have Stevie Wonder on keyboards; soon, Lady Gaga arrives to trade vocals with — and spur on — Mick Jagger. Horns come in to push the song to a grand finale, but apparently no one wants to let it end, and what sounds like a spontaneous studio jam lifts the song to another peak. Even in this digital era, it feels analog. PARELESH31R, ‘Right Here’H31R — the duo of the Brooklyn rapper maassai and the New Jersey producer JWords — conjures a sound for when lust conquers rationality on “Right Here.” The rap goes, “I know better/but if you wanna take me I could let ya,” over squishy electric piano chords, sporadic bass-drum hits and some tiny thing that’s just rattling and clanking around the mix. The mood is a tossup: eager but nonchalant, defensive but reckless. PARELESFaye Webster, ‘Lifetime’Turbulent love songs are everywhere; serene ones are much rarer. Faye Webster’s “Lifetime” savors a sense of permanence. The tempo is a very relaxed sway, piano and guitar trade little trickling phrases, and a chamber orchestra offers discreet support as Webster sings in a voice of bemused contentment, envisioning a lifelong connection. PARELESOneohtrix Point Never, ‘Again’There’s an eerie beauty in “Again,” the title track from the latest album by the electronic experimentalist Oneohtrix Point Never. The glitchy, wordless composition progresses through cycles of malfunction and decay — melodies seem to break apart, revealing the ghosts in the machines. If HAL 9000’s death scene in “2001: A Space Odyssey” makes you cry, this one’s for you. ZOLADZMatana Roberts, ‘How Prophetic’Reeds and violin explode in star bursts, over and again. A pair of drummers push ahead with a square-shouldered beat that could easily be lifted from a punk record, or from one of Junior Kimbrough’s electric blues. Alongside them, the alto saxophonist, multimedia artist and self-described “sound quilter” Matana Roberts speaks from the perspective of an ancestor (or maybe many), putting words to the critical consciousness that the women of Robert’s line have carried. “How Prophetic” arrives early on “Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the Garden,” the latest in a series of albums exploring Roberts’s ancestry and inheritance, drawing from a mix of archival material, interviews with relatives and the artist’s imagination. At the end of “How Prophetic,” Roberts recites a refrain which recurs across the album: “My name is your name, our name is their name, we are named, we remember, they forget.” GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOThe National, ‘Smoke Detector’The National ends “Laugh Track,” its surprise-release second album of 2023, with “Smoke Detector,” an eight-minute live recording that’s a spiral of desperation. The lyrics work through free associations, promises and pleas — “Why don’t you lay here and listen to distant sirens with me?” — while the band circles obsessively through four chords, falling and rising, with its guitars tangling and seething, gnashing and wailing. “You don’t know how much I love you, do you?” Matt Berninger eventually asks, already knowing the sad answer. PARELESAtka, ‘Lenny’Atka is the singer and songwriter Sarah Neumann, who was born in Germany but is now based in London. In “Lenny,” she sings about trying to save a troubled man she still loves: “I need you, I always will,” she insists. She and her producer, Jung Kim from Gang of Youths, use frantically clattering percussion and an occasional sample of church bells to transform what could have been a basic two-chord rocker into an emotional siege. PARELESDarius Jones, ‘Zubot’It takes over two minutes for any prescribed melody to kick in on “Zubot,” as you can see clearly in the accompanying video, which animates Darius Jones’s written score. But by the time his alto saxophone syncs up with James Meger’s bass, playing a zigzagging, key-jumping melody while cellos and violins scrub and scrape around them, each instrument in the group has found a way to define itself. “Zubot” is the second of four movements in Jones’s new album-length suite, “Fluxkit Vancouver (It’s Suite but Sacred),” connected equally to 12-tone modernism and free jazz and the Southern soul saxophone tradition. RUSSONELLO More

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      Aerosmith Postpones Farewell Tour After Steven Tyler Fractures Larynx

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      The frontman’s vocal injury is worse than initially thought, the band said in a statement, announcing that the shows would be delayed until 2024.Aerosmith has postponed all of the remaining shows on its farewell tour until 2024 because of a vocal injury suffered by its frontman, Steven Tyler, according to a statement made by the rock band on Facebook.Tyler hurt his vocal cords during the band’s Sept. 9 performance at the UBS Arena in New York. His injury is “more serious than initially thought,” the statement said, involving a fractured larynx in addition to vocal cord damage.The band will honor previously purchased tickets for rescheduled dates of the Peace Out tour and refunds will be available for those unable to attend the new dates, the statement said.“I am heartbroken to not be out there with Aerosmith, my brothers and the incredible Black Crowes, rocking with the best fans in the world,” Tyler said in the statement. “I promise we will be back as soon as we can!” More

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      The Legend of Gram Parsons, in 12 Songs

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      A half-century after his death, listen to some of the singer-songwriter’s most soulful signature tunes, and some tributes and covers by artists he inspired.Harvey L. Silver/Corbis via Getty ImagesDear listeners,For quite some time, I’ve been looking for an excuse to write about an artist whose music means a lot to me: the singer-songwriter Gram Parsons.When I realized that the 50th anniversary of his death was this year — Sept. 19, to be exact — I thought it would be as good a time as any. Only I didn’t want to focus on the tragic and morbid details of Parsons’s death, as so many people have done for the past half-century. (Parsons died of a drug overdose at age 26 in a Joshua Tree motel.) I wanted to use the anniversary of his death, maybe a little paradoxically, as an occasion to argue that it should not be the defining element of his legacy. The music should be.My piece about Parsons was published on Thursday, but I wanted to use today’s Amplifier to delve even deeper into his music. That’s right: This newsletter is a Gramplifier. (I had to. I’m sorry.)A native of Winter Haven, Fla. — and born into a family that made its fortune in the citrus industry — Parsons sought to bridge the divide between the counterculture and the country-music establishment. A Southern boy with a rock ’n’ roll heart, he dreamed of a loftily named, utopian sound he liked to call “cosmic American music,” injecting traditional styles with a bit of the unknown. At his best — in his time with groups like the International Submarine Band, the Byrds, and the Flying Burrito Brothers, as well as in his later solo work — Parsons made that vision a reality. Though he didn’t find much commercial success while he was alive, his influence continues to ripple.Today’s playlist contains some of Parsons’s most soulful signature tunes, as well as some tributes and covers by artists he inspired, like Elvis Costello and, of course, his protégée and duet partner, Emmylou Harris, who has been one of the most persistent torchbearers of Parsons’s legacy.Parsons remains a kind of outlaw figure in the cultural imagination, suggesting an alternative to more complacent country rock, and if you’re unacquainted, discovering his catalog feels like dusting off some dazzling hidden gems. So cue up this playlist and get ready for the return of the grievous angel.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. The International Submarine Band: “Luxury Liner”An early Parsons composition included on the International Submarine Band’s 1968 album “Safe at Home,” “Luxury Liner” is at once a rollicking road song and a tuneful confession of lonesomeness in the tradition of Parsons’s idol Hank Williams. Emmylou Harris would later help popularize the song — as she did with much of Parsons’s material — when she covered it as the title track of her 1976 album. (Listen on YouTube)2. The Byrds: “Hickory Wind”Parsons wrote two songs that appeared on “Sweetheart of the Rodeo,” his only album with the Byrds, and one of them, “Hickory Wind,” is among his most enduringly beloved tracks. As the music critic Ben Fong-Torres put it in his 1991 biography of Parsons, named after this very tune, “What made the song so universal was its recognition of one of life’s big questions — Is that all there is? — combined with pleasant evocations of youth and the safety a kid felt being at home among the pines, the oak, and the brush.” (Listen on YouTube)3. The Flying Burrito Brothers: “Hot Burrito #2”The Flying Burrito Brothers — the third band Parsons joined in as many years — melded country music and psychedelic rock seamlessly on their 1969 debut album, “The Gilded Palace of Sin.” “Sneaky” Pete Kleinow was perhaps the band member whose style best demonstrated this fusion: He played pedal steel through a fuzz-box, as though it were an electric guitar. (Listen on YouTube)4. Elvis Costello & the Attractions: “I’m Your Toy”Parsons was a huge inspiration for Elvis Costello’s 1981 country covers album, “Almost Blue,” and on it Costello offered his own renditions of two Parsons songs, including this arresting take on the Flying Burrito Brothers’ goofily titled classic “Hot Burrito #1.” Costello, though, decided to change the song’s name to reference a memorable lyric in the refrain: “I’m your toy, I’m your old boy/But I don’t want no one but you to love me.” (Listen on YouTube)5. The Flying Burrito Brothers: “Sin City”We’re talking Los Angeles here, not Vegas. Perhaps the greatest example of the briefly simpatico songwriting partnership of Parsons and the former Byrd Chris Hillman, this twangy ballad captures the mood of late-60s Southern California burnout in the fiery spirit of the Louvin Brothers. (Listen on YouTube)6. The Flying Burrito Brothers: “Wild Horses”For better and for worse, Parsons spent a lot of time in the late ’60s and early ’70s hanging out with the Rolling Stones, particularly Keith Richards (who admitted to Fong-Torres, “yes, maybe hanging around the Rolling Stones didn’t help him in his attitude towards drugs”). Parsons taught Richards a lot about American country music, though, and many people claim his influence can be heard on “Exile on Main St.” songs like “Sweet Virginia” and “Torn and Frayed.” That exchange could also be reciprocal, though, like when Richards let the Flying Burrito Brothers record his band’s new song “Wild Horses” before the Stones did. (Listen on YouTube)7. Gram Parsons: “Still Feeling Blue”For “GP,” his 1973 debut solo album, Parsons recruited much of his hero Elvis Presley’s red-hot old backing band: the guitarist James Burton, pianist Glen D. Hardin and drummer Ronnie Tutt. They lend an air of experience and polish to Parsons’s own compositions, like the lively country throwback “Still Feeling Blue.” (Listen on YouTube)8. Gram Parsons, “The New Soft Shoe”Ostensibly — if somewhat inscrutably — about the auto pioneer E.L. Cord, “The New Soft Shoe,” another highlight from “GP,” boasts one of the loveliest and most wistful melodies Parsons ever wrote. (Listen on YouTube)9. Gram Parsons, “The Return of the Grievous Angel”At a tour stop in Boston, a young poet named Tom Brown handed Parsons a sheet of vivid lyrics he’d written with Parsons in mind. They became the basis of the laid-back, lived-in “The Return of the Grievous Angel” — destined to become one of Parsons’s signature songs. (Listen on YouTube)10. Emmylou Harris, “Boulder to Birmingham”Emmylou Harris was an unknown folk singer on the Washington, D.C., club circuit when Parsons recruited her to sing backup on his solo records and tour with his band. After his death, she became a solo star in her own right, but she continued to pay tribute to Parsons throughout her career. This wrenching ballad from her major-label debut album, “Pieces of the Sky,” is about her processing the overwhelming grief of Parsons’s loss: “I would walk all the way from Boulder to Birmingham,” she sings in her clarion voice, “if I thought I could see your face.” (Listen on YouTube)11. Gram Parsons: “$1000 Wedding”Here is Parsons at the peak of his powers as a conduit for emotion. Memories of a thwarted wedding and a subsequent bender swirl in an impressionistic recollection, not always told in a linear fashion but emotionally piercing nonetheless. “Supposed to be a funeral,” Parsons sings in a heartbreakingly weary voice. “It’s been a bad, bad day.” (Listen on YouTube)12. Gram Parsons: “In My Hour of Darkness”Each verse in this elegiac song is dedicated to someone in Parsons’s life who had recently passed away: first the actor Brandon deWilde (the young man who “went driving through the night”), then the guitarist Clarence White (“another young man safely strummed his silver-stringed guitar”), and finally the Los Angeles music scene fixture Sid Kaiser (“kind and wise with age”). There’s something haunting about Parsons writing this song so shortly before his own death, and it closes out “Grievous Angel” with both a spiritual warmth and the chill of premonition. (Listen on YouTube)Out with the truckers and the kickers and the cowboy angels,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“The Legend of Gram Parsons” track listTrack 1: The International Submarine Band, “Luxury Liner”Track 2: The Byrds, “Hickory Wind”Track 3: The Flying Burrito Brothers, “Hot Burrito #2”Track 4: Elvis Costello & the Attractions, “I’m Your Toy”Track 5: The Flying Burrito Brothers, “Sin City”Track 6: The Flying Burrito Brothers, “Wild Horses”Track 7: Gram Parsons, “Still Feeling Blue”Track 8: Gram Parsons, “The New Soft Shoe”Track 9: Gram Parsons, “The Return of the Grievous Angel”Track 10. Emmylou Harris, “Boulder to Birmingham”Track 11: Gram Parsons, “$1000 Wedding”Track 12: Gram Parsons, “In My Hour of Darkness”Bonus TracksIn 1999, Emmylou Harris helped put together the richly reverent “Return of the Grievous Angel: A Tribute to Gram Parsons,” which showcased the breadth of the musicians who were influenced by Parsons — including Wilco, Beck and Sheryl Crow — and demonstrated how Parsons’s songs have echoed across generations. The great folk singer-songwriter Gillian Welch’s stirring take on “Hickory Wind” is one of the album’s finest moments, as is Lucinda Williams’s swaggering “Return of the Grievous Angel,” with backing vocals from the one and only David Crosby. More

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      Zach Bryan Begins Building His Village

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicA few weeks ago, Zach Bryan released his self-titled second major label album, which went to the top of the Billboard album chart — his first time doing so. It contained a duet with Kacey Musgraves that also topped the Hot 100. Then, not long after, he released a new EP, “Boys of Faith,” that includes collaborations with Bon Iver and Noah Kahan.Bryan is working hard, and on his own terms — he releases music seemingly at will, and is finding a path to collaborators that hews tightly to his own taste profile. Even his recent arrest, for interfering with a traffic stop in Oklahoma, felt signature, with footage from the arrest showing him to be both stubborn and apologetic, following his own moral code more closely than the law.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Bryan’s post-politics approach to stardom, his dogged work ethic, and how he’s partnering up with fellow dissidents to build a coalition of artists who are ordinarily resistant to coalitions.Guests:Elamin Abdelmahmoud, host of the CBC’s “Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud”Tom Breihan, senior editor at StereogumConnect 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

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      ‘Melissa Etheridge: My Window’ Review: Musings on Life and Music

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      On Broadway, this rock concert spliced with memoir has gained a striking intimacy.In 1979, when Melissa Etheridge was an aspiring rock star getting ready to leave Leavenworth, Kan., for music school in Boston, she got a 12-string guitar. Her father made a macramé strap for it — a sturdy, intricate piece of knot work that was a portable souvenir of his love.“And this is it,” his Grammy Award-winning daughter said during her Broadway show, turning around to give everyone a view of the strap that held up her instrument.It was a charming moment, and in our high-definition, multi-screen world, refreshingly analog: just Etheridge, life-size and in three dimensions, sharing the room with us.Share it she does, superbly, in “Melissa Etheridge: My Window,” which opened Thursday at Circle in the Square Theater, just one block east of where an earlier version of the show ran Off Broadway last fall. On Broadway, this rock concert spliced with memoir has gained a striking intimacy, as if Etheridge had shrunk an arena to fit in the palm of her hand.A stage stretches across one end of the space, floor seats and a center aisle are where the theater’s thrust stage would usually be, and a tiny satellite stage sits behind them. Circle in the Square never struck me as a warm, embracing theater, but Etheridge makes it one, paying graceful, diligent attention to every section of the 726-seat audience, and occasionally coming down off the stage to sing and stroll.Written by Etheridge with her wife, Linda Wallem Etheridge, and directed once again by Amy Tinkham, this musically gorgeous, narratively bumpy show starts with Etheridge’s hit “Like the Way I Do,” ends with “Come to My Window” and fits 15 husky-voiced songs in between, including a trippily comical “Twisted Off to Paradise,” an arrestingly beautiful “Talking to My Angel” and a winking ode to her current gig, “On Broadway.” (Sound design is by Shannon Slaton.)On a set by Bruce Rodgers whose spareness serves the complexity of Olivia Sebesky’s projections, this is a visually slick production, with abundant jewel tones in Abigail Rosen Holmes’s saturated rock-show lighting, and Etheridge looking glamorous in costumes by Andrea Lauer.The show is shorter, more polished and more assured than it was Off Broadway — though Etheridge still seems undefended when she doesn’t have a guitar strapped across her or a piano in front of her. She also doesn’t speak memorized lines but rather tells versions of stories mapped out in the script. It’s a valid approach that sometimes leaves her fumbling for words.Kate Owens plays the small, clowning role of the Roadie, a character whom the audience loves but who I wish would desist from upstaging Etheridge with antics.Etheridge herself is very funny, and she knows how to handle a crowd. Such as when she got to the point in her life story when she fell for a woman who was married to a movie star — “a for real, for real movie star,” she added, for emphasis.“Who?” a voice called out, not that the performance is meant to be interactive.“Look it up,” Etheridge said, shrugging it off.Unlike her recently published memoir “Talking to My Angels,” which opens with a recollection of “a heroic dose of cannabis” that changed her understanding of herself and the universe, “My Window” proceeds chronologically, starting with Etheridge’s birth. (Projections show baby Missy with fabulous hair.) So the talk of what Etheridge calls “plant medicine” comes later.This is a passion of hers, so it belongs in a show about her. But the performance devolves into speechifying every time it comes up, except when it morphs into an enactment of experiencing an altered state — which, despite some vividly kinetic projections, can be as tiresome to watch onstage as it would be off.Surprisingly, the most starkly powerful part of the show Off Broadway — Etheridge recounting the death of her son Beckett, at age 21, in 2020 — works less well on Broadway.I cannot fault Etheridge for her stiffness in that delicate section at the performance I saw, or for reaching for words — like her blunt assessment, “He was difficult” — to convey her memories. But this is where relying on the script’s gentler, more contextual language could assuage what must be a terrible vulnerability.Logistics also undercut that scene. While Etheridge speaks from the large stage and the auditorium is plunged in darkness, a guitar is placed on the satellite stage by a technician who crosses in front of many people. No distraction should break the connection between Etheridge and her audience in that moment.She is, throughout “My Window,” a marvel with that audience.Back when her fame was rising, she told us in Act II, she started playing arenas and stadiums.“Thousands and thousands of people,” she said, “and the funny thing is, the more people there were, the further away y’all got.”On Broadway, they’re near enough again for her to commune with. And so she does.Melissa Etheridge: My WindowThrough Nov. 19 at Circle in the Square Theater, Manhattan; melissaetheridge.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Thanks to Taylor Swift, Ranch Dressing Is ‘Seemingly’ Everywhere

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      After a photo of the pop superstar at an N.F.L. game last weekend went viral, snack and condiment companies raced to capitalize.Can’t get enough of the budding relationship between Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce? Neither can ranch dressing.Ms. Swift, a 12-time Grammy winner whose stardom has reached new heights this year with the stratospheric success of her Eras Tour, was attending the Kansas City Chiefs’ football game on Sunday — Mr. Kelce plays tight end on the team — when she was photographed next to a plate containing a piece of chicken and two dipping sauces. A fan-run Swift account on the platform X, formerly known as Twitter, shared the photo and said one of the dips was “seemingly ranch.”@tswifterastourA frenzy ensued. The post went viral, and brands ranging from Lay’s potato chips to Mercedes’s Formula 1 team jumped to capitalize. The Empire State Building lit up in “ketchup and seemingly ranch” colors.Heinz announced on Tuesday that it was releasing 100 bottles of a limited-edition version of “Ketchup and Seemingly Ranch” sauce. A spokeswoman for Heinz said that the company had settled on 100 because of an X post from a different Swift fan account that featured side-by-side photos of Mr. Kelce’s number (87) and Ms. Swift wearing a No. 13 jersey.Hidden Valley ranch dressing renamed its X and Instagram accounts Seemingly Ranch. And Buffalo Wild Wings used the moment to promote its ranch dressing and other dips, referring to several of its dips as “Possibly” Bleu Cheese, “Might Be” Asian Zing and “I Think This Is” Buffalo.“We love when ranch has a moment in culture and of course wanted to jump in when we saw ‘seemingly ranch’ trending,” said Vicki Haber, a spokeswoman for Hidden Valley. She added that the company had gotten a record number of engagements with its social media posts since changing the name of its accounts.Most companies that have capitalized on the fervor have done so through targeted social media, not by creating new products, as Heinz did. In a post on X, Lay’s promoted a fake flavor of ranch chips, while Sonic Drive-In posted a fake No. 89 football jersey, a reference to Ms. Swift’s “1989” album.Ms. Swift’s appearance during the Sunday afternoon broadcast coincided with strong ratings for the game, which Mr. Kelce’s Chiefs won easily over the Chicago Bears. More than 24 million viewers tuned in to Fox, making it the most-watched game of the week. Broadcast cameras frequently focused on Ms. Swift, who sat in a luxury box next to Mr. Kelce’s mother and was seen cheering him on after every big play.The person running the Eras account on X, who declined to give a name, said in a message over the platform that the attention to the post was completely unexpected and that the business reaction was “quite entertaining.”“All I hope is if Taylor has seen it, she finds it just as funny as the rest of the internet does,” the person said. More

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      Enough About Gram Parsons’s Death. It’s Time to Celebrate His Music.

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      The country-rock pioneer died 50 years ago at age 26 with two influential solo albums to his name, leaving a legion of “what if”s behind.More than almost any other musician, the country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons’s legacy is entwined with the story of his tragic death, 50 years ago this month.The details are sad, macabre and sordid enough to have inspired a movie titled “Grand Theft Parsons.” Let’s dispense with them here and be done with it: Parsons, a 26-year-old former member of the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers who dreamed of creating a utopian genre that he called “cosmic American music,” was preparing for the release of his second solo album when he made a trip to his adopted sanctuary of Joshua Tree National Park.On his second day there, Parsons — a prodigious drinker and drug user who once attempted to kick heroin cold turkey while locked in a room with an also-detoxing Keith Richards — overdosed on morphine and could not be revived. His stepfather immediately arranged to have Parsons’s body flown to Louisiana, perhaps so he would stand a better chance of inheriting a chunk of Gram’s family fortune. More

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      Arthur Russell’s ‘City Park’: Reconstructed, Newly Performed

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      Arthur Russell — former Midwesterner, avant-gardist in the making — moved to New York from San Francisco in the early 1970s to study at the Manhattan School of Music, where his teachers included the composer Charles Wuorinen. It wasn’t a happy relationship.Call it a clash of uptown and downtown, when such a dichotomy existed: Wuorinen, a prickly modernist of the academy, versus Russell, a post-Cagean thinker from Allen Ginsberg’s circle who was into Indian classical music. Neither was likely to be a fan of the other, and things came to a head over Russell’s “City Park,” created and first performed in 1973.The piece blends texts from Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein with a nonlinear, modular score of repetitive phrases and Fluxus-inspired directions. Russell is said to have explained to Wuorinen that the structure allows listeners to “plug out and then plug back in again without losing anything essential.”Wuorinen, famously cranky, shot back, “That’s the most unattractive thing I’ve ever heard.”Russell quickly drifted away from Wuorinen, seeking guidance from a different composer, Christian Wolff, and getting more into electronics. His career developed, ever-changing and exploratory — gathering support from peers like Philip Glass and David Byrne, freely floating among the worlds of classical music, disco and songwriting — and “City Park” faded into distant memory. Russell died in 1992 at 40, a victim of the AIDS epidemic, and the piece lived on mostly as an amusing anecdote about a lost work.Nick Hallett, center, rehearsing “City Park” at Wesleyan University, with Parsa Ferdowsi, left, and Lea Bertucci.Adrian Martinez Chavez for The New York TimesNow, though, it has been reconstructed and will be performed for the first time in five decades at the New York City AIDS Memorial on Saturday, presented by the memorial outdoors for free and featuring an ensemble that includes Russell’s close collaborators. The musician Nick Hallett, who is responsible for the reconstruction, said that the piece was “about New York City,” and more important, “tells the story of Arthur’s New York City.”Russell is a particular case among composers lost to AIDS. Most around his age died without publishers or estates; their music languishes in archives like those at the New York Public Library. Russell may have been poor and perpetually underground, despite high-profile friends and collaborators like Talking Heads, but at least he had the infrastructure of an estate to maintain his legacy.More of a problem was his output. Russell, who was often seen around town with his Walkman, obsessing over mixing and production, recorded prolifically but released little. His attitude inspired some: David Van Tieghem, the composer and percussionist, who met Russell at the Manhattan School of Music and performed in the premiere of “City Park,” respected his friend’s belief that “if you’re going to do it, do it as best you can.”“City Park” features prerecorded material, scratch loops and instructions for a turntablist.Adrian Martinez Chavez for The New York TimesRussell’s piece has been prepared at Wesleyan ahead of its performance in New York on Saturday.Adrian Martinez Chavez for The New York TimesAnother collaborator, though, the trombonist Peter Zummo, said Russell could be obstinate about not making more of a living off his art. “One time he came to me, and he said, ‘The ideal record would be one,’ a press of one,” Zummo recalled. “Which would make it a work of art. He had standards, but there was also a stubbornness.”Russell has long been known for bits of his catalog, including the album “24→24 Music” (for which he enlisted friends like Zummo, Julius Eastman and Peter Gordon) and the disco song “Is It All Over My Face.” But his music, with its wide stylistic range, has taken on new life in the decades after his death as the recordings he left behind have been released this century.“I love seeing how people really latch onto it,” Van Tieghem said. “I have students at the New School who are huge fans. People have only recently come across his stuff and just love it.”Among Russell’s longtime admirers is Hallett, 49, who came of age in clubs and looked to him as an artist who “bridged the gap between disco, experimental and songs.” Hallett eventually met people from Russell’s circle, including Van Tieghem and Zummo, as well as younger musicians who were interested in preserving Russell’s legacy.Over the years, “City Park” lingered in Hallett’s mind like “a faint question mark,” he said. “Every new description of it intrigued me in a new way.” So, when the opportunity arose to reconstruct and revive the piece, he seized it.“City Park” includes Fluxus-inspired instructions for players, including “Play like the clouds always.”Adrian Martinez Chavez for The New York TimesHallett started with several sheets of material — which was all that Russell’s estate was aware had survived. There were two pages of notes, and two more of instructions on manuscript paper. Those only introduced more questions. “I saw so many potential roads to travel down,” Hallett said. “We see references to ‘scratch pulse.’ We see instructions for a turntablist. We see instructions for electronic tape.”He next turned to archivists at the New York Public Library, who tracked down two recordings. When Hallett listened to them, he was surprised. “From the score instructions, I anticipated a disco masterpiece,” he said. “This was different. And it fascinated me.”Unable to hear the turntable, he sought help from those who had performed in the premiere to figure out why. No one seemed to remember anything of use until, after what Hallett called some “memory jogging,” it emerged that the D.J. score is meant to be inaudible to everyone but the drummer.“Arthur uses the turntable not as we’d imagine a hip-hop D.J., but more in the way that John Cage was using the turntable in 1939, in the first ‘Imaginary Landscape,’” Hallett said. “The D.J. is the inaudible brain of the work; the drummer responds only to the scratch loops.”Not only is the influence of Cage here, but also that of artists he knew intimately, including Ginsberg and Jackson Mac Low. Among notated instructions are Fluxus-esque ones: “Play like the clouds always” and “Give a signal to someone, another player, without explaining what it’s for.” Elsewhere, musicians are told, “ask the drummer (when he’s not playing) what section he’s in, and play something from that section.”The New York City AIDS Memorial, where “City Park” will be performed outdoors for free on Saturday.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“The score is a map,” Hallett said, “one that is not intended to be followed literally but one that puts agency in the performer and allows them to make choices.”Van Tieghem said that, as far as he could remember, there wasn’t any rehearsal before “City Park” premiered. There is, Hallett said, a “great amount of planning” that goes into this piece, but it can’t be prepared in a traditional way. Saturday’s players got together at Wesleyan University last week, but, accustomed to Russell’s idiom and performance practice, are not repeatedly running through it.“You shouldn’t over-rehearse a piece like this,” Hallett said. “It’s meant to be interpreted in the moment.”That doesn’t mean it’s easy, though. Zummo said that, like Terry Riley’s classic “In C,” “City Park” can’t be picked up by any musician. Looking at the score recently, he was reminded of the questions he used to ask Russell before playing a new piece of his.“I would say something like, ‘Where do you want me to start?’ and he said, ‘Anywhere,’” Zummo recalled. “At one point I asked a similar question, and he said, ‘It’s a sound field.’ It’s another way to describe the open form, I guess, and ‘City Park’ brings that to mind. In a way, it’s not going anywhere.” More