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      Overlooked No More: Cordell Jackson, Elder Stateswoman of Rock ’n’ Roll

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      This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.When Cordell Jackson’s long and mostly obscure musical career intersected briefly with American pop culture in the early 1990s (coinciding with her appearance in a popular beer commercial, in which she showed the guitarist Brian Setzer a few tricks), it was almost as if she had stepped out of a dream: grandma, resplendent in a shiny ball gown and bouffant, peering through her old-lady glasses while ferociously rocking out on a cherry red electric guitar, amp cranked up to 10.Even if we had never seen or heard Jackson before, she seemed to reside in the dusty bric-a-brac of our country’s collective unconscious: one of rock ’n’ roll’s forgotten pioneers, Cordell Jackson had been making music for more than half a century.Cordell Miller was born on July 15, 1923, to William and Stella Miller in Pontotoc, Miss., a small city once known as a hide-out for Jesse James’s gang of outlaws in the 19th century. She took an early interest in music-making, learning to play banjo, piano, upright bass and harmonica.By age 12, she was sitting in with her father’s string band, the Pontotoc Ridge Runners. “When I picked up the guitar, I could see it in their eyes: ‘Little girls don’t play guitar,’” she later recalled. “I looked right at ’em and said, ‘I do.’”Jackson moved through a variety of jobs, including interior decorator and D.J. on an all-female radio station, while waiting for her music career to take off.Jackson always claimed that she had been rocking out well before the men who would make rock ‘n’ roll famous. “If what I’m doing now is rock ‘n’ roll or rockabilly or whatever,” she told the newspaper The Tulsa World in 1992, “then I was doing it when Elvis was a 1-year-old. That’s just a fact.”Or, as she told Cornfed magazine: “Whatever song it was, I always creamed it, so to speak. I play fast. I have always gyrated it up.”In 1943, she married William Jackson, moved to Memphis and began trying to scratch her way into the male-dominated music scene. She eventually befriended and recorded demos with the producer Sam Phillips, who would go on to start Sun Records. But she grew impatient with Phillips, who saw her gender as an obstacle, and created Moon Records, becoming one of the first women in America to record and produce their own music (some say the first) and securing her place in history.“Cordell was immune to being told ‘no.’ It was almost like that was her art,” the country singer and songwriter Laura Cantrell said by phone. “A lot of artists are told ‘no’ — that what we want to do is not possible, but Cordell was absolutely determined to be an artist. That was not typical for a woman, especially in the South.”Recording sessions for Moon Records were held in Jackson’s living room, where she engineered, produced and released music by regional artists like Allen Page, Earl Patterson and Johnny Tate. Though Jackson initially hewed mostly to the production end of things, she also released some of her own performances, including 1958’s “Rock and Roll Christmas” and “Beboppers’ Christmas.”In 1958, Jackson released her own performances of “Rock and Roll Christmas” and “Beboppers’ Christmas” on her own label, Moon Records.But neither she nor her roster of artists hit the big time, and the 1960s and ’70s saw Jackson moving through a peripatetic series of other kinds of work: at a printing company; as an interior decorator with a real estate agency; as a D.J. on the all-female Memphis station WHER; running a junk shop. It wasn’t until the early 1980s, when she happened to cross paths with the musician, performance artist and filmmaker Tav Falco, that things really changed for her.The two first met at a Western Sizzlin steakhouse in Memphis, at a benefit for Don Ezell, the longtime gofer at Sun Records. “Every guitar player in Memphis was there,” Falco said in a video interview. That included Jackson, who approached him after hearing his band, the Panther Burns (featuring Alex Chilton), cover one of her originals, “Dateless Night.” The two became fast friends. He invited her to appear on bills with him and his band, and she accepted, despite the fact that, at almost 60, she had yet to play her first professional live gig.This marked the beginning of the startling second act of Jackson’s musical career, as she became — among a certain set — an elder stateswoman of grungy thrash guitar. During a 1988 appearance on the WFMU radio show “The Hound,” Jackson plugged in her guitar and let it rip; the result sounds less like a performance than a wild animal turned loose in the studio. In an interview, Jim Marshall, the show’s host, described Jackson’s playing as “some of the most vicious, nasty rock ’n’ roll guitar I’ve ever heard in my life.”Jackson in 1992 with the country singer Marty Brown, center, and the radio host Charlie Chase.Everett Collection, via ImagoJackson with members of the band the New Duncan Imperials in an undated photo.Ken CozzaShe headlined at colorful, now-vanished rock clubs in New York City, like CBGB, the Lone Star and the Lakeside Lounge, as well as at Maxwell’s, in Hoboken, N.J. She mostly played solo, but occasionally local musicians backed her up, including the Brooklyn band the A-Bones. “There were no rehearsals,” Miriam Linna, the band’s drummer, recalled in an interview. “It was just, ‘Let’s go!’”Susan M. Clarke, editor and publisher of Cornfed magazine, added: “I can’t imagine anyone knew what to do with her. I’m surprised they didn’t have her committed.”Offstage, Jackson was down to earth but proper, and deeply religious. She did not curse, and she did not drink “anything but milk or water,” she told Roctober magazine in 1993. Falco recalled her saying that doctors had put her on “an all-meat diet,” and Kenn Goodman — whose Pravda Records released her album “Live in Chicago” in 1997 — said in an interview that whenever Jackson traveled (always in her yellow Cadillac; she disliked planes), it was with “her own steak, her own milk, and giant jugs of tap water from Memphis,” because she didn’t trust any other kind.Nancy Apple, a close friend and acolyte, said that when Jackson went grocery shopping, “she would wear white old-lady gloves — not for fashion; she’d just always say, ‘I don’t want to touch all that money!’” When she got home, Jackson would take any bills she had received as change, wash them in the sink and hang them from clothespins to dry.Eccentricities aside, it was what Jackson did onstage that was truly astonishing. Watching archival footage of her performances is a jolting experience. Speaking from the stage at a 1995 concert in Memphis, Jackson described her music as “anywhere from a barnyard disaster to classical.”There was an unbridled ferocity to Jackson’s playing, almost as though she were fighting with her guitar to give her what she wanted. Her compositions — most of them instrumentals — may not be terribly unusual, but what she did with them, in her urgent, raw and unapologetically abrasive way, was. Jackson didn’t just break guitar strings when she played. She broke picks. Jackson at her home in Memphis in 1992, when her mostly obscure musical career intersected briefly with American pop culture.John Focht/Associated PressIntonation didn’t seem to matter a whit to her. Neither did keeping time: In one interview, she said, “I’ve found that the faster I play, the more accurate I become.” Form and melody, too, seemed mostly beside the point. Instead, it was all attitude, attack, rhythm, speed and noise.She “was comfortable in her own skin,” said the bassist Marcus Natale of the A-Bones — she didn’t put on airs, made no concessions, and seems to have never been anything less (or more) than exactly who she was, her performances a testament to the exhilarating power of ragged, unmanicured music.“This is not a masterpiece,” she wrote on the sleeve of one of her records, “but it could be so bad you’ll like it.”Jackson died of pancreatic cancer on Oct. 14, 2004, in Memphis. She was 81.In her music, and in everything she set her mind to, Jackson was nothing if not determined. “I’ve never been confused about what I was supposed to do while I was down here,” she said in 1999. “If I think of it, I do it.”Howard Fishman is a musician and composer and the author of “To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse.” More

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      David Soul, a Star of the Hit Cop Show ‘Starsky & Hutch,’ Dies at 80

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      An actor and singer, he rose to fame in the 1970s as one half of the popular television crime-fighting duo. He also notched a No. 1 hit single in the U.S.David Soul, the doleful-eyed blond actor and singer who rose to fame portraying half of a cagey crime-fighting duo on the hit 1970s television show “Starsky & Hutch,” and who also scored a No. 1 hit single in 1977 with “Don’t Give Up on Us,” died on Thursday. He was 80.His death was confirmed in a statement by his wife, Helen Snell, who did not specify a cause or say where he died. He had been living in Britain since 1995 and became a British citizen in 2004.A Chicago-born son of a Lutheran minister, Mr. Soul had spent nearly a decade appearing on television shows like “Star Trek” and “I Dream of Jeannie”; he also had a regular role on the ABC western comedy series “Here Come the Brides,” before he won his career-defining role of Detective Ken Hutchinson, known as Hutch, also on ABC. The part would make him a regular presence in American living rooms, as well as a recognized heartthrob, from 1975 to 1979.As Hutch, Mr. Soul played the coolheaded Midwestern sidekick to Detective Dave Starsky (Paul Michael Glaser), a savvy Brooklynite given to wearing chunky cardigan sweaters. The two tooled around the fictional Southern California burgh of Bay City in a red Ford Gran Torino emblazoned with a giant Nike-esque swoosh running down each side as they cracked open cases with the help of their streetwise informant, Huggy Bear (Antonio Fargas).Mr. Soul had first caught the eye of the show’s creators with an icy performance as a vigilante motorcycle cop in “Magnum Force” (1973), the first of several sequels to the hit 1971 Clint Eastwood film “Dirty Harry.” But he initially had misgivings about the Hutch character, seeing him as nothing more than “bland white-bread,” as he said in the 2004 television documentary “He’s Starsky, I’m Hutch.”“I didn’t like him,” he said. “I wanted to play Starsky.”Even as old-school tough guys with badges, the characters stood out on the 1970s cop-show landscape by sharing an onscreen emotional intimacy that was striking for its day.While being interviewed by the talk show host Merv Griffin, who pointed out that TV Guide had singled out “Starsky & Hutch” as television’s most violent show, Mr. Soul responded: “My opinion of the show is that it’s a love story. It’s a love story between two men who happen to be cops.”In an interview for The New York Post’s Page Six feature in 2021, Mr. Glaser said that he and Mr. Soul had kidded about the show’s homoerotic undertones “all the time.”With his place in the pop-culture firmament cemented, Mr. Soul was able to make good on his long-simmering ambitions to be a pop star.In 1977, the year after releasing his debut album, he shot to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 with the lachrymose ballad “Don’t Give Up on Us.” Many years later, Owen Wilson, as Hutch, parodied the song in none-too-loving fashion in a 2004 feature-film comedy version of the show, which also starred Ben Stiller as Starsky and Snoop Dogg as Huggy Bear.Mr. Soul, who often said that music was his priority over acting, released five albums in his career and notched four Top 10 hits in Britain in the 1970s, including “Don’t Give Up on Us,” which climbed to No. 1; “Silver Lady,” which also went to No. 1 although it reached only No. 52 in the United States; and “Going In With My Eyes Open” — No. 2 in Britain and No. 54 on the American chart.He became enough of a singing sensation that, in reviewing a 1977 concert of his at Radio City Music Hall, Robert Palmer of The New York Times described “camera-wielding teenage girls charging the stage, the flicker of hundreds of exploding flash cubes and a continual squealing.”Mr. Soul was born David Richard Solberg on Aug. 28, 1943, to Richard Solberg, a professor of political science and history as well as a theologian, and June (Nelson) Solberg, a teacher.In David’s youth, the family lived in Cold War-era Berlin as well as in South Dakota. He aspired to be a diplomat or a minister before turning his sights on a show business career. In his late teens, he learned that his girlfriend, Mim, was pregnant; under parental pressure, they married.Later, when he was 22, he found his wife another man, a friend of his, and left her and their young son, Christopher, to chase his dreams of stardom in New York.Once there, he whittled his surname down to Soul and, looking for a gimmick to boost his singing career, bought a $1 ski mask and rebranded himself as a mystery-shrouded pop crooner who never showed his face. After appearances on Merv Griffin’s show, he secured a deal with MGM Records and released a single, “The Covered Man,” in 1966.Once he tried to make it without the mask, however, his career faltered. Broke, Mr. Soul started selling himself sexually. “I was green,” he said in the documentary. “I was a kind of ‘Midnight Cowboy,’” a reference to the Oscar-winning 1969 film starring Jon Voight as a Texas dreamer turned Times Square hustler.Discouraged by the fizzling of his music career, Mr. Soul shifted to acting, breaking into Hollywood with an appearance on “Flipper,” the series centered on a pet dolphin.Once he made it big with “Starsky & Hutch,” he said, he spiraled into alcoholism before rediscovering religion in the 1980s. He met Ms. Snell, a public relations executive, in 2002, and they married in 2010.It was his fifth marriage. He had five sons and a daughter. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.After leaving the United States, Mr. Soul appeared in theater productions in London’s West End. In the mid-2000s, he landed the lead role of the outrage-courting talk show host in “Jerry Springer: The Opera.”Although he missed out on a financial windfall by selling his stake in “Starsky & Hutch” years ago for $100,000, according to a 2019 interview with The Sunday Times of London, he expressed few regrets.“I’ve had it all,” he said. “I’ve been a No 1 [star] in the world for a while — not now. I’ve had No 1 records around the world — not now. I have six wonderful children. I’m married to a wonderful woman. I’m happy. I’ve explored, I’ve seen, I’ve done.” More

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      Richard Gaddes, Opera Impresario Who Spotted Young Talent, Dies at 81

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      As leader of opera companies in Santa Fe and St. Louis, he welcomed new works as well as new artists.Richard Gaddes, a British-born opera impresario who nurtured young talent as director of companies in Santa Fe, N.M., and St Louis, died on Dec. 12 in Manhattan. He was 81.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by the Santa Fe Opera, where he served as general director for eight years, and by the Opera Theater of Saint Louis, of which he was a founder. The executor of his estate, Maria Schlafly, said he died after a brief illness.Leading the two companies over several decades, Mr. Gaddes (pronounced GAD-iss) helped spur the careers of younger stars like Thomas Hampson, Christine Brewer and Frank Lopardo, and brought prominent artists well known in Europe, like the soprano Kiri Te Kanawa and the conductor Edo de Waart, to audiences in the United States.His generous, open-minded embrace of an art form he saw as encompassing all others spurred his attempts to open it up — to new artists, new audiences and new works. In Santa Fe, he offered discounted tickets to New Mexico residents and staged a production of “The Beggar’s Opera” at the city’s El Museo Cultural using mostly local performers.“I don’t think I would be doing what I’m doing if it hadn’t been his leap of faith,” said Ms. Brewer, who had been a school music teacher before Mr. Gaddes heard her sing in a competition in St. Louis and decided to take a chance on her. She didn’t win the competition, but Mr. Gaddes sent her a check anyway.“Richard just said, ‘I heard it in your voice.’ He was super supportive,” Ms. Brewer said in a phone interview.Invited to create an opera company in St. Louis at the end of the 1970s, Mr. Gaddes had an idea at odds with local grand-opera expectations: to use the new company to engage young American singers at the beginning of their careers. His idea turned out to be fruitful.From left, Alan Kays, Stephen Dickson and Joseph McKee in a 1979 production of “Three Pintos” at the Opera Theater of Saint Louis, where Mr. Gaddes was general director.Opera Theater of Saint Louis“I recommended to them that rather than doing extravaganzas with elephants and camels and mob scenes in large spaces, what they should do is have an ensemble company presenting the cream of the crop of young American singers,” Mr. Gaddes said in an interview with the National Endowment for the Arts, which honored him in 2008.The conductor Leonard Slatkin wrote in an email that the St. Louis company “became a destination point for those starting careers.” He added that Mr. Gaddes “had an encyclopedic knowledge of the repertoire and knew what could and could not be done.”Mr. Gaddes pursued a similarly democratizing approach toward expanding the audience in Santa Fe. He had already had a long career there before becoming director in 2000, a post he held until 2008.“I felt there was a slight attitude of our being elitist,” he said, noting that the company, located seven miles outside the city, “didn’t have much to do with the locals.”His initiatives, including the reduced-price ticket scheme, transformed the audience, which went from being 38 percent New Mexican to over 50 percent.“What’s marvelous is, Richard has really taken the reins in a new era in which the piece of contemporary opera that everyone feels we are obliged to do does not have to be an act of sufferance,” the director Peter Sellars said in an interview after Mr. Gaddes was honored by the N.E.A. “It’s not like having to go in for invasive surgery. It is in fact, a pleasure.”Richard Gaddes was born on May 23, 1942, in Wallsend, an old coal mining and shipbuilding town near Newcastle in the north of England. His father, Thomas, worked in the local shipyards; his mother, Emily (Rickard) Gaddes, was a homemaker.He showed an early aptitude for music — his parents both sang in local choirs — and his mother, defying his father’s wishes, paid for his train ticket to London to audition at Trinity College of Music (now the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance), where he was immediately accepted. He graduated in 1964.To earn money, he turned pages at Wigmore Hall, then London’s premiere chamber music venue; started a series of lunchtime concerts at the hall, which became immensely popular; and went to work for an artist management company.Mr. Gaddes credited his days at Wigmore Hall with stirring his interest in helping young singers. “I turned pages for many great accompanists, including Gerald Moore,” he said in the 2008 interview. “I sat at the piano during the cycles of singers such as Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Fischer-Dieskau, los Ángeles, Hans Hotter. An amazing, amazing exposure to music that you couldn’t buy.”Spotted by the conductor John Crosby, the founder of the Santa Fe Opera, on a trip to London, he was eventually recruited to become the company’s artistic administrator in 1969, at age 25.He became founding general director of the Opera Theater of Saint Louis in 1976, and under his stewardship it became the first American opera company to receive an invitation to the Edinburgh International Festival. He returned to the Santa Fe company in 1994 and became its second general director in 2000.Mr. Gaddes is survived by his brother Harry. Another brother, Simon, died in 2011. More

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      Former Mr. Bungle Saxophonist, Theo Lengyel, Charged With Girlfriend’s Murder

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      Theobald Lengyel, a saxophonist, helped form the experimental rock band in Northern California in the mid-1980s. His girlfriend had been missing since early December.A founding member of the experimental 1990s rock band Mr. Bungle, Theobald Lengyel, was arrested on Tuesday and charged with murder, after the police in Capitola, Calif., found human remains that they believed were his girlfriend’s in a wooded area of a regional park.Mr. Lengyel’s girlfriend, Alice Kamakaokalani Herrmann, 61, who was known as Alyx, was last seen in Santa Cruz, Calif., on Dec. 3, according to the El Cerrito Police Department. After not hearing from her for more than a week, her family reported her missing on Dec. 12, the police said.Ms. Kamakaokalani had lived in Capitola, a small seaside town in Santa Cruz County. The police said in a statement that during their investigation they found her car, a red Toyota Highlander SUV, at Mr. Lengyel’s house in El Cerrito, about an hour and 40 minutes by car from Capitola. Investigators found remains, which are still being identified, in Tilden Regional Park in Berkeley, the police said.Mr. Lengyel’s girlfriend, Alice Kamakaokalani Herrmann, had been missing since early December.El Cerrito Police Department“As the investigation progressed, it became clear that foul play was involved,” the Capitola Police Department said in a statement, “leading to the identification of Theobald Lengyel as a suspect.”Mr. Lengyel, 54, who has also released music under the name Mylo Stone, has not cooperated with the investigation, according to the El Cerrito Police Department, which said they believed Mr. Lengyel had left town and drove to Portland, Ore., after Ms. Kamakaokalani’s disappearance.Mr. Lengyel, who played the alto saxophone, was one of the founding members of Mr. Bungle, which formed in the mid-1980s in Northern California as a metal band before embarking on a more experimental, absurdist path. The band released its first album, also named “Mr. Bungle,” in 1991.The album, which included a mixture of progressive rock, punk and funk, featured song titles like “Squeeze Me Macaroni” and “The Girls of Porn.” Allmusic.com described it as “a difficult, not very accessible record,” but noted that “the band wouldn’t have it any other way.”Mr. Lengyel left the band in the late 1990s, before the release of the album “California.” The band reunited and performed in Los Angeles in 2020, without Mr. Lengyel. More

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      The Best Songs Our Readers Discovered in 2023

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      Songs by Labi Siffre, Bessie Banks, the Brat and more that became invested with fresh meaning.A Liz Phair song offered some unexpected parenting advice to one Amplifier reader.Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times Dear listeners,A few weeks ago, I asked readers to share the best older song they discovered — or rediscovered — in 2023. As usual, the Amplifier community did not disappoint.Today’s playlist is a compilation of some of the best submissions along with your (condensed and edited) explanations of why these songs resonated so deeply. The track list is an eclectic mix, featuring rock, soul, jazz, hip-hop, folk, punk and just about everything in between. Quite a few of you introduced me to artists I’d never heard before, like the British singer-songwriter Labi Siffre, the Los Angeles punk band the Brat and the underrated North Carolina-born soul singer Bessie Banks. I’ll definitely be seeking out more music from all of them.I was especially struck by the stories about rediscovered songs. Sometimes a piece of music we’ve known for decades (or, in the case of one reader’s story about a Rosemary Clooney song, about as long as we can remember) boomerangs back into our lives with poetic and fortuitous timing. A classic Chiffons hit becomes an anthem for a freshly resumed relationship; a wry Liz Phair song becomes more earnest in the light of new parenthood. Some of these narratives are fun and playful, while others are powerful reminders of the ways that music can buoy us through our darkest times.Thanks to every one of you who submitted a song and a story. I wish I could have included hundreds of them, but I settled on these 13. Also, on a personal note, reading through them all provided a welcome distraction this week. Remember in Tuesday’s newsletter when I mentioned I was coming down with a cold? That “cold,” I learned shortly afterward, turned out to be Covid. So once again, like the earliest days of the pandemic, I spent my week in isolation — but at least I had all your submissions to keep me company.I hope today’s playlist helps you kick off 2024 right. Here’s to another year of music discovery!Listen along on Spotify while you read.1. Badfinger: “No Matter What”While wandering the aisles in a supermarket this year, I heard this song and launched a mini investigation into why it had such a Beatle-esque sound (answer: recorded at Abbey Road and released on Apple Records). Recently, I was pleased to hear it included in Alexander Payne’s movie “The Holdovers.” The harmonies and hooks really evoke the ’70s for me, just like that film’s nostalgic rhythms and interiors. — Cathy Boeckmann, San Francisco (Listen on YouTube)2. Bessie Banks: “Go Now”When I read that Denny Laine of the Moody Blues died, I immediately thought of his greatest hit, “Go Now.” When I went online, I found out that an American woman, Bessie Banks, recorded it first. It’s fantastic — no disrespect to Mr. Laine, but it is tremendous. Should have been a hit. — Finn Kelly, Long Beach, Calif. (Listen on YouTube)3. Labi Siffre: “Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying”It seems like a perfect encapsulation of the roller coaster that was 2023, pushing through a rainbow of emotions and holding close what matters most. It’s also just an excellent song from an artist that too few people know. — Jeremy Kotin, Milan, N.Y. (Listen on YouTube)4. John Prine: “Souvenirs”At 69, I am starting to think more about mortality and memories. This song evokes both. It also evokes the memory of Steve Goodman, one of my favorites, who recorded it with Prine. — Dennis Walsh, Media, Pa. (Listen on YouTube)5. The Chiffons: “One Fine Day”This song, written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, resonated this year because a former girlfriend and I got together after being apart for many years, and we are now so happy! — Nick Lange, Cambridge, Mass. (Listen on YouTube)6. Liz Phair: “Whip-Smart”My wife and I had our second child this year, our first boy. I am constantly thinking about how to raise both of my kids in this world and then I rediscovered this song, which flips the script on centuries of raising macho, stiff-upper-lip boys. — Ryan Humphries, Millersville, Pa. (Listen on YouTube)7. Big Maybelle: “My Country Man”This song swings so hard and has an appreciation for proper farming technique. It is a welcome burst of elemental pleasure in a year with a lot of bleakness. No one can remain motionless with this on. — Brent Bliven, Austin (Listen on YouTube)8. Billy Bragg: “A New England”I like the lyric “I loved the words you wrote to me, but that was bloody yesterday/I can’t survive on what you send every time you need a friend.” It’s a short, cut-to-the-quick tune that I didn’t immediately take to, but now I’m always in the mood for it. — Kimberly Melinda Hogarty, Tucson, Ariz. (Listen on YouTube)9. The Brat: “The Wolf (and the Lamb)”The Brat were a Chicano punk band from Los Angeles that emerged in the early ’80s. As a fan of ’80s indie rock, I thought I knew all of the bands from that era, but this year I was astonished to hear this urgent, ferocious song for the first time. Had the Brat come around later, they likely would have been much bigger, but the music industry in 1980 was unwilling to accept a Chicano punk band with a female lead singer. Hearing this song, and this band, is a reminder of all that we’ve lost through the years when we ignore artists outside the mainstream. — Kelly Mullins, Seattle (Listen on YouTube)10. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five: “Superrappin’”It’s such an influential track that has been name-checked, sampled and quoted by so many artists, yet I’d never heard it until hip-hop turned 50 this year. I think it does a great job of capturing the vibe of what I imagine hip-hop was like its first decade. It’s hype, it’s a party track, and when I listen to the song I can see Flash and the crew performing it live at a rec room party in the Bronx. — Jack Kershaw, New York City (Listen on YouTube)11. Doris Troy: “What’cha Gonna Do About It”Doris Troy was part of the original lineup of the greatest ensemble I had never heard of, the Sweet Inspirations, whose members included Cissy Houston (Whitney’s mother) and her nieces Dee Dee and Dionne Warwick. There’s something about the staccato piano combined with Troy’s elongated “I love you”s that reassures me that love isn’t fireworks — it’s the world they illuminate as they ascend and break up the darkness. — John Semlitsch, Austin (Listen on YouTube)12. Nina Simone: “Blues for Mama (Live at the Newport Jazz Festival)”This year has been a lot. War, rockets, drones: All that I could hear and see in Kyiv as a civilian resident. One might be amazed at how people can adjust. This is a song I discovered when I was riding my bike to the hospital in Kyiv where I work. It was a morning after some powerful explosions overnight. But there was also sunlight and spring, and the tune playing in my headphones, forcing me to smile. — Nazar, Kyiv, Ukraine (Listen on YouTube)13. Rosemary Clooney: “Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep”A young woman I know recently posted a photo of herself and her newborn baby girl on Instagram with Rosemary Clooney’s rendition of this Irving Berlin song in the background. When my mother passed away and I was only 4 years old, her older sister, my aunt Edie, sang this song to me often as she tucked me in for the night. It’s a bittersweet memory, but now, 71 years later, it still reminds me of how fortunate I am to have had so much love in my life. — Norman Reisman, New York City (Listen on YouTube)When they do the double Dutch, that’s them dancing,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“The Best Songs Our Readers Discovered in 2023” track listTrack 1: Badfinger, “No Matter What”Track 2: Bessie Banks, “Go Now”Track 3: Labi Siffre, “Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying”Track 4: John Prine, “Souvenirs”Track 5: The Chiffons, “One Fine Day”Track 6: Liz Phair, “Whip-Smart”Track 7: Big Maybelle, “My Country Man”Track 8: Billy Bragg, “A New England”Track 9: The Brat, “The Wolf (and the Lamb)”Track 10: Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, “Superrappin’”Track 11: Doris Troy, “What’cha Gonna Do About It”Track 12: Nina Simone, “Blues for Mama (Live at the Newport Jazz Festival)”Track 13: Rosemary Clooney, “Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep”Bonus TracksWant to get an absurdly early head start on your Best Songs of 2024 list? Jon Pareles and I have compiled our first Friday Playlist of the year, featuring some notable new tracks from Béla Fleck, A.G. Cook, Mary Timony and more. More

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      Oasis and Stone Roses Musicians Team Up, and 7 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by A.G. Cook, Mary Timony, Bela Fleck and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes), and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Liam Gallagher and John Squire, ‘Just Another Rainbow’If you’ve ever wondered what Liam Gallagher fronting the Stone Roses would have sounded like — and don’t just say “Oasis” — have I got a song for you. The snarl-lipped Gallagher joins forces with the singular Stone Roses guitarist John Squire on “Just Another Rainbow,” the first single from a forthcoming collaborative project, and naturally the two Manchester musicians make immediate sonic sense together. “Red and orange, yellow and green, blue, indigo, violet,” Gallagher sings in his unmistakable lilt — seriously, this song has Liam Gallagher singing the colors of the rainbow. But Squire ultimately ascends into the spotlight in the track’s second half, projecting his towering, prismatic riffs across the sky. LINDSAY ZOLADZSmallgod featuring Black Sherif, ‘Fallen Angel’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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      Review: The Philharmonic’s Maestro Revels in the Classics

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      Jaap van Zweden returned to the orchestra for the first time since October with a conservative lineup of works by Wagner, Beethoven and Brahms.With the new year, it’s the homestretch for Jaap van Zweden’s six-year tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic, which ends this spring.But even on their way out, chief conductors don’t lead their orchestras that much. Before this week, van Zweden hadn’t been on the Philharmonic’s podium since early October, and after Sunday he won’t return until mid-March.So Thursday’s concert at David Geffen Hall was an island in a sea of guest batons. And it was about as van Zweden-esque as a program could be, consisting of nothing but standards: the kind of music that this maestro most relishes, and what he was brought to New York to enforce discipline in.These days, if a major orchestra is going to play classic repertoire like Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto and Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, as the Philharmonic did on Thursday, it tends to precede it with a short contemporary piece in the opening slot. Window dressing, maybe, but it’s become the norm.So it was almost radical to instead give that position to the Act I Prelude from Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” probably the most-played chestnut of the evening. (For what it’s worth, audiences don’t seem to mind: The weekend’s run of four performances — rather than the usual three — is all but sold out.)The Wagner turned out to be the weakest point in an otherwise very fine concert. This was a flowing, not stodgy, take on the “Meistersinger” prelude, bringing the winds and brasses to the fore, their lines audible even in passages that usually spotlight the rich strings. While the sound wasn’t heavy, especially at loud dynamics it still emphasized the unpleasant way that, in densely massed music, the stark lucidity of Geffen Hall’s acoustics can tip into brittle blare rather than warm blend.This was less of a problem for the pared-down ensemble in the Beethoven concerto, though both here and in the Brahms, there was sleekness in the high strings without meaty heft; I kept wanting more depth to the violin sound. But there was considerable spirit and some evocative hushed playing. Again and again in the concerto, van Zweden cast a dreamlike glow without losing rhythmic tightness or momentum.And the performance boasted an immaculate soloist in Rudolf Buchbinder, nearing 80 and playing with patrician reserve and clarity, neither indulgent nor detached. At the start of the second movement, his tone was poignantly wounded in the face of orchestral aggression; in the finale, he was the ensemble’s graceful partner.The Brahms symphony was also clean and straightforward: precisely done, its tempos reasonable. The second movement developed eloquently from muted and funereal to noble and grand before a hearty third, and a fourth that was more sober and reflective than raging. This wasn’t a thrilling performance, but it was a considered and satisfying one.And it was part of a trend. When van Zweden last led the Philharmonic, in October, on the program was Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto and Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony. In those pieces and on Thursday, I didn’t feel the rigidly tense, mannered, punchy quality that has marred some of his performances. This Beethoven and Brahms were strong without being overbearing, shaped but with room to breathe.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Sunday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Willa Cather and Yehudi Menuhin: An Unlikely, Unwavering Friendship

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      These two titans of 20th-century literature and music formed a profound, yearslong relationship across generations and backgrounds.Early in 1935, a blizzard blew through New York City. The storm was so fierce, it virtually emptied Central Park. But Willa Cather spent her morning there, sledding with the violin prodigy Yehudi Menuhin and his sisters.Afterward, they all went to the Ansonia Hotel on the Upper West Side, where the Menuhins were living, for an intimate lunch — just the family, the violinist Sam Franko and Cather, along with her companion, Edith Lewis. “It was a lovely party, with the whole world outside lost in snow,” Cather, the author of American classics like “My Ántonia” and “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” wrote to her friend Carrie Miner Sherwood. “Inside, perfect harmony!”This idyll gets a passing mention in Benjamin Taylor’s brisk new biography, “Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather,” though it was one of many in the yearslong friendship of Menuhin and Cather, two titans of 20th-century culture — he a musician and she a writer whose works exude a passion for music.Their relationship was an unlikely one. Menuhin was a famous child with a busy performance schedule; Cather, several decades older, was in retreat from the modern world and skeptical of celebrity (even her own). Yet across generations and backgrounds, they formed a deep bond. She gave him a literary education, while he fed her love of music. With both of their lives in motion, they were a mutual source of stability and support, whether he was storing his sled in her Park Avenue apartment building or they were leaning on each other through loss, heartbreak and infirmity.They met when Menuhin was a young teenager, in 1930; both were in Paris and she was introduced to his family by shared friends. Cather was also struck by his younger sisters, writing to her nieces that the girls, Hephzibah and Yaltah, musicians too, were “almost as gifted and quite as handsome as he.”The next year, back in the United States, Menuhin was on a West Coast tour that coincided with Cather’s visit to her mother in Pasadena, Calif., and the two picked up where they had left off. Cather was so taken with Menuhin that she wanted to dedicate her next novel, “Shadows on the Rock,” to him and his siblings.A profile of her published that August in The New Yorker — one that described her prose “as surely counterpointed as music” — said that she “picked her intimates with care,” and that “she admires big careers and ambitious, strong characters, especially if they are the careers and characters of women. The most fortunate and most exciting of human beings, to her mind, is a singer with a pure, big voice and unerring musical taste.”The Menuhin children, instrumentalists born in America to Lithuanian Jews, didn’t fit that bill exactly, but enough for a quickly flourishing relationship. They called Cather Aunt Willa, and she loved them as if they were family. She kept what her friend Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant remembered as “a melting, angelic photograph of young Yehudi Menuhin” prominently displayed in her apartment, and frequently crossed Central Park to spend time with him and his sisters at the Ansonia.In his memoir, “Unfinished Journey,” Menuhin wrote that Cather was “a rock of strength and sweetness,” but also that “her strength had a patience and evenness which did not preclude a certain severity.”“Her mannish figure and country tweediness, her let’s-lay-it-on-the-table manners and unconcealed blue eyes, her rosy skin and energetic demeanor,” Menuhin wrote, “bespoke a phenomenon as strangely comforting to us all as it was foreign, something in the grain like Christian Temperance or the Girl Scout movement.” (The New Yorker said that she, “in spite of her Irish-Alsatian ancestry, her American upbringing, has a strain of Tartar in her temperament.”)Cather, right, traveling to Europe in 1902 with others including, at left, Isabelle McClung, who would later introduce Cather to Menuhin.University of Nebraska-LincolnCather gave Menuhin books of Heinrich Heine’s poetry and Goethe’s “Faust” in German, and would pick up used copies of Shakespeare plays for him and his sisters. “In our apartment,” Menuhin wrote, “there was a little room, nobody’s property in particular, small enough to be cozy, and furnished with a table around which Aunt Willa, Hephzibah, Yaltah, myself and often Aunt Willa’s companion, Edith Lewis, gathered for Shakespearean readings, each taking several parts, and Aunt Willa commenting on the language and situations in such a way as to draw us into her own pleasure and excitement.”She was, Menuhin thought, “the embodiment of America — but an America which has long ago disappeared.” Still, with a Henry James-like sensibility, treasuring new-world determination and hope alongside old-world refinement and tradition, she also impressed upon them European values. Through their peripatetic lives they occupied both cultures; and for them, she was a bridge.Even as Menuhin became an adult and Cather’s writing fixated increasingly on the past, their relationship remained strong. He would send her flowers and orange trees in winter. She would notify friends of his New York concerts and radio broadcasts. They went to “Parsifal” at the Metropolitan Opera, and saw Paul Robeson and Uta Hagen in “Othello” on Broadway. No matter the weather, they enjoyed walks in Central Park; her favorite path took them around the reservoir.Cather was protective of his reputation. In letters, she reminded people that “anything about my doings with the Menuhins is confidential,” and once wrote, “I scarcely dare whisper any fact or opinion about them for fear of seeing myself quoted in The New York Times.” (She was, beyond this, so private that she didn’t want any of her correspondence, as well as the draft of her unfinished final novel, to survive her death.)When Menuhin was navigating young love, Cather was a font of advice — “I always have your future very much at heart,” she told him in one letter — and gushed over his marriage to Nola Nicholas. “No artist ever made such a fortunate marriage,” Cather wrote to her friend Zoë Akins. “Yehudi loves goodness more than anything, (I mean beautiful goodness) and she has it.”When Cather was homebound for four weeks with bronchitis, Yehudi and Nola Menuhin visited her nearly every day; he tended to the fire, and she made tea. He was even more of a solace as Cather experienced loss: the deaths of her brothers and of her old friend Isabelle McClung Hambourg, who had introduced Cather and Menuhin.Little, however, could lift her from the depressive isolation that followed her surgery for breast cancer in early 1946. She wasn’t seeing any friends, “not even Yehudi,” and wasn’t even listening to music, she wrote to her sister-in-law Meta Cather. “I have simply had, for the present, to cut out all the things I loved most.”Cather would make it out again; her last night on the town was to see Menuhin play at Carnegie Hall. Then, in March 1947, he visited her at home with his two children. Hephzibah was there, too, with her husband and two boys. “Here we all were (the children only were new), the rest of us were sitting in these rooms just as we used to meet here every week 10 and 12 years ago,” Cather recounted in a letter the next day.The Menuhins were stopping by on their way to board the Queen Elizabeth. About an hour an a half before it was to set sail, they “quietly rose,” Cather recalled, then “without any flurry, dropped in the elevator to the street floor.” Seemingly understood but unspoken was that this would be the last time they saw one another. Cather died in April.In the letter about that final visit, Cather said that this friendship had been “one of the chief interests and joys of my life.” She went as far as to say that she would rather have almost any other chapter of her life left out than that of her time with Menuhin and his sisters. Even then, as adults, they felt like dear children to her, Aunt Willa.“Today,” she said at the end of the letter, “these rooms seem actually full of their presence and their faithful, loving friendship.” More