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    Aya Nakamura, French-Malian Singer, Is Caught in Olympic Storm

    In four months, France will host the Paris Olympics, but which France will show up? Torn between tradition and modernity, the country is in the midst of an identity crisis.The possible choice for the opening ceremony of Aya Nakamura, a superstar French-Malian singer whose slang-spiced lyrics stand at some distance from academic French, has ignited a furor tinged with issues of race and linguistic propriety and the politics of immigration. Right-wing critics say Ms. Nakamura’s music does not represent France, and the prospect of her performing has led to a barrage of racist insults online against her. The Paris prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation.The outcry has compounded a fight over an official poster unveiled this month: a pastel rendering of the city’s landmarks thronging with people in a busy style reminiscent of the “Where’s Waldo?” children’s books.Right-wing critics have attacked the image as a deliberate dilution of the French nation and its history in a sea of sugary, irreproachable blandness most evident in the removal of the cross atop the golden dome of the Invalides, the former military hospital where Napoleon is buried. An opinion essay in the right-wing Journal du Dimanche said “the malaise of a nation in the throes of deconstruction” was in full view.The rapid immersion of the Olympics in France’s culture wars has its roots in a meeting on Feb. 19 at the Élysée Palace between President Emmanuel Macron and Ms. Nakamura, 28. Mr. Macron, doubling as the artistic director of the Olympics, asked if she would perform.The official poster of the Olympic Games in Paris has been attacked by right-wing critics as a deliberate dilution of the French nation and its history.Thierry Chesnot/Getty ImagesWe 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

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    Homes Tied to Sean Combs Raided by Homeland Security in L.A. and Miami

    In response to questions about Mr. Combs’s residences, Homeland Security Investigations said the searches were part of “an ongoing investigation.”Federal agents raided homes in Los Angeles and Miami on Monday that are connected to the hip-hop mogul Sean Combs, a person with knowledge of the case said.Homeland Security Investigations carried out the raids but did not provide details about the case, including whether Mr. Combs was a target or which criminal charges were being investigated. Mr. Combs, who is also known as Puff Daddy or Diddy, has been accused of sexual assault and sex trafficking in multiple civil lawsuits over the last several months.A spokesperson for Mr. Combs did not respond to a request for comment.The criminal inquiry was being conducted by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York and federal agents with Homeland Security, a law-enforcement official said. Nicholas Biase, a spokesman for the Southern District, declined to comment.In a statement, Homeland Security said that agents from New York had “executed law enforcement actions as part of an ongoing investigation, with assistance from HSI Los Angeles, HSI Miami and our local law enforcement partners.”Video from Fox 11 (KTTV), a local television station in Los Angeles, showed armed officers entering a home in the Holmby Hills area of the city, which a law-enforcement official said was connected to Mr. Combs. Public records in California also indicate that the home is owned by a company led by Mr. Combs.The raids were a stunning development in the career of Mr. Combs, 54, a producer, label executive and occasional rapper who has been one of the most influential and widely recognized figures in the music business over the last 30 years.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

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    The Encounter That Put the Pianist Kelly Moran on an Unexpected Path

    The 36-year-old musician helped introduce the prepared piano to fresh audiences. Amid personal upheaval, she abandoned it and found a new voice.As spring 2022 bloomed, Irena Wang emailed the pianist Kelly Moran to ask for a mixtape.They had briefly met just days before — at the funeral of Wang’s partner of seven years and Moran’s high-school sweetheart in the little Long Island town where they grew up. He had died from an accidental overdose, eight months after becoming a father.“He was my first love, my first heartbreak, my first everything,” Moran remembered one evening after dark in Yamaha’s sprawling Midtown Manhattan piano studio in early February, a week before she turned 36. “I saw his widow and infant son, and it was one of the saddest moments of my life.”Wang’s husband, Damian, had always bragged about Moran, and even accompanied Wang to see her play with Oneohtrix Point Never in Los Angeles. After the funeral, Wang sent her an email: “I really want to know you, but I need some time. Can you maybe recommend some music?”Moran dumped 28 albums into Dropbox. That stylistic tangle — the serene throb of Gas’s “Pop,” the mesmeric pull of John Adams’s “The Dharma at Big Sur,” the magnetic oddities of Broadcast’s “Tender Buttons” — was the tentative first step of what became a friendship between Moran and Wang, and is now a family. Late last year, they moved in together; with Luka, Wang and Damian’s son, the members of this unorthodox trio have empowered one another past the shadow of grief.“So much in my life has been very focused on myself. Being an artist is narcissistic because you’re indulging your instincts,” Moran said. “But now with my family, it feels so good to be useful to other people, to have community. Music gets its potency from sharing, from having community.”That chemistry became the crucial final component for Moran’s “Moves in the Field,” due March 29, a softhearted but steel-skinned set of 10 piano pieces that are as rapturous as a waterfall or as delicate as vapor. Her first album in six years, it is the redemptive conclusion in an extended span of personal tragedy and professional doubt, all ingrained in its sweeping songs.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

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    Ariana Grande Beats Kacey Musgraves and Justin Timberlake on the Chart

    “Everything I Thought It Was,” Justin Timberlake’s first new album since “Man of the Woods” six years ago, opens in fourth place.Ariana Grande holds the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s album chart this week with “Eternal Sunshine,” beating out new releases by Kacey Musgraves and Justin Timberlake.“Eternal Sunshine,” Grande’s first new studio album in almost four years, stays at the top for a second time with the equivalent of just over 100,000 sales in the United States, including 115 million streams and 13,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate.Grande’s total was down 56 percent from its opening week, giving it enough — by a thin margin — to succeed over Musgraves’s “Deeper Well,” which started with the equivalent of 97,000. “Deeper Well,” Musgraves’s second LP since winning album of the year at the Grammys in 2019 with “Golden Hour,” starts at No. 2 with 38 million streams and 66,000 copies sold. Those sales included 37,000 copies of the album’s nine vinyl editions — among them a picture disc showing cardinals in a tree and another featuring “scented sleeves.”“Everything I Thought It Was,” Timberlake’s first new album since “Man of the Woods” six years ago, opens in fourth place with the equivalent of 67,000 sales. It is Timberlake’s first solo studio album not to make it to No. 1 since “Justified,” which went to second place in 2002.Also this week, Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” is No. 3 and Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” is No. 5. More

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    Piknik, a longtime Russian rock band, is now at the center of a tragedy.

    Early Saturday, Piknik, one of Russia’s most popular heritage rock bands, published a message to its page on Vkontakte, one of the country’s largest social media sites: “We are deeply shocked by this terrible tragedy and mourn with you.”The night before, the band was scheduled to play the first of two sold-out concerts, accompanied by a symphony orchestra, at Crocus City Hall in suburban Moscow. But before Piknik took the stage, four gunmen entered the vast venue, opened fire and murdered at least 133 people.The victims appear to have included some of Piknik’s own team. On Saturday evening, another note appeared on the band’s Vkontakte page to say that the woman who ran the band’s merchandise stalls was missing.“We are not ready to believe the worst,” the message said.The attack at Crocus City Hall has brought renewed attention to Piknik, a band that has provided the soundtrack to the lives of many Russian rock fans for over four decades.Ilya Kukulin, a cultural historian at Amherst College in Massachusetts, said in an interview that Piknik was one of the Soviet Union’s “monsters of rock,” with songs inspired by classic Western rock acts including David Bowie and a range of Russian styles.Since releasing its debut album, 1982’s “Smoke,” Piknik — led by Edmund Shklyarsky, the band’s singer and guitarist — has grown in popularity despite its music being often gloomy with gothic lyrics. Kukulin attributed this partly to the group’s inventive stage shows.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

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    Maurizio Pollini, Celebrated Pianist Who Defined Modernism, Dies at 82

    His recordings of Beethoven and Chopin were hailed as classics, but his technical ability sometimes invited controversy.Maurizio Pollini, an Italian pianist of formidable intellectual powers whose unrivaled technique and unwavering interpretive integrity made him the modernist master of the instrument, died on Saturday morning in Milan. He was 82.His death, in a clinic, was announced by the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, where he performed frequently. The announcement did not specify a cause, but Mr. Pollini had been forced to cancel a concert at the Salzburg Festival in 2022 because of heart problems and had pulled out of a number of subsequent recitals.Mr. Pollini, who performed for more than half a century, was that rare pianist who compelled listeners to think deeply. He was an artist of rigor and reserve whose staunch assurance, uncompromising directness and steadfast dedication to his ideals were evidence of what his colleague Daniel Barenboim called “a very high ethical regard of music.”Whether he played Beethoven, Schumann or Stockhausen, Mr. Pollini was almost unmatched in his capabilities. He took perfect command of his instrument, a prowess that came across “as neither glib facility nor tedious heroic effort,” the critic Edward Said once wrote, but instead as a technique that “allows you to forget technique entirely.”There were, however, many listeners who could not forget that technique, and Mr. Pollini was long a subject of controversy. Detractors heard only cold objectivity, accusing him of being too distant, too efficient or too unyielding when compared with the great characters of the piano; one of his few equals in sheer ability, Sviatoslav Richter, privately complained of hearing Mr. Pollini play Chopin on the radio with “no poetry or delicacy (even if everything’s impeccably precise).”“It was not a very imaginative performance,” Harold Schonberg of The New York Times said in his review of Mr. Pollini’s Carnegie Hall debut in 1968, eight years after the pianist had stormed to victory in the sixth International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw — the first Westerner to do so, and at only 18. “With all his skill,” Mr. Schonberg continued, “Mr. Pollini failed to suggest that he was deeply involved in the music.”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

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    7 Songs From My L.A. Record Haul

    Hear tracks from Cass Elliot, the Pretenders, Sam Cooke and more from the Record Parlour in Hollywood.Lindsay ZoladzDear listeners,Anytime I’m in Los Angeles — as I was last week, reporting a story I can’t tell you about just yet, but that you will get to read soon — I try to swing by the Record Parlour, a small but stuffed-to-the-gills shop off Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. I almost always spend more time there than I intend to, and I invariably leave ready to test the limits of how many records I can fit in my luggage.A good used record store will always make me grateful that I took my allergy pill that morning, and by that metric, the Record Parlour is a very good used record store. Dusty crates of kitschy bargain-bin finds line the floors, while robust sections organized by genre snake around the store. (According to the shop’s Instagram, their inventory includes “200,000+ Records,” and I’d believe it.) The prices have certainly gone up in the eight or so years since I’ve been stopping by, but there are still deals to be had. Just when I thought I’d perused all the pricier “New Releases” — record store lingo for used records recently stocked — I saw an entire section of “$7.98 New Releases” and let out an audible groan, because of course I was going to have to leaf through every single one of those, too.I picked up a fun, eclectic mix of rock, pop, gospel and one coveted original soundtrack you will read about below. My finds included records by Bryan Ferry, the Pretenders, Sam Cooke and more — most of which were in that $7.98 bin, and all of which made it safely back to New York in my carry-on bag. Another successful transcontinental record haul!Also, one last bit of news: Yesterday marked one year since the Amplifier launched! What a year it’s been. Thanks to each and every one of you who has read, subscribed, listened, forwarded an installment to a friend, recommended a song for a playlist, sent me an email (I try to respond personally to as many as I possibly can, but please forgive me when I fall behind!), shaken a fist at the sky because I forgot to include a song you love, or taken a chance on an artist that we’ve featured and discovered a new favorite in the process.It truly feels like we’ve built a robust community of music lovers here, and I can’t wait to see where Year 2 takes us. Again: Thank you, thank you, thank you.Burnin’ down the interbelt, from Jacuzzi to Jacuzzi,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

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    Joni Mitchell, Following Neil Young, Returns to Spotify After Protest

    Her music has quietly reappeared on the streaming service, two years after a departure over what she called “lies” about Covid-19 vaccines in podcasts.Joni Mitchell’s music has quietly returned to Spotify, more than two years after she followed Neil Young in protest of what she called “lies” about Covid-19 vaccines being spread on the streaming platform.There was no official announcement of Mitchell’s decision, but on Thursday fans on social media began to note with excitement the reappearance of some of her albums on Spotify. By Friday morning, most if not all of Mitchell’s original albums had returned, including classics like “Blue” (1971), “Court and Spark” (1974) and “Mingus” (1979).Representatives of the singer-songwriter, her record labels and Spotify either did not answer or had no comment when asked on Thursday and Friday about the apparent return of Mitchell’s albums.In January 2022, with a post on her website titled “I Stand With Neil Young!,” Mitchell said she would be removing all of her music from Spotify. Young had done so after criticizing the service for its support of Joe Rogan, the podcast star whose show had come under fire from doctors and public health officials who said that some of Rogan’s guests promoted misinformation about Covid vaccines.“Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives,” Mitchell wrote.Young returned his music to Spotify last week, saying: “My decision comes as music services Apple and Amazon have started serving the same disinformation podcast features I had opposed at Spotify.” Rogan previously had an exclusive deal with Spotify, which has since been renewed — for a reported $250 million — to allow distribution of his show on other platforms.Mitchell, 80, has become more active in recent years after suffering an aneurysm in 2015 that initially left her unable to speak. She has given several performances, including at the Newport Folk Festival in 2022 and at the Grammy Awards in February, and is set to play two “Joni Jam” shows at the Hollywood Bowl in October, joined by Brandi Carlile and others. More