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      Pharrell Williams on His New Role at Louis Vuitton

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      Earlier this month, Pharrell Williams was in the men’s atelier on the second floor of Louis Vuitton’s corporate office in Paris, sunglasses on, surveying his new perch.“Listen,” he said conspiratorially. “This window is different.”The window by his desk looks out over the small plaza on the north side of the Pont Neuf, where in just a couple of weeks, his first show as Louis Vuitton men’s creative director would take place. A 50-foot statue of the artist Yayoi Kusama, a Vuitton collaborator, hovered just outside. The rapper Pusha T and the streetwear innovator Nigo were milling about.Since Mr. Williams’s appointment was announced in February, he has spent a great deal of his time here, in this office and in the workshops that abut it, getting accustomed to holding the reins of the huge business he had been put at the creative helm of — the first time a musician has been given such a grand platform in luxury fashion.“I pinch myself every day,” he said. “This is the equivalent of a castle to me. I mean, the Seine River right there — it’s like the moat.”The long path from his childhood in Virginia Beach through hip-hop producer stardom to streetwear design impact to pop music ubiquity to here was very much on his mind. “I’m a Black man — they have given this appointment to a Black man,” he said. “This is the crown jewel of the LVMH portfolio. It’s everything, and I was appointed to rule in this position. So No. 1, a ruler of a position is usually like a king. But a ruler of this position for me is a perpetual student. It’s what I intend to be.”A little bit later in the afternoon, Mr. Williams, 50, slipped off his blazer and slipped on a brown motorcycle jacket in full LV monogram print leather. Emblazoned on the back, in studs, were the words “PUPIL” and “KING.”His appointment to the helm of Vuitton’s men’s business is, depending on your perspective, a full-throated acknowledgment of the power of Black cultural capital on a global stage and a watershed moment in the absorption of hip-hop class politics into luxury fashion. Or it’s a bellwether of challenging times to come for traditionally trained clothing designers who aspire to top posts, and a suggestion that global celebrity moves the needle more than directional design, even for the most successful luxury brands.Either way, Mr. Williams did not apply for the job — he was chosen.In December, Alexandre Arnault, a scion of the LVMH dynasty and a longtime friend, sent Mr. Williams a text: “Please call me. The time has come.”Mr. Williams at the Vuitton men’s atelier with Nigo, the innovative streetwear designer with whom Mr. Williams founded Billionaire Boys Club.Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesMr. Williams thought Mr. Arnault was perhaps going to run some name options by him for the Vuitton job. “I had been pushing somebody else,” he said. “I had been pushing Nigo. My brother, always.”Nigo — the founder of the brands A Bathing Ape and Human Made, the co-founder with Mr. Williams of Billionaire Boys Club and one of the most significant streetwear innovators — had already been named artistic director of Kenzo, another LVMH brand.Instead, Mr. Arnault extended the offer to Mr. Williams. “I had always wanted to work with him, in any way, shape or form since I started working in the group, which is already 10-plus years ago,” Mr. Arnault said. “And it was just never the right time because either the companies were too small to work with someone as big as him, or there were already people in charge, or he was working with Chanel. And stars were so aligned now, finally.”Mr. Williams said, “I’m not calling it fortune — I’m calling it favor.”Hiring Mr. Williams was one of the first decisions overseen by Pietro Beccari, a longtime LVMH executive, who was announced as chairman and chief executive of Louis Vuitton in January. “After Virgil, I couldn’t choose a classical designer,” Mr. Beccari said. “It was important that we found someone having a broader spectrum than being a very fantastic designer, which is great for the industry and we have many of them. But for that particular place, at Louis Vuitton, after Virgil, I thought we needed something more. Something that went beyond just pure design.”Mr. Williams signed the contract on Valentine’s Day and soon relocated his wife and four children and much of his team. “Listen, I miss my house in Miami,” he said. “And my house in Virginia. I really do. But right now, Paris is the center of the earth for me.”Playing the Game, or NotHis skin is as good as you think it is — the additional pressure, or labor, or scrutiny of his new position has left no creases.There was ease in his silhouette, too: a tight black double breasted vintage Vuitton blazer and well-worn white LV Trainer Snow Boots peeking out under bunched-up, flared dark bluejeans embroidered with faces derived from paintings by the Black artist Henry Taylor. The pants — one of a few pieces Mr. Williams has deployed Taylor’s work for — will appear in the spring-summer 2024 collection, which will be shown in Paris on June 20.He requested a tailor to come take a look at the hem of the jeans, which was a smidge too long on one side, and then sauntered over to the main conference table in the room, where he asked some colleagues to pull up images from his first ad campaign. It featured a pregnant Rihanna clutching multiple Louis Vuitton Speedy bags in primary colors, one of the first playful tweaks Mr. Williams is bringing to the company’s heritage. The Speedy, one of Louis Vuitton’s most recognizable designs, dates to 1930 and resembles a doctor’s bag.“I am a creative designer from the perspective of the consumer,” he said. “I didn’t go to Central Saint Martins. But I definitely went in the stores and purchased, and I know what I like.”Mr. Williams’s first ad campaign for Vuitton stars Rihanna, who clutches multiple Speedy bags.Louis VuittonHe told Mr. Beccari something similar. “He said, ‘I don’t feel like a creative director here, I feel like a client,’” Mr. Beccari recalled, adding that he trusted Mr. Williams’s natural instincts despite his never having managed a business of this scale. “I didn’t even have to speak to him about the commercial importance of what he does and the importance in terms of turnover and volume of sales, but just the importance in terms of impact.”Mr. Williams looked at his Rihanna ads the way one might pose after a particularly athletic dunk. He pointed to one and said, “That’s the golden ratio.” For emphasis, he had an associate pull up the same image overlaid with the long golden spiral, the center of it landing directly on Rihanna’s belly.“What I love about this is, it’s the biggest fashion house in the world, and that is a Black woman with child,” Mr. Williams said.Sarah Andelman, the founder of the pioneering Paris retailer Colette, and a collaborator of Mr. Williams’s, said he makes creative choices “not just for the sake of doing things. There is a story and, I would say in French, profondeur, a meaning to what he will do.”Mr. Williams basked in the refracted shine from the screen full of Rihanna images.“I know there’s a game,” he said. “I’m just not here to play it.”Mr. Williams at the men’s atelier. “A ruler of a position is usually like a king,” he said. “But a ruler of this position for me is a perpetual student. It’s what I intend to be.”Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesThe Two-Decade Crash CourseAlmost since the beginning of his career in music, Mr. Williams had found ways to incorporate, and create, fashion. In 2003, he founded Billionaire Boys Club with Nigo, perhaps his closest creative ally in style. Explaining the creative kinship between the two men, Nigo, through an interpreter, said, “The first time I went to Pharrell’s house in Virginia, when I looked in the wardrobe, everything was the same as what I owned.”In 2003, Mr. Williams met Marc Jacobs, then the men’s creative director of Vuitton, who invited him to collaborate on a pair of sunglasses. The result, known as the Millionaires, became a hip-hop luxury staple in the mid-2000s and an updated version of them is still sold today.“He was just so incredibly generous to give me that opportunity when nobody had ever given any of us an opportunity to be creative,” Mr. Williams said of Mr. Jacobs. (The Millionaires were designed by Mr. Williams, with Nigo.)“I thought the way forward for Louis Vuitton was to collaborate with other creatives,” Mr. Jacobs said. “It didn’t matter to me whether they were from music or art or other fashion designers, whether it was Stephen Sprouse, Takashi Murakami or Pharrell.”Back then, when Mr. Williams arrived in Paris, Mr. Jacobs gave him vouchers to shop in the stores. “I was very nouveau riche at that time,” Mr. Williams said, tilting his head down and offering just the tiniest hint of a knowing smirk. Mr. Williams also designed jewelry for Vuitton a few years later.Other collaborations followed: Moncler, G-Star, Moynat, Reebok, a long partnership with Adidas and an almost decade-long affiliation with Chanel and Mr. Williams’s close friend Karl Lagerfeld.Mr. Williams met Marc Jacobs in the early aughts, when Mr. Jacobs was the men’s creative director at Vuitton.Bertrand Rindoff Petroff/Getty ImagesMr. Williams and Karl Lagerfeld shared a close friendship and had a decade-long collaboration at Chanel.Swan Gallet/WWD, via Getty ImagesBut none of those gigs had the complexity, or stakes, of his current assignment.“Over the past several weeks he’s had a crash course in design and how to run a studio and how to manage a team of 40, 50 people and how to take criticism and work with the people at the top because, you know, it’s a blend of creativity and also running a business,” said Matthew Henson, who has been a personal stylist for Mr. Williams for the last couple of years.Mr. Henson is also styling the show, along with Cynthia Lu, Mr. Williams’s former assistant who is now a quiet powerhouse of idiosyncratic streetwear with her brand Cactus Plant Flea Market.When Mr. Williams walks through the studios, his awe for the specialized design teams appears genuine. “Presto, things get turned around so fast,” he said. “I’ve had more resources than I’ve ever had in my entire life. They just don’t miss. Like at all. None. Nobody.”That was something he was prepared for, in part, by conversations he had with Virgil Abloh, after Mr. Abloh was hired for this same job in 2018. In the three years at the helm of Vuitton’s men’s wear before his sudden death in late 2021, Mr. Abloh upended ideas about how a luxury house might function, and what story it might be able to tell in dialogue with those who had long been held at arm’s length from luxury fashion. Just outside the atelier hangs the crucial, defining image from Mr. Abloh’s first ad campaign for Louis Vuitton: a Black toddler draped in a “Wizard of Oz”-themed sweater, one of Mr. Abloh’s first signature pieces.Mr. Williams recalled Mr. Abloh’s awe at the scale and efficiency of the atelier. “He would always talk about how they never say no, which they don’t,” he said. “So that’s a responsibility not to abuse them.”Mr. Williams is now the second consecutive Black American in the role. “Over here, they lift us,” he said. “They appreciate what we do. They see the talent that we have.”Mr. Williams, in 2016, with Virgil Abloh, who as artistic director of Vuitton upended ideas of how a luxury house might function,Amy Sussman/WWD, via Getty ImagesThe Arnault family, he said, understands how crucial the Black American dollar and aesthetic has been to the growth and cachet of Louis Vuitton: “One hundred percent they know it,” he said. “We’ve had some conversations about how important the community is to them, and how being supportive to them is a natural and a prerequisite.”He is looking to expand the house’s brand ambassador program beyond the usual musicians and actors to Black academics, Black authors, a Black astrophysicist, even a Black bass fishing champion.“They have to be supportive of the culture because the culture contributes to the bottom line,” he said.A New HumilityThere are some things that Mr. Williams simply will not say. In public settings, at least, he speaks with the deliberateness of someone who wants no word to be misapprehended. His sunglasses stay on. (“I need something for myself,” he said.) Rhetorically, he returns to familiar narratives and motifs — the seismic changes in his life every 10 years, the eternal quest for learning, the continuing practice of gratitude.“He never speaks the truth of himself, and I hate it,” said Pusha T, who has known Mr. Williams for three decades. “It’s my pet peeve about him. He knows he’s great at things, but he wants that to walk him through the door versus him saying, ‘Hey guys, come on. Let me through.’”Squint hard, though, and you may see the faintest flickers of the mid-2000s Pharrell Williams, a more boisterous and boasty person. A whiff of the old self popped out in a video Mr. Williams posted in late January, backstage at the Kenzo show with Nigo, when he knew he was on the verge of signing his contract. “You know what rhymes with 2023? Money money tree,” he said into his phone camera, nodding intensely. He didn’t lick his lips, but he might as well have.When the appointment was announced, Tyler, the Creator, a longtime acolyte and style guru in his own right, FaceTimed Mr. Williams. “He just has this look he gives me where he kind of just goes like, ‘Yeahhhh, I did that.’ He didn’t say anything,” Tyler said. “And then he gave me the praying hands.”Mr. Williams performing at Roseland in New York in 2004. Rahav Segev for The New York TimesOn his 2006 mixtape “In My Mind: The Prequel,” a dizzying display of Dionysian ostentation, a peacock at the peak of his peacocking, Mr. Williams rapped, “We wanted this life, we salivated like wolves/ Blow a hundred grand on LV leather goods.”Mr. Williams almost flinched at the memory: “I was greeeeeasy on that.”Now, he said, “I promise you I really love being humble.” But luxury fashion is not a business built on humility, and Mr. Williams is keen to make a splash.The theme of his debut show, Mr. Williams said, will be “lovers.” The first inklings of his vision emerged in April, at a Virginia festival that Mr. Williams organizes called Something in the Water, for which Vuitton made merch. It was received coolly.Of potential negative criticism, Mr. Williams pleads equanimity. “I’m a student — students learn,” he said.Mr. Henson said he didn’t think Mr. Williams was expecting any “grace or favor” because of who he is. “He’s expecting even more criticism and harsh critique,” he said.Mr. Williams shrugged. “It’s not where my mind is, just because I think I err on the side of working with master artisans, and we’re just literally working on the details,” he said.Staying CuriousAn afternoon with Mr. Williams in creative director mode is a little bit like playing a first-person shooter. Requests pop in from unexpected directions, at erratic rhythms. Just when things get calm, someone emerges from around a corner with a mood board, or a vintage garment and a swatch of fabric it might be reimagined in. After being shown a hood with a novel but useful zipper, Mr. Williams nodded. “I don’t want anything to be just for aesthetics,” he said. “Everything has to have a real function.”For the second day in a row, he was wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt by Human Made, this time underneath a soft black leather biker jacket, and his flared jeans were in a Damier pattern.A tailor brought out a mock-up of a double-breasted blazer for Mr. Williams to try on. One of the designers asked if he wanted “a very sartorial pocket” added to the design.“Sartorial,” Mr. Williams said. “Do you follow that guy on Instagram? The Sartorialist?”At the Louis Vuitton workshop in the days before his debut collection is unveiled. Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesFor his first collection, he is leaning heavily on the checkerboard Damier print but reworking it in clever ways — digital camo or, in Mr. Williams’s parlance, “damouflage,” and tweaking the colors away from the familiar browns and grays.“Every season it’s going to be a different colorway,” he said, likening the playfulness to Takashi Murakami’s neon monogram print during the Jacobs era. The soles of various shoes will be a modified Damier pattern. On a conference table were a pair of damoflage sweatsuits set aside for his parents (“My dad is a player,” he said.)Mr. Williams, who made waves in 2007 with his oversize purple crocodile Hermès Haut à courroies bag, is most tickled by the opportunity to innovate on the Speedy, which he is remaking in several primary colors, and also in an exaggerated, oversize silhouette. A yellow Speedy in meltingly soft leather sat on the pool table that serves as an impromptu work space in the atelier, almost slumping under its own very light weight.“I want to give you that same experience that you get when you go to Canal Street, a place that has appropriated the house for decades, right?” Mr. Williams said. “Let’s reverse it. Let’s get inspired by the fact that they’ll make some colorways that the house has never made. But then let’s actually make it the finest of leather.”The day before, Mr. Williams had taken a moment to chat about designing a custom look for Naomi Campbell, including a zipped sports bra and zipped miniskirt, all in monogrammed leather (“’60s vibes, go-go”), and debating skirt lengths. “It’ll work, but I don’t know if it’ll be as sexy,” he said.He also surveyed a pair of ship-shaped bag options, one steamer-like, one a bit shorter, and picked from various trim color and font options. “This seems to be the crispiest,” he said, pointing to a white trim. He held one bag in each hand, then handed them to Nigo, who stomped off down the office in a mock model walk.What Nigo did for Mr. Williams two decades ago, Mr. Williams is now doing for those who grew up admiring him.“Me and him have a 20-year difference in age and man, what that does for me at my age is like, oh, it’s still no ceilings,” Tyler said. “To see someone at his age with his milestones, with his résumé, to not only still strive for a new world, stay curious, look for something new and something to challenge himself and let his creativity bleed into something else aside from just a drum pattern. And then actually get it. He not only strived for and did it, but actually nailed it — it means so much to me.”Mr. Williams’s new designs include printed leather jerseys and rugbys, quilted denim, Mao-neck blazers and ghillie camo with LV logo cutouts. He was excited to walk to the back of the studio, where the footwear designers work, and go over some eccentric ideas: Mary Janes and bowling shoes, a stone-encrusted snowboard boot, a design that initially scanned as a soccer sneaker but is actually a hard-bottom shoe. “I ain’t even gonna lie,” he said. “I was trying to do that at Adidas for years.”A little earlier, he was in front of his window, where he’d set up a small studio, and while fiddling with his Keystation 88 — a keyboard and sound controller — he asked his engineer to cue up a new song, tentatively called “Chains ’n Whips,” that he was considering using as part of the show’s soundtrack. Over a fusillade of psych-rock guitar flourishes, Pusha T rapped along to a pointed line in the chorus: “Beat the system with chains and whips!”“That was made in this room,” Mr. Williams said. “We just start walking around and looking out this window and you just see all of this. I mean, we beating this system, bro.” More

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      How the Head of the Universal Hip Hop Museum Spends His Sundays

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      For Rocky Bucano, who fell for the music after buying a Salt-N-Pepa CD in 1986, his work in the Bronx “doesn’t feel like work.”The Universal Hip Hop Museum, which will be part of Bronx Point, a new mixed-use development with affordable housing in the South Bronx, is not scheduled to open until 2025. But that hasn’t stopped Rocky Bucano, the museum’s executive director, from celebrating hip-hop’s 50th anniversary this year.“[R]Evolution of Hip Hop,” an exhibition tracing the genre’s momentum from 1986 to 1990, will offer free admission this August in honor of the anniversary. The show is running through September at the nonprofit’s temporary headquarters in the Bronx Terminal Market.Mr. Bucano, 63, lives in the Clason Point section of the Bronx with his wife, Kim, 62, who recently retired as a public-school teacher, and the younger of their two sons, Kylerr, 31. Rounding out the household are Tangy, the family’s Bichon Frisé mix, and Toby, a former stray cat.6 IN THE MORNIN’ I get up around 6 or 7 a.m. and open up my Microsoft Surface Duo 2. I scroll through emails and read the Sunday edition of The Times. I do this in bed very quietly. I’m trying not to wake my wife up.THE MESSAGE Around 8 or 10 o’clock, we normally order pancakes and scrambled eggs and maybe some corned beef hash from the Crosstown Diner. We have our breakfast watching the Sunday news. I like the political talk shows, like “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” My wife watches Channel 12, which has news on the Bronx, religiously. After that, we try to get our spiritual vibe on by watching Joel Osteen.IN DA CLUB The exhibit at the Bronx Terminal Market opens at 1 p.m. My son Kylerr and I usually jump in the car and shoot over there. He oversees social media for the museum and is a docent. Most of the time, I’m there all afternoon. I’m meeting with people — our visitors, our guests. Sometimes I’m working with the people who work at the museum, making sure everything is tight in terms of telling the stories of the different artifacts people are looking at. Sometimes I’ll jump on the turntables if I feel like playing music.Mr. Bucano and his son Kylerr, a docent for the museum who also oversees its social media.David Dee Delgado for The New York TimesSUPA DUPA FLY On Sundays we have a visiting D.J., Cutman LG. He’s part of our team and he’s always playing great music: James Brown and a lot of classic hip-hop like Run-DMC, LL Cool J, Salt-N-Pepa. When people come in, not only do they see objects about the great golden era of hip-hop, they actually feel it and experience what the music was like.PEOPLE EVERYDAY Being here on a Sunday is work, but it doesn’t feel like work. I’ve been a part of this project from the beginning, since we first started looking for locations in 2014. It’s part of my DNA now. It’s who I am. And I enjoy meeting people from different parts of the country and different parts of the world and learning what their connection to hip-hop is. Each person has a unique story about how they fell in love with it. Sometimes it’s the first record they bought, sometimes it’s a Run-DMC concert they went to in 1986. I remember when I bought my first Salt-N-Pepa CD. That’s what got me involved in loving the music.ROCK BOX People from Europe come over here because they’re true fans of classic hip-hop and they want to relive the earliest years. On weekdays, we have teachers bringing their students. Kids come in, and many have never seen a cassette player or a vinyl. They don’t know what a boom box is. We have a huge boom box, and when they see it they’re like, “What is that? Why do they call it a boom box?” So it’s just a lot of feel-good moments for me. I see people smiling and doing their selfies.Walking through the museum’s current exhibition, “[R]Evolution of Hip Hop,” an exhibition tracing the genre’s momentum from 1986 to 1990.David Dee Delgado for The New York TimesIT’S TRICKY When I began this journey, I wasn’t really astute in what’s called “the museum experience.” I’ve been learning on the job. The first exhibit was bare-bones. The second one we fine-tuned, made it a better experience in terms of how it was curated. And now, with this third exhibit, I think we’ve knocked it out of the park. It’s the most immersive, the most entertaining, the most informative. I would say the number one thing people like right now is the Dapper Dan Lounge, where we have a couple of his original jackets, or the D.J. booth.PUSH IT! When I get home, I might go to the gym in our community’s clubhouse and lift some weights, or sometimes I’ll walk down to the water. One of the ferry stops is not too far from where we live, so I’ll go down there and stand by the water and enjoy the sights. It’s a way of putting everything in perspective for me.RAPPER’S DELIGHT For dinner on Sundays we like to order turkey wings from a soul food restaurant. We’ll also get collard greens, and for my son, mac and cheese. I can’t eat that stuff, but I love sweet potatoes. After dinner I’m normally on my computer, emailing, sending notes to my team, looking out for anything on social media I should be paying attention to. People say I work too much.“After dinner I’m normally on my computer, emailing, sending notes to my team, looking out for anything on social media I should be paying attention to,” Mr. Bucano said.David Dee Delgado for The New York TimesIT WAS A GOOD DAY I might watch some film on Netflix or Amazon Prime, but I go to bed early. My wife comes to bed late because she’s retired. But at 10 o’clock I say, “I’ll see you later, I’m going to sleep.” And that’s it.Sunday Routine readers can follow Rocky Bucano on Twitter @RBucano and on Instagram @rockybucano. More

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      For Riccardo Muti, a Grand Sort-of-Finale in Chicago

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      The concert had ended, and Riccardo Muti, the music director of the Chicago Symphony, was walking out of Orchestra Hall when he saw a banner in the lobby and stopped in his tracks.“Muti Conducts the Grand Finale of the 2022-23 Season,” it read. This was in May, with just a month of programs to go — culminating in performances of Beethoven’s mighty “Missa Solemnis,” June 23-25, which will mark the end of Muti’s 13-year directorship.So when Muti, 81, began railing about the banner to his tiny entourage, it seemed like he must be joking: There could hardly be a grander finale to his acclaimed tenure. But it quickly became obvious that his anger was real.“I told them not to write ‘grand finale,’” he said, grimacing. “It’s a finale? And then I’m back in September?”The next morning, the offending banner was gone. His frustration was mostly silly, of course. The orchestra was just being factual in ginning up a little excitement at a climactic moment in the six-decade career of one of the most eminent figures in classical music.But Muti had a point. Since his successor has not yet been named, he will be continuing as a kind of shadow music director next season, and possibly longer. Leaving — yet not entirely leaving — on a high note, with the adoration of Chicago’s musicians and audiences, he has been sensitive that his farewell will seem like a grand anticlimax when he returns, just three months from now, for the fall opening concerts and a trip to Carnegie Hall.“‘He’s here again,’ they will say,” Muti speculated in an interview. “‘He’s back!’ It’s too much.”“I don’t blame him,” said Helen Zell, the former chair of the orchestra’s board, who endowed Muti’s music director position. “Just as courting him was a big, long process, the exit is just as challenging.”Between the complicated beginning and ending, though, Muti’s time in Chicago has been widely reckoned an enormous success. His performances of a broad swath of repertoire — his signature Italian operas in concert, Beethoven symphonies, world premieres, rarities of the past, Mozart, Schubert, Bruckner, Florence Price, Philip Glass — have been pristine yet intense, powerful yet graceful.Muti, who was born in Naples and raised in Puglia, is European to the core. Here, he conducts in 2021 at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, where he was music director for 20 years./EPA, via ShutterstockMuti leading the Vienna Philharmonic on New Year’s Day 2021; he will conduct the orchestra on the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony next spring./EPA, via Shutterstock“He took the great Chicago Symphony Orchestra and made it even greater,” Jeff Alexander, the orchestra’s president, said. “The sound now is really spectacular — in a more mellifluous, mellow, lyrical way.”His departure is about more than inevitable turnover at an important ensemble, said Pierre Audi, the stage director and impresario. It’s a milestone as the generation of leaders born before the end of World War II passes — and, with it, the old-school conception of the commanding, protecting maestro.“Muti will leave Chicago, and that’s it,” Audi said. “It’s the beginning of the end.”Muti was born, as he loves to tell people, in Naples and raised in Puglia. His longest-held position was nearly 20 years at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, and his most lasting affiliation has been with the Vienna Philharmonic, which names no chief conductor. (He will lead that orchestra on the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony next spring.) He is European to the core.Yet perhaps his most triumphant stints have been with two American ensembles: Chicago and, through the 1980s, the Philadelphia Orchestra. When he arrived in Philadelphia, he was an upstart in his 30s, taking over after four decades of Eugene Ormandy.Ormandy had built an ensemble that was thick and lush, particularly in its famous strings, and he bathed every work in a uniform butteriness: The composer served the sound. Muti aimed to reverse that dynamic, creating distinct styles for Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky — adding a flexibility that took the group, as the violinist Barbara Govatos said, “from the Cadillac of orchestras to the Ferrari.”He surprised the still-enamored musicians when he left in the early 1990s, partly because of the difficulty balancing his work with La Scala and partly because plans for a new hall in Philadelphia were stagnating. As he focused on Milan, Muti said he had no interest in another music director position in America, with all the attendant extramusical responsibilities.The New York Philharmonic nevertheless thought — twice — that it was on the verge of hiring him. Chicago ended up luckier after Daniel Barenboim announced in 2004 that he was leaving. Watching Muti conduct in Paris early the next year, Deborah Rutter, then president in Chicago, told a colleague, “If we can do it, this is the one it should be.”“There is a sort of electrical current to the energy he brings to his music-making,” Rutter said recently. “And that sort of hyper-focused energy is something I would describe as being very Chicago-like.”Muti’s relationship with La Scala was foundering, but he hadn’t appeared with the Chicago Symphony since the 1970s. He and Rutter agreed he would come in 2006, but he canceled, which was crushing. She lured him back with dates the next fall, along with a European tour.“I was too tired to travel, to start a new adventure,” Muti said. “But when I came back here, immediately it was something that happened between me and the orchestra.”Perhaps Muti’s most triumphant stints have been with two American ensembles: Chicago and, through the 1980s, the Philadelphia Orchestra. Lelli & MasottiThe critic Andrew Patner, describing those 2007 performances, wrote, “By the second date, the Italian maestro almost seemed like an old friend.” After the tour, Muti received a box of handwritten letters from the players, a personal touch that helped seal the deal.“There was an ecstatic reception he had when he was in Chicago, from the press and the public,” said Zarin Mehta, then the president of the New York Philharmonic. “He was treated with total respect in New York, but not with the ecstatic admiration he gets in Chicago.”Barenboim had relaxed the ensemble’s sound from the muscular, stentorian days of Georg Solti, but it still had a resolute Germanic style. Under Muti, the orchestra has still been able to produce, say, a Beethoven’s Fifth of blistering force, but he generally wanted something more Italianate.“I found a great orchestra,” he said, “but not balanced. Everyone was speaking about the brass. The strings were a little too — not harsh, but hard. No perfume. And the woodwinds, they had good players, but no one spoke about the woodwinds. And there is another thing: I needed them to sing.”The diet he prescribed was heavy on Schubert and, of course, opera, particularly his beloved Verdi, prepared with unsparing attention to detail. “Otello,” in 2011, was ferociously dramatic; “Macbeth” (2013), a brooding march. “Falstaff” (2016) was witty, more delicate than slapstick; “Aida” (2019), coolly elegant; “Un Ballo in Maschera” (2022), meticulously sumptuous.“The relentless thing he will not back down on is the refinement — of line, of attack, of phrasing,” said James Smelser, a hornist. “He doesn’t make mistakes. There’s always clarity, preparedness, consistency.”Muti has proved enthusiastic about performing in the community, including events at juvenile detention facilities. He embraced a fellowship program seeking to increase the racial diversity of the players’ ranks. And after years of resisting, he even began to drop some of his complaints about appearing at endless donor events.There were troubles. In 2019, a musicians’ strike lasted nearly seven weeks; in an unusual move for a music director, Muti publicly sided with the players, and appeared with them on the picket line. During the pandemic, he agreed to stay on an extra year, but the pause in performances — which meant a pause in appearances by potential candidates — stalled the search for his successor.Since relations between him and the orchestra are far warmer than they were with Barenboim at the end of his tenure — when Bernard Haitink and Pierre Boulez agreed to take on responsibilities in the interregnum, before Muti was hired — it makes sense for him to help fill the coming gap.“I’ve worked in a few other places,” said Alexander, the orchestra’s president, “where it’s much more common that the music director disappears, or they come back once every three or five years. Early in our discussions with Maestro Muti about the end of his term, we said we wanted to keep seeing him for a number of weeks each season, which I think he was happy to hear.”But while Muti will finish the musician hiring and tenure processes he has started, it’s not yet clear who will oversee new auditions. He seems intent on maintaining some flexibility, partly in case he should want to scale back his commitment after his successor is announced: He said that he has told the orchestra’s administration — who knows how much in jest? — “If you choose somebody that really I don’t like, then I don’t know if I come back.”It takes little prompting for Muti to bemoan a host of cultural problems. “Today,” he said, bags heavy and dark under his eyes, “I think we are all lost.”Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesHis replacement is the least of it. It takes little prompting for Muti to bemoan a host of cultural problems: the decline in music education, players and conductors too lazy to properly prepare or respect the letter of the score, what he views as the increasing distance between classical music and mainstream society.“Today,” he said, bags heavy and dark under his eyes, “I think we are all lost.”But his melancholy melts away when he’s on the podium, particularly in rehearsals that he leads with a kind of merry rigor, laughter snapping into a crisp downbeat. There was an endearing, oddball quality to the program he led near the end of May, telescoping between the intimate and the grand.A Mozart divertimento was followed by William Kraft’s raucous Timpani Concerto No. 1. After intermission came one of Respighi’s lively and tender “Ancient Airs and Dances” suites, before his “Pines of Rome,” a Muti party piece that also closed his first concert as music director — in front of some 25,000 people in Millennium Park.When you think of “Pines,” you usually think of bombast. But the loudness comes very near the end; much of the piece is actually quite subtle, and the way to make the finale really potent is to handle the earlier stuff with atmospheric transparency.Muti now stretches those earlier passages into a hazily dreamlike, almost out of time quality, building only slowly to triumph. In the first performance, a Thursday evening, the pianist treated a diaphanous cadenza with too much flamboyance; Muti, visibly displeased on the podium, took him aside later, and the following afternoon, the passage was properly light and watery. Any exaggeration turns this piece into kitsch; even the brassy conclusion, under Muti’s baton, is shockingly elegant and clear.“At the end of ‘Pines of Rome,’” Smelser, the hornist, said, “most conductors are flailing around. The sheer volume, it’s out of control. But he’s never out of control, and he doesn’t want us to be out of control.”“The orchestra knows exactly what I want,” Muti said. “Many times, I don’t even conduct — or it seems that I don’t conduct. It’s been 13 years of wonderful musical experiences, and friendly. In 13 years, I haven’t had a second of fight with them. It’s been always like this.” More

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      How ‘Transformers: Rise of the Beasts’ Throws a ’90s Hip-Hop Party

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      The director and production designer of the latest installment in the robot action franchise discuss recreating the sights and sounds of 1990s Brooklyn culture.In previous “Transformers” movies, fans have seen their beloved robots Optimus Prime, Bumblebee and Arcee battle their way out of plenty a dilemma. But have they ever seen an Autobot kick butt to the rhymes of LL Cool J? That’s the energy of “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” (in theaters), with its director Steven Caple Jr. giving the franchise an inclusive spin.The down on his luck Brooklyn native Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) is recruited by the Autobots to retrieve an artifact held by the museum researcher Elena Wallace (Dominique Fishback) that could transport the stranded Autobots back to their home planet, Cybertron.Robot fights ensue (mainly with a rival faction called the Terrorcons), but apart from the dazzling effects and globe-trotting backdrops, what gives Caple’s film its singular identity is the 1990s New York City hip-hop it takes inspiration from.“The ’90s was a specific era, in general, that is definitely what we wanted to tap into with the film,” Caple said in an audio interview. A sense of Black cultural spirit — the fashion, music, and community — was one that Caple felt was missing from many big budget movies of that decade. He said that it was only present if you were watching films by Black directors like John Singleton and Ernest Dickerson, major influences for Caple.To imbue the film with this nostalgic presence, the production first needed to transform a section of Montreal into Brooklyn. The effects of gentrification in Brooklyn were a factor that necessitated the move across the border. The team referred to the photography of Jamel Shabazz and the television series “New York Undercover” as visual touchstones to capture the city’s past aesthetics. They also scoured Montreal for a semblance of a street that could serve as Noah’s neighborhood, and populated the area with vintage Oldsmobiles, Cavaliers and an Acura Legend. A tracking shot near the film’s beginning creates a vivid reawakening of the era: Noah walks down the street past classic cars, and through scenes of people sitting on crates and drinking quarter waters, of some selling tapes out of their trunk.Dean Scott Vazquez with Anthony Ramos in “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.”Paramount PicturesCaple and the production designer Sean Haworth credited Ramos and Fishback — both New York natives — with providing notes that added to the film’s authenticity.“They start bringing things that they remembered from their childhood,” said Haworth in an interview, “things they liked or the music they listened to, the books they read.”Another texture from the ’90s arises in the film’s period-accurate fashions. Caple credited the costume designer Ciara Whaley with rewatching television shows like “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and “Living Single” to inspire the fly look composed of chokers and suspenders for Fishback’s Elena. For Noah’s appearance, Caple wanted to draw from the decade’s popular clothing lines. “I was very specific in being like, I wanna work with the Karl Kanis and the Walker Wear, the gear we were pushing during that time, but also were Black owned,” he said.While the film’s visual callbacks are imperative, it’s the hip-hop soundtrack that gives “Rise of the Beasts” its sonic verve. The music occasionally springs from diegetic sources. Fishback, for instance, suggested to Caple that Elena should sing to herself whenever she’s nervous. It’s why when the Terrorcons infiltrate Elena’s museum, she can be heard crooning TLC’s “Waterfalls” to herself.At other times, a needle drop of a radio classic will propel a scene, such as Digable Planets’ “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)” powering a heist sequence whereby Noah attempts to steal an Autobot disguised as a Porsche. Other soundtrack samplings include Black Sheep’s “The Choice Is Yours,” The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Hypnotize,” A Tribe Called Quest’s “Check the Rhime” and Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.” The music remains prominent even when the action shifts from the confines of New York City to the rolling hills of Peru. During the final battle between the Autobots and Terrorcons, LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out” provides a sharp punch that put a dent in the film’s budget.“It fits so perfectly, but the studio said this is gonna be the most expensive song in the movie,” Caple said. “It was that pricey. But it just felt so right.”As did commissioning the soundtrack’s sole original song, “On My Soul,” by Tobe Nwigwe (who also stars as Noah’s friend Reek) and the hip-hop legend Nas, featuring Jacob Banks. The defiant track not only gives the final battle a firmer edge beyond the easy grooves of the throwback needle drops, it marries contemporary recording techniques with ’90s flair, particularly through Nas’s sharp verses. In an interview, Nwigwe said that Nas “came in and just cooked up greatness.”To Caple, harnessing the ’90s hip-hop scene was more than artistically fulfilling. It’s a vision of urban Blackness that needn’t be politically important, even as it showcases a specific cultural lens of music and fashion. And while it’s easy to see “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” as a bid for nostalgia, Caple doesn’t want to call it a comeback. It’s a resurgence. More

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      Wes Anderson’s Best Needle Drops

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      Hear songs that memorably accompanied scenes in “Rushmore,” “The Royal Tenenbaums” and more.Gwyneth Paltrow as Margot Tenenbaum in “The Royal Tenenbaums.” She’s always late, but worth waiting for.Touchstone PicturesDear listeners,One day when I was 14, I stayed home sick from school and watched a weird little movie called “Rushmore” on Comedy Central. When it was over, I thought to myself, “Oh, so that’s what a director does.”I had never before encountered a movie that so distinctly seemed to come from a single person’s perspective. The filmmaker Wes Anderson had created his own alternate reality, with its own color scheme, its own vernacular, and — perhaps most crucially — its own killer music. I wanted to live inside of that world. I bought the soundtrack as soon as I could.For aspiring aesthetes, Anderson’s movies can be gateway drugs. Eager to catch all of his cinematic references and influences, his films led me to the work of directors like François Truffaut, Yasujiro Ozu and Satyajit Ray. But the songs in his films are vehicles of discovery, too. I’d never heard the Creation’s “Making Time,” that garage-rock classic with guitars that rev like a souped-up engine, or the Who’s gloriously bombastic rock opera “A Quick One, While He’s Away” until I saw “Rushmore.” I learned about Nico from “The Royal Tenenbaums” and Seu Jorge from “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.” Anderson’s carefully curated soundtracks felt, to me, like eclectic, handmade mixtapes.As I got deeper into movies, I realized that even the most personal-seeming film is the result of collaboration with countless others: cinematographers, production designers, wardrobe stylists, and, of course, music supervisors. The needle drops in most of Anderson’s films are the result of his longtime working relationship with the music supervisor Randall Poster. In more recent movies, like the Oscar-winning “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and the underrated “The French Dispatch,” he’s also worked with repeatedly with the composer Alexandre Desplat, who has composed intricate and appropriately quirky scores that help bring Anderson’s worlds to life.In honor of Anderson’s new movie, “Asteroid City,” which I am very excited to see when it comes out this weekend, I put together a playlist of some of the most iconic and unexpected songs featured in his films. Quite a few have become inextricably tied to Anderson scenes. Never again will I hear “These Days” without picturing Margot Tenenbaum walking off a Green Line bus in slow-motion, or “A Quick One, While He’s Away” without imagining Herman Blume destroying poor Max Fischer’s bicycle. Sic transit gloria, indeed.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. The Creation: “Making Time”The tracks used in Anderson’s movies often serve as unofficial theme songs for characters, reflecting the way they see themselves — the song playing in their own heads as they walk down the street. Fischer, the scheming protagonist of “Rushmore,” is too square to truly embody the bratty, take-no-prisoners attitude of this jangly 1966 rocker from the British band the Creation; for him, it’s more of an aspirational soundtrack. (Listen on YouTube)2. The Ramones: “Judy Is a Punk”Anderson is a master of the montage, and many of his most memorable ones rely on a great, propulsive song to give its disparate shots a unified mood. One of my favorites compiles footage of a private detective’s dossier on Margot Tenenbaum’s secret life in “The Royal Tenenbaums.” The sonic jump-cut from silence to the Ramones’ explosive “Judy Is a Punk” sets the moment apart from the rest of the film, and makes all of Margot’s exploits seem that much cooler. (Listen on YouTube)3. Paul Simon: “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”Or maybe this is my favorite montage in “The Royal Tenenbaums.” When the disreputable patriarch Royal, played indelibly by Gene Hackman, wants to bond with his precocious, track-suited grandsons Ari and Uzi, he takes them out for some light mayhem: go-karting, water-balloon-throwing and petty larceny — all to the tune of Paul Simon. It’s against the law! (Listen on YouTube)4. Seu Jorge: “Life on Mars?”Anderson’s 2004 feature “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou” featured the Brazilian musician Seu Jorge as a kind of one-man Greek chorus, singing acoustic covers of David Bowie songs in Portuguese. The melodies are so universally recognizable that you don’t need to understand the language to at least hum along to Jorge’s tender, sweetly crooned renditions of classics like “Rebel Rebel,” “Starman,” and of course, “Life on Mars?” (Listen on YouTube)5. Nico: “These Days”It’s the scene that launched a million Halloween costumes: Richie Tenenbaum waits for his escort from his days on the circuit, his sister, Margot. As usual, she’s late — but well worth the delay as she gets off the bus in her ever-present fur coat and raccoon-rimmed eyes, to the heart-stopping musical cue of Nico’s “These Days.” (Listen on YouTube)6. The Beach Boys: “Old Folks at Home/Old Man River”Several Beach Boys songs are used to great effect in “The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” but none as stirringly as “Old Man River,” which soundtracks a heavenly moment at the end of the film when the animals find themselves in a supermarket. “Get enough to share with everybody,” Mr. Fox instructs, “and remember, the rabbits are vegetarians and badgers supposedly can’t eat walnuts.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Françoise Hardy, “Le temps de l’amour”In “Moonrise Kingdom,” from 2012 and set in 1964, young Sam and Suzy run away together and attempt to live out their own feral version of adulthood on an island. Among their possessions is a portable record player for 45 RPM singles, meaning they can soundtrack their own lives. Just before the awkward beachside dance that results in their first kiss, Suzy puts on Françoise Hardy’s 1962 single “Le temps de l’amour,” an achingly perfect choice for a 12-year-old trying on an air of sophistication like a pair of too-big high heels. (Listen on YouTube)8. The Rolling Stones: “Ruby Tuesday”As it’s used in a crucial scene in “The Royal Tenenbaums,” this early Stones classic casts such a rosy, romantic glow that you almost forget that you’re rooting for Richie Tenenbaum to end up with his adopted sister. (Listen on YouTube)9. The Kinks: “This Time Tomorrow”Like the Beach Boys in “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” sometimes an Anderson film will feature several songs from a single artist. Anderson’s fifth feature, “The Darjeeling Limited,” conjures its Indian setting by using instrumentals from the films of Satyajit Ray, though its placement of several songs from the Kinks’ 1970 album “Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One” — including the sweetly bleary “This Time Tomorrow” — serve as reminders that the film is filtered through a Westerner’s sensibility. (Listen on YouTube)10. The Who: “A Quick One, While He’s Away”Yet another top-tier Anderson montage, from “Rushmore”: a battle of petty acts of revenge between Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) and Blume (Bill Murray), given an anarchic grandeur thanks to this nearly nine-minute epic by the Who. Fun fact: While the version that appears on Rushmore’s official soundtrack is from the Who’s unrivaled 1970 concert album “Live at Leeds,” the version used in the film comes from the storied 1968 BBC special and eventual live record “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus.” (Listen on YouTube)11. Van Morrison, “Everyone”Anderson has a knack for ending his movies with a bittersweet, emotionally resonant song that lingers in the air long after the credits roll. One of my favorites is “Everyone,” the clavinet-kissed Van Morrison track that rings out at the end of “The Royal Tenenbaums.” At once melancholy and hopeful, it’s the perfect way to conclude a movie that pierces your heart even as it’s making you laugh. And I think it’s a pretty good ending for this playlist, too. (Listen on YouTube)The Amplifier was written in a kind of obsolete vernacular,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Wes Anderson’s Best Needle Drops” track listTrack 1: The Creation, “Making Time”Track 2: The Ramones, “Judy Is a Punk”Track 3: Paul Simon, “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”Track 4: Seu Jorge, “Life on Mars?”Track 5: Nico, “These Days”Track 6: The Beach Boys, “Old Folks at Home/Old Man River”Track 7: Françoise Hardy, “Le temps de l’amour”Track 8: The Rolling Stones, “Ruby Tuesday”Track 9: The Kinks, “This Time Tomorrow”Track 10: The Who, “A Quick One, While He’s Away”Track 11: Van Morrison, “Everyone”Bonus TracksSeriously, behold that performance by the Who in “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus,” and bow down to Keith Moon in all his glory. Some people believe that the reason the Stones shelved the TV special and did not officially release it until 1996 was that they thought the Who upstaged them. I’ll let you be the judge: Watch this performance and ask yourself if it’s an act you’d want to follow.If you’re looking for new music, too, this week’s Playlist has fresh tunes from Meshell Ndegeocello, Doja Cat, Peggy Gou and more. More

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      Anthony Braxton, Experimental Music Master, Gets His Due

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      Anthony Braxton’s music is difficult to program even among forward-thinking institutions. Leave it to the scrappy companies to get the work done.Anthony Braxton’s music is inherently theatrical. It’s also serious, and hilariously entertaining.It is not, however, performed with a frequency that befits Braxton’s stature, in a glaring, countrywide omission. More on that in a bit, but first: When seasoned practitioners of his work gather to explore some of his most overlooked pieces, which is happening this weekend at the Brick Theater in Brooklyn, that should qualify as a major event.On Thursday night at the Brick, the scrappy Experiments in Opera company pulled off a delirious debut performance of what it’s calling “Anthony Braxton Theater Improvisations.” The one-hour show proved delightful; and the small, cozy venue was rightfully sold out. The run continues through Saturday, so grab one of the remaining seats while you can.Those who can’t make it can still dig into this side of Braxton’s music, thanks to how doggedly he documents his projects. The Experiments show deserves attention, and perhaps documentation, given the way it provides a new lens on a corner of Braxton’s more conceptual side.The trumpeter Nate Wooley.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesRob Reese served as both narrator and director.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesThe evening is based on Opuses 279-283 in Braxton’s catalog: comedic efforts written for a narrator and an improvising instrumentalist. Back in 2000, Braxton — playing a range of saxophones and clarinets — recorded several of these works with a young stand-up comedian, Alex Horwitz.In Composition No. 282, that narrator is called upon to read the day’s newspaper (with an option to crumple it for timbral effect), while the instrumentalist improvises. In No. 281, bebop-like phrases run underneath one-liners and observational humor.But with just two people, the recording’s charm sometimes peters out. The Experiments show maintains higher energy, and brings three artists to each performance: a narrator-actor (Rob Reese, who also directed); another scene partner and soprano (Kamala Sankaram, a veteran of Braxton opera recordings); and an instrumentalist (on Thursday, the trumpeter Nate Wooley, who participated memorably in some larger Braxton ensembles during the 2010s).Before the show, the saxophonist James Fei, who performs on Friday’s set, told me that Composition No. 279 is essentially a compendium of jokes. That piece didn’t make the cut in Braxton’s recording with Horwitz from 2000, but it was featured in the Experiments show.Holding a top hat, Reese paced among the audience members and asked some of them to pick a card from inside it. A card might carry one of Braxton’s “language music” organizational prompts (like “intervallic formings”), paired with a genre of joke from Composition No. 279 (like “Republican/Democrat jokes.”)While Wooley and Sankaram worked with strident, leaping intervals, Reese delivered a joke that tended toward the school of the one-liner king Henny Youngman (to whom Braxton dedicated Composition 282). I roughly transcribed one of the jokes this way: “Why are Democrats always in favor of gun control? Because they keep shooting themselves in the foot.”On the page, this may not seem like much. But set against a duet of wildly leaping figures, it all produced a dazzling novelty that also reinvigorated a vintage form; the borscht belt never sounded so endearingly strange.Reese, who collaborated with Sankaram on her imaginative opera “Miranda,” also improvised some scenic work at the front of the stage with her. Some of their material was less obviously connected to the Braxton compositions as previously recorded but felt in the right spirit — as did Wooley’s improvisations away from his horn. In the background of one scene between Reese and Sankaram, the trumpeter sat against the brick wall at the stage’s rear. While lit with the penumbra of a spotlight aimed elsewhere, he coolly mimed the smoking of a cigarette with a kazoo.And since Braxton has written that “all compositions in my music system can be executed at the same time/moment,” the troupe reveled in that possibility. At one point, Wooley relished the languid, bop-tinged opening theme of Composition No. 23D, originally recorded on the album “New York, Fall 1974.”Then Sankaram swung into one of the meatier passages written for her in Braxton’s Composition No. 380 — the opera “Trillium J,” which was recorded and performed in 2014 at Roulette in Brooklyn. In one scene, Sankaram plays the role of “Miss Scarlet,” a “helpless maiden who happens to own 400 nuclear weapons stockpile containers — not to mention the chemical gas warfare options.”Coloratura singing, written for those lines? That’s funny. In the full opera — which is available on Blu-ray and as a paid download on Vimeo — the moment of humor that Sankaram really sells can whiz by amid all the orchestral complexity. But it had new verve when she brought it back around in the improvisational maelstrom of Thursday’s more intimate set.Some of the assorted instruments used during “Anthony Braxton Theater Improvisations.” Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesAll of this spoke to the unexplored potential of Braxton’s oeuvre. His catalog of over a half-century’s compositions and his playing on reed instruments are both rightfully talked about with awe, as is his record as a mentor. Wave after wave of celebrated player-composers, including George E. Lewis and Mary Halvorson, have cut their professional teeth in his ensembles. Aaron Siegel, the executive director of Experiments in Opera, has also served as a percussionist in those groups. In opening remarks on Thursday, he credited Braxton as one of his company’s original mentors.Braxton has won a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Foundation grant, and an NEA Jazz Masters award. If you talk to leaders of forward-thinking orchestras and opera companies, you’ll often hear (off the record) about their desire to program Braxton’s ambitious pieces — the ones that carry traces of bebop and Karlheinz Stockhausen, of Hildegard von Bingen and American folk dances.But it’s evidently difficult to make happen. When the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang was young and working with the New York Philharmonic, he tried pushing Braxton’s orchestral music on his superiors. No dice. Perhaps that’s because Braxton asks players to improvise as well as pay attention to complex notated material.So, for now, we have to rely on smaller organizations like Experiments in Opera to find the right balance and bring Braxtonia to life properly. And this week, they’re nailing it. More

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      Meshell Ndegeocello’s Magnificent Mix, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Peggy Gou, Killer Mike, Sparklehorse 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.Meshell Ndegeocello featuring Jeff Parker, ‘ASR’The songs on Meshell Ndegeocello’s magnificent new album, “The Omnichord Real Book,” are always in flux. In its seven-and-half minutes, “ASR” hints at fusion jazz, Funkadelic, Ethiopian pop, reggae and psychedelia; the guitarist Jeff Parker, from Tortoise, teases the music forward. As the song accelerates, Ndegeocello sings about pain, heartbreak, healing and perseverance, and she vows, “We’re here to set the clock to here and now.” JON PARELESPeggy Gou, ‘(It Goes Like) Nanana’Peggy Gou is a South Korean-born, Berlin-based D.J. and producer with a penchant for dreamy house beats and a velvety touch. Her latest single “(It Goes Like) Nanana” plays out a bit like her own personal reworking of ATC’s ubiquitous 2000 hit “All Around the World,” but with a kinetic energy that’s distinctly her own. “I can’t explain,” Gou sings over a thumping beat and light piano riff, before deciding she can best express the feeling she wants to describe in nonsense words: “I guess it goes like na na na na na na.” LINDSAY ZOLADZDoja Cat, ‘Attention’Doja Cat returns with a vengeance on the menacing “Attention,” a statement record that puts her pop sensibility aside (at least for now) and leans into her ample skills as an M.C. “Look at me, look at me — you lookin’?” she begins, and for the next few minutes commands the floor with charismatic grit. “Baby, if you like it, just reach out and pet it,” she sings on a hook that recalls ’90s R&B, albeit filtered through Doja’s alien sensibility. The verses, though, are pure venom: “Y’all fall into beef, but that’s another conversation,” she spits with that signature fire in her throat. “I’m sorry, but we all find it really entertaining.” ZOLADZKiller Mike featuring Future, André 3000 and Eryn Allen Kane, ‘Scientists & Engineers’Ambition and achievement, electronics and exaltation all figure in “Scientists & Engineers” from “Michael,” Killer Mike’s first solo album since he formed Run the Jewels with El-P. “Scientists & Engineers” has five producers including James Blake and No I.D. The track pulsates with keyboard chords under the elusive André 3000 (from Outkast), who insists, “Rebelling is like an itch.” The music switches to silky guitar chords for Future, who sings, “It’s better to be an outcast in a world of envious.” And a beat kicks in with trap drums and blipping synthesizers behind Killer Mike, who boasts in quick triplets: “I’m never chillin’, I gotta make millions.” A multitracked Eryn Allen Kane wafts choirlike harmonies — and gospel-tinged sentiments like “I’mma live forever” — while the rappers redefine themselves. PARELESFlesh Eater featuring Fiona Apple, ‘Komfortzone’None other than Fiona Apple decided to collaborate with Flesh Eater, a Nashville avant-pop group, on the mercurial seven-minute excursion “Komfortzone.” Over a low, sputtering programmed beat and outbursts of noise and electronics, Flesh Eater’s lead singer, Zwil AR, sings hopscotching melodies reminiscent of Dirty Projectors. Apple sprinkles in some piano and eventually adds vocal harmonies on refrains like “A field of sunflowers with their backs toward me/I’m on the train.” It’s as willful as it is arty. PARELESSparklehorse, ‘Evening Star Supercharger’Mark Linkous was making his fifth album as Sparklehorse when he died by suicide in 2010. Now his family and a handful of collaborators have completed it, due for a September release as “Bird Machine.” A preview single, “Evening Star Supercharger,” tops unhurried folk-rock with the tinkle of a toy piano, as Linkous cryptically but matter-of-factly considers mortality and depression: “Peace without pill, gun or needle or prayer appear/Never found sometimes near but too fleet to be clear.” In the sky, he calmly watches a star going nova: “Even though she’s dying, getting larger.” PARELESOmah Lay, ‘Reason’The Nigerian singer Omah Lay has split his songs between partying and self-doubt; he has also been featured by Justin Bieber. “Reason,” from the newly expanded version of his 2022 album, “Boy Alone,” has minor chords and grim scenarios: “I don’t know who to run to right now/Army is opening heavy fire.” The beat is buoyant, but the tone is fraught. PARELESDavid Virelles, ‘Uncommon Sense’A low-riding shuffle beat isn’t the Cuban-born pianist, composer and folklorist David Virelles’s most common environment. But “Carta,” Virelles’s new LP, puts him and his longtime first-call bassist, Ben Street, together with Eric McPherson, an innovator and tradition-bearer in today’s jazz drumming. This is the closest Virelles has come to making a standard-format jazz trio album, though it’s still not exactly that. On the opener, “Uncommon Sense,” McPherson’s shuffle kicks in after 25 seconds of solo piano, and Virelles has already led things down a tense path, changing keys capriciously while building up a foundation for the Cubist phrase at the center of the tune. McPherson’s elegantly splattered drum style, using traditional grip to roll his rhythms out as close to the ground as possible, gives solid support to Virelles while he toys with contemporary-side influences: the bodily elocution of Don Pullen’s piano playing, the harmonic splintering and superimpositions of Craig Taborn, the rhythmic restraint of a Gonzalo Rubalcaba. You wouldn’t need to be told this album was recorded at Van Gelder Studio to realize it’s speaking with jazz history — the antique, the modern and what’s barely come into shape. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOBen van Gelder, ‘Spectrum’“Manifold,” a new album from the rising bandleader Ben van Gelder, celebrates the voice. The voice of his saxophone, the voice of the pipe organ, the human voice, the collective voice of an eight-piece band. Each has its own grain. The organ has its own prominent side-narrative in jazz history, but the Amsterdam-based van Gelder is culling from a different stream, closer to contemporary classical composers like Arvo Pärt and György Ligeti, using dissonance and space. The Veracruz-born vocalist Fuensanta sings no words on “Spectrum,” the album’s rangy centerpiece track; she joins the horns, sounding almost like another reed instrument. Beneath them, Kit Downes toggles between minimalism and high-rising waves on the pipe organ. RUSSONELLOElliott Sharp, ‘Rosette’The composer Elliott Sharp has been devising systems of pitch and structure since the 1970s. His latest album, “Steppe,” is inspired by geography. It’s music for six overdubbed vintage electric steel guitars, microtonally tuned and arrayed in stereo, exploring texture and resonance. “Rosette” is built from quick, cascading, staggered, overlapping little runs. It’s bell-toned and spiky, crumbling and reassembling. PARELES More

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      A Shorter Next Wave Festival Planned at BAM

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      The lineup for the artistic director’s final season will feature an interactive food theater performance and several dance programs.An intimate dinner-party performance, a fire-and-brimstone immersive show and a slew of dance performances are on tap for the coming Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the performing arts center announced on Friday.The festival will be the last to be programmed under David Binder, the artistic director, who announced earlier this year that he would step down and transition to an artistic advisory role on July 2. An interim artistic director will be announced in the coming weeks.This year’s edition of the storied festival will be scaled back, featuring seven programs — nearly half the last slate — from Oct. 19 through Jan. 13. The festival’s offerings have been steadily declining in recent years. In 2019, Next Wave featured 16 programs, down from 31 in 2017.“We prefer to think of it as dense and not necessarily shrinking,” said Amy Cassello, the festival’s associate director of programming. “I don’t think it’s any secret that arts institutions are pressed for funding.”The program is “an incredibly intentional effort,” she said.First on the schedule is the U.S. premiere of “Broken Chord” (Oct. 19-21), a retelling of South Africa’s first Black choir by the South African dancer and choreographer Gregory Maqoma and the composer Thuthuka Sibisi. Using atmospheric soundscapes and traditional Xhosa movement, the performance will feature a single dancer, four vocal soloists and a live local choir.Also on the lineup is the theater maker Geoff Sobelle’s surreal interactive dinner performance, “Food” (Nov. 2-18), in which audience members gather around an colossal banquet table. The show, which debuted at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in 2022, and which the New York Times critic Alexis Soloski called “a meditation on what and how and why we eat,” is the third in a trilogy of Sobelle’s performance works at BAM, following “The Object Lesson” in 2014 and “Home” in 2017.The artist and filmmaker Lynette Wallworth’s “How to Live (After You Die)” (Dec. 7-9) is a personal monologue on the seduction of cults and the extreme edges of organized religion. The choreographer Trajal Harrell’s “The Köln Concert” (Nov. 2-4), a dance work inspired by Keith Jarrett’s genre-hopping piano recording of the same name, will be performed by Harrell’s Schauspielhaus Zürich Dance Ensemble. And the choreographer Rachid Ouramdane’s “Corps Extrêmes” (Oct. 27-29), an aerial dance work, contemplates the space between earth and sky, set against the backdrop of a climbing wall and a suspended high rope.The season will conclude with Huang Ruo’s “Angel Island” (Jan. 11-13), an opera-theater work about the plight of Chinese migrants who were detained under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1883. In collaboration with the Del Sol Quartet, the Choir of Trinity Wall Street and the archival filmmaker Bill Morrison, Ruo’s BAM debut will present a multimedia requiem based on poetry engraved on the detention center’s walls.“BAM has always said that we follow the artist,” Cassello said. “The work in this festival is very much attuned to present-day issues. We don’t take for granted that people are wanting to come back to theater.” More