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      This ‘Magic Flute’ Has Ringtones, Bird Tracks and a Foley Artist

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      Supernatural happenings, curses and romances, heartbreaking arias and vocal fireworks — what’s not to love?Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” (“The Magic Flute”), a wildly popular gateway opera, has been a frequent presence on stages since its premiere in 1791. It’s a fair bet, though, that Simon McBurney’s production, which opens at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, is the first to feature a ringtone duplicating the bird catcher Papageno’s five-note musical trademark. Or to use about 100 speakers strategically placed all over the house.Morley (Pamina) and Brownlee (Tamino) rehearsing “Die Zauberflöte.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesThe tenor Brenton Ryan, as Monostatos, in the production.Lila Barth for The New York TimesFor McBurney, the use of technology is less about embracing the present than about nodding to the creation of “Zauberflöte.” That was at Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna, which was run by the multitasking Emanuel Schikaneder, the opera’s librettist and originator of the role of Papageno.“Schikaneder had the latest ways of making thunder, he had machines make the sound of rain, he had bird calls, he had people making the sound of horses’ hooves,” McBurney said in an interview. “The use of sound creates a magical world, and yet at the same time at the heart of ‘The Magic Flute’ are real human concerns.”The juxtapositions of intimacy and cosmic scale, simplicity and complexity, low and high technology have long been emblematic of McBurney’s work as a founder and artistic director of the London-based theater company Complicité. Audience members at his solo show “The Encounter” (which had a Broadway run in 2016) experienced the production through earphones, immersing them in sophisticated soundscapes. Something that could have added distance between performer and theatergoer brought them closer.Morley rehearsing with the orchestra, which is raised almost to the level of the stage.Lila Barth for The New York TimesMcBurney experimented with sound again for “Zauberflöte,” which was first staged in 2012 at the Dutch National Opera and has been presented around Europe. (It replaces the 19-year-old Julie Taymor production at the Met; her abridged, English-language version for families remains in the repertory.) A distinctive trait of McBurney’s “Zauberflöte” is the importance of the sonic environment.“For a forest scene I have five or six bird tracks that I can send out, a running brook that I’m going to put in a speaker in the far right side of the stage, two tracks of wind blowing in trees,” Matthieu Maurice, a sound designer, said at a recent rehearsal.The singers are amplified through body microphones, though only for the spoken sections — plentiful in “Zauberflöte,” which is a singspiel, a numbers show with dialogue between arias. The mics are turned off for the sung parts, requiring constant adjustments by two sound mixers.“There’s so much more I can do with the dialogue with a mic,” said the soprano Erin Morley, who plays the pure-hearted princess Pamina. “I can face upstage, I can whisper something. I’m sure there will be some purists out there who will hate this, but the important thing is that we are not singing with mics.”The director Simon McBurney at the Met. “The use of sound creates a magical world,” he said, “and yet at the same time at the heart of ‘The Magic Flute’ are real human concerns.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesNathalie Stutzmann, this production’s conductor, was also on board. “In a house as big as this one, it is obvious to me that we need to use modern technology,” she said. “The Met is huge. It’s a lack of intelligence not to adapt to a space. It’s normal to help the singers fill the space when they are speaking. It’s also important that the volume of the spoken parts match the volume of the sung parts in an opera like this one, otherwise it feels like two different works.”Amplification also allows the integration of a live Foley artist, Ruth Sullivan, who operates out of a self-contained space, visible stage left, that looks like a zany inventor’s laboratory. “Her relationship with the actors is a musical one, essentially,” McBurney said of Sullivan. “They know the sounds she is going to make, and so it is a dance in the same way Nathalie Stutzmann is dancing with the singers, trying to make the cellos and the voices work together.”The artist Blake Habermann contributes drawings and ingenious effects to live projections.Lila Barth for The New York TimesHabermann’s drawing adds to the projections.Lila Barth for The New York TimesStutzmann works as closely with Maurice as she does with the musicians and singers. (The associate sound designer, he has been implementing Gareth Fry’s original vision for the past eight years, while adding flourishes of his own, including the ringtone.) The sound effects are indicated on the sheet music, so she knows exactly what to expect and when.Adding to the increased interconnection among the opera’s moving parts, the pit is almost level with the stage.“We decided, ‘Let’s raise the orchestra, let’s make people aware of the players,’” said Michael Levine, the set designer. “Because we’re so used to the players being hidden, and they weren’t in the 18th century.”From left, Luka Zylik, Deven Agge and Julian Knopf as the three spirits that guide Tamino and Papageno.Lila Barth for The New York TimesDuring the spoken sections at rehearsal, players in the orchestra turned toward the stage like flowers to the sun. They could watch the action for a change.“There’s nothing more boring than being an orchestra musician and being in the back of a cave with no idea of what’s happening on the stage,” Stutzmann said. “Can you imagine spending three or four hours, five for Wagner, at the bottom of a pit and have no idea what’s happening above you?” Not only can the musicians see this “Zauberflöte”; some also become part of the action.Being positioned higher creates a challenge, though. “We have to be careful not to cover up the singers,” Stutzmann said. “The sound balance is changed because we’re up and above, so we’re louder. You have to be vigilant while avoiding being bland.”Ruth Sullivan, the production’s live Foley artist. “Her relationship with the actors is a musical one, essentially,” McBurney said. “They know the sounds she is going to make, and so it is a dance.”Lila Barth for The New York TimesMuch of the production’s visuals are also created in plain view. The artist Blake Habermann contributes drawings and ingenious effects — watch how he renders a starry sky — to live projections. “I show all my tricks and then they become doubly magical,” McBurney said with an impish grin.For Levine, making the entire house part of one organism reminds everybody that the artificiality and evanescence of the art form constitute its strength. “What we wanted to do is to bring the audience into the fallibility of theater,” he said. “Things are being made before your eyes, and it’s live, and it’s not going to happen again. And the people that are constructing it are here with you in the same room, and we’re all doing it together.”A scene from the production at the Met.Lila Barth for The New York TimesIf the projections are the modern equivalent of the magic lanterns developed in the 17th century, McBurney and Levine also came up with a contemporary version of a magic carpet: a central square platform that can transport the characters, but that also suggests the instability they experience. It can go up and down, and it can be inclined as various angles; the singers can scamper on top or scurry below. “It is much more secure when you’re on it,” Morley said. “From afar, it looks terrifying.” Laughing, she allowed that “when we go underneath the platform, there were a few moments in rehearsal when I said, ‘You want me to do what?’”Some modern directors have been criticized for overemphasizing an opera’s staging over its music, and forcing interpretations that depart from the familiar. But McBurney’s North Star remains the music, and trying to stay faithful to what it meant for its creator.“I think that for Mozart, if you can make music so beautiful, people will come out changed,” he said. “We can debate whether he was right or not well, but it’s called ‘The Magic Flute.’ The flute changes the way that people behave.”Mozart, he added, had confidence in his music: “He knew that it could move people in a way that might alter their lives.” More

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      36 Hours in Buenos Aires: Things to Do and See

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      12:30 p.m.
      Follow the grill smoke to the river
      Puerto Madero, a redeveloped dockside neighborhood about a 10-minute walk from San Telmo, has become one of the busiest tourist destinations in the city, thanks to landmarks like Puente de la Mujer, a sleek pedestrian bridge designed by the renowned architect Santiago Calatrava, and the ARA Presidente Sarmiento, a museum ship that bobs on the Rio Darsena Sur river next to a long line of loud, packed restaurants. Less than half a mile farther along the river, away from the crowd, is Estilo Campo, a fantastic parrilla (an Argentine steakhouse, which literally means open grill) with river views and waiters wearing kerchiefs and belts in the style of gauchos, to the delight of tourists. But the expertly prepared chorizo, crispy sweetbreads and juicy skirt steak leave no doubt that you are in an authentic Argentine parrilla, and the wine list is expansive. Lunch for two, about 18,000 pesos. More

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      Forests, Band from Singapore, Played On After U.S. Robbery

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      Forests, a band from Singapore, ended its tour in New York in high spirits, two weeks after being robbed in California.The band, Forests, did not miss a show.ForestsAn international rock band’s first U.S. tour is a moment to be celebrated, a sign that years of hard work have paid off. But just a few days into their American debut, the members of Forests, an emo rock band from Singapore, endured another rite of passage for some musicians traveling the United States when they stopped for the night at a California hotel.When they returned to their rental van a few hours later, they realized they’d been robbed.“In Singapore I kind of made a joke about it, like, oh, you know, your band is only legit if your stuff got stolen,” said Darell Laser, 36, the bassist. “Then it really happened.”Forests and the Oklahoma band they were touring with, Ben Quad, are hardly the first musicians to be robbed while on tour in America. (In 1999, Sonic Youth famously lost an entire truck’s worth of gear to a thief, also in California.) But the experience was still a shock for a band from a country as safe as Singapore.“It was the worst luck ever,” said Chris Martinez, 29, a Forests fan from San Diego who discovered the band years ago on a business trip to Singapore.The robbery prompted an outpouring of concern from both bands’ fans, and more than $9,000 in donations allowed them to buy replacement instruments. They did not miss a show, and they ended their tour in high spirits with a sold-out concert at a bar in Queens on Tuesday.“They seem to have moved past it,” said Mr. Martinez, who donated $200 to the bands’ crowdfunding campaign after learning of the robbery. “Keeping a positive attitude and trying not to let it bring them down.”Forests and Ben Quad had some instruments, along with other goods, stolen from their parked rental van while they were sleeping in a hotel after a show. ForestsThe May 1 robbery made for a surreal early leg of a cross-country tour — entitled “Get in losers, we’re going to Walmart” — that Forests had spent months planning and years looking forward to. It happened a few days after their tour began in Seattle and a few hours after their gig in Oakland.When the tired musicians from the two bands straggled into a Hampton Inn in Hayward, Calif., at about 1:30 a.m., they left their gear in the 15-passenger rental van they were sharing for the tour. They parked next to a security camera as a precaution, but it didn’t help: When they returned to the parking lot after 11 a.m., they noticed that some of their guitars, a bass, pedals, clothing and a box with cash from merchandise sales had been stolen.The theft was the latest in an area of California where property crimes like shoplifting and car break-ins are on the rise. The hotel management told the bands that its security footage did not show a theft. A location tag on one instrument appeared to show that the stolen gear had been taken to an Oakland apartment building, but the police said there was no easy way to get it back.“The cops told us, ‘Hey, there’s nothing we can do unless it ends up in a pawnshop,’” said Edgar Viveros, 27, Ben Quad’s lead guitarist. The pawnshops they called said that it had not.Instead of canceling the tour, the bands decided to play on with borrowed gear. They also set up a crowdfunding page and were surprised to see how quickly donations rolled in — $6,000 in about four hours.The robbery was “kinda heartbreaking,” Imre Griga, 23, a fan in Columbia, Mo., who attended three of the bands’ tour dates this month, said in an email. “I think the entire community felt Forests deserved much better for their first tour in America.”Within a few days, members of both bands were playing with new instruments. They went a little longer without the pedal board that Ben Quad typically uses to play samples, like the theme from an “Austin Powers” movie, between sets. But a replacement for that, too, was eventually found.Forests first played with borrowed instruments after the theft, then bought replacements after fans donated more than $9,000.ForestsBack home in Singapore, the story of the robbery, and the fan support, made headlines. Some readers commented about their own experiences of getting robbed in the United States. Others wondered how the three members of Forests, who all have day jobs and tour on their vacations, could have been so naïve.For Forests, it was not their first international tour: They have performed across the Asia-Pacific region over the years. But on their first tour of America, they loved watching the landscape — deserts, trees, snowy mountains — whip past the van’s windows.They also kept a list of “crazy things” they had seen, like people fighting in convenience stores, or the woman in Seattle who threw her luggage down three flights of stairs in a subway station. The band’s drummer, Niki Koh, 31, said he particularly enjoyed visiting a store that sold guns, knives and hunting gear — “ everything that we won’t find in Singapore.”“It’s culture shock,” he said, speaking in a video interview from Kansas City. “But at the same time, it’s very interesting.” More

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      Jessie Ware Is Dancing Into Her Second Act

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThe fifth Jessie Ware album, “That! Feels Good!,” is a robust, richly sung neo-disco manifesto, among the most vibrant music the singer has released. It marks a solidification of Ware’s second phase, following her early years making restrained club-soul and adult-contemporary R&B.This second phase was made possible at least in part by the success of “Table Manners,” the podcast she hosts with her mother, which has become central to Ware’s public flowering as a relatable celebrity. Now, she is making music that’s playful and untethered, but just as crisply delivered as ever.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about midcareer sonic switches, the importance of fantasy in music making, and how freedom outside of one’s music career can lead to liberation within it.Guests:Caryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editorLindsay Zoladz, a pop music critic for The New York Times and writer of The Amplifier newsletterConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      A Queer Punk Vaudevillian’s Surreal Take on ‘Titanic’

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      In some ways, turning the movie “Titanic” into a farce about climate change makes a lot of narrative sense. Instead of an iceberg — which has melted, of course — the ship goes down because it hits a mountain of underwater garbage.In other ways, “Titanic Depression,” a new multimedia performance, could only have come from the madcap brain of Dynasty Handbag, the queer vaudevillian with punk origins and questionable taste in unitards.The 1997 movie was a blockbuster, sure, but Dynasty Handbag’s vision may be even more epic than James Cameron’s. Clad mostly in frilly underwear, with a recalcitrant therapist on speed-text, she’s a bawdy version of Rose (Kate Winslet’s character in the movie). Jack, the Leonardo DiCaprio love interest, is played by an octopus, who sneaks aboard the vessel disguised as a fanciful hat. Billy Zane’s villainous snob is replaced by a dildo in a black loafer. A camel and a microscopic tardigrade make cameos. Mark Zuckerberg is there. The whole thing is a metaphor about the seeming futility of fighting industrial capitalism and impending environmental doom, but it is also: a hilarious romp! A sexcapade, with consent forms! A self-own, with a pause for meditation — about death! And Dynasty Handbag, the alter ego of the artist Jibz Cameron, inhabits all the parts.Cameron, 48, has been working various stages in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles as Dynasty Handbag for over 20 years, building a fan base both at august cultural institutions like the Brooklyn Academy of Music and at underground freak spectaculars.Jibz Cameron as Dynasty Handbag, in rehearsals. The project “just kept getting more money and more attention,” she said. “And then I kept feeling like it had to be bigger and bigger.”Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times“Jibz is able to address all kinds of issues — whether it’s body dysmorphia or childhood trauma or climate change — with the most hysterical absurdity and in ways that you would never expect,” said Ed Patuto, director of audience engagement at the Broad in Los Angeles, which programmed and commissioned her work. “She’s a great performer, in that you never see her rehearsals — it looks completely spontaneous.”“Weirdo Night,” her popular, long-running monthly variety show in Los Angeles, which she summed up as a “live ‘Muppet Show’ meets demented queer ‘Star Search,’” has become a Mecca for the surreal. “The ‘Weirdo Night’ community is freak church and Dynasty Handbag is the weirdo priest,” said Sarah Sherman, the breakout “Saturday Night Live” star, who has performed there. (The series was the subject of a well-received 2021 Sundance documentary.)“Titanic Depression,” which was commissioned by the Brooklyn cultural venue Pioneer Works in 2017 and will premiere there on Saturday and Sunday, is Cameron’s most ambitious and multidisciplinary project yet; it involves animation, video, soundscapes, singing, history and dance. It arrives on the heels of her Guggenheim Fellowship, a lot for an artist who refers to her crew as “dirtbag queers.”As her vision for “Titanic” grew, “it just kept getting more money and more attention,” Cameron said, with an avant-gardist’s note of surprise. “And then I kept feeling like it had to be bigger and bigger.”“What keeps it fresh for me is knowing that I can just make myself something to do, if I want to do it,” she added, on a break from rehearsals near her home in Los Angeles last week, in a studio where she also takes punk aerobics. “I definitely trust that it is what it wants to be.”Her instincts are being recognized all over: She will have visual art in “Made in L.A.,” the Hammer Museum’s biennial this fall; a comedy album, on the artist Seth Bogart’s Wacky Wacko label, is also forthcoming.But even among performance artists — not exactly a conformist bunch — Cameron’s alchemy of comedy, art, music, theater and fashion stands out for actually delivering on its lunacy.“Jibz is a force of nature,” said Jack Black, the actor and musician, adding that he and his wife, Tanya Haden, “were completely blown away” when they first saw Dynasty Handbag. “We were laughing uncontrollably,” he wrote in an email. “It felt like a hallucinogenic experience.” Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesWith a sharp jawline, an askew wig and features that contort into a bouquet of disdain, Cameron plays Dynasty as an alternate-universe star, whose aesthetic is “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” crossed with a minor ’80s Aaron Spelling crime drama (lately she’s been partial to “Hart to Hart”), “but covered in goo, and a lesbian,” she said.One of those inspirations, Paul Reubens — Pee-wee Herman himself — was impressed by her character work. “To a certain degree, she seems kind of undefinable,” he said. “You have to see it; you can’t explain it very well. And that in itself seems like an incredible thing to have going for yourself.”The show, originally developed with the artist and technologist Sue-C, and presented as part of the New York Live Arts festival Planet Justice, is performed with a video backdrop; our heroine is live onstage, and everyone else is animated, mostly from Cameron’s own drawings, and sometimes with her face.At a recent rehearsal in Brooklyn, Cameron and a team of her collaborators — including her co-writer Amanda Verwey, and the visual director, Mariah Garnett, who is Cameron’s romantic partner — were working through a scene. À la Rose and Jack, Dynasty trails the octopus through gilded-age state rooms — generated partly by Dall-E, the image A.I., because, Cameron explained, that makes them visibly off-kilter, like Dynasty herself. In the bowels of the ship, they find a throbbing dance party. (Cue techno beats, not fiddle.) Cameron choreographed a wiggly duet with her cephalopod lover.“Jibz is a force of nature,” said Jack Black, the actor and musician, adding that when he and his wife first saw Dynasty Handbag, it “felt like a hallucinogenic experience.”Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesA lot of the hourlong show is this loopy, until it gets to what David Everitt Howe, the Pioneer Works curator who commissioned the project, called “the bonkers death sequence.” A literal meditation, it underscores how consumerist greed led to the tragedy then, and to the vast trouble we’re in now.“It was such a tonal shift,” he said. “It’s dark. I remember I laughed uncomfortably, but I think it’s powerful, too. It makes the silliness stronger.”Jibra’ila Cameron, known as Jibz since childhood, grew up scrappy and poor in Northern California, with glimpses of creative freedom. A performing arts summer camp run by Wavy Gravy, the hippie clown and a friend of her parents, “totally saved my life as a kid,” she said.Her family life was volatile, though, and she left home at 15 or so, bumming around the Bay Area. Though she hadn’t graduated from high school, she was accepted at the San Francisco Art Institute on the strength of some Edward Gorey-style comics she drew. There, she was introduced to performance art and began making videos and joined bands. “I would just kind of freak out onstage, play the keyboard,” she said. (One of the groups was an all-female post-punk act called Dynasty; when it split up, she kept the name, tacking on Handbag — “I always thought the word handbag was really funny.”)“I feel like what I want to evoke with this is making something out of nothing — this tiny hope, survivability,” Cameron said.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesLater, hoping to become an actor, she studied at a theater conservatory. She had already embodied Dynasty Handbag, who debuted at Ladyfest in San Francisco in 2002, and her look remains remarkably the same: a misguided take on femininity, a studied failure of aesthetics. “She’s wearing tights, but they’re underneath a bathing suit,” Everitt Howe noted. “It’s all layered wrong.”Her quixotic clarity has influenced a younger generation of artists, like Sherman. “Jibz gave me the best piece of advice ever — after seeing me perform with all my props and costumes and gadgets and gizmos, she said, ‘You don’t need to WORK so hard, you’re funny! You’re ENOUGH!’” Sherman wrote. “I really took that to heart.”Cameron is not related to the “Titanic” director James Cameron, but he’s in the show, alongside industrialists like Benjamin Guggenheim, who “made his money in the mining and smelting businesses,” Dynasty Handbag says, punctuating her monologue about him with fart and bomb sounds. The disembodied voice of Guggenheim, who actually died aboard the Titanic, responds: “How dare you, I gave you a Guggenheim in 2022 and you wouldn’t be making this ridiculous show without me!”Cameron was still working out the ending for “Titanic Depression” last week, conjuring a moment out of a discarded plastic straw, a Lou Reed song and a gown made of garbage.“I feel like what I want to evoke with this is making something out of nothing — this tiny hope, survivability,” she told her crew. “People make music no matter where they are, what socioeconomic class. I get to come out in my showstopper outfit — that’s the showbiz part I really like. And then it gets weird.” More

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      Kassa Overall Knows Artists Feel Pressure. His New Album Explores It.

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      The drummer whose genre-crossing work has brought acclaim here and abroad returns with “Animals,” an LP of jazz, rap and soul inspired by the struggle to be OK.On a cloudy afternoon, the drummer Kassa Overall strolled past his first New York City apartment, a second-floor room in a Fort Greene brownstone. He had moved to Brooklyn after graduating from Oberlin in 2006 to play in the local jazz scene while improving his chops as a beatmaker. To help him make ends meet, the drummer Billy Hart got him a gig playing the djembe for a physical therapy dance class at a nursing home in Harlem.“So I came into the game with a consistent paying thing, low rent, and it was just like, ‘Damn, I’m here,’” Overall, 40, said as he toured his old neighborhood in March. “So I just stayed.”Fast-forward to 2020: Overall had built himself into a noted musician here and abroad, with a multifaceted sound synthesizing jazz, rap and R&B, and an album called “I Think I’m Good” — on the British tastemaker Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood Recordings label — poised to push him into wider circles. Or so he thought. “It really felt like this was about to pop,” Overall recalled. “We did Japan, then we did the West Coast, and we were selling out merch every show.”But the pandemic shut down the possibility of further touring. Overall flew back to his native Seattle and wondered what was next. “I went from being a touring musician and always having extra income to barely having enough,” he said over lunch, opening up about his hard times without any apprehension. “I felt like I wasn’t as successful as it felt like I was on the internet.”The anguish led him to start work on a new album, “Animals,” out May 26, about the struggles of surviving as an entertainer, and how the pressure to stand out can push an artist too far. “I’m one of those people that’s like, I had mental illness stuff back in the day, and I have a sensitivity,” he explained. “I can’t just walk through the world normal. I got to do a lot of [expletive] to keep my train on the track.”“I’m doing everything I can to handle it, and I can barely handle it,” Overall said. “So think about somebody who’s not doing anything to handle it. How are they going to get through all this?”Michael Tyrone DelaneyOverall had challenges throughout college, while he was studying jazz performance; he couldn’t sleep and had bouts of what he called “super high energy.” Then he’d be depressed for days. “I remember even telling my mom one day, ‘I think I’m bipolar,’” he said, recalling a moment when he was in high school. “I had this period where I was getting real isolated.” He described a manic episode where he began seeing and hearing things that weren’t there. “I started seeing stuff on me.”“I Think I’m Good” unpacked the experience of living with bipolar disorder through scant electroacoustic backing tracks and heavily modulated vocals. “Animals” takes a different approach, inspired by Overall’s feeling of kinship with unconventional musicians like Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix — “artists that you could tell were special, but also couldn’t really handle the pressure,” he said.The album’s vigorous jazz, rap and soul blends live instruments with electronic drum tracks. Its formidable roster of collaborators includes the rappers Danny Brown, Lil B and Ish of Shabazz Palaces; the vocalists Nick Hakim and Laura Mvula; and the jazz instrumentalists Theo Croker and Vijay Iyer. “The Lava Is Calm” features chilling piano; “Maybe We Can Stay” spotlights sweeping strings and flutes darting across a bouncy backbeat.“It feels like you’re in a zoo — you can’t go full animal, you know?” Overall said. “I was feeling like, within this machine and within this whole organism, I can see within myself, I’m doing everything I can to handle it, and I can barely handle it. So think about somebody who’s not doing anything to handle it. How are they going to get through all this?”Overall’s childhood in Seattle was filled with music and life lessons from his free-spirited parents. (His mother worked for the local PBS station, and his father did odd jobs and stayed at home with the children.) “Everybody else had Kraft singles and Coca-Cola,” he quipped, “we had soy milk and tofu.”He was a quick study who learned how to play drums as a young child, exploring a living room full of instruments that his father collected. There was a piano, saxophones, trumpets, clarinets, a broken violin, a four-track recorder and a beat machine that he said no one knew how to use. But Overall learned how to manipulate the electronic equipment; by fourth grade, he and his older brother, Carlos, started playing jazz songs like “Autumn Leaves” and “A Night in Tunisia.”“I’m coming home with a lot of dollar bills and ironing them,” he remembered of their early performances. “And my dad was super hands-on with us. He would take us to the spot and set up, we’d find a corner and make bread.”Overall grew up listening to a wide array of artists — John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar, Public Enemy and DJ Quik — which gave him a natural feel for all kinds of sounds. A turning point in his relationship to music came when he was a sophomore in high school and landed a $9 an hour job sweeping peanut shells and taking out trash at the Major League Baseball stadium in Seattle. After he and some friends were fired for smoking marijuana, he had a realization.“Wait a minute. I’m doing jazz gigs, getting a hundred a night, 150, sometimes 200 on a good gig,” Overall remembered thinking. “So I could either level this up or I could get better at sweeping peanuts and stuff. And I haven’t had a real job since then.”Hart, a mentor and one of Overall’s Oberlin professors, was taken by his student’s assertiveness. “I knew he had a certain amount of self-confidence that was obvious when he got there,” said Hart, who is also a noted Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner collaborator. “As far as I’m concerned, Kassa is a jazz musician who has excelled in the pop field,” he added. “He’s found a unique direction all his own. If he keeps going the way he’s going, he’s going to be a major star.”Peterson, the Brownswood Recordings founder, was one of Overall’s early supporters, and he said he was struck by Overall’s curiosity for sounds outside jazz. “He’s kind of incorporated all these elements and made something fresh and new, but with all the aspects of traditional music,” he said. “He has a really great sense of being able to push the audience to a point where they can’t take anymore before bringing the beat back in — it’s brave.”Speaking and writing candidly about his own struggles requires its own bravery, but Overall says the new album isn’t simply about one person’s trials.“We’re all aspiring to reach a higher place. And we’re all aspiring to do better,” he said. “But also have empathy for those who don’t. Because I know how hard it is. I know how hard it is to just do OK. There’s a large percentage of us that are not going to do OK. So maybe those are the people we consider animals. But it could have been you, could have been me. May have been me in the past life, or in the next life.” More

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      Hannah Jadagu Turns Small Moments Into Big Pop Songs

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      The 20-year-old N.Y.U. student’s debut album, “Aperture,” aims for emotions and earworms.What does it mean to be a pop songwriter in 2023? Part of the job is what it has always been: coming up with catchy melodies, terse lyrics and instrumental hooks; creating crisply defined verses and choruses; capturing short attention spans while tapping into broadly shared experiences.“Pop structure is always happening in my songs,” said Hannah Jadagu, 20, whose debut album, “Aperture,” will be released on Friday. In a video chat from her dorm room at New York University, she added, “I love a good hook or a good chorus. I love a good banger. I love a pop hit.”Jadagu’s dorm room is spartan. One otherwise bare wall is decorated with a poster of a fierce-looking woman’s face, origin unknown; Jadagu rescued it from a discard pile. Another displays a few posters and passes from her recent tours; Jadagu paused her college education in 2022 to tour and write her album. Her room is now primarily a musician’s work space, with her computer, a MIDI keyboard and three guitars close at hand. When she came to N.Y.U., where she’s now in her third year, she contemplated becoming a music supervisor and leaned into studies of music as a business, but soon she began to focus on her own songs.Jadagu has a distinct visual presence — a cascade of long, blond braids frames her face — and a contagious smile, particularly noticeable when she’s citing musicians she’s learned from, famous and less so. She mentioned Charli XCX, Frank Ocean, SZA, Haim, Billie Eilish, Tame Impala, the Beatles, Ellie Goulding, CeeLo Green, Clairo, beabadoobee, Vampire Weekend, Steve Lacy, Snail Mail, M.I.A., Grouplove, Winnetka Bowling League, Ritt Momney, the Japanese House, Kevin Abstract and more. Many of them, she freely admits, have had an immediate influence on whatever song she was working on when she heard them.Most of the songs on “Aperture” lean into pop’s eternal subject: uncertain romance. She sings about being scared to get serious in the folk-to-grunge “Lose”; about trying to get someone to forget an ex in the lurching, psychedelia-tinged “Six Months”; and about trying to figure out where she stands in a relationship in “Say It Now,” which expands from a winsome plaint into a stomping pop chorus.“I’m not a dramatic person in my everyday life,” she said. “But when I sit down to write something, I’m like, How can I explain how this feels big to me, even though I might not show it on the outside?”“I owe everything to SoundCloud because it helped me build a little bit of confidence,” Jadagu said of the platform where she first released her music.Makeda Sandford for The New York TimesShe added, “When you’re a songwriter, it could be that even the smallest thing happens and then you’re like, ‘That’s going to be a big song.’ There’s a way of taking something in your life, even if it’s just a small moment, and then making it into this big experience for people to listen in on.”Throughout her album, Jadagu’s music keeps shifting styles, veering from indie rock to electronic to warped R&B. “I told my manager I want to be able to make an album where it feels like there are no borders,” she said. “I wanted each song to be different.”Jadagu has a singular sense of melody. Her phrases hopscotch around, full of angular leaps that also feel easy and conversational. Those melodies turn out to be equally effective whether they’re leaping across distorted guitar chords, suave keyboards or abstract soundscapes.Greta Kline, who records as Frankie Cosmos, became one of Jadagu’s early admirers and mentors. “She’s got an encyclopedic knowledge of all the different ways that music can go,” Kline said in an interview. “And she can picture all those parts before even laying them down. She’s got an amazing producer’s mind. And she knows everything cool that’s going on.”Kline added, “She’s going to be a star. I just hope someday I get to open for her.”Jadagu has always been absorbed in music. She grew up in Mesquite, Texas, the Dallas suburb where her parents settled after immigrating from Zimbabwe in the 1990s. She soaked up pop, hip-hop and indie rock from the radio and from the albums of her older sister, Tymie. She attended church regularly — along with youth groups and church camp — and sang in the choir, where she learned to love building vocal harmonies.Jadagu turned away from the church when she was in high school. “I know the Bible,” she said. “But it just got to a point where I was like, ‘I don’t know if this is something I’m really fully believing in with my heart.’”Two songs that frame the album, “Explanation” and “Letter to Myself,” sympathetically explore how believers seek answers to fundamental questions. “Everyone is looking for an explanation/Put your faith and hope in something,” Jadagu sings as the album begins. Then she starts to wonder: “How do you know?”In high school, Jadagu studied classical percussion and joined the school’s drum line. She also picked up electric guitar at 16, learning her favorite songs on her own. But as early as elementary school, she had already started recording her own music on computers.“I’ve always just had a knack for wanting to be on some electronic device, making some sounds,” she said. When she was told to play math games on the computer, she would secretly open up GarageBand and just start making beats. “Or I’d go to pbskids.org, and they had an ‘Arthur’ game where Arthur could help me make a song.”In high school, her songwriting grew more serious, and Jadagu started uploading her music to SoundCloud, cannily using hashtags like #indie, #electronic and #relaxing that drew her first listeners to a song she has now taken down, “Night Drive Boy.”“I woke up the next day and it had 2,000 plays,” she said. “I was, like, ‘Oh, people like my music.’ And even though it was an algorithmic thing that happened, I still felt like maybe I could keep doing this and keep posting them, not just for myself. I owe everything to SoundCloud because it helped me build a little bit of confidence.”“I love a good hook or a good chorus,” Jadagu said. “I love a good banger. I love a pop hit.”Makeda Sandford for The New York TimesJadagu’s self-released music somehow reached the Sub Pop label, which signed her in her senior year of high school. She recorded “What Is Going On?,” a five-song EP released in 2021, entirely on her iPhone, using GarageBand with a guitar and an outboard microphone. “People are always like, ‘Wow, you made your EP on an iPhone, how incredible!’ And I’m like, ‘I just didn’t have money,’” she said with a smile and a shrug.With “Aperture,” Jadagu had a budget for a studio and a producer. After constructing her new songs on her own, she worked with the French producer Max Robert Baby, selecting him as a collaborator after he sent her his own version of “Say It Now.” Via video interview from France, Max recalled that Jadagu sent back “a Google document detailing every second of the track, every teeny bit of the production I made,” adding, “She’s so precise. She’s a brilliant woman, really.”Working remotely and then together — in a historic French studio, Greasy Records — they turned Jadagu’s new songs into ever more surreal studio concoctions, toying with textures and spatial effects, coming up with whimsical countermelodies and head-spinning cross-rhythms. “I’ve never seen such maturity and determination — to make something that’s really her but also really OK with her influences,” Max said. “She had an idea, coming into the studio, how she wanted each song to sound, and that vision was crystal clear.”“Aperture” is absolutely 21st-century pop: personal and technical, candid and knowing, physical and virtual, shrewdly engineered. “Ever since I started making music, I’ve always had dreams of at least being heard by people,” Jadagu said. “Pop songs are supposed to be able to connect to almost anyone, and they’re supposed to be an earworm.”“I think there’s nothing better than hearing something catchy,” she added. “You’re walking on the street later and you’re like, ‘Oh no!’ That’s when you’re doing your job — where you’ve made something that is just so infectious that it’s burrowed itself into someone’s subconscious. So they start singing it when they’re cooking, later. You know?” More

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      Why I’m Obsessed With This KC and the Sunshine Band Song

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      A deep dive into the 1982 track “(You Said) You’d Gimme Some More.”KC and the Sunshine band, likely demanding more.David Redfern/Redferns, via Getty ImagesDear listeners,Every once in a while, I’ll be telling you about a random song I am currently obsessed with in an attempt to explore the root of this fascination (and perhaps convince you to join me). Today, it’s a little-known gem from KC and the Sunshine Band.Yes, KC and the Sunshine Band. Hear me out.The year is 1982. Seven years after “(That’s the Way) I Like It.” Three years after the notorious Disco Demolition Night. A year after the arrival of MTV.The hit-making formula that had worked so well for KC and the Sunshine Band throughout the commercial height of disco — from 1975 to 1976, they had four No. 1 songs on the Billboard Hot 100! — was not going to cut it anymore. It was the ’80s now. The future. The moment had come to trash the bell-bottoms, buy a bunch of criminally expensive synthesizers, and set a low-budget and audaciously low-concept music video in an abandoned arcade. It was time for “(You Said) You’d Gimme Some More,” the irresistible and barely remembered leadoff track from the Florida band’s 1982 album, “All in a Night’s Work.”I was previously unaware that KC and the Sunshine Band ever sounded like this. There’s a dark intensity to “Gimme Some More” — a warped synthesized bass backbone and a hard-driving, mechanized beat that undercuts those signature blasts of celebratory brass. The first time I heard this track, I could have easily been convinced that it was produced not by the group’s founders, Harry Wayne Casey and Richard Finch, but Giorgio Moroder.I must here confess that the first time I heard this song was not that long ago. And that the reason it came into my life is, shall we say, accidentally Anglophobic: Remember right after Queen Elizabeth died last year, when a bunch of Irish soccer hooligans went viral for singing some regally disrespectful lyrics to the tune of KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Give It Up”? Well, that reminded my boyfriend that “Give It Up” is actually a pretty great song, and when he went to stream “All in a Night’s Work,” he stumbled upon this stone-cold jam.You know those songs that become localized smash hits within your friend circle or group chat? “Gimme Some More” quickly became one of those. It’s now the song I put on when I have control of the aux cord, usually challenging unsuspecting people to guess — just try and guess — who recorded it. A few months ago I made a friend play it in his car and then also forced him to watch the entire seven-and-a-half-minute music video. His verdict: “Something about this guy’s energy is frightening to me.”The Moroder comparison isn’t so far-fetched. The producer behind both Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby” (1975) and Blondie’s “Call Me” (1980) made the transition from disco to new wave about as gracefully as a musician could: His was an aesthetic path worth following. But it’s easy to understand why the ecstatic, upbeat “Give It Up” was an easier sell coming from the “Boogie Shoes” guy than the more aggressive and nervy “Gimme Some More.”I will not vouch for every song on “All in a Night’s Work”; the next track is titled “Party With Your Body” and contains the lyric, “Now Jazzercise is the latest trend.” So to make this journey down the rabbit hole of ’80s KC and the Sunshine Band a little gentler on you, I’ve made a short playlist that throws in a few contemporary Moroder tracks — ones that also bridge those gaps between disco, funk and new wave. I have not secured an abandoned arcade for you to dance in. That work I will leave up to you.Don’t stop what you’re doin’,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Gimme Some More (and More)” track listTrack 1: KC and the Sunshine Band, “(You Said) You’d Gimme Some More”Track 2: Giorgio Moroder, “Chase”Track 3: Donna Summer, “Pandora’s Box”Track 4: Giorgio Moroder, “Palm Springs Drive (American Gigolo Soundtrack Version)”Track 5: KC and the Sunshine Band, “Give It Up”Bonus tracksThis week I am mourning the loss, in a brutal Game 7 of the N.B.A.’s Eastern Conference semifinals, of my beloved but singularly star-crossed Philadelphia 76ers. To them, through tears, I dedicate Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road.”And to sweet, 31-year-old Bobi, the world’s oldest dog: Oasis’s “Live Forever.” It is beautiful to me that a dog who was born before the release of “Definitely Maybe” is still alive. More