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      How Do You Preserve a Vanishing Music Scene?

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      Five recent books collect photographs, memories and ephemera from the hardcore band Agnostic Front, the mysterious dance artist Aphex Twin, the rap collective Odd Future and more.Memories fade. Documentation disappears. Scenes vanish.When you’re busy creating a world, you don’t always think about how to preserve it for history. So old fliers and magazines get brittle and crumble, photos get lost, publications go out of business and websites get deleted. It falls to archivists — sometimes from a scene itself, and sometimes an avid follower — to fight that slipperiness. Each of these worthy and memorable books is the product of such work. What’s most startling is that the worlds they rescue are of the surprisingly recent past. Which means that even in this age of hyperdocumentation and rapid technological advancement, evanescence is always a threat.Roger Miret with Todd Huber, ‘Agnostic Front — With Time: The Roger Miret Archives’Roger Miret and Todd Huber; via American Made KustomThe early years of Agnostic Front, the scene-shaping New York hardcore band, were chaos incarnate: a Lower East Side life of ramshackle apartments, rumbles on the street and birthing an explosive, aggravated, pugnacious new sound. Somehow, amid all this, the frontman Roger Miret — who was picked to join the band thanks to his ferocious behavior in the pit — managed to hold on to everything. “Agnostic Front — With Time: The Roger Miret Archives” is part photo essay, and part documentation of ephemera primarily from the band’s tumultuous breakout period from 1982-86.There are oodles of fliers from bills shared with Reagan Youth, Murphy’s Law, Suicidal Tendencies, Youth of Today and more. Some were scrawled by hand and some pasted pastiche-style; some featured illustrated skinheads in suspenders, tight pants and stomper boots; and some memorably gory ones were mailed in from an Oxnard, Calif., illustrator named Chuy.Miret’s collection also includes margarine-yellow T-shirts, test presses of the band’s earliest recordings and show announcements from the Village Voice listings pages. And brief personal recollections from Miret and his bandmates capture the mayhem of the time: getting shows shut down by the police, then slapping stickers on their cars; and assembling copies of the debut Agnostic Front EP by hand, cutting covers from a large roll one by one and gluing them to order after shows.‘Liquid Sky’via Emperor Go!We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hackers Stole $635,000 in Taylor Swift Ticket Scheme, Queens D.A. Says

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      Two people stand accused of taking hundreds of tickets from StubHub to redirect them to others who resold them, prosecutors said.Two people accused of stealing and reselling more than 900 tickets to the Taylor Swift Eras Tour and other marquee events are facing criminal charges for their role in the scheme, New York prosecutors said.Several people were involved in hacking into the computer system of the online ticket-sales platform StubHub starting in the summer of 2022, the Queens district attorney, Melinda Katz, said in a news release on Monday. They then resold the tickets on the same platform for a profit, which added up to $635,000.Tyrone Rose, 20, of Kingston, Jamaica, and Shamara P. Simmons, 31, of the New York City neighborhood of Jamaica, Queens, were arrested and arraigned on Feb. 27 in Criminal Court in Queens. The lawyers listed for them in court documents did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Rose and Ms. Simmons were both charged with second-degree grand larceny, first-degree computer tampering, fourth-degree conspiracy and fourth-degree computer tampering.Mr. Rose worked for an outsourcing company in Kingston, Sutherland Global Services, which was contracted by StubHub, according to the criminal complaint.Mr. Rose and a co-worker, who has not been arrested or publicly identified, used their access to part of StubHub’s ticketing system to find a way into a secure part of the network that they were not authorized to use, where information about ticket orders was stored.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: With ‘Fidelio,’ the Met Opera Does What It Does Best

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      The Met, a magnet for star singers, flexed its muscles to stack the cast of Beethoven’s only opera, with Lise Davidsen in the title role.Opera houses tend to have their specialties. They might be havens for adventurous directors or unusual repertoire, for grand spectacles or Baroque chamber dramas. The Metropolitan Opera, at its finest, is a destination for voices.The Met is a glamorously storied house with a welcoming audience and undeniable prestige. It hasn’t always been quick to cast today’s rising singers, but when it does, it holds on to them, sometimes even bending its repertory to match theirs.And occasionally, the Met will gather its favorites in a single opera, assembling a vocal all-star team. This is what the company does best, and it can be thrilling to witness, as in the revival of Beethoven’s “Fidelio” that opened on Tuesday.This “Fidelio” isn’t just excellently sung, including by the Met’s sensitive chorus: Jürgen Flimm’s fresh-as-ever staging from 2000 is also led with clarity, drive and insight by the conductor Susanna Mälkki. It’s just a pity that the revival is so brief, with only four more performances through March 15.These performances will also be the last of the season for the soprano Lise Davidsen. With a remarkably luminous sound in Wagner and Strauss roles, she has been a pillar of the Met’s recent casting. But she announced in January that she was pregnant with twins and would take a break from singing after “Fidelio.” (She is set to be back at the Met next year to star in “Tristan und Isolde.”)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Chicago Jazz

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      Jazz has experienced a meaningful resurgence in popularity over the past 15 years or so, especially among younger listeners. What’s driving that? You could make the case that there is a particular hunger, now that so much of life is lived in the digital cloud, for the messy and untamed energy of jazz, and for its way of putting a live process on display. And if that’s the case, then it makes a lot of sense that Chicago jazz has been at the forefront of this recent surge. Chicago has always represented a particularly rootsy, physical and — yes — windy ideal in jazz. So perhaps it’s an especially heady antidote to that sense of digital disappearance.The Chicago jazz sound amounts to a sum of the city’s Black histories: In it you can usually hear something of the snowy, clamoring traffic in Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” from 1940; the yowl of Howlin’ Wolf’s electric guitar in a 1950s blues bar; the drummers and dancers pounding out rhythms at one of Kelan Philip Cohran’s gatherings at the 63rd Street Beach in the late 1960s; even the antiracist street protests of the 1990s.The Windy City was an important musical outpost from the start of the recorded era, when many blues and jazz musicians moved there from the South and became stars. It’s also known as a cradle of the avant-garde, thanks to institutions like Sun Ra’s Arkestra, established there in the early 1950s, and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a seed-sowing collective that celebrates its 60th anniversary this spring. Today, the city remains at the forefront of contemporary jazz thanks to artists like Nicole Mitchell, Kahil El’Zabar, Makaya McCraven, Tomeka Reid, Jeff Parker and Isaiah Collier, each a latter-day A.A.C.M. affiliate who has springboarded into a leading role on the international jazz circuit. And the label International Anthem, founded 12 years ago in Chicago, has become one of the biggest success stories in the indie-jazz business.We asked writers, musicians and other linchpins of the Chicago scene to tell us what tracks they would play to make a newcomer fall in love with the distinctive but multifaceted sound of Chicago jazz. Read on, listen to their picks in our playlists, and if you have favorites of your own, drop them in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Ernest Khabeer Dawkins’ New Horizons Ensemble, ‘Mean Ameen’Dee Alexander, vocalistErnest Khabeer Dawkins leading the New Horizons Ensemble.Jacob Blickenstaff for The New York TimesThis recording, featuring some of the stalwarts of Chicago’s improvised music scene, should tantalize the palate of any listener new to creative music. The music is exploratory, while at the same time being funky and accessible. This Ernest Dawkins composition is a homage to Chicago’s own Ameen Muhammad, who died in 2003 at 48. Muhammad, a dear friend of Dawkins, was not only a renowned trumpeter and composer but also a highly admired and respected educator; “Mean Ameen” gained international notoriety over the course of his brief career. Ernest Khabeer Dawkins is one of those rare individuals who manages to balance a passion for community, mentorship and art. For me, this piece represents the saxophonist and bandleader at his best, through a beautiful dedication to a dear friend.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Wizard of Vinyl Is in Kansas

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      Hydraulic machines whooshed in a sprawling Kansas factory as melted vinyl squeezed through molded stampers like pancake batter, turning out fresh new albums about once a minute. Workers inspected the grooves for imperfections, fed album jackets into a shrink-wrapper and stacked the finished products on tall dollies for shipping.Acoustic Sounds occupies a hodgepodge of squat industrial buildings in Salina, a city of about 50,000 near the geographic center of the 48 contiguous states, where grain elevators and a gigantic frozen pizza plant jut out from the flat plains landscape. Over the last 15 years, this unassuming complex has become a leading manufacturer of the music industry’s most surprising hot format: vinyl LPs.Pacing the floor was Chad Kassem, the company’s founder, who was bit by the audiophile bug as a 22-year-old who’d run into trouble with the law and now, four decades later, is a top player in the booming business of vinyl. Speaking in a slow drawl, but moving quickly on the ground, Kassem, 62, explained his obsession with making the best-sounding records possible — a never-ending pursuit that involves hunting down decades-old master tapes and making minute adjustments to tweak the temperature of an embryonic wad of polyvinyl chloride by a degree or two.Chad Kassem in his studio at Acoustic Sounds, where he keeps two turntables by his desk to check records.David Robert Elliott for The New York TimesThe control room of a recording studio operated by Acoustic Sounds at a former church in downtown Salina that Kassem bought in 1996.David Robert Elliott for The New York Times“What I’m all about,” he said, “is saving the world from bad sound.”Introduced in 1948, vinyl LPs seemed destined for extinction by the early 2000s, if not before, as the music industry went digital. But over the last decade or so, the format has been reborn, embraced by fans as a physical totem in an age of digital ephemera, and by increasing ranks of analog loyalists who swear by its sound. Today, the symbol of the vinyl craze may be a rainbow of collectible LPs by pop stars like Taylor Swift or Billie Eilish, which young fans snap up by the millions (though many may never be played). But on a chilly recent afternoon, Acoustic Sounds’ assembly lines were humming with albums by the likes of John Coltrane, Steely Dan and Lightnin’ Hopkins, in deluxe packages that go for up to $150 apiece.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Chris Jasper, Who Helped Revitalize the Isley Brothers, Dies at 73

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      A classically trained pianist turned songwriter, he was a cornerstone of the soul group’s sound during its fertile second act in the 1970s.Chris Jasper, a Juilliard-trained keyboardist, singer and songwriter who brought an expansive musical vocabulary to the long-running R&B group the Isley Brothers, helping push them into a new hit-making era in the 1970s and ’80s with singles like “That Lady” and “Fight the Power,” died on Feb. 23. He was 73.His death was announced in a statement on his Facebook account, which noted that he had been diagnosed with cancer in December. The statement did not say where he died.Mr. Jasper, who was also a producer, started his decade-long run as an official member of the Isley Brothers in 1973. He added musical complexity to the long-running R&B group as it took on a richer, funkier style for a new decade.Looking back on the Isley Brothers’ sound in a 2020 interview with Rockin’ Hot Radio, a Delaware-based station, he said, “It’s R&B, of course,” but added that he borrowed “voicings that were used in classical music, and in particular the Romantic period, with composers like Debussy, even 20th-century composers like Gershwin.”Mr. Jasper, far left, with other members of the Isley Brothers in a mid-1970s publicity photo. Seated are Ronald, left, and Rudolph Isley; standing are, from left, Marvin, O’Kelly and Ernie Isley. T-Neck RecordsDuring his tenure, the group lodged more than a dozen singles on the Billboard Hot 100 and more than a dozen albums on the Billboard 200 — six of them in the Top 10, including “The Heat Is On,” which reached No. 1 in 1975.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Music Took Over This Year’s Oscars

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeIn seemingly every crevice of the 97th Academy Awards, there was music, or a reminder of it. It was a song from a nominated film being performed, like Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande delivering one of their “Wicked” duets; or it was the best score winner Daniel Blumberg, a onetime indie-rock hero now on a second musical act; or it was the musical sections of the host Conan O’Brien’s stand-up bits.And even when there was no music performed, there was music in the air: Timothée Chalamet, who did not take the stage, nominated for the role of Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown”; nods to how music functioned in the night’s big winner, “Anora,” and in the polarizing nominee “Emilia Pérez”; and the appearance of Mick Jagger, gamely making an age joke at his own expense.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about how the Oscars incorporated music into this year’s ceremony, in manners both smooth and bumpy; whether music made for movies can ever be cool; and whether O’Brien should be making jokes about Drake and Kendrick Lamar.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterConnect 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.Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. More

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      My Favorite Concerts I Saw This Winter

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      Hear music from Father John Misty, Mustafa and other artists our critic caught onstage so far this year.Father John MistyEmma McIntyre/Getty Images for AbaDear listeners,Even during this long, often bitterly cold winter, I sometimes made it out of my apartment — please clap — to see live music. To commemorate this monumental human achievement, today I’m offering you a playlist of some of the best artists I’ve caught onstage so far this year.They include a one-woman band with a flair for electronic wizardry (Time Wharp), a young poet turned songwriter with a gorgeously heavy-hearted voice (Mustafa) and a sharp satirist who knows exactly when to get unexpectedly sincere (Father John Misty). I intend for these occasional reports from live shows to become a new recurring Amplifier feature, so look out for more of them in the near future — once the weather turns temperate enough that I am compelled to leave my home even more frequently. Spring: Please hurry!I spent a hundred bucks on gas, baby, let’s just have a good time,LindsayListen along while you read.1. Father John Misty: “She Cleans Up”Last Wednesday, the singer-songwriter Father John Misty played Manhattan’s storied Beacon Theater for the first time. Toward the end of the sold-out show, he told the crowd he wanted to commemorate the occasion with a tribute: “Here’s five minutes from Jerry Seinfeld’s set from his Beacon run last year.” Classic Father John Misty banter — and not true at all, since he immediately launched into another of his own wryly incisive tunes. FJM (whose real name is Joshua Tillman) certainly has a way with a Harry Nilsson-style ballad, as he demonstrated throughout the Beacon set, but one of my favorite moments of the night came when he played this verbose rocker from his latest album, the wide-ranging 2024 release “Mahashmashana.” Elaine Benes dance optional.▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube2. Time Wharp: “Lupron”It remains by far the most imaginative, technically impressive live cover I’ve seen so far this year: One late January night at Berlin, a small venue in the East Village, the experimental musician Kaye Loggins, who records as Time Wharp, used loop pedals and a distorted electric guitar to build a completely singular instrumental rendition of Joni Mitchell’s “Coyote.” You will, unfortunately, just have to take my word for it, since that seems to have been a one-off performance. But this luminous, hypnotic track from Time Wharp’s excellent 2022 album “Spiro World” gives a sense of Loggins’s style and her inventive virtuosity.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More