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      50 Rappers, 50 Stories: Behind the Scenes

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThis week, The New York Times published 50 Rappers, 50 Stories, a collection of oral histories gathered from hip-hop artists across generations, regions and styles. It includes testimonials from superstars like Lil Wayne, 50 Cent, Cardi B and Eminem; local heroes like Project Pat, Uncle Luke, Bun B and Krayzie Bone; and outlier champions like Trippie Redd, stic, Slug and Boots Riley.Taken together, the interviews show a genre that started local and became global, was cohesive and then fragmented. And yet some common themes echo throughout — a sense of outsider ambition, a restless commitment to innovation, a reverence for craft.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the making of the project, the common threads uniting the subjects’ stories across generations, and the joys of listening to artists rap along to some of their favorite songs from childhood.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterElena Bergeron, an assistant sports editor at The New York Times and a contributor to the 50 Rappers projectKeith Murphy, a music journalist and contributor to the 50 Rappers projectConnect 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 Thrilling, Rediscovered Nina Simone Set, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Snoh Aalegra, DeYarmond Edison, Explosions in the Sky 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.Nina Simone, ‘Mississippi Goddam’Just a week after performing at the historically Black Tougaloo College in Jackson, Miss., supporting James Meredith’s March Against Fear, Nina Simone was on fire as she strode onstage to play for a very different audience at the Newport Jazz Festival on July 2, 1966. Her interactions with the bourgeois New Englanders at Newport were hardly warm: In the middle of an acid-rinsed version of “Blues for Mama,” she dismisses them — “I guess you ain’t ready for that” — and later she hushes them: “Shut up, shut up.” But she pours every ounce of vitriol she’s got into the performance, especially on “Mississippi Goddam.” She’d first released the song in 1964, and two years later it felt as topical as ever. Meredith had just been shot while marching across Mississippi, and unrest was overtaking redlined Black neighborhoods across the country. At Newport, she amends one of the verses to address the oppression of Los Angeles’s Black community: “Alabama’s got me so upset/And Watts has made me lose my rest/Everybody knows about Mississippi, goddamn!” The entire Newport performance is now available for the first time as an album titled “You’ve Got to Learn.” It’s spellbinding, heartbreaking stuff, reminding us just how much Simone would still be lamenting today. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOSnoh Aalegra, ‘Be My Summer’Snoh Aalegra sings about not being able to let go in the forlorn, slowly undulating “Be My Summer.” She confesses, “I can’t change how I feel/Tried moving on but I’m right here where we left off.” The song arrives with a tangle of voices — some harmonizing, a few straying — and they return in choruses that are never quite unanimous, hinting at misgivings behind her pleas to “protect me from the rain.” JON PARELESAma Lou, ‘Silence’“Bring me silence till you start hearing sounds,” the English R&B songwriter Ama Lou instructs in a song that veers between sorrow and spite. The production isn’t silent but it feels sparse and hollow. Her vocals pour out over two chords implied by sustained bass notes and a hollow, stop-start drumbeat. With bursts of vocal melody that hint at prime Janet Jackson, Ama Lou mixes accusations and regrets, making it’s clear that she wasn’t the betrayer. “I believe I was convinced that you were actually all right,” she sings, quivering with disbelief. PARELESBlur, ‘The Ballad’“I just looked into my life and all I saw was that you’re not coming back,” an exquisitely mopey Damon Albarn sings at the beginning of “The Ballad,” a clear highlight from Blur’s new album, “The Ballad of Darren.” Lush backing vocals from the guitarist Graham Coxon and punchy percussion from the drummer Dave Rowntree provide a buoyancy, and layers of sonic details give “The Ballad” a kind of dreamy, weightless atmosphere. LINDSAY ZOLADZbeabadoobee, ‘The Way Things Go’The Filipino-English songwriter beabadoobee keeps a light touch as she whisper-sings about crumbling relationships like the one in “The Way Things Go.” Bouncy, folky guitar picking accompanies her as she claims the romance is only “a distant memory I used to know.” But later she gets down to accusations — “Didn’t think you’d ever stoop so low” — while a faraway orchestra with scurrying flutes floats in around her, a fantasy backdrop for her pointed nonchalance. PARELESDeYarmond Edison, ‘Epoch’Before Bon Iver, Justin Vernon was a member of DeYarmond Edison, which also included Brad Cook, Phil Cook and Joe Westerlund, who would form the band Megafaun. “Epoch,” recorded in 2005 and 2006, is the title track of a boxed set due in August and a harbinger of Bon Iver. It’s a resigned, measured ballad, with cryptic lyrics contemplating mortality and technology: “Out with the new in with the old/The wavelength rests at its node.” And behind the stately melody, the folky acoustic instruments that open the song — a banjo, a tambourine — face surreal echoes and incursions of noise. PARELESThe Mountain Goats, ‘Clean Slate’In 2002, the Mountain Goats — then the solo project of John Darnielle — released one of the most beloved albums in its vast catalog, “All Hail West Texas,” a collection of wrenching character studies bleated into a boombox accompanied by just an urgently played acoustic guitar. More than two decades later, and now with a full band behind him, Darnielle will revisit those same characters on the forthcoming album “Jenny from Thebes.” The first single, the lively “Clean Slate,” suggests that he won’t be returning to the previous album’s lo-fi sound; the new track has a rock operatic grandeur and a ’70s AM radio brightness. The lyrics are full of closely observed desperation and stubborn glimmers of hope — which is to say they’re classic Darnielle. “It’s never light outside yet when they climb into the van,” he sings. “Remember at your peril, forget the ones you can.” ZOLADZGrupo Frontera and Ke Personajes, ‘Ojitos Rojos’There are worse misfortunes than having no space left on a cellphone because it’s filled with photos of an ex. But that’s the situation in “Ojitos Rojos” (“Little Red Eyes”), the latest collaboration by the well-connected Mexican American band Grupo Frontera, from Texas — this time with another cumbia band, Ke Personajes from Argentina. Over hooting accordion and a clip-clop cumbia beat, the singers trade plaints about maxed-out memory capacity and lingering, near-stalker-ish devotion: “Although you tell me no and deceive yourself with another baby/I know I’m the love of your life,” sings Emanuel Noir of Ke Personajes. Is it heartache, or would cloud storage help? PARELESTravis Scott, Bad Bunny, the Weeknd, ‘K-Pop’One beat, three big names and an SEO-optimized title are the makings of “K-Pop,” a calculated round of boasting and come-ons from Travis Scott, Bad Bunny and the Weeknd. The track, produced by behind-the-scenes hitmakers — Bynx, Boi-1da, Illangelo and Jahaan Sweet — hints at crisp Nigerian Afrobeats, and it spurs three distinct top-line strategies. Travis Scott is quick, percussive and melodically narrow; Big Bunny leaps and groans; the Weeknd is sustained, moody and on brand, crooning “Mix the drugs with the pain” and promising vigorous, alienated sex. As in K-pop, hooks are flaunted, then tossed aside when a new one arrives. PARELESExplosions in the Sky, ‘Ten Billion People’The Texas band Explosions in the Sky has been playing instrumental rock — “post-rock” — since the late 1990s, relying on patterns, textures and dynamics to make up for the absence of lyrics. “Ten Billion People” is one of its perfectly paced wordless narratives: clockwork and skeletal to start, swelling with keyboards and guitars, seesawing with stereo dueling drum kits, pausing the beat and then rebuilding toward something more majestic and reassuring. It’s both minimalist and dramatic. PARELES More

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      Malaysia Halts Festival After Kiss Between The 1975 Members

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      The episode comes as rights groups have warned of growing intolerance against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in the country, where homosexuality is a crime.Malaysia’s government halted a music festival in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, on Saturday, a day after the frontman of the British pop rock band The 1975 kissed a male bandmate onstage and criticized the country’s anti-L.G.B.T. laws.“There will be no compromise against any party that challenges, disparages and violates Malaysian laws,” Fahmi Fadzil, the country’s communications minister, said on Twitter after meeting the organizers of the Good Vibes Festival, a three-day event set to run until Sunday.The 1975 have also been banned from performing in Malaysia, said a government committee that oversees filming and performances by foreigners.Homosexuality is a crime in Muslim-majority Malaysia. Rights groups have warned of growing intolerance against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.In videos posted on social media late on Friday, Matty Healy, the band’s frontman, was seen kissing the bassist, Ross MacDonald, after criticizing Malaysia’s stance against homosexuality in a profanity-laden speech to the festival audience.“I made a mistake,” he said. “When we were booking shows, I wasn’t looking into it.” He added that he did not understand the purpose “of inviting The 1975 to a country and then telling us who we can have sex with.”Mr. Healy later cut short the set, telling the crowd: “All right, we’ve got to go. We just got banned from Kuala Lumpur, I’ll see you later.”The band could not immediately be reached for comment. Mr. Healy had faced criticism for kissing a male fan at a 2019 concert in the United Arab Emirates, which also has laws against homosexual acts, according to news media reports.The festival’s organizer, Future Sound Asia, apologized for the show’s cancellation after Mr. Healy’s “controversial conduct and remarks.” It said The 1975’s management had promised that the band would obey performance guidelines.“Regrettably, Healy did not honor these assurances,” it said in a statement.Mr. Fahmi, the communications minister, said Malaysia was committed to supporting the development of creative industries and freedom of expression.“However, never touch on the sensitivities of the community, especially those that are against the traditions and values ​​of the local culture,” he said.The government in March introduced stricter guidelines, including on dress code and conduct, for foreign acts coming to Malaysia, citing the need to protect sensitivities, the news media reported.Friday’s episode ignited an uproar on Malaysian social media, including among some members of the L.G.B.T. community, who accused Mr. Healy of “performative activism” and said his action was likely to expose the community to more stigma and discrimination.The 1975 are on Sunday scheduled to play at a festival in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, where a recent L.G.B.T. event was canceled amid security threats. More

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      Nico Muhly Modernizes Monteverdi With ‘Irreverent Veneration’

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      When a new production of Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo” premieres at Santa Fe Opera on July 29, something about it might seem slightly odd.Sure, there will be the usual Orfeo, in this case the tenor Rolando Villazón, and a familiar sight at the podium in the conductor Harry Bicket. If the staging by Yuval Sharon, one of the most creative opera directors at work today, provokes a thought or two — well, that is only to be expected by now.No, what might surprise people most is the sound emerging from the orchestra pit. This will not be Monteverdi as we have heard him; there will be nary a period instrument in sight, neither a harpsichord nor a sackbut, a theorbo nor a cornett. It will be, rather, Monteverdi as newly orchestrated by Nico Muhly and brought right into the contemporary.“It’s a piece of music I’ve always loved, and I love Monteverdi,” said Muhly, a composer whose opera credits include “Marnie” and “Two Boys.” Accepting the Santa Fe commission, to him, “seemed like a really easy ‘yes.’”Santa Fe’s production, titled “Orfeo,” is not intended as a grand revanchist blow against the period-instrument movement that has claimed early music as its own for decades. Bicket, after all, is the music director of the English Concert, once in the vanguard of that movement and still one of its eminent groups. And Muhly was offered the assignment because his love for Byrd, Tallis and the like is not just avowed, but audibly present in much of his own music.Yuval Sharon, left, the director of Santa Fe’s “Orfeo,” and Muhly.Brad Trone for The New York TimesWhat Santa Fe’s “Orfeo” does speak to, though, are the artistic opportunities that are starting to open up as the first generation of period-instrument pioneers pass from the scene, the early-music movement confronts an uncertain future and all the old polemics about how works ought to be performed start to seem passé.At any rate, doing “Orfeo” in the way that Nikolaus Harnoncourt, John Eliot Gardiner and Jordi Savall have would be impossible at Santa Fe. The company has a resident orchestra that uses modern instruments, and even if period instruments could be brought to the desert for the summer, “the size of the building,” Bicket said, “means we would probably have to have, like, five theorbos and three harps and all these harpsichords, which in an open-air theater is not really practical.”Typical repertory companies, too, aren’t able to present the work as it has come to be heard — which is not just a shame, but also a detriment to our collective understanding of opera itself.“It’s not appropriate to call it the first opera, because we know it was not the first opera,” Sharon said of “Orfeo.” “Opera was not a genre at this point, when this piece was created. But in many respects, I think it makes perfect sense to call it the first opera, because it set the benchmark for what we look to opera to create for us.”This orchestration, Muhly explained, therefore aims to make the work more practical to perform in standard houses, beyond Santa Fe. “I’m not doing anything crazy to it,” he said. “It’s just about it not being this unwieldy thing.”COMPOSERS HAVE LONG been interested in reorchestrating “Orfeo” for contemporary ears; in its treatment of the Orpheus myth, it is, fundamentally, an opera about the power of music.Sharon said of “Orfeo” that “it set the benchmark for what we look to opera to create for us.”Brad Trone for The New York TimesThe conductor Henry Bicket, who said that in preparing this new production, “We agreed that it would be Monteverdi’s ‘Orfeo.’”Brad Trone for The New York TimesThe work, with a libretto by Alessandro Striggio, premiered in 1607. But, according to the musicologist Nigel Fortune, it was largely forgotten after Monteverdi’s death, in 1643, until the late 19th century. Then, Vincent d’Indy, Carl Orff, Ottorino Respighi and Bruno Maderna all tried their hand at a reorchestration. For the Maggio Musicale in Florence in 1984, Luciano Berio convened a quintet of young composers — Betty Olivero and Luca Francesconi among them — to rewrite “Orfeo,” employing electronic tapes and even a rock band. By then, however, the period-instrument revolution was in full flow; when Paul Hindemith presented a scholarly “attempt to reconstruct the premiere” in Vienna in 1954, Harnoncourt and other members of his recently formed Concentus Musicus Wien played in the ensemble.To Bicket, none of those versions, or others, seemed appropriate for use at Santa Fe; they involved cuts, or were too of their own time. But since Santa Fe has had a tradition of presenting a premiere each year, he explained, a new production seemed an ideal opportunity to commission “a young, contemporary composer to say what this century has to say about this music.”And Muhly is an admirer of “Orfeo.” “There are so many moments of slyness, where what you’re getting in terms of plot and what you’re getting in terms of emotional content is coming from literally one tiny little harmonic move, like one strange flat,” he said. “Also, there’s very traditional word painting. You go up to heaven, and he goes up the scale. It’s this wonderful combination of trickery and things that are quite obvious and theatrical.”A rendering of Sharon’s production for Santa Fe.Matthew Johnson & Alex Schweder, visual environment designersOne of the reasons that so many composers have felt able to try their hand at orchestrating or adapting “Orfeo” is that Monteverdi left them the opportunity. Even the most conscientious, scholarly performer of “Orfeo” has to make choices about how to play it, because scores that were published early in the 17th century omit crucial details, especially in the continuo parts that comprise so much of the work.“All of it is a sketch, because there was no international music scene,” Bicket said. “Composers did not have to write information into the score, apart from a vocal line and a bass line and maybe a bit of harmony here or there, because there was an understanding, a style, which was part of being a musician in those days.”“When I do this with my own players in the English Concert,” Bicket added, “we do read the notes, but we are actually reading the rhetoric — and the heart of it is finding the rhetorical gesture.”Many of the conductors who have performed or recorded “Orfeo” have chosen to create their own editions; listen to some of the historically informed recordings of the work, Muhly pointed out, and you can hear divergences far more marked than in period accounts of, say, Beethoven symphonies, sometimes on matters as fundamental as cadences.Bicket leading a rehearsal of “Orfeo.”Brad Trone for The New York TimesThere is therefore no one, true “Orfeo” that anybody can be faithful to, and that invites creativity. For Sharon, a production of it can sit easily within his interest in how operas from the past can be recreated today. It’s an urge that — beyond his lauded work with the Detroit Opera and the Industry, the company he founded in Los Angeles — has seen him stage parts of “Götterdämmerung” as a drive-through and led him to present the four acts of “La Bohème” in reverse.“We’re all making a guess as to what it must have been like to have done this piece,” Sharon said of the Monteverdi. “We have to interpret it; we have to decide. What instruments are going to play this? What is the proper performance style for this? There’s no such thing, there’s just the humans that are bringing it to life at that particular moment in time, needing to take this blueprint that Monteverdi and Striggio left us and interpret it in our own way, and for our own time. So I think that makes it eternally an opportunity for constant reimagination.”Even so, Muhly asked for, and Bicket laid down, some ground rules. “We agreed that it would be Monteverdi’s ‘Orfeo,’” Bicket said, and it was stipulated that the vocal and the bass lines should remain unchanged from the primary source. Bicket wrote out a vocal score, filling in the harmonies that Monteverdi left out, noting where chords could be restated or shift in other ways.Otherwise, though, Muhly was left to translate the material into his own compositional language, which he had come to in dialogue with early music and even early instruments; among his published scores is a “Berceuse With Seven Variations” for solo theorbo.“I think because music of the past features so heavily in my own, original music,” he said, “I stepped to this with a form of irreverent veneration.”Muhly described Monteverdi’s score as “this wonderful combination of trickery and things that are quite obvious and theatrical.”Brad Trone for The New York TimesThat’s not to say the process was easy. While it was in some ways simpler than writing another opera of his own, Muhly said, in others it was harder, requiring him to innovate and defer at the same time. He has adapted the continuo part mostly for a small ensemble of alto flute, English horn, clarinet, bass clarinet and harp, and voiced the figured bass in octaves far higher and lower than tradition would suggest. Some of the trickier problems involved echoing the way in which Monteverdi shrinks and expands his orchestration, and making the underworld distinct, yet not “cartoonishly evil.”But what Muhly argues against, and confesses to being “a little bristly about,” is the perception that “a new take or a new interpretation of something in some way erases, or is in conflict, with the previous interpretation.” His version of “Orfeo” is not intended to supplant those that have come before it, still less to render early-music takes on the material redundant. Far from it.“You know what would be great, literally what would be fantastic?” Muhly said. “Let’s just say someone saw this thing and was like, ‘Wow, I’m totally fascinated by this piece,’ goes back and gets any of the period recordings, and it’s a gateway drug that way. Similarly, if someone hears it and is like, ‘I hated that so much, I really want to hear the original again,’ and then they go to the original again, that’s also good. I think that’s just fine.”The more Monteverdi, in the view of Muhly and his collaborators, the better.“It’s really not about me; it’s about you having a great night at the theater,” Muhly said. “I want the music to serve the drama. And that’s always how it should be.” More

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      Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga: How an Unlikely Pair Soared Together

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      The crooner and the pop star seemed like unlikely collaborators when they joined up in 2014. But the two masters of reinvention inspired and bolstered each other’s careers.It’s still one of the most impressive flexes I’ve ever seen a musician pull off live — and at the age of 88, no less.In 2015, during the third of four sold-out shows at Radio City Music Hall, Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga were sharing a bill, promoting their chart-topping, cross-generational 2014 duets album, “Cheek to Cheek.” They had a light, snappy chemistry on the songs they sang together, but the best parts of the night were their solo sets, each inviting their respective fan bases — Bennett’s tasteful traditionalists and Gaga’s sartorially zany but spiritually sincere Little Monsters — into the other’s world.For most of the concert, they’d been playing with a full band and orchestra, but for one number during his own set, Bennett summoned a single guitarist to join him in the snug radius of a spotlight. He told us the song was dedicated to his “best friend, Frank Sinatra,” and launched into a velvety rendition of “Fly Me to the Moon,” holding the microphone down at his side rather than bringing it to his lips. A few lines in, he set the mic down atop a piano and sang the rest without any amplification at all. The entire venue was suspended in a hush stillness, and Bennett’s voice was so strong and clear that you could hear every crystalline note, every enunciated lyric, even in the cheap seats.It was spellbinding, and so quintessentially Tony Bennett: the unshowy elegance, the inevitable name-dropping and, above all, the ease with which he suddenly transformed from the rat-a-tat every-crooner into a phenomenally gifted belter who could project like an opera singer.In August 2021, while battling Alzheimer’s disease, Bennett, who died on Friday at 96, made his final public appearance on that very same stage, again with Lady Gaga. He once again demonstrated strength and resilience, this time by simply performing at all. A poignant “60 Minutes” segment captured Bennett’s struggles in rehearsals but his ultimate triumph when he took the stage. In run-throughs, Gaga said, “He called me ‘sweetheart.’ But I wasn’t sure he knew who I was.” She witnessed a startling transformation, though, anytime the band struck the opening notes of another song and Bennett began to sing.“When the music comes on, something happens to him,” she said. “He knows exactly what he’s doing.”Here was the final act of an unlikely collaboration that had changed the trajectory of each musician’s career. When Gaga first linked up with Bennett for “Cheek to Cheek,” some skeptics saw it as nothing more than a savvy distraction, a way for a wild pop instigator to rebrand as a throwback jazz singer in the wake of her first major flop, the overblown (if, in hindsight, somewhat underrated) 2013 album “Artpop.” But the gusto, reverence and musical intelligence she brought to her work with Bennett undoubtedly won her fans and respect from an older generation of listeners. As I was filing out of Radio City that night in 2015, I couldn’t keep track of how many people I’d heard muttering versions of, “I had no idea that Lady Gaga could actually sing!”Bennett was no stranger to cannily timed reinvention, either. He stormed MTV when he was in his late 60s, recording an “Unplugged” album that featured collaborations with Elvis Costello and K.D. Lang, and that eventually won him a Grammy for album of the year. He sang with more eclectic and, in some cases, even younger musicians on his series of “Duets” albums, from 2006 to 2012. He found a kindred spirit in Amy Winehouse, but their connection was short-lived. Their great rendition of “Body and Soul,” for “Duets II,” was the last thing she ever recorded. It was released as a single posthumously, on what would have been Winehouse’s 28th birthday.Gaga satisfied Bennett’s desire to stay active and involved with a younger generation of musicians, and her professional stability made her into the most committed of his duet partners. But Gaga has also said that Bennett’s mentorship “saved” her life. The then-octogenarian’s example allowed her to think beyond the successes or failures of the present moment, and to value a musical career’s longevity. “I was so sad. I couldn’t sleep. I felt dead,” Gaga said of the time before “Cheek to Cheek.” “And then I spent a lot of time with Tony. He wanted nothing but my friendship and my voice.”It’s not that their voices or energies always blended particularly well — Gaga brought an antsy theatricality to their collaborations, while Bennett’s voice seemed to get even more laid-back and free of artifice as he aged — but the mutual admiration they shared was genuine enough to open the minds of their respective audiences and generational cohorts. With their Grammy-winning 2021 album of Cole Porter covers, “Love for Sale,” Bennett seemed to be passing the baton to Gaga, deeming her capable of continuing his lifelong task of keeping the Great American Songbook alive. And Gaga, in turn, was telling her Little Monsters to do their homework and appreciate American popular music’s rich history.One of their last, and most bittersweet, moments of mutual respect came during that 2021 Radio City show, forever immortalized in a “60 Minutes” clip that has been making the rounds on social media on Friday. After weeks of calling her “sweetheart,” the name finally came back to him when they were — where else? — onstage. “Whoa!” Bennett cried, to his duet partner’s obvious delight. “Lady Gaga!” More

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      The Amiable, Unswerving Tony Bennett

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      In an 80-year career, he stuck with one mission: illuminating songs he cherished.Has there ever been a more purely likable pop figure than Tony Bennett?Throughout a career that began in the 1940s, Bennett, who died on Friday at 96, maintained one mission, amiably and unswervingly. He didn’t chase trends; he didn’t get defensive, either. Instead, he let listeners — and, in recent decades, much younger duet partners — come to him, generation after generation. He welcomed them to a repertoire of songs he admired, knew intimately and was happy to share.Bennett sang vintage pop standards, the pre-rock canon sometimes called the Great American Songbook. They’re songs mostly about grown-up love, about courtship, yearning and fulfillment, with elegant rhymes and ingenious melodies that invite a little improvisation. He recorded with orchestras, with major jazz musicians, with big bands and, for more than 50 years, with the pianist and arranger Ralph Sharon and his trio. He was always unplugged — a simple fact that cannily recharged his career when he played “MTV Unplugged” in 1994.Bennett’s voice made the technical challenges of his songs evaporate. As a young man, he showed off his near-operatic range and dynamic control in early recordings like “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” from 1950. But he wasn’t an old-fashioned crooner; his sense of swing was just as strong. And he understood that pure virtuosity can keep listeners at a distance. He soon revealed a grain in his voice that made it earthy and approachable, downplaying his precision. Very often, there was a jovial savvy in his phrasing; he’d punch out a note ahead of the beat, as if he couldn’t wait to sing it.Bennett onstage at Carnegie Hall in 1976. His long career had its share of commercial ups and downs and transient record-company pressures.D. Gorton/The New York TimesThere was always an easy strength, a self-confident baritone underpinning, in his singing. When he had a big band behind him, he was easily brassy enough to hold his own. But he didn’t steamroller through his songs. He was ever attentive to lyrics. His signature song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” has two melodic peaks near the end. The first is on the line “When I come home”; he sustains “home” and tapers it off with longing in his vibrato, as if he’s feeling the distance. Soon afterward comes “Your golden sun will shine for me,” and he sings “sun” as if he knows he’ll be basking in it.Bennett’s long, long career had its share of commercial ups and downs and transient record-company pressures. As the 1960s ended, he was persuaded to record recent pop hits on the album “Tony Sings the Great Hits of Today!,” though he maintained some dignity by putting lush orchestral arrangements behind songs like George Harrison’s “Something.”After changing labels — and, in the mid-1970s, starting his own short-lived but artistically rewarding label, Improv — Bennett returned to what he did best: singing standards with musicians who brought out their jazz possibilities. Two albums he made with the harmony-probing pianist Bill Evans — “The Tony Bennett/Bill Evans Album” (1975) and “Together Again” (1977), both just piano-and-voice duets — are luminous testaments to the way Bennett never took familiar songs for granted.He was 67 when he recorded “MTV Unplugged” with Sharon’s trio and a guest appearance by Elvis Costello. It was a shrewd and satisfying move; Bennett became pop’s cool grandpa. Rock-hating Grammy voters seized their chance to give him his second album of the year award (after “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”), and current rock and pop performers embraced the chance to sing with him and learn from him. Duet albums (with K.D. Lang, Diana Krall and Lady Gaga) and individual duet tracks (with, among many others, Aretha Franklin, B.B. King, Willie Nelson, Bono, Christina Aguilera, Queen Latifah and Amy Winehouse) made clear how admired, durable, companionable and game he was; even the awkward moments are endearing.In later years, as his voice lowered and thickened, Bennett used those qualities to bring out mature perspectives. The slow-motion version of Jerome Kern’s “The Way You Look Tonight” that appears on the 2007 compilation, “Sings the American Songbook, Vol. 1,” is latter-day Bennett: a little raspy, a little tremulous and gloriously fond, an affirmation not only of “tonight” but of a longtime love. There’s a rueful chuckle as he sings, “That laugh that wrinkles your nose/Touches my foolish heart.” Those lyrics were written in 1936, and Bennett was still listening through every line, still getting closer to the song. More

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      Tony Bennett’s 10 Essential Songs

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      Over a career of 70-plus years, the singer infused his performances with a huge range, dramatic flair, rhythmic agility and an inquisitive approach to interpreting lyrics.When Anthony Dominick Benedetto was growing up in Astoria, Queens, during the Depression, his parents couldn’t afford to pay for the singing lessons he wanted. But he had a good teacher close to home: his father, John Benedetto, an immigrant from southern Italy who loved the songs of the old country and sang them to his two sons on their front stoop.Anthony Benedetto later took the advice of the comedian Bob Hope and adopted the more Americanized stage name Tony Bennett. He enjoyed a long, prolific career until his death on Friday at 96, with plenty of ups and downs, 20 Grammys and an Emmy, in addition to being a Kennedy Center honoree and the first interpretive singer to receive the Gershwin Prize from the Library of Congress.Voice lessons, however long delayed, were important to his development. After he served in World War II, Bennett studied, thanks to the G.I. Bill, at the American Theater Wing school in Manhattan. When he was still singing in his 90s, he credited his bel canto training — an Italian vocal style that dates back to the 18th century and that emphasizes a light tone — for maintaining his instrument.Bennett was equally at home with romantic ballads and jazzy saloon songs, and whether he was singing Cole Porter or Stevie Wonder, he brought a huge range, dramatic flair, rhythmic agility and an inquisitive approach to interpreting lyrics. In 1965, Frank Sinatra told Life magazine, “For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business.” He held on to that distinction for decades to follow.Here are 10 of his greatest songs.“The Boulevard of Broken Dreams” (1950)Bennett had been singing in Bob Hope’s live revue when he was signed to a contract by Mitch Miller, the pop-minded A&R chief at the venerable Columbia Records. In his first single for the label, it’s easy to hear what impressed Miller: Bennett cuts through the Spanish-inflected arrangement of this kitschy 1930s tango with an untethered expression of postwar bravado.“Strike Up the Band” (1959)Bennett was a big Count Basie fan, and he especially admired the Basie band’s surging use of dynamics, so he was well prepared for this session. His version of George and Ira Gershwin’s characteristically tricky “Strike Up the Band” lasts just over a minute and a half, but Billy Mitchell’s tenor sax solo is dazzling and it’s hard to name another singer who could navigate the band’s hard, swinging tempo with such élan.“I’m Thru With Love” (1961)Like Frank Sinatra before him, Bennett pushed back when Miller tried to steer him toward greater commerciality. Miller was “furious” and stormed out of the recording studio, Bennett later wrote, when the singer insisted on moving away from grand orchestral arrangements to record an album with only a pianist, his sympatico collaborator Ralph Sharon. The jazz standard “I’m Thru With Love” had previously been recorded by Bing Crosby, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald, but Bennett optimized the song’s melancholy tone in this streamlined version.“The Best Is Yet to Come” (1962)The album-opening title song from “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” became Bennett’s signature hit, but it’s the jaunty closer that sounds fresher now. He snagged “The Best Is Yet to Come” from a flop Broadway musical called “All American,” and turned it into a standard: Sinatra covered it two years later, and Fitzgerald and Bob Dylan, among others, eventually followed. It remained a concert staple for years, and no song better exemplifies what the critic Mark Rowland once called Bennett’s “radiance of spirit.”“Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” (1967)Bennett considered Count Basie and Duke Ellington the two greatest bandleaders he’d ever heard, and with the great Milt Hinton on bass and the Basie regular Joe Newman on trumpet, he swings effortlessly and joyfully on this Ellington jazz standard. Bennett had something close to awe for great jazz musicians, which may be why he never claimed to be part of that tradition. “I’m not a jazz singer,” he often said. “I’m a singer who likes jazz.”“Something” (1971)Between 1951 and 1963, Bennett released 19 songs that reached the Top 20 of the Billboard singles chart. Then the Beatles came along and the hits stopped. The Columbia Records honcho Clive Davis pushed Bennett to cover modern pop hits, and on the day he began a new record a new record that included Beatles and Stevie Wonder songs, Bennett vomited, Davis recalled. The singer was a trouper, though; the “woo!” he interjects in the middle of George Harrison’s “Something” is almost convincing.“Some Other Time” (1975)Bennett had an affinity for pianists: Art Tatum was an enduring influence, he had a long partnership with Ralph Sharon, and he made one of his best albums with Bill Evans. Though he wasn’t a master of urban ennui on the level of Sinatra, Bennett does wring all the bittersweet rue out of this song, written by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green for the musical “On the Town,” by singing in parallel with Evans’s lyrical, prudent piano.“I Got Lost in Her Arms” (1986)For much of the ’70s, the toll of drugs, divorce, tax problems and depression wore Bennett down. Then his son Danny took over as his manager and engineered a return to Columbia Records. Maybe more significantly, Bennett reunited with Sharon and recorded his acclaimed comeback with just piano, bass, drums and an orchestra. His voice was now rougher, but especially on his version of Irving Berlin’s “I Got Lost in Her Arms,” he adjusted by infusing his lower register with savvy understatement.“When Do the Bells Ring for Me” (1990)Bennett loved the Great American Songbook, but eventually, a prolific singer runs out of pre-rock standards and needs to find slightly younger material. So Bennett was delighted when, in a restaurant one night, he heard the piano bar stalwart Charles DeForest perform a song he’d written, “When Do the Bells Ring for Me” It became a concert showcase for Bennett, thanks to its climactic high notes, and when he sang it at the Grammys in 1991, he got a standing ovation.“I Get a Kick Out of You” (2021)Biographically, Bennett couldn’t have had less in common with Cole Porter, a Midwesterner born to substantial privilege. But Porter’s giddy use of double and triple rhymes was perfect for Bennett’s rubato trickery, so his second album with Lady Gaga was a Porter-only affair, released five years after Bennett was given a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. And let’s be honest, it’s a kick to hear a 95-year-old master sing, “Some, they may go for cocaine.” More

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      João Donato, Innovative Brazilian Musician, Is Dead at 88

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      A prolific pianist, composer and arranger who began recording in the 1950s, he was a pioneer of bossa nova but didn’t confine himself to any genre.João Donato, a Brazilian composer, musician and producer who was a pioneer of bossa nova and who went on to cross-pollinate music across the Americas, died on Monday in Rio de Janeiro. He was 88.His death, in a hospital, was announced on his Instagram page. Brazilian news media reported that the cause was pneumonia.Mr. Donato was in the coterie of Rio de Janeiro musicians — among them Antonio Carlos Jobim, João Gilberto and the guitarist Luiz Bonfá — who developed the subtle swing and harmonic sophistication of bossa nova in the mid-1950s.But Mr. Donato didn’t confine himself to any genre. In a recording career that extended from the 1950s into the current decade, he released some three dozen albums as a leader and collaborated with a wide range of artists on many more. Although he was best known as a keyboardist, he was also a singer, accordionist and trombonist.As a pianist, Mr. Donato was known for his blend of a frisky, restlessly syncopated, harmonically intricate left hand with relaxed, sure-footed right-hand melodies. As a composer, producer and arranger, he constantly — and playfully — fused and stretched idioms and production styles. He once said he had a “sweet tooth for funky ideas.”Mr. Donato played MPB (as Brazilian popular music is widely known; the letters stand for “música popular brasileira”), jazz, funk, salsa, American pop and pan-American hybrids that were entirely his own. He worked with generations of Brazilian musicians, including the singer and movie star Carmen Miranda; the singers Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Milton Nascimento and Marisa Monte; and the rapper Marcelo D2.He also recorded with Eddie Palmieri, Michael Franks, Mongo Santamaría and Ali Shaheed Muhammad from A Tribe Called Quest. Throughout his life, he sought new grooves.The president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said on Twitter: “João Donato saw music in everything. He innovated, he passed through samba, bossa nova, jazz, forró, and in the mixture of rhythm built something unique. He kept creating and innovating until the end.”Mr. Donato’s debut album, released in 1956, was produced by Antonio Carlos Jobim, another innovator of bossa nova.João Donato de Oliveira Neto was born on Aug. 17, 1934, in Rio Branco, the capital of the state of Acre. He began playing accordion and writing songs as a child. In 1945, he moved with his family to Rio de Janeiro, where he began performing professionally in his teens.Mr. Donato began leading his own groups in the early 1950s while also working as a sideman. He played accordion on Luiz Bonfá’s first album, released in 1955, as part of a studio band that also included Antonio Carlos Jobim. Mr. Jobim produced Mr. Donato’s debut album, “Chá Dançante” (1956), and Mr. Donato wrote songs with João Gilberto, including “Minha Saudade,” which became a Brazilian standard.But by the end of the 1950s, Mr. Donato’s preferred style had grown so complex that audiences complained that they couldn’t dance to it, and he had difficulty finding work in Brazil. He accepted a job backing Carmen Miranda at a Lake Tahoe resort, and relocated to the United States.As the 1960s began, he was welcomed by Latin and jazz musicians. He recorded with Cal Tjader, Astrud Gilberto (who died in June), Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaría and Eddie Palmieri. (He played trombone in Mr. Palmieri’s La Perfecta, a brassy salsa band Mr. Palmieri called a “trombanga.”)The vibraphonist Dave Pike recorded an entire album of Mr. Donato’s compositions, “Bossa Nova Carnival,” in 1962, and the saxophonist Bud Shank put Mr. Donato in charge of his 1965 album, “Bud Shank & His Brazilian Friends.” “This is João Donato’s baby,” Mr. Shank wrote in the liner notes. “I’ve turned all the problems over to him and I just relax and play.”On his own albums for U.S. labels, Mr. Donato drew on jazz and Caribbean influences as well as Brazilian ones. His pivotal 1970 album, “A Bad Donato,” was a radical turn toward funk, merging Brazilian-rooted melodies and rhythms with electric keyboards and wah-wah guitars. The keyboardist and arranger Eumir Deodato, who worked with Mr. Donato on that album, went on to have a worldwide Brazilian funk hit with his version of “Also Sprach Zarathustra (2001).”Mr. Donato’s album “A Bad Donato,” released in 1970, merged Brazilian-rooted melodies and rhythms with electric keyboards and wah-wah guitars. Mr. Donato returned to Brazil in 1973. There, a friend persuaded him to record songs with lyrics rather than solely instrumentals, including his own modest but earnest vocals. His tuneful, easygoing 1973 album, “Quem É Quem,” was not an immediate hit, but it has been widely praised over the years; in 2007, Brazilian Rolling Stone placed it among the 100 greatest Brazilian albums.Mr. Donato’s new lyricists included two of the leading figures in the determinedly eclectic Brazilian cultural movement known as tropicália: Caetano Veloso, who put Portuguese lyrics to “O Sapo” (“The Frog”) to turn it into “A Rã,” and Gilberto Gil, who supplied lyrics for many of the songs on Mr. Donato’s 1975 album, “Lugar Comum.” Mr. Donato also wrote songs with lyrics by his younger brother, Lysias Ênio Oliveira.For the next two decades, Mr. Donato recorded almost entirely as a sideman. The singer Gal Costa recorded “A Rã” for her 1974 album, “Cantar,” and hired Mr. Donato as an arranger and bandleader for that album and her subsequent tour.Mr. Donato also recorded extensively with important Brazilian musicians like Jorge Ben, João Bosco, Chico Buarque and Martinho da Vila. He continued to perform his own music and released a live album, “Leilíadas,” in 1986. But he didn’t return to making his own studio albums until “Coisas Tao Simples” (“Such Simple Things”), released in 1994, even as he continued to do session work with songwriters including Bebel Gilberto and Marisa Monte.The albums Mr. Donato made after resuming his solo career were unpredictable and diverse. Some returned to his bossa nova-jazz fusions; some featured singers, including Wanda Sá, Paula Morelenbaum, Maria Tita and Joyce. Others had titles reflecting Mr. Donato’s fondness for musical hybrids, like “Bluchanga” (2017) and “Sambolero” (2010), which won a Latin Grammy Award for best Latin jazz album. He also received a Latin Grammy for lifetime achievement in 2010.In 2017, Mr. Donato made an album of synthesizer-centered funk, “Sintetizamor,” with his son, João Donato, known professionally as Donatinho, who survives him. Other survivors include his wife, Ivone Belém, and his daughters, Jodel and Joana Donato. He lived in Rio de Janeiro.In 2021, Mr. Donato collaborated with Jazz Is Dead, the Los Angeles-based project of Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge, on the album “Jazz Is Dead 7.” In 2022 he released “Serotonina,” an easygoing pop-jazz album featuring his electric piano and clavinet.On Twitter, Mr. Veloso summed up Mr. Donato’s music admiringly. It was, he wrote, “the highest achievement of extreme complexity in extreme simplicity.”Ana Ionova More