Music

His career as a musician and a painter over six decades ended abruptly when he was convicted of sexually abusing teenage girls.Rolf Harris, the Australian-born entertainer whose decades-long career on British television ended in disgrace after he was convicted of sexually abusing teenage girls, died on May 10 at his home in Berkshire, England. He was 93.His family announced the death in a statement released on Tuesday. The PA news agency reported that a death certificate gave the cause as neck cancer and “frailty of old age.”Mr. Harris’s career on British television spanned 60 years, but it collapsed in 2013 when he was arrested and charged with a total of 12 attacks on four young girls from 1968 to 1986. He was later sentenced to five years and nine months in prison. At the time of the offenses, the girls ranged in age from 8 to 19, although his conviction for the assault on the 8-year-old girl, an autograph hunter, was later overturned.One of Mr. Harris’s victims was a close friend of his own daughter, Bindi. He was convicted of abusing the girl over the course of six years, beginning when she was 13.“Your reputation lies in ruins, you have been stripped of your honors, but you have no one to blame but yourself,” Judge Nigel Sweeney told Mr. Harris at his sentencing in 2014.“You have shown no remorse for your crimes at all,” he added.Mr. Harris died without apologizing to his victims.The son of Welsh immigrants, Agnes Margaret and Cromwell Harris, Mr. Harris was born on March 30, 1930, in a suburb of Perth, Australia. He moved to Britain when he was 22 — with, he later said, “nothing but a load of self-confidence” — to study at the City and Guilds of London Art School. He made his first appearance on the BBC in 1953, drawing cartoons on a children’s television show.That kicked off a storied career that included everything from international hit songs to lighthearted television shows on which he would demonstrate his skills as a quick-fire painter (think Britain’s version of Bob Ross).“Can you tell what it is yet?” became his famous catchphrase as he brought the canvases to life. It also became the title of his autobiography, published in 2001.A 1964 album by Mr. Harris. He had several hit records in Britain and Australia, and his “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport” reached No. 3 in the United States.JP Roth CollectionOne of Britain’s best-known artists, Mr. Harris was even commissioned in 2005 to paint a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II for her 80th birthday — the whereabouts of which remains a great source of mystery. It was previously voted the British public’s second-favorite portrait of the queen, but it received a notably colder reception from critics.“I was as nervous as anything,” Mr. Harris told the British press in 2008, describing the two sittings he had with the monarch. “I was in a panic.”As a musician, he was known for his use of a colorful array of instruments, including the didgeridoo and the so-called wobble board — an instrument he invented. He featured it in his best-known song, “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport,” a novelty number about an Australian stockman’s dying wishes, which he wrote in 1957.His 1963 rerecording of the song, which reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, catapulted him to stardom in the United States. That same year, he recorded a version with the Beatles for a BBC radio show — the names of each band member playfully incorporated into the lyrics. (“Don’t ill-treat me pet dingo, Ringo.”)The song’s original fourth verse courted controversy because of its use of the word “Abo,” a derogatory slang term for Aboriginal Australians. The verse was included on Mr. Harris’s first recording of the song but omitted from later versions, and he later expressed regret about the lyrics.His career ultimately ended in disgrace a decade ago when he was one of several older media personalities arrested as part of Operation Yewtree, a British police investigation arising from the sexual abuse scandal involving the television presenter Jimmy Savile. Among the others convicted as part of the investigation were Britain’s best-known publicist, Max Clifford, and Stuart Hall, a former BBC broadcaster.After Mr. Harris was convicted in 2014, he was stripped of the honors he had been awarded throughout his career, and reruns of his television shows were taken off the air. He was released on parole in 2017 after serving three years in prison, after which he sank into a reclusive life at his family home in Bray, Berkshire, a quaint village west of London on the banks of the River Thames. Bray is said to have more millionaires than any small town in Britain.Mr. Harris’s survivors include his daughter, Bindi Harris, and his wife, Alwen Hughes. The two married in 1958 after meeting in art school, and she and his daughter stuck with him throughout his trial and prison term.After Mr. Harris’s sentencing in 2014, Judge Sweeney depicted him as an offender who had manipulated his fame.“You took advantage of the trust placed in you because of your celebrity status,” he said.Mr. Harris’s lawyer at the time, Sonia Woodley, pleaded with the judge to be lenient because of his age.“He is already on borrowed time,” she said. More

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicTikTok moves fast: the content stream is relentless and easy to scroll through, and music is often sped-up to accompany it. Listening to pop hits there can be disorienting — the music is familiar, but the pace can be unsettling. Seemingly endless remixes from the nightcore and plugg music scene help shape the sonic experience of the app.This movement is also creating a new class of hit. A sped-up version of Miguel’s “Sure Thing” became a staple on the app a couple of months ago, propelling the 12-year-old song to the Top 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 and to the top of the Billboard pop airplay chart. The Arizonatears Pluggnb Remix of Lil Uzi Vert’s “Watch This” hit the Hot 100 in February. Almost every artist of note has had their music sped up by a relatively anonymous producer and fed into the app.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about how TikTok reframes listening habits, what fast music achieves that regular-speed music can’t, how musicians are grappling with this new kind of (sometimes unsolicited) attention and how labels are already capitalizing on the trend.Guest:Elias Leight, senior music reporter at BillboardConnect 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 [email protected]. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

Performances across the country were canceled last week after Beijing began investigating a stand-up comedian.The cancellations rippled across the country: A Japanese choral band touring China, stand-up comedy shows in several cities, jazz shows in Beijing. In the span of a few days, the performances were among more than a dozen that were abruptly called off — some just minutes before they were supposed to begin — with virtually no explanation.Just before the performances were scrapped, the authorities in Beijing had fined a Chinese comedy studio around $2 million, after one of its stand-up performers was accused of insulting the Chinese military in a joke; the police in northern China also detained a woman who had defended the comedian online.Those penalties, and the sudden spate of cancellations that followed, point to the growing scrutiny of China’s already heavily censored creative landscape. China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has made arts and culture a central arena for ideological crackdowns, demanding that artists align their creative ambitions with Chinese Communist Party goals and promote a nationalist vision of Chinese identity. Performers must submit scripts or set lists for vetting, and publications are closely monitored.On Tuesday, Mr. Xi sent a letter to the National Art Museum of China for its 60th anniversary, reminding staff to “adhere to the correct political orientation.”Mr. Xi’s emphasis on the arts is also part of a broader preoccupation with national security and eliminating supposedly malign foreign influence. The authorities in recent weeks have raided the corporate offices of several Western consulting or advisory companies based in China, and broadened the range of behaviors covered under counterespionage laws. Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, sent a letter to the National Art Museum of China on Tuesday reminding staff there to “adhere to the correct political orientation.”Pool photo by Florence LoMany of the canceled events were supposed to feature foreign performers or speakers.It was only to be expected that Beijing would also look to the cultural realm, as its deteriorating relationship with the West has made it more fixated on maintaining its grip on power at home, said Zhang Ping, a former journalist and political commentator in China who now lives in Germany.“One way to respond to anxiety about power is to increase control,” said Mr. Zhang, who writes under the pen name Chang Ping. “Dictatorships have always sought to control people’s entertainment, speech, laughter and tears.”While the party has long regulated the arts — one target of the Cultural Revolution was creative work deemed insufficiently “revolutionary” — the intensity has increased sharply under Mr. Xi. In 2021, a state-backed performing arts association published a list of morality guidelines for artists, which included prescriptions for patriotism. The same year, the government banned “sissy men” from appearing on television, accusing them of weakening the nation.A bookstore in Zibo, China. Literature is closely regulated by the authorities.Qilai Shen for The New York TimesOfficials have also taken notice of stand-up comedy, which has gained popularity in recent years and offered a rare medium for limited barbs about life in contemporary China. The government fined a comedian for making jokes about last year’s coronavirus lockdown in Shanghai. People’s Daily, the Communist Party mouthpiece, published a commentary in November that said jokes had to be “moderate” and noted that stand-up as an art form was a foreign import; the Chinese name for stand-up, “tuo kou xiu,” is itself a transliteration from “talk show.”The recent crackdown began after an anonymous social media user complained about a set that a popular stand-up comedian, Li Haoshi, performed in Beijing on May 13. Mr. Li, who uses the stage name House, had said that watching his two adopted stray dogs chase a squirrel reminded him of a Chinese military slogan: “Maintain exemplary conduct, fight to win.” The user suggested that Mr. Li had slanderously compared soldiers to wild dogs.Outrage grew among nationalist social media users, and the authorities quickly piled on. In addition to fining Xiaoguo Culture Media, the firm that manages Mr. Li, the authorities — who said the joke had a “vile societal impact” — indefinitely suspended the company’s performances in Beijing and Shanghai. Xiaoguo fired Mr. Li, and the Beijing police said they were investigating him.Within hours of the penalty being announced on Wednesday, organizers of stand-up shows in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and eastern Shandong Province canceled their performances. A few days later, Chinese social media platforms suspended the accounts of Uncle Roger, a Britain-based Malaysian comic whose real name is Nigel Ng; Mr. Ng had posted a video poking fun at the Chinese government on Twitter (which is banned in mainland China).But the apparent fallout was not limited to comedy. Scheduled musical performances began disappearing, too, including a stop in southern China by a Shanghai rock band that includes foreign members, a Beijing folk music festival and several jazz performances, and a Canadian rapper’s show in the southern city of Changsha.The frontman of a Buddhist-influenced Japanese chorus group, Kissaquo, said last Wednesday that his concert that night in the southern city of Guangzhou had been canceled. Hours later, the frontman, Kanho Yakushiji, said a performance in Hangzhou, in eastern China, had been canceled, too. And the next day, he announced that Beijing and Shanghai shows had also been called off.“I was writing a set list, but I stopped in the middle,” Mr. Yakushiji, whose management company did not respond to a request for comment, wrote on his Facebook page. “I still don’t understand what the meaning of all this is. I have nothing but regrets.”Organizers’ announcements for nearly all of the canceled events cited “force majeure,” a term that means circumstances beyond one’s control — and, in China, has often been used as shorthand for government pressure.Stand-up show organizers did not return requests for comment. Several organizers of canceled musical performances denied that they had been told not to feature foreigners. An employee at a Nanjing music venue that canceled a tribute to the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto said not enough tickets had been sold. A Chinese rock band concert in Qinhuangdao, China, last year. Scheduled musical performances have been canceled, with organizers citing “force majeure.”Wu Hao/EPA, via ShutterstockSome of the foreign musicians whose shows were canceled have since been able to perform in other cities or at other venues.But a foreign musician in Beijing, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, said his band was scheduled to play at a bar on Sunday and was told by the venue several days before that the gig was canceled because featuring foreigners would bring trouble.Lynette Ong, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Toronto, said it was unlikely that the central government had issued direct instructions to spur the recent cultural crackdowns. Local governments or venue owners, conscious of how the political environment had changed, were likely being especially cautious, she said.“In Xi’s China, people are so scared and fearful that they become extremely risk-averse,” she said. “Overall, it’s a very paranoid party.”In the past, when nationalism has gone to extremes, or local officials overzealously enforced the rules, the central government would eventually step in to cool down the rhetoric, in part to preserve economic or diplomatic relationships. But Professor Ong said Beijing’s current emphasis on security above all would give it no reason to intervene here.“If people don’t watch comedy, there’s no loss for the party,” she said.Joy Dong More

Smith, a rising young composer, has adapted her work “Lost Coast” into a cello concerto premiering this week at the Los Angeles Philharmonic.In 2014, the composer Gabriella Smith took a hike through the Lost Coast in Northern California. Populated by bears, mountain lions and Roosevelt elk, it’s an area so rugged that the scenic Highway 1, which runs along the water, has to detour far inland. She kept a tide log on hand for portions of the trail that follow the shore. “You have to be careful,” she said, “not to be swept away.”The wildness surprised her. “I felt so much awe being there,” Smith said. And she liked the sound of the name: the poetry of the words “lost” and “coast” together, the multiple meanings it suggests. It was, as John Adams, one of her mentors, would say, a title in search of a piece.She wrote a cello solo with looping electronics for Gabriel Cabezas, a friend and former classmate at the Curtis Institute of Music, inspired by the image of a trail being repeatedly washed away. Then the piece transformed into a more complex, layered recording, released in 2021. And now “Lost Coast” is taking on yet another life, its grandest yet: a cello concerto, premiering on Thursday with Cabezas and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.This work and its trajectory are a lot like Smith’s career. At 31, she prefers to write for people she has a relationship with, even as she receives increasingly prominent commissions. Here and elsewhere, her music, in addition to its fascination with the natural world, exudes inventiveness with a welcoming personality, rousing energy and torrents of joy — not to mention an infectious groove.“I always assume,” Cabezas said, “that anybody who listens to her music will be her next biggest fan.”Growing up in Berkeley, Calif., Smith studied piano and violin, and at 8 — even earlier, if you ask her mother — began to write music of her own to figure out how it all worked. But she kept it secret, convinced that what she was doing was strange, even embarrassing. She didn’t know anyone else like her.It took encouragement, as well as music theory lessons, from her teacher at the time to keep going. Smith was inspired by the composers whose works she was learning: Mozart, Bach, Haydn. Her own pieces, though, didn’t resemble theirs, if only because, she said, “I didn’t know how to sound like that.”Gustavo Dudamel, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s music and artistic director, speaking with Smith during a rehearsal this week. He will conduct the premiere of her cello concerto “Lost Coast.”Alex Welsh for The New York TimesOnce, she wrote what she thought was a Mozartean duo for violin and piano, until she heard two classmates play it. “But that,” Smith said, “encouraged me, because it was this puzzle to figure out how to make the idea match the result.”Other influences entered her brain, mainly Bartok and Joni Mitchell. And she received a boost from Adams. He remembered a quiet teenager who arrived at his house with a “staggering” number of pieces, all polished with plastic spiral binding. “I was impressed,” he said, “that she obviously had this incredible determination at a young age.”Smith wasn’t just determined in music. She also loved nature and became interested in environmental issues around the age she started composing. At 12, she started volunteering at a research station in Point Reyes; the people there told her that they had never been approached by someone so young, but they gave her a try. For the next five years, she banded birds and bonded with local biologists. She even got her mother on board.At 17, she started at Curtis in Philadelphia but missed the West Coast. “I was so homesick,” she said, “that it sort of forced me to reckon with not only who I was as a composer, but as a person. I infused all that into the music, and that’s when my music started to sound like me.”Smith is soft-spoken. But as a composer “she fills up the whole room,” said the violist Nadia Sirota, who has performed her music and collaborated with her and Cabezas as a producer on the “Lost Coast” album. “She knows exactly what she’s talking about. And when someone has clear ideas, it’s just about realizing them.”As Smith continued to write, Adams clocked that her sound was quickly maturing. He saw a sensitivity to the natural world that, he said, “goes all the way back to the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony.” And he could tell that, for performers and audiences alike, it would be fun. Cabezas has certainly felt that way: “You don’t lose a sense of what music should be, but at the same time there’s optimism, quirkiness and humor.”In “Tumblebird Contrails,” a piece that Adams and Deborah O’Grady, his wife, commissioned through their Pacific Harmony Foundation, a Point Reyes hike is translated into music of muscularity, amazement and delight. Similar adjectives come to mind for other scores, such as the quartet “Carrot Revolution,” an immediately engrossing work of pure excitement.These feelings, Smith said, come naturally: “I try to put in all the emotions, but joy is the one I care most about. It’s the joy that I experience from the natural world and, honestly, the joy of making music.”Smith’s titles tend toward the playful. Sometimes they can seem nonsensical, like “Imaginary Pancake,” a piano solo written for Timo Andres. But that was inspired by a memory from a childhood summer music program where she was impressed by an older boy who was playing something with his arms stretched to both ends of a keyboard. She asked him what it was, and he said Beethoven.As an adult, she tried to find that music but couldn’t; she realized that her memory had exaggerated it until it became something else. So she composed based on the inspiration of an imaginary piece. And “pancake”? That’s the image of a player leaning over the keyboard with arms outstretched, flat like a pancake.Now living in Seattle, Smith remains involved in environmentalism. She bikes instead of drives, and is working on an ecological restoration at a former Navy airfield. There is some anger about the state of climate change in her music, like the song “Bard of a Wasteland,” but even then the rhythms suggest underlying optimism. “It’s so easy to slip into despair,” she said, “but there are all these people around us working on this in incredibly joyful ways. We need to feel the things we need to feel and grieve the things we need to grieve. Then we need to go on.”The pervading emotion of Smith’s music is joy: “the joy that I experience from the natural world and, honestly, the joy of making music,” she said.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesThere is determination, too, alongside awe in “Lost Coast.” The album version was made in Iceland, over multiple sessions that layered Cabezas’s playing with a few contributions by Sirota and singing by Smith, based on her compositional method of recording herself on Ableton software. “She creates music in space,” Sirota said. “It’s almost like she’s molding clay.”For the concerto version, Smith adapted her singing into more traditional lines for winds and brasses. But it wasn’t a one-to-one transfer; many sections were heavily changed, and she also added a cadenza. “There are some wild parts that she rewrote,” Cabezas said. “It fits the orchestral aesthetic a little more, and she’s found some places where that works even better.”Smith wants to further integrate the environmental and musical sides of her life. Her next piece — for the Kronos Quartet’s 50th anniversary, with a preview coming to Carnegie Hall in November ahead of its full premiere in January — will include interviews she made with others working on climate solutions. But she is still figuring out how to do more.“I can write music, but that feels like the first step,” she said. “A lot of it feels like uncharted territory. But everybody, in every field, needs to do this.” More

Elaine Mitchener will draw on a range of extended vocal techniques to give a sensitive portrait of mental illness in the music theater piece “Eight Songs for a Mad King.”When the British vocalist Elaine Mitchener performs Peter Maxwell Davies’ “Eight Songs for a Mad King” at Wigmore Hall in London on Friday, a lot will be on her mind: the complex psychology of the work’s central character, the piece’s rich performing history and its sensitive perspective on mental health. That’s before she even gets to the notes.“It’s an exhausting piece emotionally,” Mitchener said in a recent interview. “You have to have a very still inner core in order to perform it. Otherwise, you just will not be able to get to the end.”“Eight Songs for a Mad King” is a 30-minute music-theater monodrama, written by Davies in 1969 in collaboration with the actor Roy Hart. It is based on the life of King George III, who reigned in Britain in late 18th and early 19th centuries and who had an unknown mental illness. Onstage, a highly distressed King George battles with, and eventually succumbs to, the sounds in his head. It’s a challenging work for any singer, requiring a five-octave vocal range, a variety of speech-singing techniques, plus multiphonics — singing two or more notes at the same time.Mitchener has honed these capabilities over nearly 15 years as an experimental vocal performer, but she is also and composer and movement artist. Her practice incorporates improvisation, choreography and research.Although Friday’s performance, in which she will sing with the contemporary music ensemble Apartment House, was programmed long before the coronation of King Charles III was announced, Mitchener said that watching the May 6 ceremony had fed into her preparation. It had helped her imagine the psychological extremes that George III must have experienced, she said: “from being crowned, to being completely mad,” and ending up “beaten, whipped, mocked, jeered.”Mitchener, center, in rehearsal with the contemporary music ensemble Apartment House in London on Tuesday.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times“The more I’ve understood the context of George III’s illness, and reading behind the scenes of what Davies was trying to do with this work — which was to destigmatize mental illness — I have a much more sympathetic approach to the character,” Mitchener said. “We as a society are becoming more understanding about these issues that could happen to any of us,” she added.Her research had also led her to believe that Hart’s contribution should be better recognized, she said. Hart developed the hyper-expressive vocal technique that the piece requires at the Alfred Wolfsohn Voice Research Center, a Berlin- and London-based institute that explored sounds beyond speech or song, informed by the screams that its founder heard in the trenches of World War I.Hart’s involvement in “Eight Songs” informed not only the piece’s many vocal requirements, but also its emphasis on drama, said Kelvin Thomas, a baritone who has performed “Eight Songs for a Mad King” over 100 times. “It’s the drama that drives the music and the technique,” he said. “It’s not just that you’re technically screaming,” Thomas added, “there’s a reason why you’re screaming.”“Eight Songs for a Mad King” requires a five-octave vocal range, a variety of speech-singing techniques and the ability to sing two notes at the same time.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times“Eight Songs for a Mad King” is toward the older end of the repertoire that Mitchener usually tackles. This past Sunday, she performed in London alongside the American poet Moor Mother in a series of improvised duets. In March, Mitchener performed a program of works by Jason Yarde, Matana Roberts, Tansy Davies and others, all written in the last three years, at the MaerzMusik contemporary music festival in Berlin.“I consider myself a performer who composes — in that order, really,” she said. “But to me,” she added, “the responsibility of any performer is to really liberate the score from what you see.”Michener was born in 1970, in London, to Jamaican parents. Early exposure at home to ska, dub, gospel and Rastafarian music was later nurtured at a local Adventist church. “If you go to particularly Black churches, and people discover that you have a talent for music, or delivering text, that’s really encouraged from a young age,” Mitchener said.Her path to contemporary music was complicated. As a student at Trinity College of Music in London, she encountered some modern works — including “Eight Songs for a Mad King” — although most of her studies involved classical singing. In her final year there, her singing teacher died, and a new tutor recategorized her voice from a low contralto to high mezzo-soprano. “I had to start again,” Mitchener said.After graduating, Mitchener took an eight-year hiatus from performing but continued taking vocal lessons while she worked jobs in theater advertising and music publishing. In 2008, she found a teacher who was “unfazed by contemporary music,” she said: the opera singer Jacqueline Straubinger-Bremar, whom she has continued lessons with for the past 15 years. “Some people never find the right teacher for their voice, for where they are musically, or where they are in their lives,” Mitchener said. “I was lucky to find her.”“Me being onstage as a Black experimental contemporary music vocalist,” Mitchener said, “is in itself a political act.”Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesAlongside interpreting others’ works, Mitchener has conceived performance projects herself, including “Industrializing Intimacy,” a work about togetherness and separation that uses improvised vocals, choreographed movement and computer-generated sound, and “SWEET TOOTH,” a music theater piece that examines the history of the British sugar trade and the brutalities of slavery.She said that foregrounding the historical contributions of Black performers and composers was particularly important to her, and noted that two of the best exponents of “Eight Songs for a Mad King” — Julius Eastman, the American composer and performance artist; and William Pearson, the baritone — were Black.“Me being onstage as a Black experimental contemporary music vocalist,” Mitchener said, “is in itself a political act.” She will be aware of this, as well as the lessons of her research, onstage on Friday. “When I do this piece, I’m thinking about all of these things,” she said. “How it comes out, I’m not sure I can say. But it all feeds in.” More

Emotions wash over Halle Bailey in waves.When a little girl embraced her at Disney World in March, Bailey, who has the plum role of Ariel in the live-action film of “The Little Mermaid,” fought hard to keep her composure. But when a box of sequined Little Mermaid dolls with auburn locs and cinnamon skin arrived on her doorstep, she couldn’t hold it in.Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

The band is back, woo-hoo! Revisit 12 of its greatest songs.Graham Coxon and Damon Albarn, Blur’s two opposing forces, showcasing their late-90s haircuts.Chris Pizzello/Associated PressDear listeners,Last week, out of nowhere, the beloved Britpop band Blur announced a new album due July 21 — its first in eight years. Say it with me now: Woo-hoo!“The Ballad of Darren” — recorded in secret and wrapped earlier this year — will be the band’s ninth album, arriving nearly 35 years after Blur was formed. The group’s discography can seem imposing if you’re not familiar with all of its twists and turns, and don’t have anyone to guide you through it. Luckily, you do not have this problem, because Blur is one of my favorite bands.Blur’s career is all about the friction of opposing forces — and those are, for the most part, the band’s charismatic frontman Damon Albarn and its more introverted but equally brilliant guitarist Graham Coxon. The bassist Alex James and the drummer Dave Rowntree are stabilizers, grounding the band’s adventurous sound.In the liner notes to “21,” a 2012 boxed set compiling material from the group’s first seven albums, Rowntree gave what is still perhaps the most succinct summary of the band’s driving tension: “Graham used to say that he wanted to make an album that nobody would want to listen to. But you can’t do that in a band with Damon.” (If you want to read an extended cut of me geeking out on Blur, I wrote a zoomed-out summary of the band’s first two decades in a review of “21.”)A few notes on this playlist, compiled to celebrate Blur’s return. It’s not quite chronological, but it’s meant to show the breadth of the band’s sprawling career. Only two Blur albums are not represented here, and for different reasons: “Modern Life Is Rubbish,” the sophomore effort from 1993, because I find most songs from its follow-up, “Parklife,” to be better examples of what Blur was trying to do in that era; and “Think Tank” from 2003, for the semi-controversial reason that I don’t consider it a Blur album at all, given that almost all of it was recorded without Coxon and I believe the definition of Blur to be a specific alchemical happening between four particular people. (Albarn has even admitted as much in recent years, joking that, if anything, “Think Tank” was a “LUR” album.)Consider this playlist slightly beyond entry level: Blur 201, if you will. I avoided the most obvious songs, presuming that you’re already familiar with “Song 2” at the very least, and maybe also the band’s era-defining mid-90s hits “Girls and Boys” and “Parklife,” or its 1999 stadium-size weepie “Tender.” If you’re not, check those out when you get a moment. But for now, let’s follow the herd down to Greece and dive in.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. “Lot 105” (1994)To set the mood: a zany interstitial from the band’s 1994 masterpiece, “Parklife.” (Listen on YouTube)2. “There’s No Other Way” (1991)Blur began life as a prettily vacant Britpop group that was often lumped in with late-80s U.K. subgenres like Madchester and baggy; the best-case scenario, at that time, was it would become the next Stone Roses. I am happy the quartet grew out of this sound quickly, but there are several perfect pop songs on its 1991 debut album, “Leisure,” including the exquisitely bratty single “There’s No Other Way.” The video for this song is important for several reasons: 1) Damon Albarn’s haircut 2) The Lynchian aesthetic that foreshadows the way Blur would soon come to write songs about the dark underbelly of polite society and 3) Seriously, behold Damon’s 1991 bowl cut. (Listen on YouTube)3. “Country House” (1995)Perhaps best known for beating Oasis’ “Roll With It” in the epochal battle of Britpop on the U.K. charts, “Country House,” from the band’s fourth album, “The Great Escape,” is a wickedly catchy sendup of rich people who abandon the urban rat race for lush, secluded digs in the country — and specifically, of Blur’s former manager and label head David Balfe. It also boasts the only music video ever directed by the artist Damien Hirst, who went to Goldsmiths College with three-quarters of Blur. (Listen on YouTube)4. “M.O.R.” (1997)Blur’s 1997 album — yes, the one with “Song 2” — was the band’s most dramatic stylistic pivot: Here was what until then seemed like a quintessentially British band earnestly and somehow convincingly embracing American indie rock. The propulsive “M.O.R.,” though, is a bridge between Blur’s past and future. The chorus interpolates David Bowie’s arch, vampy “Boys Keep Swinging,” even as Coxon’s distorted, disaffected guitar squalls like J Mascis. (Listen on YouTube)5. “Coffee & TV” (1999)One of just a few Blur songs on which Coxon sings lead vocals, the fan-favorite single “Coffee & TV” is at once prickly and sweet, a steadily chugging tune suffused with an introvert’s romanticism. “Sociability is hard enough for me,” he and Albarn sing in wobbly falsetto. “Take me away from this big, bad world and agree to marry me.” I am not exaggerating when I say I still think about that little milk carton guy all the time. (Listen on YouTube)6. “Tracy Jacks” (1994)A sharp, poignant character study of a middle-aged civil servant on the verge of a nervous breakdown, “Tracy Jacks” is a perfect encapsulation of the band’s widening sociological scope circa “Parklife.” (Listen on YouTube)7. “Charmless Man” (1995)And, from around the same time, here’s a much more acidic snapshot of British life: “Educated the expensive way/He knows his claret from his Beaujolais/I think he’d like to have been Ronnie Kray/But then nature didn’t make him that way.” (Listen on YouTube)8. “Go Out” (2015)I love all the weird art-rock textures and sounds that protrude from this jaunty pop ditty from the band’s 2015 comeback album, “The Magic Whip” — a perfect match for Albarn’s caustic, deadpan vocal. (Listen on YouTube)9. “Beetlebum” (1997)In news that does not surprise me at all, Liam Gallagher has admitted that this is his favorite Blur song. War is over (if you want it). (Listen on YouTube)10. “No Distance Left to Run” (1999)Inarguably the saddest Blur song; no, I won’t be taking any questions at this time. If this gutting ballad — written around the time of Albarn’s breakup with the Elastica frontwoman Justine Frischmann — doesn’t destroy your heart, I don’t even know what to tell you. This is the sound of love dying, with a whimper: “I won’t kill myself trying to stay in your life/I’ve got no distance left to run.” (Listen on YouTube)11. “This Is a Low” (1994)Blur constantly wrestles with ambivalence about Anglophilia, but it can’t hide a certain affection toward its native country on this majestic “Parklife” highlight, which was partly inspired by the band’s habit of listening to BBC shipping forecasts while homesick on tour. (Listen on YouTube)12. “The Universal (Live at Hyde Park)” (2012)On Aug. 12, 2012, Blur played a triumphant reunion concert in London’s Hyde Park, following the Summer Olympics closing ceremony. The excellent and inevitably titled live album “Parklive” captures the ecstatic energy of that night — and especially the soaring singalong “The Universal,” which closed the show in grand style. (Listen on YouTube)Well, here’s your lucky day,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“The Brilliance of Blur” track listTrack 1: “Lot 105”Track 2: “There’s No Other Way”Track 3: “Country House”Track 4: “M.O.R.”Track 5: “Coffee & TV”Track 6: “Tracy Jacks”Track 7: “Charmless Man”Track 8: “Go Out”Track 9: “Beetlebum”Track 10: “No Distance Left to Run”Track 11: “This Is a Low”Track 12: “The Universal (Live at Hyde Park)”Bonus tracksMore exciting news: The New York Times has a new audio app! From time to time, I’ll be recording audio versions of The Amplifier on there, and you can also find Jon Caramanica’s Popcast and Jon Pareles recommending new music, plus a whole lot more Times music content. The app also features read-aloud stories and narrated articles from the worlds of politics, tech, health, food, sports, the entire archive of This American Life and much more. To start exploring, download the New York Times Audio app here. More

The colorful prints of BayouWear, born at a New Orleans jazz festival, reflect the city itself.It all started with a poster.In 1975, while in graduate school at Tulane University, Bud Brimberg had to come up with a project for a business class. His idea: have an artist in New Orleans create a poster as merchandise for a local music festival.That event, now known as the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, has become one of the city’s cultural staples. This year’s Jazz Fest, held over seven days in April and May, featured hundreds of performers across 14 stages. According to organizers, about 460,000 people (including staff and vendors) attended.Since 1975, each Jazz Fest has been commemorated with an artist-designed poster. Mr. Brimberg, 73, still oversees their production. And since 1981, he has also made printed Hawaiian shirts sold at the festival. After introducing the shirts, which also feature a unique motif each year, Mr. Brimberg started to offer other pieces, including shorts and dresses.The clothes, called BayouWear, have turned into a sort of unofficial uniform for Jazz Fest attendees and performers like Irma Thomas, a soul singer and a festival fixture known for taking the stage in a custom dress featuring the latest print.Bud Brimberg, who started selling printed clothes at Jazz Fest in 1981, wearing a jacket with BayouWear’s alligator print from 1999.Emily Kask for The New York Times“Whenever someone wears the clothing, the festival, along with the culture that created it, lives on,” said Quint Davis, the producer of Jazz Fest, who has helped plan the event since it began in 1970.Lisa Alexis, the director of the Office of Cultural Economy in New Orleans, said the BayouWear clothes have also come to represent the city itself. “Everyone looks forward to the design each year,” she said. “It just seems to give a very comprehensive representation and feel of our New Orleans culture.”On a Friday at this year’s festival, Ann Patteson, 78, from New Orleans, said she was wearing one of the 18 BayouWear shirts in her collection. For her, the shirts represent just about every Jazz Fest she has attended.Austin Hajna, a 36-year-old physician assistant from Washington, D.C., was one of dozens of people browsing the shirts ($59), shorts ($39), dresses ($59) and sleeveless tops ($49) at a tent selling BayouWear. Many pieces featured the 2023 print — an architectural motif inspired by buildings in the French Quarter — and there were lots of clothes from past festivals.Mr. Hajna, who had a drink in his hand, was wearing a blue shirt covered with green streetcars and turquoise palm trees, the 2015 print. He said it was one of two BayouWear shirts he owns, adding that he planned to buy a third that day, “right after a sip of this vodka.”Austin Hajna, center, wore a shirt with the 2015 BayouWear print while shopping at the brand’s merchandise tent at the festival.Emily Kask for The New York TimesFrom left, Zach Meredith in a shirt featuring BayouWear’s red beans and rice print from 1998; Paige Nelson Stypinski, in an alligator print; and Tyler Stypinski, in the architectural print introduced in 2023.Emily Kask for The New York TimesBen DeMarais, who attended Jazz Fest with his son this year, wore a shirt with BayouWear’s 2013 print featuring iris flowers and brass instruments.Emily Kask for The New York TimesJamel Banks at the festival’s BayouWear tent, wearing a shirt with the Pucci-inspired print from 2019.Emily Kask for The New York TimesJamel Banks, a 38-year-old engineer from Houston, was in line behind Mr. Hajna. His shirt featured a colorful Pucci-inspired print of a dancing man that was introduced in 2019. The shirts, he said, “feel very father-ish — but a cool dad.”“I’m ready for the matching shorts now,” Mr. Banks added, “and something for my girlfriend.”Though clothes with past BayouWear prints are still sold, certain designs are harder to find. Original samples and stock of the 2001 print — plates of sugar-dusted beignets next to mugs of cafe au lait — were destroyed during Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Brimberg said.BayouWear garments are made entirely of rayon, which Mr. Brimberg said he chose because it dries fast, hangs loose and displays colors more vividly than other fabrics. “The gradations were missing in cotton,” he said, zooming in on a photo of the 2003 print (a jumble of crawfish) to show how the color of the crustaceans faded from a deep orange into a pale coral.Mr. Brimberg — who grew up in Brooklyn and has the mannerisms, and accent, of Larry David — comes up with ideas for BayouWear prints himself before finding artists to help bring them to life. He said his references over the years have included pointillist and Cubist art, the brand Marimekko and the French glassmaker Lalique.The ideas for the prints themselves, he said, typically strike at random, often while he is roaming around New Orleans. The first print, in 1981, was inspired by a palm-tree-dotted shirt on a man playing an upright piano in that year’s Jazz Fest poster.Kathy Schorr, a textile artist in New Orleans who helped make BayouWear’s 2023 architectural print, said she loves how fluid the designs are. “You can’t tell what it is until you’re right up on it,” Ms. Schorr said. “They just look like a beautiful pattern from a distance.”The buttons on many BayouWear shirts are no less thoughtfully designed than the prints. To match certain motifs, Mr. Brimberg has had buttons custom made to look like tiny drums (for a percussion-themed print from 2016), guitar picks (for a print from 2006) and water-meter covers (for this year’s architectural print).For garments featuring this year’s architectural print, Mr. Brimberg had buttons made to recall water-meter covers. Emily Kask for The New York TimesThe 2015 streetcar print.Emily Kask for The New York TimesFor shirts featuring a yellow-eyed alligators from 1999, Mr. Brimberg had buttons made to look like the reptiles’ teeth. “I went down to the voodoo museum and bought some alligator teeth,” he recalled. “Then I took them to my dentist, since they were kind of ugly, and asked if he could do some cosmetic dentistry to polish them up. And I had that cast as a button.”At the opening day of this year’s Jazz Fest, Kayla Biskupovich, 26, from New Orleans, was wearing an alligator-print shirt over a dress covered in watermelon slices, the print from 2014. “This dress was my mom’s, she bought it the year this pattern came out,” said Ms. Biskupovich, who graduated recently from Louisiana State University.For a better fit, she tied knots at the dress’s back to tighten it. “I didn’t want to cut it, because that would be sacrilegious,” Ms. Biskupovich said.“I also wanted to wear the gators,” she added as she held out one of her shirt’s triangular white buttons. “Look at the teeth! Could you die?!” More