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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Brazilian Jazz

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      When the term “Brazilian jazz” arises, one might think of bossa nova, or Sergio Mendes (its most popular purveyor), and stop there. But there’s a world beyond those sunny instrumentals and bright vocals, where artists like Hermeto Pascoal, João Donato and Leny Andrade show that Brazilian jazz can be funky, soulful and esoteric. This type of jazz had deeper resonance beyond the oceanfront views it conjured.The origins of Brazilian jazz are often traced to the late 1950s, to the advent of bossa nova by the composers Donato and Antônio Carlos Jobim. Blending samba (a style of music born out of the Afro-Brazilian communities in Rio de Janeiro and Bahia) with American jazz, bossa nova — which means “new wave” — reached its apex in 1964 when “The Girl From Ipanema,” sung by the Brazilian vocalist Astrud Gilberto, hit the U.S. singles chart, and won the Grammy for record of the year in 1965. Yet before the song’s success, American composers like Quincy Jones, Herbie Mann and Dave Brubeck recorded bossa nova albums, which stoked the curiosity of U.S. listeners.Thanks to the contributors below, a mix of musicians, writers and scholars, we get to hear Brazilian jazz beyond the gravitational pull of bossa nova and samba, from its height in the ’60s to the present day. And while you’ll see familiar names pop up more than once, they’re often in conversation with others from the broad space of the genre. Traces of bossa nova and samba emerge, but these selections also take fusion, ambient and psychedelia into account. You can find a playlist at the end of the article, and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Jeff Caltabiano, writer and historianSão Paulo Underground, “Jagoda’s Dream”Brazil, a country rich with Indigenous musical traditions, has had an ongoing dialogue with the (North) American jazz tradition since the 1950s. That dialogue has broadened well beyond the breezy straightjacket of bossa nova. The visionary American composer and cornetist Rob Mazurek spent eight years living in Brazil, and has been in musical conversation with the São Paulo-born musicians M. Takara and Guilherme Granado for two decades, with the group São Paulo Underground. Takara and Granado go back even further, having met as teenagers in the city’s punk scene. Granado’s hazy keyboards open up “Jagoda’s Dream,” from the band’s third album, “Três Cabeças Loucuras” (“Three crazy heads”), from 2011. The song was written for their friend’s daughter, with a melody and harmony by Mazurek and an infectious cavaquinho rhythm pattern by Takara. The cavaquinho, a miniature guitar with a bright sound, is prominent throughout. During the recording, Takara played cavaquinho with his hands while playing the drums with his feet. Richard Ribeiro played second drums. The song is a firecracker that represents São Paulo’s creative music scene and its hybrid of sounds. A chorus of voices takes us out, wordlessly repeating the rhythm pattern, about to wake from Jagoda’s magnificent dream.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Joyce Moreno, singer and composerTenório Jr., “Embalo”In the early 1960s, bossa nova was at its peak in Brazil and was also growing worldwide. Some Brazilian musicians who were fluent with both bossa nova and jazz began to organize themselves into instrumental groups, mostly trios, but adding horns on occasion. They created music — samba-jazz they called it — with inventive improvisation, sultry rhythms and creative harmonies. One of the most brilliant pianists to emerge from the samba-jazz movement was Tenório Jr. In 1964, at 23, he recorded his one and only album as a leader, “Embalo,” which is now widely acknowledged a classic of the genre. On the title track, a composition by Tenório arranged by the alto saxophonist Paulo Moura, Tenório’s solo is a gorgeous example of the heights that made-in-Brazil jazz could achieve. Unfortunately, that recording is the only taste of Tenório’s genius we still have. In Buenos Aires in 1976, while on tour as a sideman for the Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes, Tenório mysteriously “disappeared” in Argentina on the eve of that country’s military coup (a story told in the excellent animated film “They Shot the Piano Player” by the Spanish filmmakers Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal). Tenório’s music, however, lives on forever.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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      Best Albums of 2024: Charli XCX, Mk.gee, MJ Lenderman and More

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      Charli XCX, Mk.gee and MJ Lenderman top our pop music critics’ lists this year.Jon Pareles | Jon Caramanica | Lindsay ZoladzJon ParelesConcepts, Craftsmanship, Sensuality and Tidings of ApocalypseThe agendas for 21st-century musicians keep getting more complicated. They can try to out-game streaming and social media algorithms, stoking the celebrity-industrial complex or steadfastly ignoring it. They can lean into idiosyncratic artistic instincts and intuitions. They can channel the zeitgeist or defy it. Of course, listeners have choices as well. For me, there was no definitive musical statement for 2024, no obvious pathbreaker. But there were plenty of purposeful, heartfelt, exacting and inspired individual statements. I gave the top slot to a project that strove mightily to unite a glossy sonic (and online) presence with surprising confessions. But song for song, the rest of the list can easily stand alongside it. And if there’s more than a little apocalyptic gloom in these choices, well, that’s 2024.1. Charli XCX, ‘Brat’ and ‘Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat’The year’s conceptual coup belonged to Charli XCX. “Brat,” the album she released in June, used dance-floor beats, blippy synthetic hooks and meme-ready graphics as she assessed just where she stood as a pop striver in her 30s, more than a decade into her career: pushing, partying, wondering whether to set it all aside to have a baby. Somehow, “Brat” landed as a full-fledged hit — and by September, Charli XCX had rewritten all the tracks and added star collaborators, dispensing hooks while trying to keep a level head about success. Amid all the hyperpop gloss and online chatter, she still sounded honest.2. Brittany Howard, ‘What Now’Brittany Howard’s second solo album tackles the contours of a relationship that is fizzling out.Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesBrittany Howard lays out the ragged emotions of a crumbling relationship on “What Now”: numbness, mourning, second-guessing, guilt and furtive glimmers of relief. While the tracks are rooted in soul, rock, R&B, funk and disco, they turn familiar styles inside-out with targeted distortion and surreal, displaced mixes. The songs capture all the disorientation that comes with a life-changing decision.3. Vampire Weekend, ‘Only God Was Above Us’Vampire Weekend’s once-meticulous musical universe gets punctured by noise on “Only God Was Above Us.” Its fifth album grapples with how what used to be called indie-rock can face a new pop landscape, and how determined innovators can keep pushing themselves. The answers include history lessons, quasi-sequitur lyrics and constantly morphing studio arrangements — a running, enlightening battle between strict song structure and an unruly world.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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      Best Jazz Albums of 2024

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      Musicians both established and up-and-coming stretched themselves in fresh ways over the last year, creating poignant moments of collaboration and challenge.In 2024, jazz continued to spiral out, looking both forward and backward and expanding to mingle with adjacent styles. The year’s most memorable releases in the genre are diverse, but they all share one key trait: a delight in intimate, real-time musical conversation.1. Tarbaby, ‘You Think This America’Orrin Evans’s original “Red Door” appears on the trio Tarbaby’s latest album, a record made with no additional featured musicians.Yana Paskova for The New York TimesThe pianist Orrin Evans, the bassist Eric Revis and the drummer Nasheet Waits have each been indispensable to 21st-century jazz, both as bandleaders and sidemen. But despite a near-20-year history, their collective trio, Tarbaby, has flown under the radar. With “You Think This America,” the first Tarbaby album without any additional musicians, they stake their claim as an elite group capable of conveying the most guileless tenderness (on a version of the Stylistics’ “Betcha by Golly, Wow”), the deepest blues feeling (on the 1920s standard “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out”) and the hippest sort of post-bop looseness (on the Evans original “Red Door”). They did it all while cultivating a refreshingly non-hierarchical approach, where moment to moment each member has an equal sonic stake.2. David Murray Quartet, ‘Francesca’Even when David Murray first arrived in New York around 50 years ago as an upstart saxophonist and bandleader, he seemed like an old soul, communing with the roots of jazz while thriving on its cutting edge. So he’s a natural fit for the elder-statesman role he plays on “Francesca,” alongside three outstanding younger musicians — the pianist Marta Sánchez, the bassist Luke Stewart and the drummer Russell Carter — who seem intuitively connected to his love of vigorous swing and grittily exuberant improv. The results feel like quintessential Murray, whether on the swaggering, extroverted “Am Gone Get Some” or the title track, a waltz that starts off restrained but soon bursts with emotion.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 Ultimate Yacht Rock Playlist

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      Gain a deeper appreciation of music from Michael McDonald, Toto and Christopher Cross.Michael McDonald appearing on “Soul Train” in 1982.Soul Train/Getty, via Courtesy HBODear listeners,Over the weekend, I watched an entertaining new documentary — or, as it’s billed, a “dockumentary” — about the genre of music that’s retroactively come to be known as “yacht rock.”You might be familiar with the term, which encapsulates a disparate scene of mostly California-based musicians who brought jazz, soul and R&B influences to mainstream pop and soft rock in the late 1970s: Think Kenny Loggins, Toto, Christopher Cross and just about any song with backing or lead vocals by Michael McDonald. What you might not realize is that the term “yacht rock” was coined not by music critics or even the musicians themselves, but by a ragtag group of comedians who lovingly parodied some of those musicians in a beloved web series that premiered in 2005.“Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary,” currently streaming on Max, features interviews with J.D. Ryznar, a creator of the web series, as well as Loggins, Cross, McDonald and a host of the other artists who defined the genre’s sound — even if it wasn’t considered a genre at the time. “To us it was just the next logical step in making pop music,” Loggins says in the film. Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen had the documentary’s strongest rejection of the term: At the mere mention of “yacht rock,” he hangs up on the film’s director Garrett Price — though not before suggesting a course of action unprintable in this family newsletter.Regardless of what you call it, (“smooth music,” “the West Coast sound” and “progressive R&B pop” are all offered), Price’s documentary makes the case that this was indeed a unified scene, driven by overlapping influences, shared personnel and playfully competitive studio one-upsmanship. Like the web series that preceded it, the new documentary ultimately offers a deeper appreciation of this sometimes-maligned music, which is worth a considered reappraisal.Today’s playlist is one such opportunity. It features some of the aforementioned yacht rock luminaries alongside a few of the younger artists they influenced, like De La Soul, Warren G and Thundercat. Listening on a decent pair of speakers or headphones is a must; donning a captain’s hat is entirely optional.No wise man has the power,LindsayWe 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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      YSL Trial Ends With Final Defendants Acquitted of Murder and Gang Charges

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      The winding, yearslong case against the star Atlanta rapper Young Thug, who recently pleaded guilty to gang charges, and five others concluded on Tuesday.Shannon Stillwell, left, and Deamonte Kendrick were found not guilty of murder and conspiracy to violate the RICO act.Miguel Martinez/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated PressMiguel Martinez/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated PressThe two remaining defendants in the gang conspiracy and racketeering case against YSL, the Atlanta rap label that prosecutors said doubled as a violent street crew led by Young Thug, were found not guilty on Tuesday of murder and conspiracy to violate the RICO act.The verdict ended a winding trial that became the longest in Georgia history. It arrived nearly two years after jury selection began and followed a year of testimony from close to 200 witnesses and nearly 16 hours of deliberations spread across four days.Young Thug, the platinum-selling rapper born Jeffery Williams, accepted a guilty plea on Oct. 31 and was released from jail after being sentenced to time served and 15 years of strict probation. As the case limped toward its conclusion in recent weeks, three other defendants also negotiated plea deals amid chaotic proceedings.Yet two of the original six men on trial — Deamonte Kendrick, known as the rapper Yak Gotti, and Shannon Stillwell, also known as Shannon Jackson — said they rejected similar deals with prosecutors, opting to leave their fate to jurors in Fulton County, Ga.On Tuesday, Mr. Kendrick and Mr. Stillwell were acquitted of the 2015 murder of Donovan Thomas Jr., an alleged gang rival, and also found not guilty of participating in criminal street gang activity and conspiracy to violate Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act, or RICO. Mr. Stillwell was also acquitted of a second murder, but he was found guilty of a single count: possessing a firearm as a felon.The judge in the case, Paige Reese Whitaker, was required to sentence Mr. Stillwell to the maximum sentence for the gun charge — 10 years in prison — because of recidivism guidelines. But she opted to convert all but two of those years to probation while also crediting Mr. Stillwell with time served.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 Revolutionary Sound at the Heart of ‘The Nutcracker’

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      There comes a moment in “The Nutcracker,” a ballet full of fantasy of fantastical music, when the Sugar Plum Fairy dances to a tune you’ve probably heard before.Over plucked string instruments, a glassy, bell-like melody emerges from a celesta, evoking water drops and then more as those drops give way to flowing runs. It’s a transporting sound: mysterious and otherworldly, delicate and playful.This is the famous “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” a highlight of “The Nutcracker” and a holiday staple, born on the stage and heard today in commercials and on movie soundtracks around this time every year.Unmute to listen as Megan Fairchild dances the Sugarplum Fairy in New York City Ballet’s production of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker.New York City BalletThe “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” is so familiar that it’s difficult to imagine that when this music was new, in 1892, it was really new. And that’s because of the celesta.Only recently invented, the celesta was in its infancy when Tchaikovsky began to imagine how he might write for it. Since then, its sound has spread throughout classical music and into pop, often with the same magical effect you hear in “The Nutcracker.” More

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      The Classical Music Our Critics Can’t Stop Thinking About

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      Watch and listen to five recent highlights, including performances by Davóne Tines and Lise Davidsen, and a new album by Ethan Iverson.The New York Times’s classical music and opera critics see and hear much more than they review. Here is what hooked them during the past month. Leave your own favorites in the comments.Davóne TinesAn installation view of “Living Room, Orlean, Virginia,” part of “Making Home — Smithsonian Design Triennial” at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAndrew Carnegie’s 1902 mansion on Fifth Avenue, a Georgian homage on an immense, Gilded-Age scale, is currently the home of a more modest domestic scene: the bass-baritone Davóne Tines’s childhood living room.As part of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s triennial exhibition, “Making Home,” Tines has worked with the director Zack Winokur and the artist Hugh Hayden to create “Living Room, Orlean, Virginia,” an uncanny, poignant replica of the house of Tines’s grandparents, who raised him.‘Living Room, Orlean, Virginia’Sonic composition by Davóne Tines and Zack Winokur with Alma Lee Gibbs Tines, and John Hilton Tines Sr. Sound engineered by Al Carlson.The “Living Room” tableau, arranged on an enormous rocker, is a meditation on “home” as something soothing yet precarious for a musician like Tines, who spends much of his year on the road. On closer inspection, this installation, with its cozy arrangement of furniture, an upright piano and even a rug over carpeted flooring, has a dreaminess to it: Eerily, the photo frames are empty.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 Brown’s Concerts Draw Protest in South Africa

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      Women’s rights activists have petitioned for the singer to be denied a visa for two shows in South Africa, where gender-based violence is high.After Chris Brown announced that he would be performing in Johannesburg, tickets for the city’s 94,000-capacity FNB Stadium sold out in under two hours. A second show was swiftly added.Nearly as quickly came a protest against Brown, who has faced allegations of violence and harassment of women including his guilty plea on charges that he assaulted Rihanna, his then-girlfriend, in 2009. Women for Change, a South African nonprofit, started a petition to block Brown’s performances on Dec. 14 and 15. The organization presented the petition, which received over 50,000 signatures, to the country’s Departments of Home Affairs and of Sports, Arts and Culture, asking that Brown be denied a visa.The singer’s planned return has particular resonance in South Africa, where women are killed at a rate five times higher than the global average, with 60.1 percent of those murders committed by an intimate partner, according to a study by the South African Medical Research Council. “We aim to send a clear message that South Africa will not celebrate individuals with a history of violence against women,” Sabrina Walter, the founder of Women for Change, said in an interview.Brown and his representatives have not addressed the protest, but in October, as the group spread the #MuteChrisBrown hashtag on social media, the singer seemed to troll the organization by writing, “Can’t wait to come,” under one of its Instagram posts. Walter said the reply triggered a wave of online harassment from Brown’s followers, including death threats against her and her team. It was not the first time Brown used his fame to rally against detractors. He has challenged other celebrities who refer to allegations made against him, and in February used Instagram to accuse the NBA of bowing to sponsor pressure to disinvite him from participating in an event related to its All-Star game. In 2019, Brown was released without charges after being accused of aggravated rape in France. He then sold T-shirts that read “This Bitch Lyin’” online.In the years since his 2009 arrest, Brown has been accused a number of times of violence against women, including throwing a rock through his mother’s car window in 2013 and punching a woman at a Las Vegas nightclub in 2016. In 2017, his ex-girlfriend Karrueche Tran obtained a temporary restraining order, citing harassment, physical violence, intimidation and death threats during and after their on-again-off-again relationship, which lasted from 2011 to 2015. In 2022, a judge dismissed a lawsuit that accused Brown of drugging and raping a woman on a yacht owned by Sean Combs.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