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      Tim Berne, a D.I.Y. Jazz Institution

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      The saxophonist and composer has spent 50 years in the New York scene. As he turns 70, he’s commanding gigs at a Brooklyn bar and continuing to inspire.For the saxophonist and composer Tim Berne, the Brooklyn bar Lowlands is a favorite neighborhood hangout. Lately, it has also become his musical laboratory.During the past two years, Berne has regularly walked the block and a half from his Gowanus home to the cozy establishment on a sleepy stretch of Third Avenue. Tall, with a moseying gait and a mop of gray hair, he blends in easily. There is no stage, so he and his bandmates, a rotating cast of newer and longtime associates, set up on the floor, amid purple Christmas lights and an illuminated Miller High Life sign.Passers-by might expect a classic-rock covers gig, but that changes when Berne begins warming up. His alto sound, chiseled and neon-bright, cuts through the space like a laser beam. It’s an instant reminder that one of the true thought leaders in progressive jazz — an unassuming yet undeniable force in the music for more than four decades — is still operating at peak strength as he approaches his 70th birthday on Wednesday. (He returns to Lowlands on Oct. 22.)“That Lowlands gig, he takes it as seriously as if he was going to be playing at Carnegie Hall,” the guitarist Bill Frisell, a frequent Berne collaborator in the ’80s who has re-entered his orbit, said in a video interview. “It’s like his life is on the line.”Frisell said that after their early work together, he didn’t keep close tabs on Berne’s music. “I heard him again, and it was like, ‘Man alive,’” he said, going on to describe “how these germs of ideas that were there at the beginning had blossomed and expanded, and his sense of all the parts — the melody, the rhythm, the harmony, the counterpoint — all of that had just kept on getting richer and richer.”“I’m not an artist; I’m just playing music,” Berne said.Malike Sidibe for The New York TimesWe 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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      3 Day Trips From Nashville

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      Fall is the perfect time to take excursions from bustling Music City into the surrounding countryside, where a variety of natural and cultural adventures await.Little more than a decade ago, Nashville, a.k.a. Music City, wasn’t so much a tourist town as it was a destination for musicians — a place where performers like Taylor Swift could still play the Bluebird Cafe without creating a scene.These days, visitors come in droves. And with more to do both in the heart of the city and in newly popular outlying neighborhoods, many people are staying longer. They might even want to work in a brief escape from what has become a lively, even raucous, city, and explore the lush, surrounding countryside.Here are three day trips from Nashville, all within a two-hour drive. Tennessee is a beautiful state, especially in the fall, when tulip poplars, sugar maples and hickory trees turn bright red, gold and copper, making the drive as joyful as the destination. Why not see more of it while you’re visiting?Fall Creek Falls State ParkThe 30,638-acre Fall Creek Falls State Park, situated on the rugged Cumberland Plateau, is just a few hours from Nashville.Sarah ReidKnown for its bluff-top vistas and stunning waterfalls, Fall Creek Falls State Park (free), about 100 miles east-southeast of Nashville, is one of Tennessee’s most popular — not to mention beautiful — state parks. The 30,638-acre natural area is situated on the rugged Cumberland Plateau, which traverses Tennessee diagonally. Here, you’ll find waterfalls, an extensive cave system, gorges, crystal clear streams and stands of virgin hardwood. In the fall, the park is lit with the bright yellow of towering green ash trees and the russet of red oaks.A good first stop is the Betty Dunn Nature Center at the north entrance, where you can learn about the park’s flora and fauna and history, stock up on snacks and have a park ranger plan the day’s journey with a curated map.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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      Ka, Lone Soldier of New York’s Underground Rap Scene, Dies at 52

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      The rapper, whose name was Kaseem Ryan, was known for self-producing 11 albums while also a maintaining a career with the New York Fire Department.Kaseem Ryan, who built a small but fervent following as an underground Brooklyn rapper known as Ka while maintaining a career as a New York City firefighter, died in the city on Saturday. He was 52.His death was announced by his wife, Mimi Valdés, on Instagram, as well as in a statement posted on his Instagram page. No cause was given, though the statement said that he had “died unexpectedly.”First with the mid-1990s underground group Natural Elements, and then on 11 solo albums he produced himself and released over nearly two decades, Ka gripped hard-core hip-hop listeners with gloomy beats and vivid descriptions of street life and struggle.In a 2012 review of his second album “Grief Pedigree”, The New York Times pop music critic Jon Caramanica described Ka as “a striking rapper largely for what he forgoes: flash, filigree, any sense that the hard work is already done.”Kaseem Ryan was born in 1972 and raised in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York. During his teen years, he dealt crack and sold firearms.He spent much of the 1990s trying to make a name for himself as a rapper, but then quit music altogether, only to come back a decade later.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 Wildly Subversive Music of Soviet Ukraine

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      An archival label in the United States was going to release a huge compilation of records from the U.S.S.R. Then Russia invaded Ukraine.Eugene Hutz still owns his copy of “Slayed?,” a 1972 album released the year he was born by the British bad boys Slade that his father purchased on the Ukrainian black market. Its spine is now lined with tape, its cover deeply ringed by the record inside. But for Hutz, 52, it remains a powerful talisman of rock ’n’ roll’s transformative potential, even amid oppressive regimes.“Enthusiasts knew their way to the black market, and my dad was an extreme enthusiast — a translator of Western culture, a spiritual seeker,” Hutz said of his father, the musician Sasha Nikolaev, during a recent phone interview. “My dad played it endlessly. I was born and raised to the sound.”Hutz emigrated to the United States in 1990, and played in various groups before the raucous band Gogol Bordello made him a rare stateside emissary of Ukrainian rock. The scene in his homeland is getting a bigger spotlight on Friday with “Even the Forest Hums,” an 18-track compendium of wildly diverse Ukrainian sounds (including Hutz’s minimalist teenage band, Uksusnik) that pulls back the curtain on a quarter-century of pop, post-punk, disco and experimental music largely made under Soviet control.The set is part of an ongoing rediscovery of Ukraine’s musical heritage, catalyzed in part by Russia’s 2022 invasion of its western neighbor.“When the war started, I had phone calls from international journalists: ‘Who are you, Ukrainians? What is your music?’ Nobody was interested before,” the journalist, filmmaker and record store owner Vitalii Bardetskyi said in a video interview from Kyiv. “Ukrainians were asking themselves the same questions. In the past two and a half years, Ukrainians found out more about ourselves than in the previous 30.”Cukor Bila Smert sounds like the band David Lynch might have tapped for an especially sinister “Twin Peaks.”via Cukor Bila Smert’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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      Tim Heidecker, Glendale Dad

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      From the moment he showed up at Tim Heidecker’s house, the Chihuahua in the dragon costume seemed a little freaked out.Mr. Heidecker — an actor, comedian and singer-songwriter — lives on a low-key, tree-shaded street in Glendale, Calif. On a recent morning, he was in his converted garage, getting ready for another episode of his talk show, “Office Hours Live With Tim Heidecker.”As crew members hurried around the room, Mr. Heidecker, 48, installed himself at an old white piano and started banging out the opening chords of the Rolling Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” A few feet away, the “Office Hours” co-hosts Vic Berger and Doug Lussenhop started blasting random pop-culture sound bites over the speakers, including Jim Carrey yelling “Alllll right-y then!” on repeat.The noise was too much for Mr. Piffles 2.0, who is billed as “the world’s only magic-performing Chihuahua.” Dressed head to tail in a green get-up, he trembled in the arms of his handler, the Las Vegas entertainer known as Piff the Magic Dragon.Mr. Heidecker headed to a standing desk in the middle of the garage. It was time to start planning the episode.“We’re getting close here, guys,” he said. “Do we need Piff at the top of the show? Are we going to talk first?”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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      Charli XCX’s Starry ‘Brat’ Remixes, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Victoria Monét, Samara Joy, the Linda Lindas and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Charli XCX featuring Ariana Grande, ‘Sympathy Is a Knife’Now that her “Brat” album has given Charli XCX her long-deserved mass pop audience, she has recharged it with a follow-up album of remixes: “Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat.” On the first version of “Sympathy Is a Knife,” she sang about personal insecurities and a rivalry she couldn’t help feeling, “’Cause I couldn’t even be her if I tried.” The remix has the same two-note synthesizer riff but a new lyric about the vicious precarity of 21st-century stardom: “It’s a knife when you’re finally on top/’cause magically the next step is they wanna see you fall to the bottom.” Ariana Grande, who has been through her own fame roller coaster, makes a natural ally.Obongjayar, ‘Tomorrow Man’Obongjayar, a songwriter from Nigeria who’s now based in London, connects the call-and-response and social exhortations of Fela Kuti’s 1970s Afrobeat to the samples, loops and layering of contemporary computerized African pop in “Tomorrow Man.” Over a deep, thumping beat, he denounces laziness: “If you no work you suffer,” he rasps. Meanwhile, percussion clatters around him and other sounds go whizzing by — flutes, piano, distorted guitar — like career obstacles to be batted away.Victoria Monét, ‘The Greatest’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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      Stevie Wonder Live: A Night of Love and Mischief

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      At 74, the singer and songwriter returns to arenas with a message of healing and understanding. He’s using trademark exuberance and joy to deliver it.It was a little after 9 p.m. Thursday night at Madison Square Garden, and Stevie Wonder was finally getting loose. He’d begun “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” one of his defining anthems, with a hopped-up-hootenanny version of the country standard “You Are My Sunshine.” He almost giggled — it was light work.Then, with fullness and verve, he jerked hard into his song, and the music went from 2-D to 3-D. He wasn’t denigrating the other one, so much as he had a point to make.“I. Feel. Like. This. Is. The. Beginning.”Each word arrived like a rocket whizzing past your ear — propulsive, powerful, so potent you almost tilted your head away ever so slightly to let it zip by. He was singing a love song, a declaration of emotional commitment, but when he really got going, it felt much more like a convocation. This love, we’re all in it together.Much of Wonder’s set list was drawn from the stretch from the late 1960s through the mid 1970s during which he released some of the most indelible entries in the history of American song.The New York TimesSo it went during this performance — part of a brief tour with the extremely chewy title, Sing Your Song! As We Fix Our Nation’s Broken Heart — which was much of the time a display of unparalleled singing, some of the time a kaffeeklatsch of feel-good utopianism, and in more places than you’d think a showcase for a very serious artist to be very silly.First, the voice: Wonder can do things with it that no popular singer in the five decades since his commercial prime has truly been able to match. It can sound like it’s falling apart while it’s in fact landing with strength and precision. With Wonder, a song is a suggestion, a framework to set up pyrotechnic runs and novel alternate melodic approaches. The song (usually) has a fixed starting and concluding point — everything else is a negotiation.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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      Gustavo Dudamel Visits New York With Promise, and a Warning

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      The superstar conductor will take over the New York Philharmonic in 2026. Is his tour with the Los Angeles Philharmonic a preview?Home is a slippery concept in classical music, a global art form of constant travel and jobs that require relocating for months or years at a time.The superstar conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who will become the New York Philharmonic’s next music and artistic director in 2026, is based in Madrid with his family. You could call that home. In a recent interview with The Los Angeles Times, though, he said that he would always think of his native Venezuela as home. And, after 15 years of leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Southern California is home, too.“I am going to New York, of course,” Dudamel said, “but L.A. is home.”Comments like this are a reminder that, for now, New York has little claim on Dudamel. The Los Angeles Philharmonic is still very much his home orchestra: where he has led the premieres of some 300 pieces, founded an immense youth orchestra program and achieved celebrity status in a city of celebrities.There are, perhaps, clues to Dudamel’s New York future in his Los Angeles present, which was on exhilarating display over three evenings at Carnegie Hall this week. He led the Los Angeles Philharmonic in concerts that reflected his gift for must-hear programming and his open-minded disregard for genre, his welcome belief that at a high enough level, all music can be art.But Dudamel is not without his weaknesses. While he can be brilliant off the beaten path, he is less distinct and perceptive in the classics. In that sense, his visit to Carnegie is both a sign of promise and a warning.He has always been a bit uneven. His early Beethoven recordings, with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, hardly rise in a crowded field. Two years ago, he led the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Carnegie in a performance of Mahler’s First Symphony that lacked vision and precision.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