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      Megan Thee Stallion Testifies in Tory Lanez Trial. Here’s What to Know.

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      Megan Thee Stallion testified on Tuesday in the assault trial against Mr. Lanez. The case had previously played out on social media and in music released by the rappers.LOS ANGELES — Megan Thee Stallion, the Grammy-winning rapper, took the stand on Tuesday during the assault trial against the rapper Tory Lanez, testifying that she still had nerve damage after he shot her in the feet in the wake of an argument two years ago.The case has played out on social media and in music released by both rappers. On an album released in 2020, more than two months after the encounter, Mr. Lanez rebutted Megan Thee Stallion’s account; she has defended herself on Instagram, in interviews and with her own defiant track.Mr. Lanez, whose real name is Daystar Peterson, could face nearly 23 years of prison if convicted. He faces charges of assault with a semiautomatic handgun; of carrying a loaded, unregistered firearm in a vehicle; and of discharging a firearm with gross negligence.Prosecutors say that in July 2020, in the early morning hours after a party in Los Angeles, Mr. Lanez lashed out at Megan Thee Stallion after she had criticized his rap abilities, firing toward her feet as she walked away from the vehicle they had both been riding in. The defense has disputed that Mr. Lanez fired the shots, suggesting it could have been another woman who they claim was upset that the two rappers had been intimate with each other.On Tuesday, Megan Thee Stallion largely reiterated what she had told reporters and recounted on social media about the encounter, testifying that she had initially misrepresented the events of that night to the police because tensions were high after the murder of George Floyd and she was afraid of how they would respond.“I didn’t want to talk to the officers because I didn’t want to be a snitch,” she testified.Megan Thee Stallion also testified about how the fallout from the encounter has made her depressed and hindered her career. She said that she was a private person who spoke out to defend her name, and that she had been the target of abusive comments on social media.“Because Tory has come out and told so many lies about me, and making this all a sex scandal, people don’t want to touch me,” she said. “It feels like I’m a sick bird.”The shooting occurred just as Megan Thee Stallion’s fame was growing. Months earlier, her collaboration with Beyoncé on a remix of “Savage” became her first No. 1 Billboard hit. That year, the blockbuster song “WAP” — a viral collaboration with Cardi B — turned her into an even bigger star.Here’s what to know about the case.What happened after the shooting?Initially, the details around what happened that night were hazy.Days after the shooting, Megan Thee Stallion — who was born Megan Pete — posted on her Instagram account that she had “suffered gunshot wounds” that required surgery but did not provide more details. But amid surging gossip and speculation, she later said the shooter was Mr. Lanez, who had been arrested and charged with concealing a firearm in the vehicle.Mr. Lanez addressed the situation in rap lyrics that suggested a conflicting account, including, “We both know what happened that night and what I did/But it ain’t what they sayin’.”In October 2020, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office charged Mr. Lanez with assault.Megan Thee Stallion’s career ascended in 2020 thanks to collaborations with Beyoncé on a remix of “Savage” and with Cardi B on the blockbuster “WAP.”Evan Agostini/Invision, via Associated PressWhat has Megan Thee Stallion said?In an interview with CBS’s Gayle King this year, Megan Thee Stallion said that she and a friend had been driving with Mr. Lanez after a party at the home of Kylie Jenner, the beauty mogul, when an argument broke out in the S.U.V.After she exited the vehicle, she said, Mr. Lanez shouted “Dance!” and a sexist slur before shooting at her. He then apologized and offered her and the friend, Kelsey Harris, a million dollars for them to keep quiet about what had happened.When the police arrived, she said, she told officers that her foot injuries had been caused when she stepped on glass.She later addressed her initial decision to withhold information from the police in her song “Shots Fired,” rapping, “If it weren’t for me/Same week, you would have been indicted.”Megan Thee Stallion, 27, has been outspoken about the shooting and what she sees as the broader issues at play, writing in a guest essay in The New York Times that the “skepticism and judgment” that followed her allegations were emblematic of how Black women were “disrespected and disregarded in so many areas of life.”Outside the courthouse on Tuesday, several fans of the rapper voiced their support with a banner that read, “We stand with Megan.”What has Tory Lanez said?Mr. Lanez, 30, who has pleaded not guilty to all charges, has not given interviews about his specific account of that night. But at the start of the trial, his lawyer, George Mgdesyan, said the argument in the car had involved Ms. Harris, a friend of Megan Thee Stallion’s; he said Ms. Harris was angry when she learned that Megan Thee Stallion had been intimate with Mr. Lanez, Rolling Stone reported.On the 2020 album on which he addressed the shooting, which was called “Daystar,” Mr. Lanez rapped, “If you got shot from behind, how can you identify me?”It is unclear whether Mr. Lanez plans to take the stand.What evidence is at the center of the case?Prosecutors have homed in on a text message that they say Ms. Harris sent to Mr. Lanez’s bodyguard that night, writing, “Help” and “Tory shot Meg.” They are also expected to present a text message in which Mr. Lanez apologizes to Megan Thee Stallion after the shooting. The defense has countered that Mr. Lanez did not directly admit to carrying out the shooting, according to The Los Angeles Times.Mr. Mgdesyan also suggested that there was a lack of physical evidence to prove the case against Mr. Lanez beyond a reasonable doubt. He told jurors, The Los Angeles Times reported, that Mr. Lanez’s DNA had not been found on the gun. More

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      The ‘Twin Peaks’ Theme Isn’t Just a Song. It’s a Portal.

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      Angelo Badalamenti, who died at age 85, left behind the bum-bommm that feels like home.Suffering from a case of middle age, I recently decided to learn the piano as an adult. The lesson I played on Monday was the theme from “Twin Peaks” — well, the idiot-proof, one-hand version that my iPad teaching app prepared for me, built around that low, hypnotic pattern. Bum bommm. Bum BOMMM.Later that day, in the sort of coincidence that seems to happen only in dreams and in small, spirit-afflicted logging towns in Washington, came news that the song’s composer, Angelo Badalamenti, had died at age 85.Badalamenti was a classically trained composer with a long résumé, including the scores for David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive.” But his memory is secured by those mesmeric notes, which opened the red curtains on Lynch and Mark Frost’s eerie mystery, and which stand above and apart from most music written for television like an ancient evergreen in an old-growth forest.In a recent list of the 100 greatest TV themes ever, Rolling Stone ranked “Twin Peaks” at 35. It would be unfair to use Badalamenti’s passing to dunk on that choice. (Counterpoint: Come on.) But whether or not it is the best theme of all time, it may be the most otherworldly, the most unlike anything that came before it.TV themes before 1990, when “Twin Peaks” premiered, tended to be come-ons or introductions. They whipped up a sense of excitement and adventure, like the theme from “Mission Impossible.” Or they outlined characters and told a story, like Waylon Jennings’s “Good Ol’ Boys” from “The Dukes of Hazzard.”Badalamenti’s theme is not a synopsis. It is not a fanfare. It is a passageway, a portal. It is slow, spare and meditative, even by the relatively languid TV pacing of three decades ago. It tells you to reset your pulse, abandon your expectations and step for an hour into a dark wood where the owls are not what they seem.Angelo Badalamenti was a classically trained composer with multiple film scores to his name. His memory is secured by the opening notes of the “Twin Peaks” theme.Nancy Wegard for The New York TimesThat opening motif seems to be plucked on the strings of an instrument that no human ever played, because in a way it is. According to Badalamenti, it began as a sample on a synthesizer, pitched lower and doubled with another guitar sound. “There’s no synth that has that sound, and it’s much too low to be an electric guitar, and it’s not a bass,” Badalamenti told Vulture in 2016. “We kept that quiet because we didn’t want anyone else to use it.”The resulting sound is simultaneously twangy and chthonic. It seems to vibrate from the earth, from your bones, from inside a tree trunk. It is, like the series, both filled with ghostly dread and saturated with romantic emotion.The theme couples that figure with a wash of dreamy synthesizers. Their interplay sets up contrasts that Lynch and Frost built into their supernatural murder mystery. It’s spooky but also naïve. It’s retro, with echoes of a rockabilly riff, and space-age. (The synthesizers, the critic John Rockwell wrote in The Times in 1990, “invest everything with an electronic glow, as if the music were radioactive.”)The music for “Twin Peaks” had to make realistic and surrealistic sense. It needed to work in a cherry-pie all-American diner and in the anteroom of the underworld. Badalamenti met the challenge in his playful and minimal score for the rest of the series, from the wistful “Laura Palmer’s Theme” to the seductive “Audrey’s Dance” to the jazzy, twitchy “Dance of the Dream Man.”The score played with Americana and pop history, but despite coming out at the dawn of the age of TV irony — “Seinfeld” had premiered a year before — it never winked. Like “Twin Peaks” itself, it meant what it said, even if you could spend your life grasping after that meaning.When Lynch and Frost brought “Twin Peaks” back for a revival in 2017, it was in many ways a different series with a different sound: even more gorgeously and truculently experimental, with an audio palette that leaned heavily on Lynch’s eerie, mechanical sound textures.But as the opening sequence began, there it was again: Bum bommm. Bum BOMMM. TV series are rituals, and those opening notes feel quasi religious, like an “om,” the one true bass line thrumming under eternity.Those notes live somewhere deep in my brain; I could feel that as I clumsily plunked them out on my piano. This is the power of a great theme: However disorienting things might get, on the screen or in life, you can always return to that musical mantra. Angelo Badalamenti is gone now. But his song remains, pulling me ever deeper into the woods. More

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      Don Lewis, Unsung Pioneer of Electronic Music, Dies at 81

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      He invented the first system for integrating multiple instruments using a single control panel, predating the MIDI controller by years.It was 1974, and Don Lewis was getting tired of hauling around so many keyboards. One day he would be in a studio in Los Angeles, working alongside Quincy Jones. A week later, he might be on tour as a member of the Beach Boys’ backup band. Or he might be performing his own gigs, shuffling up and down the West Coast with an ever-growing assortment of keyboards and other equipment.He could have just taken his trusty Hammond Concorde organ, itself not a small item. But Mr. Lewis was an aural explorer, constantly on the hunt for new sounds. If he found a keyboard with a particular tone to it, he had to add it to his collection. He was a one-man band; he aspired to be a one-man orchestra.His problem was about more than sheer weight. Each instrument had to be controlled separately, and there was no industry standard for integrating them. An electrical engineer by training, he decided to strip them down for parts and build something new.It took him three years of designing and fund-raising, but in 1977 he finalized the Live Electronic Orchestra, commonly known as the LEO.This musical Frankenstein’s monster brought together pieces from three keyboards, a slew of synthesizers, control panels and a drum machine into a set of plexiglass modules. Mr. Lewis sat in the middle, like a musical air traffic controller. His design allowed him not only to choose the sounds he wanted, but also to mix them in real time.Mr. Lewis, 81, died on Nov. 6 at his home in Pleasanton, Calif. His wife, Julie Lewis, said the cause was cancer.These days, people are used to the idea that they can produce virtually any sound they want on a laptop. That was far from the case in the 1970s, but Mr. Lewis found a way to create a symphony of sound at his fingertips.The LEO cost more than $100,000, and he never made another. Still, it was a hit. He played six nights a week in a packed bar along Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. Among his many fans was an engineer named Ikutaro Kakehashi, who was so inspired by Mr. Lewis’s invention that he went on to develop, with Dave Smith, the musical instrument digital interface, known as MIDI, the protocol that makes modern music production possible. (Mr. Smith died at 72 in June.)A big part of Mr. Lewis’s success as a live musician was getting audiences to listen to him and not gawk at his keyboard rig. His technology was so clever, so seamless, that most people soon forgot about it entirely and allowed the music he created to sweep them away. He was an unsung pioneer of electronic music who paved the way for a billion beeps, boops and oonz-oonzes to come.He wasn’t without his critics, who said that he was not a musician at all but a mere button-pusher. In the mid-1980s, members of the musicians’ union protested his performances, claiming that he would drive them out of business. He challenged their right to picket him before the National Labor Relations Board. He lost.The prospect of having to cross a picket line just to do his job was too much. He stored the LEO in his garage and tried to put the whole experience behind him. Several years later, the government re-examined his case, and this time decided in his favor — and even gave him a settlement.He didn’t bring back the LEO, though. He donated it to the Museum of Making Music in Carlsbad, Calif., where it sits on display today.He was a one-man band who with his invention, the LEO system, aspired to be a one-man orchestra. Mr. Lewis in 1971.Denver Post, via Getty ImagesDonald Richard Lewis Jr. was born on March 26, 1941, in Dayton, Ohio. His father worked odd jobs, and his mother, Wanda (Peacock) Lewis, was a cosmetologist. They divorced when Don was very young, and he rarely saw his father again until decades later.He grew up in a religious home, attending church at least once a week. Early on he became obsessed with the organ, and with the sounds that the church organist was able to draw out of it.One night he had a dream that he had replaced the organist on the bench.“I woke up and told my grandmother and grandfather, ‘I’ve got to learn the keyboard, because the feeling I had in that dream was something I hadn’t felt in my whole life,’” he recalled in the documentary “Don Lewis and the Live Electronic Orchestra,” scheduled to air on PBS in February.He enrolled at the Tuskegee Institute in 1959 to study electrical engineering. He sang in the school chorus and even performed at a rally for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.He stayed only two years. As tensions with the Soviet Union began to heat up, the Army was expanding the draft, and Black college students, unlike most white students, were often not exempt.Mr. Lewis enlisted in the Air Force. He received training as a nuclear weapons specialist and served for nearly four years in Colorado and New Mexico.After receiving an honorable discharge in 1965, he moved to Denver, where he was hired as an engineer for Honeywell, ran a church music program and worked part-time in a music store. Soon he was getting booked as a nightclub act, and eventually made enough to quit his day job.Mr. Lewis spent the next several years on the road, often as a demonstration musician for Hammond, the organ company. He was already tweaking his instruments and equipment, looking for ways to eke out new sounds. He was also making his name as a studio engineer and musician, working with musicians like Mr. Jones and Marvin Hamlisch, especially after he settled in Los Angeles in the early 1970s.Along with his wife, he is survived by his sister, Rita Bain Merrick; his sons, Marc, Paul and Donald; his daughters, Andrea Fear and Alicia Jackson; and five grandchildren.After putting the LEO in storage, Mr. Lewis worked as a consulting engineer for companies like Yamaha and Roland. He was on the team that developed the sounds for Yamaha’s revolutionary DX7 — the instrument that defined 1980s synth pop — and the team behind Roland’s TR-808, perhaps the most popular drum machine ever made.He taught at Stanford, Berkeley and San Jose State, and with his wife ran a program to bring music into elementary schools.“I think music is more than entertainment,” Mr. Lewis said in the documentary. “I think it has a stronger and more meaningful purpose in our lives. And I think what we’re here to do as individuals is help people unlock and find those things that are dormant.” More

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      Review: SZA’s ‘SOS’ Revels in Mixed Emotions

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      On her second album, the singer with an unpredictable and emotionally charged flow expands her sound as she ponders all her conflicting impulses.“I just want what’s mine,” SZA announces in “SOS,” the title song and opener of her second studio album. She spends the rest of the album wrestling with exactly what that means. Does she want casual sex or lasting love, relationships or independence, revenge or forgiveness, self-questioning or self-respect, familiar problems or a new start, power or trust? SZA’s music melts down styles — singing, rapping, rock, R&B, pop, folk, indie-rock, electronica — to ponder and interrogate her conflicting impulses. And she juggles them all against the backdrop of her career and the demands of celebrity and of social media, where she regularly galvanizes her fans with teasers and snippets.Solána Rowe, who records as SZA, has only two official studio albums in a decade-long career. “SOS” was preceded by “Ctrl,” which she originally released in 2017 but expanded by seven new songs in June 2022. Yet albums are only part of SZA’s sprawling output; she has been releasing singles and EPs since 2012 and racked up guest spots with, among many others, Kendrick Lamar, Summer Walker, Lorde, Megan Thee Stallion and Maroon 5. Even in collaborations, SZA’s voice always leaps out: pungent and plaintive, sometimes brazen and sometimes forlorn, easily demanding attention.Along the way, SZA, 33, has moved from the left-field electronic experiments of her early EPs to savvy but still probing pop, as the mainstream bends toward her ideas. “Ctrl” has been certified multiplatinum; “All the Stars,” her duet with Lamar on the “Black Panther” soundtrack, was nominated for an Academy Award, and she won a Grammy singing with Doja Cat on “Kiss Me More.”SZA’s gift is her unpredictable and emotionally charged flow, the complex craftsmanship she puts behind songs that sound like spontaneous confessions. Her vocal lines flaunt quirks and asymmetries that are simultaneously conversational and strategic. SZA can race through syllables like a rapper, then land on a melodic phrase that soon turns into a hook. Her melodies are casually acrobatic, like the syncopated, ever-widening leaps she tosses off in “Notice Me.”With 23 songs, “SOS” arrives as a long, nuanced argument SZA is having with her companions and with herself. It’s not a narrative concept album, but the songs are connected by recurring threads: a roundelay of infidelities and reunions, betrayals and connections, self-doubt and self-affirmation.The songs leap from personal beefs to universal quandaries, while SZA challenges herself as both musician and persona. She presents herself not as a heroine but as a work in progress who knows she’ll make more mistakes. “Now that I ruined everything I’m so [expletive] free,” SZA exults in “Seek & Destroy,” even as the slow, minor-key track tries to drag her down.“SOS” draws on multiple producers and collaborators, invoking old styles and seizing recent ones. In “Kill Bill,” SZA fantasizes about killing her ex and his new girlfriend, sounding both lighthearted and dangerous as the production spoofs a plush R&B ballad. In “F2F,” she starts with earnest folk-pop and blasts into rock as she insists that she’s only cheating with someone “because I miss you.”In “Gone Girl,” she warns a partner about getting too clingy — “I need your touch, not your scrutiny,” she sings, “Squeezing too tight, boy you’re losing me” — on the way to a chorus that echoes “She’s Gone” by Hall & Oates. And in the delicate ballad “Special,” she chides herself for letting someone destroy her self-esteem using melodic hints of “Creep” by Radiohead and “The Scientist” by Coldplay. She sounds natural, even unguarded, in every setting.“SOS” leans into every shade of SZA’s mixed feelings. Slow-grind ballads like “I Hate U,” “Used,” “Love Language,” “Open Arms” and “Blind” detail her anger at boyfriends’ bad behavior, yet admit she’s still drawn to them. But in the quietly resolute “Far,” she insists she’s “done being used, done playing stupid,” and in “Conceited,” she bounces assertive vocal lines off hooting keyboard chords and crisp programmed drum sounds as she declares, “I been burnin’ bridges, I’d do it over again/’Cause I’m bettin’ on me, me, me.” And she should. There’s bravery and beauty in admitting to uncertainty.SZA“SOS”(TDE/RCA) More

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      Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ Returns to No. 1

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      The singer’s holiday anthem, first released in 1994, ends Taylor Swift’s six-week run atop the Hot 100 singles chart.Back in 1994, Mariah Carey released the album “Merry Christmas,” with an anchor track, “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” that mixed the R&B production style of the era with nostalgic touches reminiscent of Phil Spector. The song did well at radio, and the album reached No. 3 on Billboard’s chart, behind LPs from Kenny G and Boyz II Men.Flash forward a couple of decades and Carey’s song had become a modern classic, but chart domination had long eluded it. After a yearslong promotional push that included a concert residency at the Beacon Theater in New York, an animated film and a new music video — as well as the song’s annual ubiquity on streaming playlists — “All I Want” finally made it to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in 2019, and repeated the feat in 2020 and 2021.Now Carey’s seasonal blockbuster has returned to No. 1 yet again, ending the six-week reign of Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero.” Buoyed by streaming, “All I Want” leads a new Top 10 dominated by decades-old holiday hits, including Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” (1958) at No. 2, Bobby Helms’s “Jingle Bell Rock” (1957) at No. 3 and Burl Ives’s “A Holly Jolly Christmas” (1964) at No. 4.On the album chart, “Heroes & Villains,” the new LP by the rap super-producer Metro Boomin, opens at No. 1 with the equivalent of 185,000 sales in the United States, including 233 million streams, according to the tracking service Luminate. Metro Boomin, whose real name is Leland Wayne, has produced hits for artists like Migos, Future, Gucci Mane and Post Malone, but “Heroes & Villains” is his third time at No. 1 with an album of his own.The release features a deep bench of guest stars, like the Weeknd, 21 Savage, Travis Scott, Future and Takeoff from Migos, who was shot and killed six weeks ago. The 85-year-old actor Morgan Freeman also contributed his familiar voice-of-God narration to a promotional short film and parts of the album, as he did on a joint LP by Metro Boomin and 21 Savage two years ago.Swift’s LP “Midnights” falls to second place in its seventh week out, five of those at No. 1. Drake and 21 Savage’s “Her Loss” is No. 3, Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” is in fourth place and Michael Bublé’s 11-year-old holiday favorite “Christmas” falls one spot to No. 5.Carey’s “Merry Christmas,” from 1994, lands at No. 10 on the album list. More

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      Samara Joy’s Voice (and Social Media) Is Helping Jazz Find Fresh Ears

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      The 23-year-old singer had something rare in the genre — a viral moment — and will compete for best new artist at the Grammys in February.Samara Joy was kicking off an encore engagement at New York’s storied Blue Note club in November, just days before her 23rd birthday, when sparks began to fly.“It was my first set, and I was in the middle of telling a story,” she recounted a few weeks later. “I was building up this whole scenario that was going to get me into the song, and then I closed my eyes — and when I opened them, five seconds later, there was all this smoke coming up.” (A woman seated by the stage got a bit too close to a flickering candle; the fire was swiftly extinguished.)“Nothing like that had ever happened to me before,” Joy said, giggling softly. Just a week later, she had another, more traditional first, picking up two Grammy nominations for “Linger Awhile,” her second album and Verve Records debut. The album teams her with noted musicians — the guitarist Pasquale Grasso, the pianist Ben Paterson, the bassist David Wong and the drummer Kenny Washington — on standards including Monk’s “‘Round Midnight” and Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me.”Joy, a Bronx native who’s currently based in Washington Heights, goes by her first and middle name (her surname is McLendon). She will compete in February for best jazz vocal album and best new artist — a field in which recent winners have included ubiquitous stars such as Olivia Rodrigo, Megan Thee Stallion and Billie Eilish.When she got the news, Joy was on a train heading home after a gig in Washington, D.C. “I felt like screaming,” she said, “but I was in the quiet car, so I couldn’t freak out.”Joy has grown accustomed to reaping honors. In 2019, as a student at the State University of New York at Purchase, she won the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition; she became an Ella Fitzgerald Memorial Scholar the following year. Joy’s singing, with its precocious depth, creamy tone and fluttery vibrato, continued to inspire comparisons to both of those legends after the release of several videos that went viral, something of a rarity in jazz — in one, she performed Duke Ellington’s “Take Love Easy,” a song recorded by Fitzgerald in the 1970s — and a self-titled album in 2021.While Joy said she wasn’t especially active on social media at first, it has grown into a natural tool for expression. Jamie Krents, the president of Verve Records, said Joy’s presence there “was one of the things that attracted us to her — seeing how genuine and intriguing she was, and how that could shine through on those channels. She’s a normal 23-year-old person who happens to be a world-class singer.”Regina King, Anita Baker, Chaka Khan and Don Cheadle have also expressed admiration. The celebrated bassist and composer Christian McBride, who judged Joy in the Sarah Vaughan competition, finds her vocals “full of wisdom.”“It’s spooky; she sounds and tells a story like an elder,” he said in a phone interview. “But I think what I love most about her — and I pray that the challenges in life don’t change this — is she’s always positive. She’s got such a fun, positive spirit.”That spirit was palpable during a conversation at a food court in her neighborhood, where Joy admitted her fast success has left her head spinning a bit. “Sometimes I honestly don’t believe this is happening,” she said. “I see pictures of this glammed-up girl, but I’m just me” — on that afternoon, a young woman wearing sensible glasses and no perceptible makeup, clad in sneakers and a down jacket she picked up at Marshalls.The singer, who is currently touring with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in “Big Band Holidays” — the show will arrive at the Rose Theater Wednesday through Sunday — has spent little time at home over the past six or seven months, juggling dates throughout the United States and Europe. “When there are people my age in the crowd, it’s mostly students,” she said. “Or you have younger audience members who have seen me on Instagram or TikTok” — Joy has more than 200,000 followers on the video platform — and tend to be less familiar with jazz.Joy can empathize: She sang with a jazz band in high school that tended toward “a lot of contemporary, fusion-y stuff,” and was largely unfamiliar with the repertoire until arriving at Purchase. And while she’s the paternal granddaughter of the noted gospel singers and preachers Elder Goldwire and Ruth McLendon, who performed with the Savettes of Philadelphia, that genre also held little appeal initially.Joy will compete for two Grammys in February, including one in an all-genre category: best new artist.Scott Rossi for The New York TimesInstead, Joy listened to the old-school R&B beloved by both her parents, “Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin and Stevie and Chaka,” she said, and sang in middle and high school musicals, making her theatrical debut as Erzulie (the goddess of love) in a sixth-grade production of “Once on This Island.” “I was scared about the acting part, because I was very shy — I still get that way sometimes,” she said. “But I wanted to sing, so I was like, ‘We’re going to learn these lines and try as best we can to get inside this character.’”Eventually, Joy did begin singing in church, where her father also performed frequently. (Antonio McLendon is a singer, songwriter and bassist who has toured with the gospel star Andraé Crouch.) “I started in the choir when I was 16, and then I started to sing lead, which was nerve-racking,” she said. “The church live-streamed the services, and I had all these eyes on me.” She nonetheless became “more serious about it, because I was there all the time. We had rehearsal, we had Bible study, we had services on Saturday and Sunday. That was my priority — whereas jazz band was just an after school thing, a couple of songs here and there.”When Joy won the Sarah Vaughan competition, “My grandfather was disappointed, I think” — Ruth McLendon had died in 2014 — “because he thought singing belonged in the church, that it should serve as worship to God,” she explained. “I don’t think he would ever come into a jazz club, because of his beliefs, which I respect and understand. I know that he still loves me, regardless of how he feels about the career decisions I’m making.”Joy’s ambitions include writing; she penned rhapsodic lyrics for “Nostalgia (The Day I Knew),” a sweetly breezy number on “Linger Awhile.” “Now I’m paying more attention to the melodies and harmonics of all these songs I’m singing,” she said. “I’m telling this composer’s story and this lyricist’s story, and it’s beautiful, but I hope I can be influenced enough to write content for myself.”Studying giants like Vaughan and Fitzgerald — Carmen McRae and Betty Carter are also favorites — has also made Joy eager to explore a range of styles: “Sarah Vaughan could sing anything; she could go incredibly deep and then she could sing operatically, and neither seemed like a struggle. I look at her, and at some opera singers, and I want that ease.”When Joy speaks specifically of jazz, of course, there is a particular sense of devotion. “I look at all these influences — like Charlie Parker, like Duke Ellington, like Betty Carter and Sarah Vaughan — and I think, these people were here,” she said, a measure of awe creeping into her quiet voice. “This is a young music, and they did so much in their lives to draw people to this type of music; it deserves to be talked about and shared. And as long as I’m passionate about it, that’s my goal — to share it.” More

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      Review: Klaus Mäkelä, Rising Star of Conducting, Arrives in New York

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      Klaus Mäkelä, a young yet already accomplished maestro, made his New York Philharmonic debut with a performance that prioritized clarity.Now New Yorkers know what the hype is all about.The hype, that is, around the 26-year-old Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä. He’s the fastest-rising maestro of his generation, a darling of fellow musicians and orchestra administrators alike. It seems that every time I meet with someone in the industry lately, there comes a moment in the conversation when I’m asked, “Have you heard Klaus Mäkelä?”Outside New York, it’s been hard not to. He has collected podium appointments so quickly, an ensemble as prestigious as the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam was willing to create a title, artistic partner, to keep him in reserve until he officially becomes its chief conductor in 2027. That’s when his contracts will be up at the Orchestre de Paris and the Oslo Philharmonic; already, there are whispers about where he could go next.Chances are, he will not go to the New York Philharmonic, where he made his debut on Thursday. (For those keeping track, Leonard Bernstein was just a year younger when he got his unexpected big break.) This orchestra — whose music director, Jaap van Zweden, will depart at the end of next season — needs a new conductor much sooner than Mäkelä is available. But perhaps he has a future as a frequent guest; his first outing with the Philharmonic was a promising one, under an even bigger spotlight than planned, with a program of only symphonic works after the concerto soloist, Truls Mork, withdrew because of an injury.The Philharmonic, at its most exasperating, can be a brash and unbalanced ensemble. Under Mäkelä’s baton on Friday morning, however, it was largely measured in delivering what has become, to mixed results, his trademark clarity. He brought a transparent, levelheaded approach to the emotional extremes of two Russian, B-minor symphonies premiered nearly a half-century apart — the Sixths of Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich — as well as to a contemporary work, Jimmy López Bellido’s “Perú Negro.”López Bellido is a favorite of Mäkelä’s among living composers. It’s easy to hear why; this is music that, on the surface, sounds like a successor to other works in Mäkelä’s repertoire that employ enormous orchestral forces, such as the Ballets Russes scores of Stravinsky that he will take to the Aix-en-Provence Festival next summer, or the post-Romantic symphonies of Mahler that he has toured.Unlike those, however, “Perú Negro” — premiered in 2013 as part of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra’s centennial and originally conducted by López Bellido’s friend Miguel Harth-Bedoya — thrills and entertains, but reveals itself all too readily.This piece has the hallmarks of López Bellido’s style, such as rich orchestration and maximal gesture, along with homages to the folk songs and rhythms of the Black Peruvian music that the title hints at. Although Mäkelä was up against the newly renovated David Geffen Hall’s bright acoustics in taming the Philharmonic’s sound, he led a lively account, which was met with a standing ovation.But the memory of it was quickly swept aside by the Shostakovich that followed — in particular the similarly grand, breakneck finale. There, you could hear what was lacking in “Perú Negro”: ambiguous exuberance, Janus-faced passages that misdirect and provoke, both inviting and impenetrable, forever irreconcilable. López Bellido could take a lesson from that, as someone who clearly knows how an orchestra can sound, but not necessarily what it can say.The Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky symphonies were studies in letting a score speak for itself. Whether that works is largely a matter of taste, and ensemble. I heard a similar touch in a Mahler Four that Mäkelä conducted last year in Munich; there, the cool performance didn’t deliver on the symphony’s heavenly climax. But his Mahler Six in Amsterdam this summer was a revelation of terror directly expressed.At the Philharmonic, Mäkelä kept some of the orchestra’s characteristic imbalances in check — such as the outsize sounds that rendered the winds section virtually invisible in the Beethoven Nine led by van Zweden in October — but hadn’t quite rewired the players. He did, though, manage to lend both symphonies a legible, compelling shape, if at a bit of a remove. The most evocative moments came not from the entire group but from soloists: Frank Huang’s violin fleetly galloping in the Shostakovich; Judith LeClair’s bassoon dolefully opening the Tchaikovsky; and Anthony McGill’s clarinet reprising that work’s second theme with rending sweetness.The third movement of the Tchaikovsky, a perennial audience favorite, especially benefited from Mäkelä’s lucid reading, whose transparency brought equal attention to the itinerant melodic line and the dense orchestrations surrounding it. There was a sense of what the composer might have been thinking when he wrote to his publisher, Pyotr Jurgenson, that he was “happy in the knowledge that I have written a good piece.”I found myself, though, wanting to know more than how Tchaikovsky viewed his own music. Mäkelä’s conducting was so deferential to the score, it was tempting to shake him and ask, “But what do you really think?” Classics like this symphony warrant not just recitation, but also repeated examination.Then again, it’s helpful to remember that we are talking about a 26-year-old. Who hasn’t changed drastically throughout their 20s — in life, in work, in worldview? It will be interesting, and worthwhile, to see where that growth takes Mäkelä. He has proved that he can wrangle the war horses. Now it’s time to see what else he can do.New York PhilharmonicPerformed on Friday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Hamish Kilgour, Whose New Zealand Cult Band Had Reach, Dies at 65

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      He was a powerful drummer and, most notably, a founding member of the Clean, which inspired indie bands like Pavement, Yo La Tengo and Superchunk.Hamish Kilgour, a founding member of the New Zealand band the Clean, who was celebrated among fans of underground music for his propulsive drumming and his countercultural approach to life, has died. He was 65.He was found dead in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Monday, 10 days after being reported missing, the police there said. His death was referred to the coroner’s office.A central figure in the crop of freewheeling New Zealand musicians on the independent label Flying Nun that came to be called the “Dunedin sound,” Mr. Kilgour spent four decades as a musician, singing and playing percussion and later the guitar.He eventually played with more than 100 bands, including the Great Unwashed, the Sundae Painters and Monsterland, and lived for almost 30 years in New York, where he formed the band the Mad Scene.He also had a secondary passion for painting: He produced hundreds if not thousands of frank, idiosyncratic pictures, many of which were repurposed as album cover art.A deceptively powerful drummer, Mr. Kilgour might start a song in ramshackle fashion, then build to a thunderous conclusion. He had early on been inspired by Moe Tucker’s single snare on live recordings by the Velvet Underground. “I thought, that’s kind of magical and that’s possible — I could do that,” he said in 2012. Ms. Tucker’s minimalist, driving style and her enthusiasm for the power of the tambourine, later colored his own playing.Not every drummer, however talented, is immediately recognizable, said Mac McCaughan, the owner of the label Merge Records, which last year reissued the Clean’s first two releases. “But with Hamish — he had a voice on the drums,” he said in an interview. “He had his own style and his own character.”In 1981, Roger Shepherd, a local record store manager who was in the process of founding Flying Nun Records, saw the Clean perform at the Gladstone Hotel in Christchurch. “They were pretty obviously the best band in the world,” Mr. Shepherd recalled.Almost before the set had finished, he asked them to record with him. The first recording session produced “Tally Ho!,” a frenetic, surf-rock-adjacent single — made for 50 New Zealand dollars — that scraped into the Top 20 in New Zealand, buoyed by its popularity on student radio stations.Flying Nun’s fortunes had been transformed. The subsequent EP “Boodle Boodle Boodle,” recorded that year on a similar budget, spent 26 weeks on the New Zealand charts. American indie bands, including Pavement, Yo La Tengo and Superchunk, would cite it as an inspiration.For listeners outside New Zealand, the musicians on the Flying Nun label had a kind of legendary status, said the American filmmaker Michael Galinsky, who became a friend of Mr. Kilgour’s.“It just opened up all these worlds,” he said of “Tuatara,” a 1988 Flying Nun compilation on which Mr. Kilgour appeared. “It’s so far away — you don’t see pictures of these people, there’s no writing about them, there’s no internet. So they’re mythic, and incredible.”Inspired by the Enemy, a punk group started by friends of theirs, members of the Clean had begun rehearsing together in 1978 — Mr. Kilgour taught himself the drums, while his brother, David, played guitar and Peter Gutteridge played bass. (Mr. Gutteridge was later replaced by Robert Scott.)After its first flash of success, the members of the band made an early decision to split up just four years into their career. But as the Clean’s influence on do-it-yourself underground rock became more apparent, they reunited in 1988. Over the next 30 years, interrupted by long spells apart, the Clean continued to perform in the United States and elsewhere around the world, releasing several albums.As a member of the Mad Scene, Mr. Kilgour recorded multiple albums and EPs, as well as two solo albums, “All of It and Nothing” and “Finkelstein,” and made myriad other guest appearances on other artists’ records.Hamish Robert Kilgour was born in Christchurch on March 17, 1957, the older of two sons of MacGregor and Helen Stewart (Auld) Kilgour. He was reared mostly in Cheviot and Ranfurly, small communities in New Zealand’s rural South Island. In 1972, the family moved to the coastal city of Dunedin, also in the South Island, where Mr. Kilgour’s father took a job as a pub manager while his mother ran the establishment’s kitchen. Hamish received a bachelor’s degree in English and history from the University of Otago in Dunedin in 1977.After his father was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where he died in 1982, his mother worked as a nurse to support the family. She later supported her sons’ band, helping to fund both a van and a P.A. system as they performed around the country with the Clean.Mr. Kilgour moved to New York in the late 1980s after the breakup of his first marriage, to Jenny Halliday. There he met Lisa Siegel, who would become his second wife and a bandmate when they formed the Mad Scene. The couple had a son, Taran.But life in New York, where he worked as an art handler, house painter and carpenter in between music gigs, was at times precarious, especially after he and Ms. Siegel broke up in 2013.He moved back to New Zealand during the coronavirus pandemic and played music there whenever he could, while eking out an existence that strained his mental and physical health, people close to him said.He is survived by his brother and bandmate, David, and his son.For his contemporaries in New Zealand, Mr. Kilgour was a testament to the notion that being from a far-off country of a few million people with no established rock tradition did not preclude people from making great music.“Just because it comes from here, and not London or New York, it doesn’t mean that it’s not valid,” said Mr. Shepherd of Flying Nun. “That was a startling thing that we kind of knew was true anyway, but that hadn’t been articulated for us.”Richard Langston, a music journalist and longtime friend, said Mr. Kilgour had “changed the way you could record indie rock.”“He was that important,” he added, “and he lived a crazy, brave, solo life.” More