Music

Hear tracks by Luke Combs, Jessie Ware, Indigo de Souza and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at [email protected] and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Lizzo featuring SZA, ‘Special’Lizzo’s soulful, gospel-choir-backed performance of “Special,” the title track from her 2022 album, was a highlight of this year’s Grammys telecast, and now she’s recruited SZA to provide a fresh spin on the song. “You call it sensitive, and I call it superpower,” SZA sings, nimbly skipping across the beat, while Lizzo offers her a message of solidarity: “I thought that I’d let you know, in case nobody told you today, you’re special.” If the original version was a more general anthem of uplift, SZA’s presence gives the song a more intimate call-and-response quality, as if she and Lizzo were two girlfriends exchanging words of support after a long day. LINDSAY ZOLADZBeyoncé, ‘Cuff It (Wetter Remix)’It’s easy, and expected, to think about Beyoncé from the top down. On Sunday, she won four Grammys, giving her a career total of 32 and making her the most decorated performer in the show’s history. Conversations about her music, how she assembles it and how she releases it often take on a world-historical tone. She is the defining superstar of the stan era, publicly available only every once in a while.The Emotionally Charged Sound of SZAThe artist, whose real name is Solána Imani Rowe, has become a dominant figure in American pop.View From the Top: Her moody, enigmatic music made SZA a megastar. Can she learn to live with success?‘Ctrl’: The artist’s first album for a major label, released in 2017, held on to the electronics and the leisurely tempos of her past work. But it placed her fully in command of her songs.Interview: After receiving five Grammy nominations for “Ctrl,” the singer sat down to discuss her journey to success and facing her inner critic.‘SOS’: On her second album, SZA presents herself not as a heroine but as a work in progress who knows she’ll make more mistakes.But she is listening. One of the more gratifying and unexpected turns of the “Renaissance” era has been her acknowledgment of how fans listen to her, responding in something like real time. First, in August, she formally released a mash-up of “Break My Soul” and Madonna’s “Vogue” that had been floating around online.Now, she’s done it again. A few months ago, the D.J. and producer esentrik made a mash-up of “Cuff It” with “Wetter,” a temperate love rap from 2009 by the Chicago fast talker Twista, produced by the Legendary Traxter. It was a hit on TikTok, and now, it’s become something even more substantive. Beyoncé recorded new vocals for this version, which takes the sauciness of the original and cools it down slightly, leaning into afterglow.Making this remix official is savvy acknowledgment that fans listen to music in ways artists can’t anticipate, and it behooves artists to be mindful of how they’re being consumed. And it is savvy business too, a way of formalizing the chaos of TikTok and bringing it under the umbrella of the empire. JON CARAMANICAJessie Ware, ‘Pearls’Jessie Ware’s latest disco-inspired track is an effervescent invitation to, as she puts it, “shake it til the pearls fall off.” The single from her April album “That! Feels Good!” is thick with sumptuous atmosphere and Ware’s signature sass. But most impressively, its chorus’s ascending melody is a dazzling showcase of Ware’s stratospheric upper register. Sing along at your own risk. ZOLADZMegan Moroney, ‘I’m Not Pretty’A razor-sharp premise for a song: “Somewhere out there my ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend is scrolling through my Instagram/Tearing me down, passing the phone around.” A young country singer with a voice that mixes sweetness with wryness, Megan Moroney targets this charming, funny, exhausted song at women who tear other women down. CARAMANICALuke Combs, ‘Love You Anyway’In midcareer mode, Luke Combs doesn’t let it rip quite as often as he once did. His bellow is more stable, his emotional presence more dignified. But there’s still something of a purring engine inside songs like “Love You Anyway,” which in the hands of a lesser singer, would be a familiar, cloying ode to a love so strong, it’s worth the pain of potentially losing it. But when Combs sings, “If your kiss turned me to stone, I’d be a statue standing tall in ancient Rome,” he sounds like he’s thoroughly pondered the consequences — the likelihood of heartbreak — and is pressing on with force nonetheless. CARAMANICAIndigo de Souza, ‘Younger & Dumber’“Younger & Dumber,” from the Asheville singer-songwriter Indigo De Souza, is a slow-burning tear-jerker, a gradual accumulation of heartbreaking lines that takes flight in a soaring climax. “Sometimes I just don’t want to be alone, and it’s not because I’m lonely,” De Souza sings in a wearied croon. “It’s just that I get so tired of filling the space all around me.” But just then, her voice swells in intensity and fills that space with her own wrenching emotion. ZOLADZYaya Bey, ‘Exodus the North Star’Brooklyn’s Yaya Bey brings a light touch to “Exodus the North Star,” the title track from an upcoming EP that follows her excellent 2022 album “Remember Your North Star.” “Exodus” is a love-struck reverie that begins as a sparse arrangement — just Bey’s voice and some celestial keys — but soon explodes into a joyful, horn-kissed celebration. “Baby, it’s the way you make me feel like your girl could get up and fly,” Bey sings and, accordingly, the song suddenly takes flight. ZOLADZFrench Montana featuring 2Rare, “Ratataaaaa’Turns out that French Montana’s meandering smears, typically at home over lightly galloping production, sound equally intriguing over sounds twice as quick. This song (which perhaps is an allusion to an old TikTok meme) is jubilant and spacious, and a little odd. The Philadelphia club rapper 2Rare, who guests here, is more naturally bouncy than his host, but his antic energy is mostly a counterweight to French Montana’s impressionistic almost-raps. CARAMANICA More

The Scottish trio has been making political, genre-blending songs for a decade. On a new album, the group embraces the elation of community.When the Scottish band Young Fathers were partway through writing their new album, “Heavy Heavy,” Graham Hastings, known as G, played his brother-in-law a song called “Rice.” The track features cascading drums and bouncy, booming bass as the three-piece chant lyrics including “These hands can heal” and “See the turning tide.”“What are you doing?” Hastings, who sings and plays keys, percussion and synths, recalled his brother-in-law asking. “That’s far too happy for Young Fathers.”For years, the group’s music had been labeled abrasive or forbidding. Being told it was too upbeat, Hastings, 35, said, was “another surprise, another sense that we were doing something we hadn’t before.”Over the past decade, Young Fathers — which also includes Alloysious Massaquoi and Kayus Bankole, who both sing, rap and play percussion — have made music that juxtaposes gospel, hip-hop, electronic music and even the swagger of punk. Despite winning the prestigious Mercury Prize in 2014, their songs have a habit, Bankole said, of “falling between the cracks,” and rarely get played on pop radio stations.The director Danny Boyle, who used Young Fathers’ music for his 2017 movie “T2 Trainspotting,” said in an interview that they “are like a boy band, except no other boy band you’ve ever heard in your life before.” Their music, with oblique lyrics that touch on topics including masculinity and attitudes to immigrants, sums up the loneliness of urban Britain, Boyle added, but he said the group sings with such “white and Black soul,” it lifts listeners up.That uplift is the focus of “Heavy Heavy,” Young Fathers’ fourth studio album and first in five years, though not necessarily by design. In a recent interview at its messy studio — a squat building wedged between a graveyard and a furniture upholsterer in a working class district of Edinburgh — the trio said it hadn’t taken an intentional direction on the LP. It was just trying to “expel all we needed to expel,” Massaquoi, 35, said.At the end of 2019, the group started working on “Heavy Heavy” following a rare year off, so when the three men finally met up to write, they could really “appreciate what we have: the arguments, the fallouts, the joy, the happy moments,” Bankole, 35, said.The trio has been having those ups and downs for over 20 years, after meeting when they were 14 at an underage club in Edinburgh. They each had very different backgrounds: Massaquoi arrived in Edinburgh as a refugee from Liberia’s civil war; Hastings grew up in a working class home in the city; and Bankole lived in a Nigerian household where he was expected to become a doctor or a lawyer. But Massaquoi said that on the club’s dance floor, surrounded by tipsy teenagers, their connection was immediate.Soon, they were making tracks in Hastings’s bedroom, crowded around a microphone hanging in a closet. As teenagers, they initially tried to be a “psychedelic boy band,” Hastings said, performing upbeat rap songs, complete with dance routines, at the club where they had met. They secured a manager, but got stuck in limbo, spending a decade writing songs that were never released. Frustrated, their music took a darker turn, which unlocked a new level of their creativity. Once they started putting those new tracks online in 2013, they once again had the industry’s attention.When Young Fathers reconvened for the “Heavy Heavy” sessions in 2019, it was the first time they’d written music alone since those early days in the bedroom. Massaquoi said going back to their childhood connection simply “made the most sense.” Sometimes writing felt like “toil,” Hastings added, but he said the trio were addicted to “the moments of ecstasy” they create together. It was only once the album was finished that they realized many of its songs had a real “communal aspect,” Massaquoi said.The album includes “Ululation,” in which the band hands vocal duties to Tapiwa Mambo, a friend who ululates joyfully in Shona, a southern African language; and “Drum” in which the group urges listeners to “hear the beat of the drums and go numb, have fun.”“Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is create a sense of community,” Hastings said, “to get people together and to dance.”In the past, Young Fathers were known for taking a disruptive approach to their art. In 2015, they released an album titled “White Men Are Black Men Too” hoping to encourage discussion around issues of race and identity (Massaquoi and Bankole are Black, Hastings is white.)At a recent show in Brighton, Young Fathers performed tracks from the new album as well as old favorites. Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesTwo years later, the group made a video for Scotland’s National Portrait Gallery. As Bankole danced in front of the gallery’s paintings of white aristocrats from centuries ago, Massaquoi pointed out that there was no one like him “framed in gold” in the museum.“Am I meant to admire the brushwork and the colors and the historical context without considering how you came to be here, and the people who look like me aren’t?” Massaquoi intones in the track. “Am I meant to just accept this?”Today, discussions about Britain’s legacy of colonialism are commonplace, even in the country’s museums. But in 2017, some social media users posted racist responses to the video.“Sometimes we’re consciously subverting things,” Hastings said. But as a multiracial group working across genres, “we’re accidentally subverting things by just being.”At a recent album release show, a handful of fans in the 900-strong crowd said the group’s racial mix and politics were a vital part of its appeal. Greg Shaw, 40, a personal trainer who’d driven two hours to the gig at Chalk, a club in Brighton, southern England, said he loved that the band “sing about Black issues, about working class issues, about being together as one.”For most of the 40-minute set, the band seemed lost in its own experience of the music: Bankole prowled and danced around the stage, dreadlocks flying; Massaquoi crooned soulfully into a mic with his eyes closed; and Hastings glared intensely at the crowd as he sung gruffly.But just before Young Fathers began a final number, an old fan favorite called “Toy,” Bankole beamed at the crowd.“What a beautiful family we have here,” he said. Soon, much of the audience was dancing and jittering just like him. As the track ended, Hastings twisted knobs and hit buttons on a bank of electronic equipment to fill the venue with noise. Then he turned and grinned at everyone.There’s nothing wrong with happiness, Hastings had said in Edinburgh: “There is a lot of power in joy.” More

A 20th anniversary edition of the band’s blockbuster second album will include a handful of previously unreleased demos and the completed track “Lost.”Enough time has passed since his band’s first record that the Linkin Park singer Mike Shinoda has reached the stage of his career where his children’s friends are shocked to learn he was in one of the biggest bands of the 2000s. “The reactions are hysterical,” the musician, 45, said in a video interview from his home studio in Los Angeles.He offered a knowing smile about what it meant that it had taken so long. “I think we gradually got comfortable with being elder statesmen,” he said about being discovered by the next generation. “But I’m really grateful for the respect that the band is enjoying from younger people, whether it’s fans or people who are making music.”Linkin Park has not released a new album since May 2017, two months before its other frontman, Chester Bennington, died by suicide at 41. But while assembling material for a 20th anniversary reissue of the band’s second album, “Meteora,” Shinoda came upon something fans haven’t heard before: a handful of unreleased, close-to-complete songs that have sat in the band’s archives for two decades.The first of those tracks, “Lost” — built around Bennington’s passionate vocals, and out on Friday — was pulled from one of Shinoda’s dormant hard drives. “Everything came back,” he said, about rediscovering the track. “That was that day. That was that thing. I remembered us having this conversation about which songs should make the cut.”The song, which was fully recorded and mixed in 2003, was ultimately left off “Meteora” because it was similar to “Numb,” an album single that reached No. 11 on the Billboard chart and has 1.9 billion YouTube views. Today, it serves as an example of Bennington’s potent talents during the band’s commercial peak. (“Meteora” went seven-times platinum; the band’s 2000 debut, “Hybrid Theory,” has an RIAA diamond certification for sales over 10 million.)“He could take that thing he was singing, and just sledgehammer it through somebody’s heart,” Shinoda said with reverence. “I’ve grown to appreciate what we had even more, because it’s hard to get that. I work with people where I go, ‘Oh, can you sing it this way?’ And they just can’t.”Brad Delson, the band’s guitarist, called “Lost” a “surprise gift” from Bennington. “The performance is so beautiful, delicate and clear,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot of great Chester vocals, and this is among the best.”The band also revived two nearly completed songs: “Fighting Myself,” which Shinoda finished mixing last year and called “a definitive Linkin Park track,” and “More the Victim,” released in a version that’s “basically the furthest we got with it, in terms of a demo.” Shinoda said “Fighting Myself” received a light touch during the mixing process to preserve its period authenticity.“I really wanted to keep it true to the initial intention, because I didn’t want to taint this time warp,” he said. “What I love about the three new songs is that all of them represent a different facet of the band, as it was in 2003.”“He could take that thing he was singing, and just sledgehammer it through somebody’s heart,” Mike Shinoda said.Kevin Mazur/WireImage, via Getty Images“Meteora” was made at a critical moment in Linkin Park’s career. “Hybrid Theory” was the best-selling album of 2001, outpacing LPs from established superstars like ’N Sync, Jay-Z and Destiny’s Child. This seemingly instant success placed more attention and pressure on the band, which began writing the songs that would make up “Meteora” while on tour.“Our attitude, going into the sessions, was that we had everything to prove,” Shinoda said. The fusion of sounds from “Hybrid Theory” — emotive singing alongside nimble rapping, hip-hop rhythms underneath distorted guitars — was already being mimicked across the industry, and the band was eager to prove its creative versatility. “We said, ‘We wrote this formula, so we got to rewrite it, and let people know we’re bigger than that,’” he explained. “‘Because if we don’t start to pivot, we’re going to get stuck forever.’”The super deluxe version of the “Meteora” reissue, due April 7, features “Work in Progress,” a collection of edited tour footage shot by the band’s in-house videographer, Mark Fiore, who captured what Shinoda called “weird, fly-on-the-wall stuff.” The boxed set also includes five previously unreleased full-length concert recordings, taken from a period when the band was constantly on tour at stadiums and arenas around the world.Shinoda said that assembling the “Meteora” set inspired different feelings than the “Hybrid Theory” anniversary, which the band marked in 2020 with a similar boxed set. “We were still processing Chester’s passing at the time we were putting that stuff together,” he said. “Now, the tone for me was much more celebratory.”As Linkin Park matured and its members started families and pursued other commitments, the band inevitably began to shift. The new collection offers a portrait of a group that was still ascending, and working as a unit to achieve all its goals. “When we made ‘Meteora,’ the band was everything,” Shinoda said. “We had so much dedication to what we were building at the time, but there was also that wonderful naïveté. We were just flying by the seat of our pants.”No version of Linkin Park has played live since a 2017 tribute concert to Bennington, where his vocals were sung by a committee of guest musicians including Jonathan Davis of Korn, Machine Gun Kelly and Alanis Morissette. Currently, there are no plans for the band to stage a similar performance, or record without Bennington. “I don’t think we can predict that,” Shinoda said. “You have to let things travel in whatever direction. If and when it’s the right time, that’ll occur to us.”But the process of assembling the reissue has provided another means of considering how Bennington may have wanted the band to proceed without him. In particular, Shinoda said he “felt confident” that the singer would have endorsed these expanded editions. “Historically, he was always way more bullish about putting out stuff,” he said. “A typical Chester reaction would have been, ‘Why not just make the album 15 songs?’ When I thought about that, it was very reassuring.” More

His sophisticated collaborations with the lyricist Hal David — “The Look of Love,” “Walk On By,” “Alfie” and many more hits — evoked a sleek era of airy romance.Burt Bacharach, the debonair pop composer, arranger, conductor, record producer and occasional singer whose hit songs in the 1960s distilled that decade’s mood of romantic optimism, died on Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94.His publicist Tina Brausam confirmed the death. No specific cause was given.A die-hard romantic whose mature style might be described as Wagnerian lounge music, Mr. Bacharach fused the chromatic harmonies and long, angular melodies of late-19th-century symphonic music with modern, bubbly pop orchestration, and embellished the resulting mixture with a staccato rhythmic drive. His effervescent compositions epitomized sophisticated hedonism to a generation of young adults only a few years older than the Beatles.Because of the high gloss and apolitical stance of the songs Mr. Bacharach wrote with his most frequent collaborator, the lyricist Hal David, during an era of confrontation and social upheaval, they were often dismissed as little more than background music by listeners who preferred the hard edge of rock or the intimacy of the singer-songwriter genre. But in hindsight, the Bacharach-David team ranks high in the pantheon of pop songwriting.Bacharach-David songs like “The Look of Love” (Dusty Springfield’s sultry 1967 hit, featured in the movie “Casino Royale”), “This Guy’s in Love With You” (a No. 1 hit in 1968 for Herb Alpert), and “(They Long to Be) Close to You” (a No. 1 hit in 1970 for the Carpenters) evoked an upscale world of jet travel, sports cars and sleek bachelor pads. Acknowledging this mystique with a wink, Mr. Bacharach appeared as himself and performed his 1965 song “What the World Needs Now Is Love” in the 1997 movie “Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery,” which spoofed the swinging ’60s ambience of the early James Bond films. He also made cameo appearances in its two sequels.Mr. Bacharach with Hal David, his most frequent collaborator, and Dionne Warwick, the pair’s definitive interpreter. Together they turned out a steady stream of pop hits.Frank Driggs Collection/Getty ImagesMr. Bacharach collaborated with many lyricists over the years, and even wrote some of his own words. But his primary collaborator was Mr. David, seven years his senior, whom he met in a music publisher’s office in 1957. The team’s artistic chemistry solidified in 1962, beginning with the hits they wrote and produced for Dionne Warwick, a gifted young gospel-trained singer from East Orange, N.J.Mr. Bacharach met Ms. Warwick at a recording session for the Drifters that included “Mexican Divorce” and “Please Stay,” two songs he wrote with the lyricist Bob Hilliard. Hearing Ms. Warwick, a backup singer, Mr. Bacharach realized he had found the rare vocalist with the technical prowess to negotiate his rangy, fiercely difficult melodies, with their tricky time signatures and extended asymmetrical phrases.The artistic synergy of Mr. Bacharach, Mr. David and Ms. Warwick defined the voice of a young, passionate, on-the-go Everywoman bursting with romantic eagerness and vulnerability. Their urbane style was the immediate forerunner of the earthier Motown sound of the middle and late 1960s.Mr. Bacharach and Mr. David worked in the Brill Building, the Midtown Manhattan music publishing hub, and they are frequently lumped together with the younger writers in the so-called Brill Building school of teenage pop, like the teams of Carole King and Gerry Goffin or Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. But they rarely wrote explicitly for the teenage market. Their more sophisticated songs were closer in style to Cole Porter, and Mr. Bacharach’s fondness for Brazilian rhythms recalled lilting Porter standards like “Begin the Beguine.”Hits and a MissBeginning with “Don’t Make Me Over” in 1962, the team turned out a steady stream of hits for Ms. Warwick, among them “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” “Walk On By,” “Alfie,” “I Say a Little Prayer” and “Do You Know the Way to San Jose.” Accepting the Academy Award for the score of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” in 1970. Mr. Bacharach also won the Oscar for best song that year, for the film’s “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”Associated PressMr. Bacharach’s success transcended the Top 40. He won two Academy Awards for best song: for “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” written with Mr. David, in 1970, and “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do),” written with Peter Allen, Carole Bayer Sager and Christopher Cross, in 1982. His original score for the 1969 film “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” which included “Raindrops” (a No. 1 hit for B.J. Thomas), won an Oscar for best original score for a nonmusical motion picture. And the Bacharach-David team conquered Broadway in December 1968 with “Promises, Promises.”Adapted by Neil Simon from “The Apartment,” Billy Wilder’s 1960 film about erotic hanky-panky at a Manhattan corporation, “Promises, Promises” was one of the first Broadway shows to use backup singers in the orchestra pit and pop-style amplification. Along with “Hair,” which opened on Broadway that same year, it presaged the era of the pop musical.“Promises, Promises” ran for 1,281 performances, yielded hits for Ms. Warwick in the catchy but fiendishly difficult title song and the folk-pop ballad “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” and was nominated for seven Tony Awards. (Two of its cast members won, but the show itself did not. Both “Promises, Promises” and “Hair” lost in the best-musical category to the much more traditional “1776.”) It was successfully revived on Broadway in 2010.At the piano in 1968 with the “Promises, Promises” team, from left: the actor Jerry Orbach, who won the Tony for his role; the actress Jill O’Hara; the director Robert Moore; the playwright Neil Simon, who adapted the musical from Billy Wilder’s 1960 film “The Apartment”; the producer David Merrick; and the actor Edward Winter.Bob Wands/Associated PressWith success both in Hollywood and on Broadway, as well as a high-profile movie-star wife, Angie Dickinson, whom he had married in 1965, Mr. Bacharach entered the 1970s not just a hit songwriter but a glamorous star in his own right. It seemed as if he could do no wrong. But that soon changed.In 1973, Mr. Bacharach and Mr. David wrote the score for the movie musical “Lost Horizon,” adapted from the 1937 Frank Capra fantasy film of the same name. The movie was a catastrophic failure. Shortly after that, the Bacharach-David-Warwick triumvirate, which had already begun to grow stale, split up acrimoniously amid a flurry of lawsuits.Reflecting on his split with Mr. David in 2013 in his autobiography, “Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music,” written with Robert Greenfield, Mr. Bacharach acknowledged that “it was all my fault, and I can’t imagine how many great songs I could have written with Hal in the years we were apart.”A New PartnershipMr. Bacharach endured several fallow years, personal as well as professional — his marriage to Ms. Dickinson was over long before they divorced in 1981 — but experienced a commercial resurgence in the 1980s through his collaboration with the lyricist Carole Bayer Sager, whom he married in 1982.Mr. Bacharach and Ms. Sager hit their commercial peak in 1986 with two No. 1 hits: the Patti LaBelle-Michael McDonald duet “On My Own” and the AIDS fund-raising anthem “That’s What Friends Are For,” which went on to win the Grammy for song of the year. Originally recorded by Rod Stewart for the soundtrack of Ron Howard’s 1982 movie “Night Shift,” and redone by an all-star quartet billed as Dionne and Friends (Ms. Warwick, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and Elton John), “That’s What Friends Are For” was Mr. Bacharach’s last major hit. He and Ms. Sager divorced in 1991.Mr. Bacharach married the actress Angie Dickinson in 1965; they divorced in 1981. At the time of their marriage, he was not just a composer but a debonair, glamorous star in his own right. Associated PressBurt Freeman Bacharach was born in Kansas City, Mo., on May 12, 1928. His father, Bert Bacharach, was a nationally syndicated columnist and men’s fashion journalist who moved his family to Forest Hills, Queens, in 1932. His mother, Irma (Freeman) Bacharach, was an amateur singer and pianist who encouraged him to study music. He learned cello, drums and piano.While still underage, he sneaked into Manhattan jazz clubs and became smitten with the modern harmonies of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, which would exert a huge influence on him.After graduating from Forest Hills High School, he studied music at several schools, including McGill University in Montreal and the Mannes School of Music in New York. Among his teachers were the composers Henry Cowell and Darius Milhaud. While serving in the Army in the early ’50s, he played piano, worked as a dance-band arranger and met the singer Vic Damone, with whom he later toured as an accompanist.He became the German actress and singer Marlene Dietrich’s musical director in 1958 and toured with her for two years in the United States and Europe. Other performers he accompanied in the 1950s included the Ames Brothers, Polly Bergen, Georgia Gibbs, Joel Grey, Steve Lawrence and a little-known singer named Paula Stewart, who in 1953 became his first wife. (They divorced in 1958.)Mr. Bacharach spent the 1950s accompanying famous performers, including the German actress and singer Marlene Dietrich, pictured with him in 1960.Werner Kreusch/Associated PressThe Bacharach-David songwriting team enjoyed immediate success in 1957 with Marty Robbins’s “The Story of My Life” and Perry Como’s “Magic Moments.” Mr. Bacharach’s emerging melodic signature was discernible in early 1960s hits like Chuck Jackson’s “Any Day Now” (lyrics by Mr. Hilliard) and “Make It Easy on Yourself” (lyrics by Mr. David), a success for Jerry Butler in the United States and the Walker Brothers in Britain. In their Gene Pitney hits “(The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance” and “Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa,” the team adopted a swaggering quasi-western sound.All the elements of Mr. Bacharach’s style coalesced in Ms. Warwick’s recordings, which he produced with Mr. David and arranged himself. In the typical Warwick hit, her voice was surrounded by strings and backup singers, the arrangements emphatically punctuated by trumpets echoing the influence of Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass.Among the other artists who had hits with the team’s songs were Jackie DeShannon (“What the World Needs Now Is Love”), Dusty Springfield (“Wishin’ and Hopin’,” “The Look of Love”), Tom Jones (“What’s New Pussycat?”) and the 5th Dimension (“One Less Bell to Answer”). But Ms. Warwick was their definitive interpreter.A ReunionAfter the “Lost Horizon” debacle, Mr. Bacharach worked predominantly as a concert performer, conducting his own instrumental suites and singing his own songs in an easygoing voice with a narrow range. He periodically released solo albums, of which the most ambitious was “Woman” (1979), a primarily instrumental song cycle recorded with the Houston Symphony. But these records had a negligible commercial impact.Time eventually healed the wounds from Mr. Bacharach’s split with Mr. David and Ms. Warwick, and he reunited first with Ms. Warwick (most notably for “That’s What Friends Are For”) and later with Mr. David (for “Sunny Weather Lover,” recorded by Ms. Warwick in the early 1990s). He found his greatest interpreter since Ms. Warwick in the pop-soul balladeer Luther Vandross, whose lush 1980s remakes of “A House Is Not a Home” and “Anyone Who Had a Heart” transformed them into dreamy quasi-operatic arias decorated with florid gospel melismas.He married Jane Hansen, his fourth wife, in 1993. She survives him, along with their son, Oliver; their daughter, Raleigh; and a son, Cristopher, from his marriage to Ms. Sager. Nikki Bacharach, his daughter with Angie Dickinson, committed suicide in 2007.Mr. Bacharach accompanied the singer-songwriter Elvis Costello at Radio City Music Hall in New York in 1998.James Estrin/The New York TimesIn his 60s, Mr. Bacharach found himself regarded with awe by a younger generation of musicians. Bands like Oasis and Stereolab included his songs in their repertoire. The British singer-songwriter Elvis Costello, a longtime admirer, collaborated with him on the ballad “God Give Me Strength” for the 1996 film “Grace of My Heart,” loosely based on the life of Carole King. That led them to collaborate on an entire album, “Painted From Memory” (1998), arranged and conducted by Mr. Bacharach, for which they shared music and lyric credits.A track from that album, “I Still Have That Other Girl,” won a Grammy for best pop vocal collaboration. It was the sixth Grammy of Mr. Bacharach’s career; he would win one more, in 2006, when his “At This Time” was named best pop instrumental album, as well as a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2008. The Bacharach-David team was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972. Forty years later, shortly before Mr. David died at age 91, the two received the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song from the Library of Congress.Mr. Bacharach in 2007. “Most composers sit in a room by themselves and nobody knows what they look like,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I get to make a direct connection with people.”Lisa Maree Williams/Getty ImagesMr. Bacharach remained in the public eye until the end. In December 2011, “Some Lovers,” a musical for which he wrote the music and Steven Sater wrote the lyrics, opened at the Old Globe in San Diego. “What’s It All About? Bacharach Reimagined,” a New York Theater Workshop production built on his songs, opened Off Broadway in December 2013. (An earlier revue based on the Bacharach-David catalog, “The Look of Love,” had a brief Broadway run in 2003.) As recently as 2020, Mr. Bacharach was still writing new music, releasing a collaboration with the singer-songwriter Melody Federer.In 2013, Mr. Bacharach began collaborating with Mr. Costello, Mr. Sater and the television writer and producer Chuck Lorre on a stage musical based on the “Painted From Memory” album but also including new songs. That project never came to fruition, although some of the new material ended up on Mr. Costello’s recent albums. All the music from the “Painted From Memory” project is included in “The Songs of Bacharach & Costello,” a boxed set that also includes Mr. Costello’s recordings of Bacharach songs, which is scheduled for release next month.Looking back on his career in his autobiography, Mr. Bacharach suggested that as a songwriter he had been “luckier than most.”“Most composers sit in a room by themselves and nobody knows what they look like,” he wrote. “People may have heard some of their songs, but they never get to see them onstage or on television.” Because he was also a performer, he noted, “I get to make a direct connection with people.”“Whether it’s just a handshake or being stopped on the street and asked for an autograph or having someone comment on a song I’ve written,” Mr. Bacharach added, “that connection is really meaningful and powerful for me.”Alex Traub More

The pioneer of ambient music, now 79, rediscovered some of his earliest recordings for a new four-disc set.Laraaji, a pioneer of ambient music, barely remembers recording most of “Segue to Infinity,” a four-disc trove of his early studio sessions. In the decades since he started recording, Laraaji has made dozens of albums and cassettes, both solo and collaborative. He has played concerts, festivals, webcasts, collaborations with musicians and dancers, yoga classes, meditation gatherings and more.The collection, due Friday, reissues “Celestial Vibrations,” the small-label 1978 debut album that Laraaji made under his birth name, Edward Larry Gordon, and adds six extended tracks — each the length of an LP side — from the same era. Its recordings were rediscovered by Jake Fischer, a college student who bought them on eBay in 2021 for $114.01; they were acetate recordings that had been found in a storage locker. Many tracks on “Segue to Infinity” begin with the voice of the recording engineer announcing the take, sounding fairly jaded. Then the music scintillates, dances and reverberates on its own long time frames.“I just vaguely remember doing the recordings, and I forget who was doing the business dealings with the record at the time,” Laraaji, 79, said via video chat from his apartment in Harlem. He was dressed in orange, the color he has been wearing for decades, with an orange tapestry on the wall behind him. It’s the hue, he has said, of fire and transformation, of sunrise and sunset, which “drives the energy toward creativity and self-realization.”What Laraaji does remember is that the sessions were performed live in real time: “I was using loops at the time, but it was all straight in the moment.” He recorded most of the music solo, but the title track is a duet with a jazz flute player, Richard Cooper, whom Laraaji has been unable to find now that their music is being released.At the time, Laraaji was playing for passers-by in parks and on sidewalks, performing hypnotic, billowing, open-ended improvisations with mallets on an electrified zither, an autoharp without its chord bar. He discovered the instrument in a Queens pawnshop when “a mystically intimate voice” advised, “‘Don’t take money for the guitar,’ which I was trying to pawn,” he recalled. “It said, ‘Swap it for that autoharp in the window.’”It was ideal for a musician drawn to bell-like, consonant sounds. “I explored the autoharp and was surprised where it took me,” he said. “It gave me an instrument that I could perform from meditative states. It was exotic and it was like a miniature keyboard. It was quality controllable. It was portable. It was new. It was different.”In 1979, the British musician Brian Eno heard Laraaji in Washington Square Park, where he often performed, “sitting on the ground with his little autoharp and two little speakers,” Eno recalled in a video chat from England.Eno left Laraaji a note inviting him to record. “People are very nonchalant about something they see every day,” he said. But he saw something special in the man busking in orange robes. “I thought, ‘There’s probably nobody in this crowd who is going to think there should be an album of this guy except me, because I’m a foreigner and I’m a stranger and it looks exotic and interesting to me.’”The album Eno produced, “Ambient 3: Day of Radiance,” was Laraaji’s first international release, in 1980. It is now considered a milestone of ambient and new-age music. Eno said his own role in the music was minimal. “I had a little bit of influence on some of those pieces, in that I added something to the processing of the sound,” he said. “But the music was all his.”Another early Laraaji fan was Vernon Reid, the guitarist who formed the socially conscious hard-rock band Living Colour. He bought the “Celestial Vibrations” album on the street from Laraaji after hearing him play in Park Slope, and they went on to become friends.“Laraaji was really a complete outsider,” Reid recalled in a video interview. “He played this mesmerizing music and he didn’t have a chip on his shoulder. He’s extraordinarily consistent in all the years I’ve known him. He showed me that there was a way to be in the world with music that wasn’t predicated on rage and wasn’t predicated on material things.”“When Brian Eno encountered him, he wasn’t looking for Brian Eno,” Reid added. “He wasn’t the one trying to impress Brian Eno. There was no construct. He’s a person who was following this impulse. He just is what he is.”But that identity has evolved. Edward Larry Gordon was born in 1943 in Philadelphia and grew up in New Jersey, attending a Baptist church. (The name Laraaji has echoes of “Larry G.”) “Bethlehem” — the first track of his debut album — was titled to commemorate the experience of being baptized when he was 12. “It was semi-traumatic and transformational. It was a very, very deep moment,” Laraaji said. “You’re in the water, so the best friend to you at that point is your next breath. I wanted to emulate that experience in life — to treat others to a nonverbal baptism experience by sound.”“My music turns into a wafting sound or a wall of sound,” Laraaji said. “The idea is to move faster than the mind can track. And so the mind gives up and goes to a relaxed place and gives up its thinking function for awhile.”Balarama Heller for The New York TimesHe played violin as a child and majored in piano and composition at Howard University, but also explored acting and stand-up comedy. After college he moved to New York City, where he appeared in Greenwich Village clubs as a comedian and hosted shows at the Apollo Theater. He also had a role in the groundbreaking 1969 film “Putney Swope.”“The idea of invoking laughter has always been second nature to me,” he said. “But at some point when I began exploring consciousness, cause and effect, I realized that the material I was using for comedy wasn’t the most mindfully healthy thing for me to be sharing with audiences or to be conditioning myself with. So around 1970, I faded out of comedy.”He grew increasingly interested in meditation and in exploring the healing properties of sound. Then and now, he said, his music grows out of “improvisation, experimenting with electric zither and exotic open tunings, and performing from contemplative, meditative states.”Through the decades, his music has embraced advancing technology: guitar pedals, synthesizers, apps, all in the service of “adventurous sound painting,” he said.“The texture of the music is like embracing a warm, immersive, friendly, welcoming, inviting soul with a warm, fuzzy hug. Or like a nice, soothing, safe place to be vulnerable. And I think of music as inspiring movement, inspiring a body movement, inspiring a positive movement of thought and social behavior.”Laraaji has also returned to invoking laughter, but without telling jokes. Along with his concert schedule, he presents “laughter meditation” workshops, an idea he was introduced to at an ashram in New York. “The idea was to get people relaxed, chanting into their bodies and then get them to laugh for 15 minutes lying down,” he said. “The workshop evolved into a play-shop, where I direct people how to laugh using the voice, into the body, into the head, to massage the head, the thyroid, the thymus in the chest, the heart, the abdominal organs, and then releasing air from the alveoli in the lungs. So it becomes a total inner workout.”The recordings that have resurfaced on “Segue to Infinity” can be simultaneously enveloping and propulsive. Some are simply named after the instruments they use: “Koto” (Japanese zither) and “Kalimba” (African thumb piano). And some derive their soothing tone, paradoxically, from nonstop motion: “Kalimba 2” is a 23-minute tour de force of sheer concentration and stamina.“His innovation was to bring a rhythmic intensity at the same time as creating this shimmering kind of cloud,” Reid said. “There’s a kind of dance that’s inherent in what he does, and at the same time, the celestial vibration.”Laraaji enjoys the paradox of hyperactivity bringing relaxation. “My music turns into a wafting sound or a wall of sound,” he said. “I think of dance movement or Brownian motion. The idea is to move faster than the mind can track. And so the mind gives up and goes to a relaxed place and gives up its thinking function for awhile.”Hearing his old recordings may change the course of Laraaji’s performances. “People come to the concerts expecting a variety of Laraaji-isms, and I tend to go to a medley of things in my live performances,” he said. “I haven’t done really a thing in a long form for 15 minutes’ duration for a live performance, which is now something I will get back to. I respect long form. As James Brown said, ‘Stay on the scene.’”Note: The photographer used a lens filter to create a starburst effect on these images. More

Esa-Pekka Salonen led the New York Philharmonic the day after Gustavo Dudamel was named as its next music director.If critics ruled the world — hope springs eternal — Esa-Pekka Salonen might be the New York Philharmonic’s music director right now. A conductor and composer, incisive and dryly funny, with a broad and quirky repertory, he was favored by some of us during the process that resulted in the selection of Jaap van Zweden in 2016.Who knows how long Salonen would have stayed in the job, but van Zweden is leaving after next season, just a few years into his tenure. And on Tuesday, the Philharmonic announced that Gustavo Dudamel, the superstar music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, would replace him.Dudamel, though, is conducting on the West Coast this week. He’s coming to New York for a news conference on Feb. 20, then doesn’t lead his new orchestra until May. Because of classical music’s glacial planning cycles, it won’t be until 2026 that he officially takes up the podium.So, by coincidence, it was Salonen — Dudamel’s predecessor in Los Angeles and now the music director of the San Francisco Symphony — who led the Philharmonic’s first concert since the appointment, on Wednesday at David Geffen Hall. (One for the annals of bad timing: Just last week, the two men and Rafael Payare of the San Diego Symphony unveiled, with much hoopla, the California Festival, a coming joint venture.)If any performance could have captured the excitement the Philharmonic is feeling —  look at the photo published in The New York Times of Judith LeClair, the principal bassoon, erupting when she learned the Dudamel news — it was the joyful rendition of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony that closed Wednesday’s program.Under Salonen, the first movement steadily gained tension and excitement from the alternation — and sometimes the superimposition — of rough, abrupt accents and silkily long legato lines. He was unafraid of dramatic elongations of transitional passages: the short prelude to the Vivace section, the exchange of quietly wistful material through the winds later on.The Allegretto second movement, which under some batons can feel like an adagio dirge, was here remarkably flexible, neither too slow nor too heavy. The third movement began with a blitheness that gave the weighty trio section true grandeur by contrast. A whooshing start to the finale was soon, once again, grounded in those legato lines, headlong but fundamentally guided.It was interesting to compare with the excellent interpretation of Beethoven’s Second Symphony here last month by Santtu-Matias Rouvali. Written merely a decade before the Seventh, it is a vestige of the vanishing world of Classicism, and Rouvali scrupulously avoided breathlessness, any sense of losing rhythmic clarity and control.But in Salonen’s take on the more bacchic Seventh, you got a sense of revelry in the way this music is intricately constructed to seem on the verge of falling apart. Near the end of the first movement, there was the proper, slightly exhilarating, slightly queasy-making impression of different parts of the orchestra simultaneously speeding up and slowing down.It was appropriate in a week of Philharmonic pride that the soloist earlier in the program was drawn from the ranks of the orchestra: Anthony McGill, the principal clarinet, who was featured in the American premiere of Salonen’s “kínēma.” Replace the “k” with a “c” and you get the idea; the piece was drawn from plans for a film score.Salonen said from the stage that the roughly half-hour work, composed during the pandemic lockdown and scored for strings alone, was “practically” a clarinet concerto — made up of five “scenes” that he compared to individual rooms, each without the ranging or development we usually expect within concerto movements. (For those who wanted development, he said to laughter, there was the Beethoven symphony to come after intermission.)The first scene is a shining, dewy dawn; the second, a soft, easygoing aria over a steady repeating bass line; the third, a bright, pizzicato accompaniment to a skipping, spattering clarinet; the fourth, a restrained elegy punctuated by sudden, swiftly abandoned surges.The fifth begins with hymnlike solemnity, reminiscent of a sunset, with the violins making a high, smooth spearing sound that shades into the tone of the clarinet. Unexpectedly aggressive, sharply rhythmic music follows — this seems to be the material that Salonen joked earlier was an echo of “Psycho” — accompanied by siren cries from the soloist.It felt odd to be unleashing so much drama at the very end, a big release of something that was never quite built up. But “kínēma” isn’t unpleasant, and McGill was a stylishly reserved soloist, not one to impose himself even in virtuosic passages — his tone mellow yet direct, sweet and refreshing.The concert — beginning with Luciano Berio’s elegantly wry, 20th-century layering of four versions of an 18th-century Luigi Boccherini quintet — was a spirited union of new and old, and an aptly stirring celebration of exciting news.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

The Before Midnight parties promise all the thrills of a hedonistic night out, but with a respectable finish time for older dance music fans.It was Friday night, in a 2,000-person capacity nightclub in London, and the dance floor was packed. A heavy-duty sound system pounded out house music and a huge disco ball turned overhead. Only one thing was off: It was 9.30 p.m.A woman in the crowd gleefully yelled to the throng of people around her: “I’m 15 weeks postpartum and I’m in the club!”The party, called Before Midnight, is organized by the Irish D.J. Annie Macmanus, who plays under the name Annie Mac: It promises all the thrills of a club — just with an early bedtime. Starting at 7 p.m. and wrapped up by 12, Before Midnight is one of several recent variations on the hedonistic all-night sessions in which dance music is usually enjoyed, aimed at older fans juggling children and careers.“There’s an inherent belief that clubbing is for young people,” Macmanus said recently by phone. “There’s now a generation of people who experienced clubbing in its most popular guise, and still want to do that, but don’t feel like they belong there anymore.”Macmanus explained that Before Midnight was born out of her desire to fit a music career around her duties as a mother of two children, ages 6 and 9. Late-night D.J. sets didn’t mix well with their weekend activities, she said.“It felt like I had jet lag,” Macmanus said. “It just wasn’t accommodating for where I’m at in my life right now.”Annie Macmanus, who D.J.s as Annie Mac. Before setting up Before Midnight, she fronted BBC radio’s flagship dance music show.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesMacmanus said this reckoning coincided with her decision, in 2021, to stand down as the presenter of the BBC’s flagship dance music show, on BBC Radio 1 — a gig she had held for 17 years and which cemented her name as a musical tastemaker in Britain.Before Midnight was her next act, she said, a fresh project to restore some work-life balance. The premise was simple, she added: “a definitive club night that’s just like a normal one, only earlier.”The first night, held last year at the Islington Assembly Hall, a London music venue, was a one-off experiment. It sold out, and, at the end of last year, Macmanus announced a 10-date Before Midnight tour of Britain and Ireland. The tour’s two remaining London dates are also taking place at Outernet, a new, subterranean nightclub in the city’s West End that is the largest live events space built in central London since the 1940s.Before Midnight is particularly popular with women, who Macmanus estimated make up about 75 percent of the crowd. Jodie Brooks, 44, who has attended every Before Midnight party in London to date, was in the crowd this past Friday. “I just didn’t want the night to start at 1 a.m. anymore,” Brooks, who works in advertising and like Macmanus has two children age 6 and 9, said later by phone. “I never wanted parenthood to change me in that way, but, inevitably, it just does. You have to get up and do the Saturday-morning football practice at 9 a.m.,” she said.The coronavirus lockdowns of 2022 and 2021, which took clubbing temporarily out of the mix, made many people in their 30s and 40s re-evaluate how they wanted to spend their weekends. Some, like Brooks, emerged determined to get back on the dance floor, but on new, more wholesome terms. With Before Midnight, she said, “You can go for a really lush dinner at six. By eight you’re in the club,” and “by 12 you’re out.”Before Midnight is particularly popular with women, who Macmanus estimated make up about 75 percent of the crowd.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesOthers realized that they liked dance music, but not nightclubs. Adem Holness, who leads the contemporary music program at the Southbank Center, a central London arts venue, said that many of the venue’s offerings suited electronic music enthusiasts at a more mature life stage: Performances are seated, and finish in time to catch the last Tube home.“We have a menu of different options for people,” he said. “It’s about making the model work for all kinds of people.”In the last year, D.J.s and dance music performers including Fabio & Grooverider, Erykah Badu and Peaches have all played gigs at the Royal Festival Hall, a concert hall managed by the Southbank. “I’m seeing people wanting to experience really great music that you might think or assume belongs in a club, somewhere else, or in a different way,” Holness said.Before Midnight’s London dates are at Outernet, a new, subterranean nightclub in the city’s West End.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesUpcoming parties are scheduled for Manchester in northern England, Glasgow and Dublin, among other cities.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesBefore Midnight was also influenced by the experience of bringing club culture into a more rarefied space, Macmanus said. In 2019, she recalled, she played in New York at MoMa PS1’s Warm Up, the art museum’s summer series that sets experimental and electronic music alongside contemporary art and design. There, she saw a multigenerational audience dancing together, she said. “It had a big effect on me as a D.J.,” she added. “I’m always going to try and reach that type of a dance floor.”The Before Midnight concept was simple, Macmanus said: “a definitive club night that’s just like a normal one, only earlier.”Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesMacmanus added that an early-starting dance party wasn’t a totally original idea. Tim Lawrence, a professor of cultural studies at the University of East London who researches nightlife has been running a monthly London dance party that starts at 5 p.m. since 2018; in an interview, he said that events like Before Midnight were a way to “pluralize the culture.” During a 2017 tour of the United States to promote his book “Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor,” Lawrence recalled, he attended an invite-only party in New York called Joy that started around dinnertime.Lawrence brought the concept back to London with him and co-founded his monthly dance party called All Our Friends. “It’s about confounding certain ideas that come with the all-night or late-night thing,” Lawrence said. The earlier timetable allows for a different approach to dancing, he said, which can “potentially be more expressive, more interactive and go a bit deeper on a social level.”But for Brooks, the advertising worker, the appeal of Before Midnight was much simpler: It was an opportunity to dance to the music that she loves, in a club like any other, and be home in time for bed.“You get all the joy and the love,” she said. “You get to be a part of something again. And you don’t feel out of place.”Confetti released just before midnight signaled the party was almost over.Lauren Fleishman for The New York Times More

8 a.m.
Grab a biscuit Uptown
The six-mile commercial corridor of Magazine Street is a glorious mish-mash of retail shops, art galleries and good places to eat, with surprises on nearly every block. For breakfast Uptown, stop in for a flaky cheddar-and-chive biscuit ($4.75) at La Boulangerie, a New Orleans take on a classic French bakery with a happy thrum on Saturday mornings. Take it to go and stroll along Magazine Street, taking notes on places you might want to hit up when they open later in the day: Magpie, is a standout vintage clothing and jewelry store, and Sisters in Christ, which sells records and books, is well attuned to the city’s D.I.Y. arts underground. Shawarma On The Go, inside a Jetgo gas station, is notable for its Lebanese iced tea with pine nuts. Crunchy, cold, aromatic and savory-sweet, the drink is a local spin on a traditional Lebanese drink called jallab. More