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      At Jazz at Lincoln Center, Dave Chappelle Rallies to Keep ‘Tradition Alive’

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      Outside the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Wednesday night, hundreds of people in shimmering gowns and velvet tuxes waited for the program to begin. They snacked on popcorn from gold pinstriped bags and sipped cocktails in front of a wall lined with giant black-and-white photos of the jazz pianist and composer Duke Ellington.“I love coming here,” said Alec Baldwin, as he posed with his wife, Hilaria Baldwin, who was wearing a plunging lilac gown and a cross necklace, on the red carpet at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s annual fund-raising gala, which celebrated Ellington’s 125th birthday.The couple, who married in 2012, star in a TLC reality TV show, “The Baldwins.” Filmed as Mr. Baldwin faced trial for involuntary manslaughter, it focuses on their hectic family life with seven children, all age 11 and under, and eight pets. A judge dismissed the case in July.“The kids aren’t necessarily into the music I appreciate,” said Mr. Baldwin, 67, who wore a navy suit and a burgundy button-down. “I like a lot of classical. I love Japanese jazz, too.” (Ms. Baldwin, 41, a fitness expert and podcast host, said she played a lot of Billie Eilish.)Alec and Hilaria Baldwin. Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesVictoria and Michael Imperioli.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesDuke Ellington’s granddaughter, Mercedes Ellington.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ronan the Sea Lion Is Probably Better Than You at Keeping a Beat

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      This is Ronan. She’s a California sea lion and she probably has better rhythm than you.Scientists earlier showed that Ronan, a resident of the Long Marine Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was the first nonhuman mammal who could be trained to keep a beat, including moving in time with music. That was in 2013 when Ronan was young. Researchers recently decided to test the 15-year-old sea lion’s skills again and showed that not only had she improved her ability to bob her head in sync with beats, but she is even better than most humans at doing so.“I think that it demonstrates conclusively that humans are not the only mammals able to keep a beat,” said Tecumseh Fitch, a cognitive biologist who studies biomusicology at the University of Vienna and wasn’t involved in the new study, which was published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.Parrots are known to be able to keep a beat by moving their bodies. And recent studies have highlighted the beat-keeping capabilities of other mammals, such as monkeys and rats. But after more than a decade, “Ronan the sea lion’s rhythmic entrainment is clearly the best known in nonhuman vertebrates,” Dr. Fitch said.The researchers trained Ronan for a few months, focusing on enhancing her precision with the old tempos on which she was trained in the past. Then, they looked at how good Ronan was at keeping a beat compared with when she was 3 years old — showing that she improved her skills as she matured.Then, the team tested Ronan’s ability to move her head in time with tempos of 112, 120 and 128 beats per minute and compared it with the ability of 10 people aged 18 to 23 to move their arm in time with those same tempos. “The hand is like the sea lion’s head, and the arm is like the sea lion’s neck, and it’s about the same size, so they can move through the same amount of space and do the task,” said Peter Cook, a cognitive neuroscientist with a specialization in marine mammals at New College of Florida.Human participants and Ronan performed comparable rhythmic tasks at 112 beats per minute.University of California Santa Cruz, NMFS 23554We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Carla Bley’s 1970s Experimental Masterpiece Gets a Belated Premiere

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      On a recent afternoon at the New School, the Tishman Auditorium vibrated with the hum of voices. The sound started so imperceptibly that it took a while to realize that it came from the 10 singers who appeared motionless, lined up in front of microphones.As the low drone grew louder, individual voices peeled off with microtonal shudders and ululations, and foghorn-like trombone blasts wormed their way through the vocal texture. Eventually, a 20-piece jazz orchestra joined in, forming a vast mushroom cloud of sound.“Whatever it is can’t have a name,” a spectral voice intoned, “since it makes no difference what you call it.”The ensemble, made up of students and faculty members, was rehearsing “Escalator Over the Hill” by Carla Bley with lyrics by Paul Haines for a performance on Friday. Remarkably, it will be the staged American premiere of this masterpiece of 1970s experimentalism. In an essay, Bley, who died last year, wrote that the work was conceived as a jazz opera, though “the term ‘opera’ was used loosely from the start, an overstatement by two people who didn’t have to watch their words.”Carla Bley in a photo from around the time that “Escalator Over the Hill” was released. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesWhen a recording was released in 1971, the album cover identified it as a “chronotransduction,” an invented term playing on time and conversion. Whatever it is, “Escalator” became a cult album.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kwame Alexander on Bringing the Free Spirit of Jazz to Young Viewers

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      The latest in the author’s Acoustic Rooster franchise, a PBS Kids special and series aim to teach children the beauty of collaboration and improvisation.In 2010, the poet and novelist Kwame Alexander faced a challenge that is familiar to parents everywhere. His younger daughter, then a year old, wouldn’t stop wailing.Lullabies failed. Rocking didn’t help, nor did a car ride. Finally, Alexander put on a few records and found the solution: It was jazz, Baby, jazz!“So I would play her Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald,” he said in a video interview in mid-April. “I would play her bossa nova, and she would stop crying. And I thought: Wow, this is kind of cool. Maybe I should write something about jazz for her.”The result was “Acoustic Rooster and His Barnyard Band,” Alexander’s first children’s book. But an enterprising rooster doesn’t crow only once, and the author’s feathered, guitar-strumming character has lived on, in a 2021 Kennedy Center stage musical and in three more books. And now Rooster is making his television debut: On Thursday, PBS Kids is premiering “Acoustic Rooster and His Barnyard Band,” a one-hour animated special that Alexander created with the screenwriter Kay Donmyer. (The special is streaming on all PBS digital platforms; check local listings for broadcast times.)Alexander, 56, is no stranger to TV: He was the showrunner of “The Crossover,” the Disney+ 2023 adaptation of his Newbery Medal-winning middle-grade novel about basketball, which won an Emmy for best young teen series. In “Acoustic Rooster,” he and Donmyer, who collaborated on the script and the lyrics, are presenting a, well, cockier version of the book’s strutting hero.In the special, Rooster wants to win a jazz band contest, but first he needs to be part of a group. He plans to join the famous Barnyard Band — which has members like “Mules Davis,” “Lil Herdin” and “Ella Finchgerald” (voiced by the jazz singer Dee Daniels) — and help it win the competition by being its undisputed star.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What the Cult Singer Daniel Johnston Left Behind

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      Electric Lady Studios, in Greenwich Village, is a working music museum. The Fender Twin amplifier that the studio’s onetime owner Jimi Hendrix brought to work before his 1970 death remains, as does an electric piano Stevie Wonder used on an astounding run of records. There’s a keyboard Bob Dylan played in Muscle Shoals and several lurid murals by the painter Lance Jost, originals depicting interstellar travel and Aquarian-age sexual exploration.But Lee Foster — the former intern who became the space’s co-owner in 2010, after helping rescue it from financial ruin — keeps his drawings by the singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston in a small safe in the corner of his office, each page bound in plastic in a lime-green three-ring binder.Daniel Johnston’s drawing desk in his Texas home.Several 3D-printed versions of Johnston’s frog character, Jeremiah.The shelves in Daniel Johnston’s kitchen are completely filled with figurines and keepsakes. The house remains largely as he left it before his 2019 death.“It has nothing to do with financial value,” Foster said in his art-lined room last month, as afternoon slipped into evening. “It is so meaningful that, even if it was for that hour or three when he was sitting down to draw, it was all he was thinking about. There’s a little bit of his soul in there.”Soon after Johnston’s death in 2019, at 58, Foster became the unexpected custodian of Johnston’s unexpectedly enormous art archive. His career hamstrung by bipolar disorder and stints in psychiatric hospitals, Johnston first found acclaim as an unguarded and guileless songwriter in the late ’80s with tunes that cut instantly to the emotional quick.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s Path From Harlem to Stardom, and Now Federal Court

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      Jason Swain was on his way home to the Bronx when friends told him that something had happened to his brother at a charity basketball game in Harlem. Nine young people at a City College of New York gymnasium were crushed to death in an overcrowded stairwell. Dirk Swain, 21, was lying on the gym floor with a sheet draped over his body.The promoter of the December 1991 event was a 22-year-old novice music producer named Sean Combs.For more than six years, the Swains and other families pursued wrongful death suits, saying Mr. Combs had oversold the game, and that bad planning and inadequate security had led to the tragedy. By the time their cases were settled, Mr. Combs had skyrocketed from a junior record label employee to global superstardom; the $750,000 that he contributed to the $3.8 million in settlements represented a fraction of his wealth as hip-hop’s newest, flashiest mogul.Mr. Combs never accepted full responsibility for the deaths and, for many people, the stampede faded into history. But not for the families who lost their loved ones.“Every one of those nine people was doing something positive in their life,” Mr. Swain said in an interview.The City College incident was Mr. Combs’s first moment of notoriety, but far from his last. In the ensuing three decades, he has repeatedly faced allegations of violence or serious misconduct. The beating of a rival music executive. Gunshots fired in a nightclub. The threatening of a reality-TV cast member. An assault of a college football coach.If found guilty of all charges, Sean Combs, who has spent the last seven months in a Brooklyn jail, could spend the rest of his life in prison.Willy Sanjuan/Invision, via Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Strauss’s ‘Salome’ Gets a New Staging at the Metropolitan Opera

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      In his company debut, the director Claus Guth takes a psychological approach, surrounding the title character with six versions of her younger self.The first sound in the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of “Salome” isn’t the wriggle of clarinet that begins Strauss’s score. It’s the tinkle of a music box, while a little girl plays with a doll at the lip of the stage. Projected on the curtain behind her is a giant image of herself, slowly twirling.She suddenly gets angry at the toy and begins beating it against the ground. Even before the orchestra squirms in, Claus Guth’s grimly effective staging has made clear its preoccupations: childhood, dancing, violence.Guth, one of Europe’s busiest directors and making his Met debut with this production, is also fascinated by multiple versions of the self. Starring the soprano Elza van den Heever — simultaneously innocent and hardened, sounding silvery yet secure — this “Salome,” which opened on Tuesday, gives its title character not one youthful double, but six.The group of Salomes, progressing in age from perhaps a kindergartner to the 16-year-old played by van den Heever, is dressed in matching dark frocks, giving hints of “The Shining” and Diane Arbus photographs.Guth, placing the action in a dour black mansion around the turn of the 20th century, has shifted from ancient to modern times Strauss’s 100-minute, one-act adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s scandalous play. “Salome” depicts, in decadent music inspired by the flowery language of the Symbolists, the biblical princess who was drawn to and rejected by John the Baptist and who demanded that he be decapitated by her depraved stepfather, King Herod.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More