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      A Mighty Generation of Musicians. A Moving Final Chapter.

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      The conductors Michael Tilson Thomas and Daniel Barenboim have continued to perform as aging and illness loom.LOS ANGELES — At the beginning of the final movement of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, the strings play a mellow, stirring hymn. Then a solo bassoon silences the warmth: A funeral dirge is passing through. But just a few moments later, the strings flood back, violas and violins swooping up through a sudden chord that conjures folk fiddling, energy, passion, life itself.No, they seem to cry. Not death. Not that. Not yet.I have rarely heard the strings’ rich, defiant answer to the bassoon as effusive, as certain, as it was on Sunday afternoon, in the last of three performances of Mahler’s Ninth at Walt Disney Concert Hall here, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic led by Michael Tilson Thomas.It has been nearly a year and a half since Thomas, at 78 one of the world’s leading musicians for more than half a century, announced he would be undergoing treatment for an aggressive form of brain cancer. And five months since he told The New York Times that he had been contemplating the music he wants played at his memorial service.Yet M.T.T., as he is widely known, is still with us, and still vital. Conducting Mahler’s valedictory masterpiece, whose ending is the repertory’s great evocation of letting go, he took his time on Sunday but refused to wallow in the obvious, unbearable emotions.The performance came just days after another miracle of a concert from an eminent maestro lately forced to reckon with mortality. On Jan. 6, Daniel Barenboim, 80, stepped down from the podium of the Berlin State Opera, a position he has held since the early 1990s, after a year buffeted by health problems. The following day, he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in a program streamed live.Thomas comes from a generation of older musicians who have long ruled the classical music landscape, but who are reaching the twilights of their careers.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesLike Thomas’s Mahler, Barenboim’s Schumann and Brahms were autumnal but vigorous, more present-tense than elegiac. While neither man seemed interested in denying reality, both made clear their intention to affirm life while it lasts.Not that. Not yet.Together, these were among the most poignant spectacles I’ve witnessed as a concertgoer. However sketchy and inevitably arbitrary such milestones are, the recent struggles and remarkable late-career concerts of these two men will always mark for me the passing from the scene of their generation of artists — a generation that has loomed over the musical landscape, and stubbornly refused to cede it, for decades.Although in fine health, Riccardo Muti, 81, is stepping down as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra this season. The pianist Martha Argerich, also 81, who grew up with Barenboim in Buenos Aires and joined him in Berlin, has lately had her own health issues. At the Salzburg Festival last summer, the pianist Maurizio Pollini, yet another 81-year-old, canceled a recital because of heart trouble after the audience was already in its seats. Last year, a fall caused Herbert Blomstedt, 95, to briefly interrupt his calmly authoritative, jaw-dropping tour of the world’s top orchestras, which will continue at the New York Philharmonic in two weeks.The fact that more attention is being paid to Blomstedt now than 30 or 40 years ago is telling about the field. While classical music has always been fascinated by child prodigies, it is a performing art in which older performers truly hold sway. Even as audience draws: Brian Lauritzen, the host of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s radio broadcasts, wrote on Twitter that Sunday afternoon’s concert was the most full he had seen Disney Hall since before the pandemic.So audiences are sometimes witness to aging bodies pressing up against their limits. I was at Carnegie Hall in 2000 when the great tenor Carlo Bergonzi, who had never sung the title role of Verdi’s “Otello,” finally had to admit, after two painful acts, that his 75-year-old vocal cords were no match for the part and bowed out of the rest. At Salzburg this summer, Barenboim appeared a frail shell of his former self, straining to mount the podium as he led the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the youth ensemble he founded with Edward Said.But while his physical infirmity was disconcerting, what has stayed with me most was the sensitivity showed him by the superstar pianist Lang Lang, the soloist that evening. As they walked on and off and as they played, Lang both deferred to and deftly guided his maestro mentor in a way that did not ignore what was happening but granted Barenboim a full measure of dignity, and provided him the opportunity to make music as best as he was capable.Martha Argerich, left, and Daniel Barenboim — musical companions since the 1940s — appeared together with the Berlin Philharmonic as Barenboim announced his resignation from the Berlin State Opera.Monika RittershausIt was a moving reminder that even amid the little humiliations — when Thomas first returned to the podium after his cancer treatment, in November 2021, his slipping pants had clearly not yet been tailored to the changes in his body — aging and illness open a space for both performers and us in the audience to be vulnerable and graceful. To be connected to a long line of transmitted knowledge and beauty. To be grateful.After he canceled a much-anticipated new production of Wagner’s “Ring” in October, it seemed possible that Barenboim might not conduct again. And when he did return, in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on New Year’s Eve, critics’ accounts painted a grim picture, focusing mainly on the performance’s distended length.But a week later, with the Berlin Philharmonic, he balanced natural flow and robust urgency in Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto and Brahms’s Second Symphony. Without lacking vividness, the Brahms had a gentle cast in its opening; the Allegro finale sent off bright energy, but its colors were the blaze of a sunset rather than daylight brashness. It was just the right amount of goodbye.And after the high-spirited delicacy of the Schumann, Barenboim joined Argerich, a musical companion of his since the 1940s, at the keyboard for Bizet’s four-hand piece “Little Husband, Little Wife” from the suite “Children’s Games”: a moment of aching tenderness.Barenboim took the handful of stairs to the stage carefully but without relying on the handrail, and his motions on the podium were sometimes wide and sweeping. But he often seemed to be overseeing as much as conducting: leading with watchful eyes but keeping his arms down, experienced enough to know what the orchestra didn’t need from him.Thomas, too, told The Times in August that his illness had forced him to be more efficient in his gestures. On Sunday he was fluent but restrained, sometimes keeping a simple beat; sometimes slicing his baton horizontally; sometimes pumping his arms firmly downward; sometimes raising his hands, cupped around an invisible ball, as if both to summon and catch the sound.There was the straightforwardness that has always characterized his Mahler. (Among many recorded cycles of the symphonies, his no-nonsense, beautifully performed set with the San Francisco Symphony, which he led for 25 years, was my choice to play straight through on a long road trip last year.) Here in Los Angeles, his pace was patient even in the middle movements, which, more than sardonic or sour, felt proud and feisty. Here I am, they seemed to say. Take me or leave me.The work’s glacial final minutes, with the strings slipping past one another as the beat grows amorphous, seemed, more than ever in my experience, to describe the haziness of the end of consciousness.But there was not, in the silence that follows the dying of the sound, the usual game of chicken between an audience raring to applaud and a conductor unwilling to release. On Sunday there was no battle of wills, no self-indulgence, before the ovation. Thomas let the quiet come, then let it go. More

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      Review: Met Opera’s ‘Dialogues des Carmélites’ Revival

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      This revival of John Dexter’s production of “Dialogues des Carmélites” features a tightly knit cast led by the full-voiced soprano Ailyn Pérez.True to its name, Francis Poulenc’s “Dialogues des Carmélites” is an opera built on conversations, specifically ecclesiastical ones, about spiritual heroism, martyrdom and crises of faith. But in the Metropolitan Opera’s searing revival, which opened on Sunday, much was left unsaid, too — to stunning effect.Blanche de la Force, a nervous, fretful young aristocrat, seeks to join an order of Carmelite nuns to quiet her mind and find refuge amid the chaos of the French Revolution. As the Reign of Terror takes hold and religious communities are outlawed, the nuns take a vow of martyrdom that ultimately conveys them to the guillotine.The vow requires a unanimous vote, tabulated in secret. When Mother Marie announces that there was one nay, Constance, a young, fun-loving sister, steps forward to say that it was hers and that she wishes to retract it.At the Met, Ailyn Pérez’s Blanche, utterly beside herself, shot disbelieving looks of terror and exasperation across the stage at Sabine Devieilhe’s Constance, who met her gaze with loving reassurance.Such moments abounded in the company’s revival of John Dexter’s long-running production, staged on this occasion by Sarah Ina Meyers. It’s rare to see an opera so focused on women and their relationships to one another, and rarer still to see those relationships explored so profoundly.Pérez ingeniously deployed her warm, vivacious soprano as a Blanche who could hide in a convent from the world but not from herself. Her fragile nerves shot, Pérez’s Blanche often attempted to maintain a composed, pallid front, but her voice betrayed her, surging with feelings she had yet to master.Constance, Blanche’s fellow novice and dramatic foil, is easily cast with a perky coloratura voice. Devieilhe, with a smooth tone like light cream, gave Constance’s prattling utterances an air of ingenuous wisdom, beautifully balancing Pérez’s tightly wound, self-conscious Blanche.Poulenc individuates the female roles using vocal weight and range, and with Pérez’s full-voiced Blanche, the Met turned to dramatic voices for the more mature characters. Jamie Barton’s Mother Marie couched difficult truths in a plush voice — warm and consoling but also exacting and uncompromising. In one scene, she chews out an officious commissar without so much as removing her hands from the pockets of her vestments. Christine Goerke, her tone formidable and mettlesome, was a magisterial Madame Lidoine capable of leading the nuns in their darkest moments.The Old Prioress, who precedes Lidoine as the order’s Mother Superior, comes to a grisly end early in the opera, with a bang-up death scene that some singers approach with Meryl Streep-like meticulousness. Alice Coote gave an intense performance, more in-the-moment than grandly stylized, her nervy mezzo taking on the growl of a woman whose ox-like strength only prolonged her agony.The supporting male roles included Laurent Naouri, who rendered Blanche’s father as a vehement, indignant relic of another time; Piotr Buszewski, who, in his Met debut, sang Blanche’s brother with solicitude and an appealing tenor; and the chameleonic tenor Tony Stevenson as a comforting, charitable chaplain.The conductor Bertrand de Billy refined the score’s occasionally astringent harmonies and piquant climaxes. He took a broad view in mapping each scene’s dynamics, underscoring the singing with sumptuous patience and moving toward one big moment.“Dialogues” ends with one of opera’s great coups de théâtre. As the nuns make their way to the scaffold, singing “Salve Regina,” their voices, approaching exultation, drop out one by one with each swipe of the guillotine.But there is a quieter ensemble moment I won’t soon forget. Stripped of their habits and dressed in plain clothes, the nuns, having received their death sentence in a prison cell, circle around Goerke’s Lidoine for a laying of hands. In a reversal of the spectacular finale to come, they join her one by one — aching, wordless, holding fast to each other, not as proud martyrs, but as uncertain women shored up by faith and by one another.Dialogues des CarmélitesThrough Jan. 28 at the Metropolitan Opera; metopera.org. More

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      At 80, the Saxophonist Billy Harper Is Still a Towering Force

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      He spent years playing with Art Blakey, Lee Morgan and Max Roach, earning praise for his sax’s piercing cry. He’s still composing and turning heads live.Billy Harper grew up in front of an audience. Every Sunday, his family buttoned him into a suit and tie with a freshly starched shirt and drove to Saint Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church in Houston, where his grandfather preached and young Billy sang. “They were having me onstage when I was 3, singing solos,” he said. “The music was getting inside me.” Surrounded by great vocalists, he thought he was going to be a singer, too: “Until I got the horn.”Harper moved to New York in 1966, when he was 23, and began turning heads with the piercing and songful cry of his saxophone. It didn’t take long for him to become a prized collaborator for members of the jazz pantheon like Art Blakey, Max Roach and Lee Morgan. One of the last standing from his generation, Harper, who turns 80 on Tuesday, is still revered in the jazz world as both saxophonist and composer.Earlier this month, he played four nights at Smoke, the Manhattan jazz club, where attendees got a blast of his singular sound, which summons the urgency of John Coltrane and the power of the Black church. A charismatic presence onstage, dressed entirely in black leather, Harper calls his listeners to attention. His improvisations are torrential, dance-like and swinging, spiraling upward to mountaintop pronouncements that can leave listeners in a sweat.“His music is bracing,” said the pianist Francesca Tanksley, who has performed in Harper’s bands since 1983. She credits him with opening doors of inspiration, so that the music “becomes less of a craft and more of an adventure. He’s a man on a mission, he always has been — a knight of sorts.”The drummer Billy Hart, who plays with Harper in the all-star hard bop group the Cookers, said Harper’s music reflects the divine. “I’ve known Harper for 50 years, and we don’t even talk that much,” he said. “I don’t know exactly what he believes, but I can hear it. It’s rhapsodic. He’s praying on the bandstand.”Harper said that music comes to him in his sleep or while walking down the street: “Suddenly I’ll hear a tune in my head, and sometimes I’ll hear a whole choir of voices, singing it.”Scott Rossi for The New York TimesHarper shrugs off praise. “I just want to be a pure musician,” he said, speaking by phone from his apartment in Harlem, where he lives with his wife, the singer Morana Mesic, and their 11-year-old son, Prince. His mission at 80 is the same as when he was 25: “The idea is to make a mark in the creative music world — not anything commercial — just add something to what has already been done by the guys who came before me. If I can just do that, then I’ve done my part. I’m doing it.”He has long flown under the media’s radar, perhaps because his career took off as rock grew dominant in the music industry and independent jazz labels struggled. His debut album, “Capra Black,” recorded 50 years ago with a hotshot band and a choir, is a classic of what’s come to be known as spiritual jazz. Harper has never played anything but spiritual jazz. You can hear it in his stirring tunes, stretching back to the 1970s: “Cry of Hunger,” “The Awakening,” “Trying to Make Heaven My Home.”As a composer, he bears comparison with more famous musicians like Wayne Shorter and McCoy Tyner. Some of his compositions seem to unfold across vast landscapes, majestic and haunting, as if Harper were traveling through epochs of time. “Billy is a griot, a storyteller,” said T.K. Blue, the saxophonist and flutist who performed with Harper for 30 years in bands led by the pianist Randy Weston. “I can hear the history of where he comes from in that music. It’s regal. I hear Africa. I hear Texas. I hear the blues.”Harper spent much of his childhood in Houston’s Third Ward, a historically Black neighborhood filled in those days with blues joints. Walking past a music shop when he was 11, he spotted a shiny tenor saxophone in the window and was intrigued by its complexity — its multitude of buttons and keys. Returning home, he announced that he wanted either a pony or a saxophone for Christmas. (He got the horn.)Harper’s Uncle Earl, an old schoolmate of the bebop trumpeter Kenny Dorham, introduced him to albums by Dorham, Horace Silver and Sonny Rollins. Harper, self-taught, played along with the records and in school marching bands, and soon began sitting in with blues bands around town.By 1961, when Harper arrived at North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas), his playing “had the soul stuff, the feeling,” he said. “But I had to get the technical stuff, and they made me get it together.” Enrolled as a music major, he took his first-ever saxophone lessons and developed a grueling regimen. Holing up in a practice room for 10 or 12 hours at a time, daily, he garnered a reputation: “People thought I was crazy — or that I was going crazy,” he recalled, with a laugh.Harper has recorded 20 or so albums with the quintet, and is planning a new one. He’s been writing songs inspired by his 11-year-old son.Scott Rossi for The New York TimesToward the end of his junior year, Harper won a seat in the school’s prestigious One O’Clock Lab Band, known for its polish and professionalism. It was 1964, and Harper became the first Black student ever accepted into the ensemble: “It was a big thing to get in, though I hadn’t really thought about it back then,” he said. The other musicians “were open and warm, and the band was off the charts. After that, I was ready for anything.”After graduating in 1965, he spent a year or so in Dallas, jamming with big-time saxophonists like James Clay and Claude Johnson, veterans of Ray Charles’s band. Then in 1966, Harper jumped into his black Mustang fastback and drove to Manhattan. His second night in the city, he parked in front of the Five Spot Cafe on St. Marks Place and rushed inside with his horn to hear Thelonious Monk. He forgot to lock the car, and was robbed of nearly everything he owned. That first year in New York was a challenge. He tried sitting in nightly at Slugs’ Saloon, a jazz mecca on the Lower East Side, but rarely got a paid gig.But in 1967, a chance meeting on Broadway with Gil Evans, the composer, arranger and Miles Davis collaborator, led to an invitation to rehearse with Evans’s big band. Harper would become one of its important soloists. Word spread and his résumé grew.Harper — himself an accomplished drummer — spent years playing with the drummer Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. He was a member of the trumpeter Lee Morgan’s final band and was at Slugs’ the night Morgan was fatally shot there in 1972. He spent much of the ’70s in a quartet led by the drummer Max Roach, and held the first tenor chair in the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra. Its leaders would keep him glued to his seat until the end of a set — at which time, like a pent-up thoroughbred leaving the gate, he would rise to deliver a scarifying blizzard of a blues-drenched solo.His A-list collaborations continued over the decades; since 2010, Harper has recorded half a dozen albums and toured widely with the Cookers while also maintaining his own group, which he described as authentic: “We have a soul-heart-mind connection when we play together,” he said.Typically, members stick with the quintet for years, if not decades, as in the case of Tanksley. To this day, she said, when the band plays one of Harper’s compositions, the musicians seem to enter “a small universe with its own state of being.”Harper has recorded around 20 albums with the quintet, though it’s been a while — the group’s most recent disc, “Blueprints of Jazz Vol. 2,” came out in 2008. His recordings can be as hard to find as they are musically definitive.He plans to make a new album this year and has been composing a set of tunes inspired by his son. He said that music comes to him in his sleep or while walking down the street: “Suddenly I’ll hear a tune in my head, and sometimes I’ll hear a whole choir of voices, singing it. So I run home and write it down, fast.”Not every 80-year-old maintains this level of creativity; playing a tenor saxophone for hours at a time requires a serious degree of physical conditioning. But Harper — who used to jog miles daily and trained as a martial artist — finds that his energy doesn’t flag much.“Inside, I feel 25, maybe 26,” he said.And he’s still turning heads with the singing sound of his saxophone. His friend Hart compares him to the Pied Piper of Hamelin: “People want to hear that sound. Charlie Parker had it. John Coltrane certainly had it. It’s a sound that doesn’t change the notes, it makes the notes, and that’s the sound that Billy has.” More

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      Barclays Center Drops SeatGeek and Returns to Ticketmaster

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      The Brooklyn venue replaced Ticketmaster, the industry leader, in 2021 in favor of SeatGeek, a competitor. It is not clear why it changed direction again.In 2021, Barclays Center in Brooklyn made a surprising announcement about its business: After nearly a decade with Ticketmaster, the industry leader, as its ticketing vendor, the arena was switching to SeatGeek, an aggressive upstart.Now, barely a year into what had been a seven-year contract, BSE Global, the parent company of Barclays — the home of the Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty basketball teams, and a destination for major concert tours — is canceling its partnership with SeatGeek and returning to Ticketmaster.The change was revealed on Friday when Barclays announced a concert by the singer and producer Jackson Wang on May 11 with a link to Ticketmaster. SeatGeek, which remains the ticketer for many events already on Barclays’s calendar, will gradually be replaced by Ticketmaster in coming months as new concerts and sporting events go on sale.The abrupt switch, at a high-profile venue in one of the biggest markets in the world, is head-spinning news in the lucrative ticketing business, where Ticketmaster’s dominance has long been a matter of debate and scrutiny.“It’s very rare for such a cancellation,” said Larry Miller, the director of the music business program at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development.“Ticketing platform deals with venue owners are not of short duration,” Mr. Miller added. “I can’t think of a time over the last decade where a major venue has dropped a ticketing platform early on in the deal cycle.”The reasons for the change at Barclays were not immediately clear. Neither BSE Global nor SeatGeek would comment about whether there were any problems with ticketing that may have prompted a switch.In a statement, a spokeswoman for BSE Global said that SeatGeek “provided our fans with a first-class game day ticketing experience, and we’re appreciative of the time and energy they put into our work together.”The president of SeatGeek, Danielle du Toit, expressed no upset at Barclays’ change of direction. “It’s never easy to part ways with a client,” she said in a statement, “but as we look to the future, SeatGeek is grounded in our strategy and road map that are geared towards solving the challenges that plague the live entertainment experience.”Since its founding in 2009, SeatGeek has positioned itself as an industry disrupter. Initially just a resale platform, it has sought to challenge Ticketmaster’s dominance in the so-called primary market — sales directly from a venue’s box office, on behalf of sports teams or performing artists. When BSE Global announced its SeatGeek deal, which took effect in October 2021, the venue company praised its new partner’s “best-in-class mobile platform.”SeatGeek’s clients include major sports franchises like the Dallas Cowboys and the New Orleans Saints, as well as Jujamcyn Theaters, one of Broadway’s major theater owners.But SeatGeek, and other ticketing companies, all still lag far behind Ticketmaster, which sold 485 million tickets in 2019, the last year of business unaffected by the Covid-19 pandemic, an amount that swamps its competitors. Regulators have been monitoring Ticketmaster’s market share since it merged in 2010 with the concert giant Live Nation in a deal that critics suggested would damage competition in the ticketing industry, a consequence that Live Nation has denied.As a condition for its approval of the merger, the Justice Department entered into a regulatory agreement with Live Nation that, among other things, prohibited it from retaliating against venues that do not sign with Ticketmaster by withholding shows it controlled. The agreement, known as a consent decree, was extended by five years in 2020 after federal regulators found that Live Nation had “repeatedly” violated it. At the time, Live Nation did not admit to any wrongdoing, and said that extending the decree was “the best outcome for our business, clients and shareholders.”In an interview, Joe Berchtold, the president of Live Nation, acknowledged that the company is always under scrutiny for its actions in the marketplace. In recent weeks, for example, lawmakers have expressed concern over Ticketmaster’s botched ticket sale for Taylor Swift’s latest tour, and the company was widely condemned for its mishandling of a Bad Bunny concert in Mexico City.But Mr. Berchtold was unequivocal in stating that the company did not break any of its regulatory guidelines with Barclays Center.“I can absolutely confirm,” he said, “that there was no retaliation at Barclays for not using Ticketmaster, in terms of the routing of any concerts.”Tracking the blips and dips in tour dates for concert venues can be an inexact science. But data from Pollstar, a trade publication that covers the live music business, shows that Barclays Center received 13 Live Nation-promoted tours in the year after SeatGeek took over the venue’s ticketing business — a drop for Barclays, which in the years before the pandemic had tended to get about two dozen Live Nation events annually.However during the same period, from 2016 through 2019, the data also indicates the venue hosted fewer shows from independent promoters — those not associated with Live Nation or its major competitor, AEG Presents — from an average of more than 50 a year to less than 20 in the year after SeatGeek took over.SeatGeek and BSE Global declined to comment on the data.Barclays Center competes with Madison Square Garden, as well as the Prudential Center in Newark and the new UBS Arena in Elmont, N.Y., for major concert tours to fill out its schedule. Since 2019, BSE Global has been owned by Joseph Tsai, a Taiwanese-born tech billionaire, who bought out its previous owner, the Russian mogul Mikhail Prokhorov. More

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      John Cale’s Musical Journey Knows No Limits

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      LOS ANGELES — Just a few years after he’d left the provincial Welsh mining town where he was born, a 23-year-old John Cale was invited — along with his friend Lou Reed and their budding band the Velvet Underground — to Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York.“The first day you walked in, you joined the Academy,” Cale said in the industrial but cozy lounge of his studio on a recent afternoon, recalling the first meeting with the pop-art power broker who would become the band’s manager. “The atmosphere of that place was really special,” he added; artists from all over “came in and unzipped a bag of magic.”The musician, now 80, was reminiscing on an uncharacteristically gloomy January day in Los Angeles. Cale seemed to have summoned the Welsh weather along with his memories, and sat bundled up in a black puffer jacket and wool socks. “That’s the first thing you remember: all the work that was being done,” Cale said. “Andy was nonstop. We were nonstop. And it paid off.”It was, however, just the beginning of one of the most accomplished résumés in rock history, if not 20th-century culture. Cale studied under John Cage and Aaron Copland, and later learned about the transformative power of drone from the avant-garde musicians La Monte Young and Tony Conrad. He had a fling with Edie Sedgwick and a short marriage to Betsey Johnson. After he was unceremoniously booted from the Velvet Underground in 1968, he became a prolific, risk-taking producer, helming trailblazing albums by the Stooges, the Modern Lovers, Nico and Patti Smith. His catalog as a solo artist is unbelievably rich, tonally varied and full of buried treasure. He is arguably responsible for plucking a little-known Leonard Cohen deep cut called “Hallelujah” out of obscurity. He is inarguably the most important electric viola player rock has ever seen.“Something snapped, in a good way,” Cale said of a creative streak during the pandemic.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesIt’s possible to chart the eras of Cale’s vast career by his succession of iconic haircuts: the chic, chin-length pageboy of his Velvet Underground days; the greasy bed head of his proto-punk ’70s; an asymmetric art-crop as the ’80s became the ’90s; and the feathery, birdlike style in which he now wears his distinguished, white-gray locks, set off by a playfully Mephistophelian soul patch. Two months before his 81st birthday, he is still spry, sneaking in a pre-interview workout in his studio’s gym. (He’s been a disciplined exerciser since the late 1980s, when he kicked drugs by taking up the most physically demanding sport he could think of: squash. “It got me through,” he said.)On Cale’s new album, “Mercy” — his 17th as a solo artist, due next week — he occasionally glances back, on songs that honor late friends like David Bowie and Nico. But more often he’s making art focused firmly and defiantly in the present, responding to the political turmoil of the day (one song is titled “The Legal Status of Ice”) and collaborating with a supporting cast of younger avant-garde and indie artists: The celestial crooner Weyes Blood, the punky provocateurs Fat White Family and the art-rock dreamers Animal Collective all make guest appearances.“I consider it an honor to watch little decisions he makes,” said the Animal Collective multi-instrumentalist Brian Weitz (who records as Geologist), in a phone interview. “He’ll throw out one or two sentences to explain it, and it means the world.”Cale has always been a man of contradiction: a classically trained violist with a penchant for chaos. In our conversation, he casually referenced such thinkers as John Ruskin, Bertrand Russell and Henri-Louis Bergson, but was just as quick to ad-lib a flatulence joke. When interrupted midsentence by a deafening gurgling coming from the building’s pipes, Cale grinned impishly and said “Excuse me” with impressive comic timing.“He could be so formal in a certain way — he’s so learned and classical,” Smith said in a phone interview. (Cale produced her landmark debut album, “Horses,” in 1975.) “But he could also be as wild as any of us.” She recalled a kinetic 1976 gig in Cleveland when Cale played bass with her band during a cover of the Who’s “My Generation,” and “it got to such a fever pitch and the ceiling was so low that John put his bass through the ceiling of the club.” Cale in 1963, studying a musical score.Eddie Hausner/The New York TimesThe breadth of Cale’s accomplishments has left his collaborators and admirers in awe. “If you had one part of his career, you’d be a legend,” LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy said in a phone interview. “If you were only the producer that John Cale was, you’d go down in history. If you were only in the Velvet Underground, your ticket’s punched to rock ’n’ roll heaven. But then you did all those Island solo records, and the Eno collaboration, and then ‘Songs for Drella,’” he added, referring to Cale’s 1989 reunion with Reed, before trailing off.For all his creative triumphs, Cale never quite became a household name like Reed, his collaborator and sometimes antagonist. Todd Haynes’s acclaimed 2021 documentary “The Velvet Underground,” though, served as a corrective, arguing that Cale was the band’s secret weapon.“There was no way to overstate John’s absolutely primary role as a conceptual and creative partner with Lou Reed,” Haynes said in a phone interview, describing Cale as “the most elegant flamethrower of ’60s utopianism that I can think of.”Cale loved the film (“The minute I heard Todd was going to be doing it, I relaxed”), but he’s not one to sit around and think too hard about his legacy — he still has work to do. “I think that came to me from Wales and my mother,” he said. “She was a teacher, and I got it all basically from her: You don’t sit on your laurels. You get on with whatever it is that you haven’t done yet.”In recent years, Cale has become a generous collaborator with younger artists, and a kind of living conduit to avant-garde history and wisdom.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesCALE, THE ONLY child of a coal miner and a schoolteacher, spent the first 18 years of his life in Garnant, a small village in South Wales, “a strange, remote, some said mystical land,” as he wrote in his autobiography, “What’s Welsh for Zen.” When he was 7, he started learning English, and classical piano. A few years later, the BBC came to his school and recorded the precocious youngster playing a composition he’d written himself. The sheet music went missing, so Cale had to wing the ending. It was a thrill: his first improvisation.“Creatively it liberated me,” he wrote. “I started to take chances.”The viola, the crucial element that would later transform the Velvet Underground’s sound, came into Cale’s hands by chance: When it came time to choose an instrument for the school orchestra, it was the only one left. The local library was his portal to other worlds, especially when he realized he could request sheet music. “I was able to put my fingers in all these scores of the avant-garde,” he said at his studio, citing Webern, Berg, Haubenstock-Ramati and, of course, John Cage.When Cale was 15, he caught “Rock Around the Clock” at the local cinema; all his classmates rushed the screen and started to bop. He was electrified, bewildered — up until then, Stravinsky had been his idea of rock ’n’ roll — and a little scared that everyone was about to get in trouble. After that, he said, “I was confused. Did I want to go into the avant-garde, or did I want to go into rock ’n’ roll?”He went to Goldsmiths’ College in London, a suitable place to figure that out. Cale’s incendiary student performances — including one that involved playing a piano with his elbows — scandalized some of the faculty, but he was already dreaming of America. After exchanging letters with Cage and Copland, Cale received a scholarship from Leonard Bernstein to study at the prestigious Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts. In 1963, he came to New York and quickly fell in with Conrad, Young and the boldly minimalist Theater of Eternal Music, joining them frequently to play meditative drones that lasted for hours. At last he’d found community, and the mind-expanding experiences he’d always longed for.“I knew what I wanted from New York,” he said. “And I got it.” Meanwhile in Brooklyn, Lou Reed had been born exactly a week before Cale; “I always knew he had an edge on me!” Cale quipped in his memoir. So began one of the most generative and — still, almost a decade after Reed’s death — tumultuous partnerships in rock.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesEach time I asked Cale about Reed, he slyly rerouted the conversation: “We drifted apart,” he finally said. But maybe everything that needs to be known is right there in the music. As he wrote in a statement shortly after Reed’s 2013 death, “Unlike so many with similar stories — we have the best of our fury laid on vinyl, for the world to catch a glimpse.” Last year, the archival label Light in the Attic released a collection of 17 previously unreleased tracks from Reed’s earliest recordings, including a May 1965 tape that features folky, self-recorded demos of future classics like “Heroin” and “I’m Waiting for the Man.” (Cale, who was Reed’s roommate in a drug-fueled Ludlow Street loft at the time, sings backup on some of them.) It’s revelatory to hear the material in this larval stage: They are unmistakably Lou Reed songs, yes, but they’re not yet Velvet Underground songs. “You see that he really hadn’t begun to imagine the potential of this music,” Haynes said of Reed, “and that what he was doing in content and lyrics hadn’t found a correlative energy and sensibility yet in the music.” Enter Cale, with his interest in drone, his connection to the avant-garde, and the low, sonorous viola that melted down traditional rock-song structures like molten lava.“That dialectic, that tension, that attraction, that romance that brought the two of them together,” Haynes said, “therein lies the mystery of this music.”THE GLORY DAYS didn’t last long. “I didn’t quite know how to exist outside the environment of the Factory,” Cale said. Warhol spent the latter part of 1968 recovering from a gunshot wound; by the end of the summer, Reed had given the rest of the Velvet Underground a Cale-or-me ultimatum, and insisted that the guitarist Sterling Morrison break the news. For all their merits, the albums that the V.U. released without Cale are quieter and more conventional. (“Who gets kicked out of the Velvet Underground for being too avant-garde?” Murphy mused. “I love that. That’s John Cale.”)Cale, left, and Lou Reed performing in the Velvet Underground. In 1968, Cale was forced out of the band he had helped found.Adam Ritchie/Redferns, via Getty Images“It made some other people in the band unhappy, but it was just a challenge to me,” Cale said of his ousting. That Welsh work ethic, and his mother’s humble advice, saved him: “I decided, well, OK, you can sit on your hands and do nothing, or you can get up, move your butt and produce some things.” The first album he worked on would change Nico’s image forever, the stark, harrowing “Marble Index.” The second was the Stooges’ 1969 self-titled debut, one of the founding documents of punk.After the refined chamber-pop of his great 1973 album “Paris 1919,” Cale’s solo work grew increasingly feral, too. He unleashed lacerating screams on the 1974 album “Fear” (the recording that made Smith seek him out as a producer) and embraced post-punk on the adventurous “Honi Soit,” from 1981. “There’s this counterpoint of Lou going and doing Zen,” he said and laughed, referring to Reed’s interest in meditation and tai chi, “and then I’m going and doing rock ’n’ roll.”Cale and Reed hadn’t spoken in years when they ran into each other at Warhol’s funeral in 1987. The old spark was back, and they began work on a tribute to their former manager, which would become the theatrical, confidently sparse “Songs for Drella.” By the time it arrived in 1989, they were no longer speaking. A Velvet Underground reunion in the early 1990s was similarly short-lived, also owing to creative differences between Cale and Reed.Cale cleaned up his rock ’n’ roll lifestyle when his daughter, Eden, was born in 1985. He released more classically minded albums and continued to exert an inconspicuous influence on musical culture. In the early 1990s, a small French record label asked him to contribute to a Leonard Cohen tribute album. He chose “Hallelujah” — a song from the quietly received 1984 album “Various Positions” that he’d first heard Cohen perform at the Beacon Theater — and made some tweaks to the lyrics and simplified the song’s arrangement. His version certainly struck a chord. When Jeff Buckley first began playing the song, a magazine editor in the audience told him backstage that he liked his Cohen cover. “I haven’t heard Leonard Cohen’s version,” Buckley is said to have replied. “I know it by John Cale.”Cale said he inherited his work ethic from his mother: “You don’t sit on your laurels. You get on with whatever it is that you haven’t done yet.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesCale has remarkably open ears for an octogenarian: He often speaks of “what a boon to music” hip-hop is and, in our conversation, expressed admiration for rap producers like Mike Will Made-It and Dr. Dre. “Hey guys, do you know what’s going on here?” he said to his imagined peers. “Better ideas of mixing, better ideas of melodies — it’s like, get on the train or get off.”In recent years, Cale has become a generous collaborator with younger artists, and a kind of living conduit to avant-garde history and wisdom. “I jokingly tell people that it’s like a friendly godfather-type relationship that I have with him,” Animal Collective’s Weitz said. Cale has long been an admirer of the band, and Weitz described their reciprocal appearances on each other’s records — Cale played on the band’s 2016 album “Painting With,” and Animal Collective appear on a track from “Mercy” — as a kind of “music-for-music swap.”Cale still makes art on the edge. In June 2019, he headlined the DMZ Peace Train Festival on the border between North and South Korea. (The wildlife surprised him: “Korean rattlesnakes!”) In 2014, at London’s Barbican museum, he conducted the first-ever orchestra of flying drones. A certain defiance also courses through “Mercy,” a slow, meditative album. The songs have immediate emotional resonance, but they ask the listener for patience, too.LCD Soundsystem’s Murphy admires that. “He always approaches it as, ‘What’s interesting to me right now?’ rather than being careerist,” he said. “Songs made by people like that last in a very different way,” he continued. “They feel alive and current for much longer, because they’re made with respect.”There are plenty more of them coming, too. Cale spent much of the pandemic holed up in his studio, and he estimates that he’s written around 80 new compositions in the past few years. “Something snapped, in a good way,” he said. “It was like, you can’t turn your back on this, this is something that’s going to go on. And I want to go on.” More

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      Fans Mourn Lisa Marie Presley, Daughter of the King, at Graceland

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      At the stone wall outside Elvis Presley’s estate, his only child was remembered as a kind of rock star royalty.MEMPHIS — Some wrote messages on the stone wall in front of Graceland, the storied Memphis mansion that housed Elvis Presley’s studded jumpsuits and his private plane, the Lisa Marie, customized with gold bathroom fixtures. Others left flowers.A day after the death of Lisa Marie Presley, 54, the singer-songwriter and only child of Elvis, fans mourned her loss and recalled how the Presleys had touched their lives.At Graceland on Friday, Stephanie T. Perez, whose great-aunt taught Elvis in high school and whose grandfather worked for him as an upholsterer, said she had visited the same spot with her mother years ago, when the king of rock ’n’ roll had died. She was 2.“I just felt it was important to be on this street the day his daughter passed away,” Ms. Perez, now 47, said. “You hate it for them. You hate it for Elvis’s legacy. You hate it for her life that was cut short. But most of all, just sorrow for the kids and Priscilla.”Now Lisa Marie Presley, who owns the mansion and original grounds at Graceland, will be buried there, according to the Lede Co., which represents her daughter Riley Keough. “Lisa Marie’s final resting place will be at Graceland, next to her beloved son Ben,” it said in a statement.It was not immediately clear on Friday what had caused Ms. Presley’s death. Her mother, Priscilla Presley, said in a statement on Thursday that her daughter had been receiving medical attention but did not share more information. “She was the most passionate, strong and loving woman I have ever known,” Ms. Presley said.Lisa Marie Presley was born to Elvis and Priscilla in 1968. He died when she was 9.Keystone/Getty ImagesLisa Marie Presley was famous from the moment she was born, the daughter of one of the biggest stars in the world. And while she would go on to try to forge her own path as a singer, she remained best known as a kind of rock star royalty: She was the only daughter of Elvis and, from 1994 to 1996, she was married to Michael Jackson.But she led a tumultuous life, one that was buffeted by loss. She lost her father when she was 9. Married and divorced four times, she also struggled with opioid addiction. Her son, Benjamin Keough, died by suicide in 2020. Less than six months before her own death, she wrote about grieving his loss, saying that it had “destroyed” her but that she kept going for the sake of her three daughters.Fans mourned her outside Graceland, the eclectic eight-bedroom residence in Memphis that Ms. Presley inherited after her father’s death and which opened to the public as a museum in 1982.The plane that Elvis named after his daughter sits at Graceland.Lucy Garrett for The New York TimesGraceland has housed more than a million artifacts, among them a fake-fur cocoon bed with a stereo in the canopy. Then there is Mr. Presley’s private plane, the Lisa Marie, which had four TVs and a stereo with 52 speakers.Within hours of the announcement of Ms. Presley’s death late Thursday, about a dozen Elvis fans arrived at Graceland, bundled up in coats and gloves on a blustery chilly nightKimber Tomlinson, 49, recalled how Elvis fans in Memphis had been smitten from the start with Lisa Marie, who was so well-known here that nobody seemed to feel the need to use her last name. Her first memory of Elvis, she added, was when her mother took her to Graceland about a week or so after his funeral.“It’s sad, so sad,” Ms. Tomlinson said. “Her life was always in the spotlight,” she added, referring to Lisa Marie. “That family has had their share of heart attacks and heartbreaks.”Ms. Tomlinson recited the long history of loss among the Presley family: Gladys, Elvis’s mother died at age 46 in 1958; Elvis died in 1977 of heart failure at age 42; Lisa Marie’s son, Benjamin Keough, died by suicide in 2020 at age 27; and now there was Lisa Marie’s death.The sprawling estate opened for business as usual on Friday, just days after Ms. Presley had joined fans at the mansion on Sunday to celebrate what would have been Elvis’s 88th birthday.Jason Hanley, the vice president of education at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, observed that Ms. Presley’s death was a cultural touchstone of sorts because she was the daughter of the “King of Rock ’n’ Roll” and had been married to the “King of Pop.” Her death, he said, was imbued with a particular wistfulness and nostalgia for an era that had changed American music.“She was the heir to Elvis’s empire and rock ’n’ roll royalty, and she recorded three great albums in which she wanted to say something about herself in the shadow of her father’s legacy,” he said. “Her death is heartbreaking for us because it marks the passage of time.”A bouquet of flowers for Lisa Marie Presley at Graceland.Lucy Garrett for The New York TimesOne of her former husbands, the actor Nicolas Cage, told The Hollywood Reporter he was devastated by Ms. Presley’s death. “Lisa had the greatest laugh of anyone I ever met,” he was quoted as saying. “She lit up every room, and I am heartbroken.” The Michael Jackson estate said in a statement that Jackson had “cherished the special bond” he and Ms. Presley shared and that he was “comforted by Lisa Marie’s generous love, concern and care during their times together.”Ms. Presley released three albums in which she set out to forge her own musical path while drawing from the music of her father, whose singular cocktail of blues, gospel, pop and country made him the first huge rock star and transformed American music.She said she had been hesitant to lean on her family name. But she was overruled by her record label, which made the personal “Lights Out” — “Someone turned the lights out there in Memphis. That’s where my family’s buried and gone” — her debut single in 2003.Her father’s larger-than-life legacy remained with her right until her final days. On Tuesday, she was again conjuring him at the Golden Globes, telling a television host that Austin Butler, who won the lead acting award for drama for his performance in Baz Luhrmann’s biopic “Elvis,” had perfectly embodied her father.But at Graceland on Friday, it was Lisa Marie that Presley fans remembered. Perez left her own message on Graceland’s wall: “Godspeed, LMP.”Cindy Wolff More

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      Lisa Marie Presley, Singer-Songwriter and Daughter of Elvis, Dies at 54

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      Her death in Los Angeles on Thursday, after a life tinged with tragedy, came after a medical emergency and brief hospitalization.Lisa Marie Presley, the singer-songwriter and only child of Elvis Presley, died on Thursday in Los Angeles after a medical emergency and a brief hospitalization. She was 54.Sam Mast, a representative of Priscilla Presley, her mother, announced the death in a statement. Earlier in the day, Ms. Presley said her daughter had been receiving medical attention but did not provide more information. Ms. Presley lived in Calabasas, Calif., west of Los Angeles.The daughter of one of the most celebrated performers in music history, Ms. Presley followed her father’s career path. She released three rock albums, on which she set out to establish a sound of her own while also paying homage to the man who forever changed the American soundscape with his blend of blues, gospel, country and other genres.Hers was a life tinged with tragedy. She was 9 when her father died in 1977, and she lost others who had been close to her along the way, including her former husband, Michael Jackson. The suicide of her only son, Benjamin Keough, at age 27 in 2020 hit her especially hard, an episode she wrote about movingly last year in an essay for People magazine to mark National Grief Awareness Day.“My and my three daughters’ lives as we knew it were completely detonated and destroyed by his death,” she wrote. “We live in this every. Single. Day.”The enormous legacy of her father was a constant presence in her life. On Tuesday, she was again celebrating him at the Golden Globe awards ceremony, telling Extra TV that Austin Butler, who won the award for lead actor in a drama for his performance in the title role of Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis,” had perfectly captured the essence of her father.“I was mind-blown, truly,” Ms. Presley said. “I actually had to take, like, five days to process it because it was so spot on and authentic.”In his speech accepting his award during the televised ceremony, Mr. Butler singled out the Presley family for its friendship and support as the camera panned to a visibly moved Priscilla and Lisa Marie Presley seated at his table.Ms. Presley in 2012 beside a display of her childhood crib at Graceland, Elvis Presley’s home in Memphis. Lance Murphey/Associated PressOn Sunday, Ms. Presley was at Graceland, her father’s estate in Memphis, to commemorate what would have been his 88th birthday.Father and daughter were extremely close. Elvis once flew Lisa Marie to Idaho after she said she had never seen snow. He named his 1958 Convair 880 private jet the Lisa Marie.Ms. Presley owned Graceland and her father’s artifacts, as well as 15 percent of Elvis Presley Enterprises, the corporate entity created by a Presley trust to manage its assets.Though Ms. Presley’s music career never reached the heights her father’s had achieved, his influence was evident in her music and lyrics. “Someone turned the lights out there in Memphis,” she sang in “Lights Out,” a song from “To Whom It May Concern,” her debut album, released in 2003. “That’s where my family’s buried and gone.”In 2018, she co-produced an album celebrating Elvis’s love of gospel music and sang along with a recording of him on one of the songs. “I got moved by it as I was singing,” she said in an interview.If her albums produced no signature hits, her last name enshrined her as a celebrity. And her star-studded relationships only deepened that perception. Foremost among those was her marriage, from 1994 to 1996, to Mr. Jackson. Together, the pair — one the daughter of the king of rock ’n’ roll, the other regarded as the king of pop — attracted the glare of cameras and bountiful attention. In August 1994, The New York Times reported on the couple’s revelation that they had married.“After announcing a union that might have been conceived in supermarket-tabloid heaven and proclaiming a need for privacy, the world’s most famous newlyweds were holed up last night in a place not known for its isolation: Trump Tower,” The Times wrote. “At 5:40 p.m., a few hours after the statement was released in Los Angeles, the developer Donald J. Trump emerged from Trump Tower to the kind of reportorial throng normally reserved for the likes of, well, Michael Jackson or Donald Trump, and confirmed that, yes, the couple were ensconced on the top floor of the Fifth Avenue tower.”There was speculation that the marriage was an effort to deflect attention from investigations into allegations by a 13-year-old boy that Mr. Jackson had molested him. For a time the couple portrayed a happy marriage — Ms. Presley said she wanted to be known as “Mrs. Lisa Marie Presley-Jackson.” But by the end of 1995 they had separated, and they divorced the next year.Ms. Presley was married three other times; those marriages ended in divorce as well. She married the singer and songwriter Danny Keough in 1988, the actor Nicolas Cage in 2002 and, most recently, in 2006, Michael Lockwood, a guitarist who was music director of her 2005 album, “Now What.” They divorced in 2021.Her survivors include her daughter with Mr. Keough, the actress Riley Keough, and twin daughters with Mr. Lockwood, Harper and Finley.In a foreword to the 2019 book “The United States of Opioids: A Prescription for Liberating a Nation in Pain” by Harry Nelson, Ms. Presley wrote about her struggle with addiction, which she said began when she was given a prescription for pain medication after the birth of the twins in 2008. She quoted her own response to a point-blank question about her problem posed to her on the “Today” show in 2018.“I’m not perfect,” she recalled saying. “My father wasn’t perfect, no one’s perfect. It’s what you do with it after you learn and then you try to help others with it.”Elvis and Priscilla Presley with their daughter, Lisa Marie, after her birth in 1968. Associated PressLisa Marie Presley was born in Memphis on Feb. 1, 1968. “I’m a shaky man,” her famous father told reporters when his wife was admitted to Baptist Memorial Hospital for the birth, an occasion that made international news.In “Elvis by the Presleys,” a 2005 book of recollections by Lisa Marie and Priscilla Presley and others, Lisa Marie wrote of her childhood memories of her father.“The thing about my father is that he never hid anything,” she wrote. “He didn’t have a facade. Never put on airs. If he was crabby, you knew it. If he was angry, he’d let you know. His temper could give Darth Vader a run for his money. But if he was happy, everyone was happy.”Home life had its odd moments.“One time in the middle of the night I’m awoken by this incredibly loud noise coming from my father’s bedroom, which was right next to mine,” she related. “I get out of bed and see the guys buzz-sawing down his door so they can move in a grand piano. He felt like playing piano and singing gospel songs.”In the same book, Priscilla Presley wrote of Elvis’s tenderness toward his daughter in her early years.“Twice he spanked her on her bottom,” she remembered. “Once she colored a velvet couch with crayons, and once she ignored his warnings and got too close to the edge of the pool. The spankings were restrained and also warranted. But poor Elvis was a mess afterwards. You would have thought he had committed murder.”As a performer, Ms. Presley, whose most recent album was “Storm & Grace” (2012), knew her name would always be impossible to escape. But she was eager to be taken on her own terms.“It’s my own thing,” she said of her career in a 2003 interview with The Times. “I’m just trying to be an artist. I’m not trying to be Elvis Presley’s child. And I’m not trying to run from it either.”Kirsten Noyes More

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      Everything But the Girl’s Long-Awaited Return, and 12 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Miley Cyrus, Vagabon, Lonnie Holley featuring Michael Stipe 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 theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Everything But the Girl, ‘Nothing Left to Lose’Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt released their last album as Everything But the Girl in 1999. They announce a new one with “Nothing Left to Lose,” a song that shows its danceable desolation from its initial bass note and twitchy, echoey drumbeat, even before Thorn arrives to sing, “I need a thicker skin/This pain keeps getting in.” The production opens up a hollow void between throbbing bass tones and just enough single notes to sketch the rhythm and harmony; Thorn’s voice fills it with melancholy longing. JON PARELESSkrillex, Fred again.. and Flowdan, ‘Rumble’Skrillex, PinkPantheress and Trippie Redd, ‘Way Back’On his first singles as a lead artist since 2021, Skrillex explores two different sides of the jungle family tree. On “Way Back,” he takes a pop approach, partnering with the dreamlike vocalist PinkPantheress on a bubbly, quick-stepping flirtation anchored by some anguished pleas from Trippie Redd. On “Rumble,” though, he leans in to a harsher sound more in keeping with the thundering dubstep he first made his name with, but refracted though a jagged lens, with Fred again.. manipulating samples and the grime veteran Flowdan declaiming with cool detachment. JON CARAMANICABizarrap and Shakira, ‘Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53’Shakira’s revenge on her ex-boyfriend of 11 years, the soccer player Gerard Piqué, is as much a canny social media beef as a song. “I was out of your league,” she sings, going on to rap, “So much time at the gym/But maybe work out your brain a bit too.” Dozens of rappers and singers have collaborated with the Argentine producer Bizarrap, but unlike most of his sessions, “Vol. 53” isn’t a beat and a rap; it’s a fully produced electro-pop song with multitracked vocals and a contemptuous, self-branded hook: “A she-wolf like me isn’t for guys like you.” PARELESMiley Cyrus, ‘Flowers’Miley Cyrus exudes a cool confidence on “Flowers,” the breezy leadoff single from “Endless Summer Vacation,” due March 10. At first, the song seems like a brooding breakup post-mortem, but that turns out to be a ruse: “Started to cry, but then remembered I can buy myself flowers,” Cyrus sings, and the mood suddenly lifts. The relatively subdued chorus melody may not demand much of Cyrus, but her vocals are imbued with a laid-back maturity and convincing self-assurance. “I can take myself dancing, and I can hold my own hand,” she sings with her signature huskiness. “Yeah, I can love me better than you can.” LINDSAY ZOLADZParamore, ‘C’est Comme Ça’Latching on to the deadpan, spoken-word sarcasm of post-punk groups like Dry Cleaning, in “C’est Comme Ça” Hayley Williams takes on the isolation and enforced introspection of the pandemic era. “Sit still long enough to listen to yourself/Or maybe just long enough for you to atrophy to hell,” she deadpans over a disco thump with scrubbing guitars. The nonsense-syllable chorus — “Na na na na!” — is where Paramore’s pop-punk reflexes kick in. PARELESVagabon, ‘Carpenter’On her buoyant new single “Carpenter,” Laetitia Tamko, who records as Vagabon, opts for a sound that’s sleeker, lighter and more playful than her previous material. Rostam Batmanglij’s coproduction provides a reset, but the sweet melancholy of Tamko’s vocals gives the song an added emotional weight. “I wasn’t ready for what you were saying,” she sings on this tale of gradual maturity. “But I’m more ready now.” ZOLADZGracie Abrams, ‘Where Do We Go Now?’Here is pop’s verbal compression at its most distilled, to single syllables: “When I kissed you back I lied/you don’t know how long I tried.” Gracie Abrams, the definitive online sad girl, breathily sings, continuing a question — “Where do we go now?” — that has an open-ended answer. PARELESYo La Tengo, ‘Aselestine’The word “Aselestine” sounds like a cross between a crystal and an over-the-counter medication, but in Georgia Hubley of Yo La Tengo’s mouth, it becomes a conduit for mellifluous, vowel-y beauty. “Aselestine, where are you?” she sings with numb serenity. “The drugs don’t do what you said they do.” Like “Fallout,” the previous single from the indie legends’ 16th album “This Stupid World,” “Aselestine” is vintage Yo La Tengo, a timeless, quietly poignant distillation of the band’s singular essence. ZOLADZYahritza y Su Esencia, ‘Cambiaste’The teenage singer Yahritza Martinez of the family band Yahritza y Su Esencia is powerful and peculiar. She sings with preternatural theatricality and emotional heft, yet somehow maintains a youthful casualness. On “Cambiaste,” she yearns in stops and starts, lamenting someone who’s cast her aside. The song moves slowly, almost erratically, as if she’s staggering through sludge in search of refuge. It’s the latest in a slew of Yahritza songs that might be heard as unerringly odd if they weren’t so instinctually pop. CARAMANICAMoneybagg Yo featuring GloRilla, ‘On Wat U On’A tug of war of toxicity between two of Memphis’s finest rappers, “On Wat U On” is unsentimental and testy. Moneybagg Yo is the cad, rapping about needing freedom (“Tryna see me every weekend, damn/I need space to miss you”). And GloRilla is aggrieved, constitutionally fed up — she’s had enough: “I be busting out the windows/got him switching up his cars.” After two minutes of back and forth, there is, notably, no resolution — just recrimination and resentment. CARAMANICAIggy Pop, ‘New Atlantis’Most of Iggy Pop’s new album, “Every Loser,” circles back to the bone-crushing riffs and surly bluntness of his glory days in the Stooges — sometimes pointedly (in “Frenzy” and “Neo Punk”), and sometimes approaching self-parody. But there are glimmers of Iggy’s other eras in songs like “New Atlantis,” a cowbell-thumping, mock-admiring tribute to his current home, Miami. Being Iggy, he appreciates the city for its seaminess and its vulnerability to climate change: “New Atlantis, lying low/New Atlantis, sinking slow,” he sings. PARELESLonnie Holley featuring Michael Stipe, ‘Oh Me, Oh My’The songwriter and outsider visual artist Lonnie Holley previews a new album, “Oh Me, Oh My,” with its elegiac title track: two slowly alternating piano chords underpinned by a bass fiddle and surrounded by echoes and, later, electric guitars and more mysterious sounds. Holley merges preaching and singing, as he declaims “I believe that the deeper we go, the more chances there are for us to understand.” He invokes family and faith, joined by Michael Stipe from R.E.M. intoning, “Oh me, oh my”; it’s thick with atmosphere and memory, offering no conclusions. PARELES More