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      Taylor Swift’s Second-Week Sales Are Still Among the Year’s Biggest

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      The singer’s blockbuster new album, “Midnights,” holds strong atop the Billboard 200 chart, and her single “Anti-Hero” is No. 1 on the Hot 100.Following the expectation-shattering blockbuster debut of her new album, “Midnights,” Taylor Swift has coasted to a second week atop the charts, earning the equivalent of another 342,000 album sales, according to the tracking service Luminate.Although “Midnights” experienced a 78 percent drop in its second week of release — down from 1,578,000 in sales the week prior — Swift’s follow-up performance was still good enough for the third-largest total of the year so far, topping even the debut of Beyoncé’s “Renaissance.” (Other than “Midnights” last week, only Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House” sold more.)Swift managed to move more than one million copies of “Midnights” in its first week largely on the strength of physical merchandise, including vinyl, CDs and even cassettes. But the album lingers at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 this week thanks to its consistency on streaming services, where it totaled 294 million plays (down from 549 million).Combining digital plays, downloads and purchases of the complete album, the second-week sales of “Midnight” were the largest for any album in its second week since Adele’s “25” in 2015, Billboard said.Swift also maintains a healthy standing on the singles chart, the Hot 100, where she had previously occupied all of the Top 10 — a first in the chart’s history. This week, the single “Anti-Hero” holds at No. 1, with Swift songs also landing at No. 6, 7 and 9.Rihanna’s new single, “Lift Me Up,” a ballad from the “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” soundtrack, debuts at No. 2.Rounding out the Top 5 on the album chart are Lil Baby’s “It’s Only Me” at No. 2, Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” at No. 3, the special edition reissue of the Beatles’ “Revolver” at No. 4 and Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” at No. 5.In its 95 weeks on the chart, Wallen’s album has only fallen from the Top 10 once. More

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      Cate Blanchett’s ‘Tár’ Puts Mahler in the Spotlight

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      The Austrian composer’s Symphony No. 5 is the obsession of the conductor played by Cate Blanchett — and of the fans of her latest film.For a 70-minute Austrian symphony first performed more than a century ago, Mahler’s Fifth makes a surprisingly strong case for itself as the song of the season.No, Gustav Mahler didn’t occupy the top 10 spots in the Billboard Hot 100, as Taylor Swift did last week, and the piece’s lush fourth movement has yet to be co-opted by the TikTok crowd. But the symphony, which plays a central role in the new Cate Blanchett drama, “Tár,” seems to have a way of sticking with audiences long after they’ve left the theater, finding its way onto the strolling, cleaning and cooking playlists of listeners who might otherwise be more inclined toward Adele, OneRepublic or Beyoncé.Enjoying a brisk autumn day walking around Manhattan listening to Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. I’ve been TÁR-pilled.— jeff becomes her 🔮 (@jheimbrock) October 19, 2022
      Dalton Glass, a tech worker in Lakeland, Fla., is not a total stranger to classical music: He listened to a lot of it as a child, and as an adult, he hears at least a bit whenever he has an incoming call. (His ringtone of several years is a snatch of Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier.”) Still, he has some blind spots.“I’d never heard Mahler before in my life until that movie,” said Mr. Glass, 30. Now, he said, the piece is in regular rotation.Cate Blanchett as the fictional conductor Lydia Tár on the cover of a new soundtrack album.Deutsche GrammophonThe model for the “Tár” soundtrack cover is a 1993 release featuring Claudio Abbado.Deutsche GrammophonMr. Glass’s fascination with the film — he and a friend talked about it for the entire hourlong drive home from Tampa, where he caught the first of the two screenings he has seen to date — echoes the fixation of the imperious heroine brought to life by Ms. Blanchett.‘Tár’: A Timely Backstage DramaCate Blanchett plays a world-famous conductor who is embroiled in a #MeToo drama in the latest film by the director Todd Field.Review: “We don’t care about Lydia Tár because she’s an artist; we care about her because she’s art,” our critic writes about the film’s protagonist.An Elusive Subject: Blanchett has stayed one step ahead of audiences by constantly staying in motion. In “Tár,” she is as inscrutable as ever.Back Into the Limelight: The film marks Field’s return to directing, 16 years after “In the Bedroom” and “Little Children” made waves.Learning to Act: Sophie Kauer, a cellist in real life and in the film, had zero acting experience when she auditioned. She learned the craft from Blanchett, and from Michael Caine videos.In “Tár,” Mahler’s Fifth is something of a white whale for the celebrated (fictional) maestro Lydia Tár, the only Mahler symphony she has yet to record with a major orchestra in order to complete what audiences are told is a kind of Grand Slam of conducting. Throughout the film’s two and a half hours, she pursues the live recording with single-minded intensity, even as her professional and personal lives begin to unravel amid the fallout from her abuses of the power of the podium.Gage Tarlton, a 24-year-old playwright who lives in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, saw the movie in large part because he is a huge fan of Cate Blanchett. “I’ve loved Cate Blanchett for a really long time,” he said. “If Cate Blanchett is in a movie, I’m going to see it.”Although many of Mr. Tarlton’s feelings about the film are proving to be a slow burn — he said he “docked half a star” from his initial appraisal of the movie on Letterboxd after taking some time to puzzle out the story’s lingering questions and ambiguities — he didn’t waste any time adding some Mahler to his life.“I looked it up as soon as I got home,” he said.Others seem to have had the same idea. In October, streams of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 on Apple Music were up 150 percent from the previous month, according to data provided by the platform. Compared with the same month last year, they had more than tripled.Of the many recordings of the symphony available for streaming, Mr. Tarlton’s go-to is a 1993 Deutsche Grammophon album featuring the Berlin Philharmonic under the baton of Claudio Abbado. In the movie, Ms. Blanchett’s Tár uses that album’s cover image, a photograph of Abbado marking up a score while seated in a concert hall, as a model for her own Deutsche Grammophon photo shoot.“I actually tried a couple different ones, and that is the one that I like the most,” Mr. Tarlton said.A deliciously — or perhaps deliriously — meta concept album issued by Deutsche Grammophon shows Ms. Blanchett in a similar pose. It features audio excerpts from the film, original compositions by the Oscar-winning composer Hildur Gudnadottir and Ms. Blanchett plunking out “The Well-Tempered Clavier.”So when the soundtrack slipped the notice of even some dedicated fans of the movie, it was very possibly a function of timing: It came out on Oct. 21, the very same day as a certain blockbuster album whose first-week sales obliterated expectations of what was possible in the streaming era.The entry of Mahler’s Fifth into pop culture echoes the resurgences of works by Beethoven and Pachelbel in the 1970s and 1980s.Photo illustration by Kyle Berger for The New York Times“I listened to Taylor’s album probably at 5 a.m. the day after it came out,” said Millie Sloan, 47, referring to Ms. Swift’s album “Midnights.” Ms. Sloan, an account manager at her family’s construction company in Atlanta, said she was not aware of the “Tár” tie-in album. She said on Twitter that she had been listening exclusively to Mahler and “Midnights” for a week — though not on the same playlist. (“It’s a different listen,” she explained.)Ms. Sloan maintains a playlist of instrumental music that she encounters in the wild on TV and in movies, so the symphony had an obvious home in her Spotify account. What was less clear was where it would fit into her life.“I did put it on while I was cooking dinner the other day,” she said. But after gamely trying to soldier through the meal, she and her husband ultimately found the piece “a little too exuberant for a dinnertime listen.” She now listens to it mostly while walking and doing chores.The symphony (full title: Symphony No. 5 in C sharp minor) is regarded as one of Mahler’s greatest achievements. First performed in Cologne, Germany, in October 1904, the piece was once described by a New York Times critic as “the first of Mahler’s orchestral works in which the ensemble seems to embody a single mind: a churning, reflective and obsessive being. It is, to be sure, a neurotic mind, full of mercurial and unpredictable reactions.”It is far from the first classical composition to enjoy a moment of sudden pop cultural relevance. Particularly in the late 1970s and early 1980s, plum placements in popular films thrust masterworks into the mainstream. Among those to get a boost from Hollywood: Pachelbel’s Canon (“Ordinary People”), Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” (“Apocalypse Now”) and Beethoven’s Fifth, a cheekily reconfigured version of which — “A Fifth of Beethoven,” anyone? — figured in the disco-era bible that is the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack.Mahler’s Fifth does seem to have achieved an unusual distinction: featuring prominently in two New York Film Festival darlings that opened in American movie theaters last month. In addition to its star turn in “Tár,” there is “Decision to Leave,” a fast-paced detective thriller by the South Korean director Park Chan-wook that makes defiant use of the symphony’s fourth movement. More

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      Review: In ‘Only Gold,’ Each Move Is Worth 1,000 Words

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      The new Kate Nash dance musical, choreographed by Andy Blankenbuehler, is spectacular as long as you pay no attention to what it’s saying.The cutesy Frenchness of “Only Gold,” a dance-musical hybrid directed and choreographed by Andy Blankenbuehler, begins even before the lights go up. (The preshow announcement is winkingly bilingual.) But it really moves into overdrive when Kate Nash, the English singer-songwriter who provided the music and lyrics, arrives onstage and says: “Paris. 1928. A time when rules were ready to be broken.” A show that starts that way should come with a content warning: These clichés may hurt your teeth.The upside of “Only Gold,” which opened on Monday at MCC Theater, is that it is so pretty to look at, and so musically dreamy, you can mostly tune out the words. Nash’s are hard to decipher anyway; because rhyme and scansion aren’t her thing, the ear gets no help. In the song “Misery,” for instance, the line “I will never leave you behind” is repeatedly misaccented to make the last word sound like a synonym for “derrière.” It’s an odd sentiment that way.As for the spoken words — the book is by Blankenbuehler and Ted Malawer — they have the skeletal feebleness of a fable, except when occasionally larded with triple-crème tropes like “listening to your heart,” Paris “working her charm” and “magic in the cobblestones.”Because “Only Gold” is in fact a fable — its title apparently drawn from the Tennyson line “love is the only gold” — you may not mind that. What sort of language would you suggest for a story about the arrival in Paris of the royal family of Cosimo? To that inevitable city King Belenus (Terrence Mann) drags Queen Roksana (Karine Plantadit) to prepare for the wedding of their daughter, Tooba, pronounced like the brass instrument and portrayed by Gaby Diaz. I believe the characters’ names were generated by a malfunctioning anagram app.In any case, the parents’ marriage has turned cold over the years, and Tooba’s incipient one to a douchey count (Tyler Hanes) might as well come with a sign saying “Not Gonna Happen.” Within minutes of Tooba’s arrival, she’s out on the town in her underwear, buying out Cartier and Chanel and locating a bellhop (Ryan Steele) who will make a suitably inappropriate substitute fiancé.Hannah Cruz, standing at center; Plantadit and Terrence Mann, seated foreground; and Kate Nash, right.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesTiresomely, each of these characters has a lesson to learn. (Well, not the douche; he’s the disposable kind.) Belenus’s is to stop being such a royal pain, especially to Roksana, whom he has hurt in some way we are not privileged to learn. To rekindle their love, he commissions a humble watchmaker (Ryan VanDenBoom) to create a bejeweled peace necklace; Roksana’s lesson is to accept it. And when the watchmaker’s fame as a royal provisioner drives a wedge between him and his frustrated wife (Hannah Cruz), even they must learn something — I’m not sure what, but it involves a piano.At least Tooba’s assignment is clear: to stand up for herself as a woman wearing dainties in public. No man will tell her what to do! — except Blankenbuehler, who has given her some terrific dances. In one of them, to the song “Mouthwash” from Nash’s 2007 debut album, she stomps out her feelings of thwarted privilege better than anything the book itself can muster, while the bellhop alternately supports her ferocity and waits out her tantrum. Diaz and Steele are thrilling.But then all the dancing is thrilling; perhaps it’s the magic in the cobblestones. And if it comes as no surprise that Blankenbuehler, the choreographer of “Hamilton,” can assemble eye-catching sequences into long narrative arcs, it’s nice to see him working with a full cast of dancers, not just an ensemble. Well, maybe not a full cast. Nash mostly just walks around or sits at the piano, singing tartly while others push it around like a tea cart; Mann doesn’t dance much, either, but his posture tells his story.The sensational Plantadit more than compensates. Showing off her line and power with every move she makes, she reminds you of the shows she did with Twyla Tharp: “Movin’ Out,” in 2002, and “Come Fly Away,” in 2010. “Only Gold” sometimes achieves their kind of thrust and physical splendor.It’s also splendid to look at, with the Art Nouveau swirls of David Korins’s set lit in rich purples and pinks by Jeff Croiter. Anita Yavich’s costumes, nodding to the period but also shredding it, are spectacular. The cast sings prettily, too.Ryan Steele and Gaby Diaz, with Kate Nash at the piano, are thrilling in the show, our critic writes.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWhether the prettiness outweighs the silliness will involve a personal calculus. For me, the hybridization of dance and musical theater is problematic, as it all but dares you to find one or the other set of genes defective in the resultant offspring. Had “Only Gold” been merely an evening of choreography set to songs, I would have gotten no less from it, even if Nash’s lyrics kept drawing my attention in the wrong direction. Some of the numbers, especially those from her back catalog, have an entirely mystifying relationship to the story, or to any story.But her music, with its funky accents and faux baroque curlicues on a girl-pop foundation, was evidently inspirational for Blankenbuehler. As he recently told Elisabeth Vincentelli in The Times, he thrives on syncopation and (in both senses of the word, I think) the offbeat.It’s a devil’s bargain: If you want the music, you’re pretty much forced to take the words. In “Movin’ Out” (with the words of Billy Joel) and “Come Fly Away” (with the words of Sinatra hits) that isn’t fatally awkward; the shows, essentially dance revues, use the lyrics for mood and just a suggestion of plot. Crucially, neither has much, if any, dialogue, because once you have dialogue you have a fight on your hands, or rather your feet. The two means of delivering information can’t help but squabble for primacy.When it’s a fair fight, so much the better — see “West Side Story,” or “Hamilton” for that matter. But in “Only Gold” the simplistic story and trite dialogue drag the dancing down. Perhaps the authors spent too much time listening to their hearts and not enough to organs higher and lower.Only GoldThrough Nov. 27 at MCC Theater, Manhattan; mcctheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. More

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      Myra Melford Builds Anew With an All-Star, All-Woman Quintet

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      The pianist’s latest group fills its recent album “For the Love of Fire and Water” with idiosyncratic life.Draft up a list of today’s most inventive and respected players in the realm of what tends to be called improvised music (or creative music or free jazz) and you’ll inevitably name the players in the pianist Myra Melford’s Fire and Water Quintet: the saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, the guitarist Mary Halvorson, the cellist Tomeka Reid and the percussionist Lesley Mok.These are restless artists, mostly a generation or so younger than Melford, who have built a collaborative scene and individual legacies in the fertile cracks between improvisation and composition, between jazz and other musics, between the club and the academy — cracks that Melford has spent her 30-plus-year career widening.“It’s wonderful to play with them,” Melford, 65, said in late October in a video interview from her home in the Bay Area, where she is a professor of Composition and Improvisational Practices at the University of California, Berkeley. In conversation, she pairs thoughtfulness with a peppery exuberance, a mix that reflects her pianism. “Each is such an important individual voice, and I love to hear what discoveries they make.”Melford thinks of her composing as architectural, as structures to be explored, an approach that seems natural for a musician who grew up in a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Illinois, relishing its curious nooks and crannies. For the Fire and Water Quintet, which comes to Roulette in Brooklyn Monday night to celebrate the release of its album “For the Love of Fire and Water,” Melford provides the structure and the players, together, fill it with idiosyncratic life.Melford’s respect and admiration for her bandmates is mutual, of course. If it weren’t, crucial elements of improvised music — trust, deep listening, empathetic responsiveness — would prove impossible.“Myra is a great composer and conceptualist, and her piano playing is fearless and creative,” Laubrock said in an interview. Halvorson noted that she first became aware of Melford in college, and has admired her ever since: “The intensity, clarity and fearlessness of her improvising, plus her ability to integrate the melodic and rhythmic with the textural and experimental seamlessly, has always been an inspiration.”Mok added, “Working with Myra has given me a framework for how to think about composition, especially when writing for strong improvisers, and how to make simple choices that allow the music to shine.”Melford’s music draws on a host of influences and traditions, including her mentors Don Pullen and Henry Threadgill, and a variety of global musics: She studied harmonium in Calcutta, spent a year in an upstate ashram and has participated in a cultural exchange program with the Huichol people of Mexico. She celebrates what inspires her — her “Snowy Egret” quintet album from 2015 grew from her reading of Eduardo Galeano’s “Memory of Fire” trilogy — but the music stands alone. (Sadly, Melford confirms that with the death of the trumpeter Ron Miles in March, that band is done.)“I realized early on that I wanted to synthesize all the ideas or things that have had an impact on me and my life,” Melford said. “But I don’t want to be didactic. I like ambiguity. I want a world of possibilities suggested by the music.”From left: Melford, Mary Halvorson, Ingrid Laubrock, Tomeka Reid and Lesley Mok. “Each is such an important individual voice, and I love to hear what discoveries they make,” Melford said of the quintet.Magdalena Wosinska for The New York TimesThe release that perhaps best reveals the breadth of her interests and collaborations is “12 From 25,” an album from 2018 that collects performances from shows Melford played with a dozen different ensembles at the Stone during its 2015 celebration of her 25th year of making music. In recent years, trio projects like MZM (with Miya Masaoka and Zeena Parkins) and Tiger Trio (with Nicole Mitchell and Joëlle Léandre) and other collaborations have offered her an expansive palate, a mix of personalities and the chance to make big sounds.The Fire and Water Quintet is a touch more raw, its elbows sharper, suiting the strengths of the players. Its lineup exemplifies how much more open the jazz-adjacent music world is to women than when Melford first played duets with the flutist Marion Brandis in the mid-1980s.“I was so used to being the only woman in bands that at a certain point I sort of stopped noticing,” Halvorson said, referring to projects as late as the 2000s. “I do feel that, in this music community at least, there has been a gradual shift in momentum in that regard over the past 20-plus years.”Jazz critics have long used the term “encounter” to describe musicians playing together. Listen to “For the Love of Fire and Water” and you’ll hear something more like a hyper-creative play date. (On the album, Susie Ibarra plays drums.) Melford composed a suite for improvisers, inspired by a MoMA retrospective of Cy Twombly’s work — abstract art responding to abstract art. It opens with a solo statement, a tart greeting from Melford’s piano, rhythmic pulses and exploratory runs across the keyboard, until Reid’s cello joins in some two minutes later, answering Melford but also pushing someplace new.At intervals, the rest of the band follows, one at a time, pitching in with what the others are building. Eventually, like a destination appearing out of fog, a lopsided groove emerges: a composed passage the band toys with until suddenly lurching to a stop for more free play, pairing off in duets or trios. Once in a while, they ebb to near silence or boil over into collective noise.In her teaching at Berkeley, Melford introduces improvisation and complex music to students, telling them it’s OK not to like it, but asking that they at least truly listen. That’s also what she hopes for in an audience. “What’s being made by improvisers, what’s being said, depends as much upon the listener as the players,” she said.Asked to describe her ideal audience, she responded, “Someone with an open mind and an open heart, with curiosity and a willingness to drop the idea that they’re going to hear an ‘avant-garde’ musician.” (She prefers terms like “creative music,” feeling that “avant-garde” today too often refers to a “genre with expectations and rules rather than an ethos of exploration or surprise.”)However you might care to classify it, Melford’s music is welcoming, suffused with melody and feeling, rooted in both Monk and Bartok, open to plateaus of contemplative beauty, like the final movement of “For the Love of Fire and Water.” When it does boil over, it brings listeners with it. Or maybe “listeners” is the wrong word. Perhaps they’re explorers. More

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      Aaron Carter, Singer, Dies at 34

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      Mr. Carter, who released his first album at age 9 and “Aaron’s Party” at age 12, was the younger brother of Nick Carter, a member of the Backstreet Boys.Aaron Carter, the singer and actor who briefly became a teenage sensation in the early 2000s and who was known for the hit song “I Want Candy,” was found dead on Saturday at his home in Southern California. He was 34.Taylor Helgeson, a representative for Big Umbrella, an entertainment management company, confirmed Mr. Carter’s death but declined to comment on the cause.The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department responded to a call at Mr. Carter’s home in Lancaster, Calif., on Saturday and found a person dead at the residence, according to Deputy Alejandra Parra, a spokeswoman for the sheriff’s department. Officials said they could not yet confirm that it was Mr. Carter.Mr. Carter, who released his first album at age 9 and the popular album “Aaron’s Party (Come Get It)” at age 12, became a fixture of teenage programming and magazines and made appearances on shows like “Lizzie McGuire.”“Aaron’s Party” peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard 200 list, selling some three million copies. He released five studio albums and was a contestant on the show “Dancing With the Stars.”His career later stalled, and in recent years he has been embroiled in legal trouble and has shared his struggles with addiction. In 2018, he released his first album in some 15 years, “Love,” to lukewarm reviews.Aaron Carter performing at the South Street Seaport in New York City in 2003.Stuart Ramson/Getty ImagesMr. Carter, who was described in The New York Times as a “tween heartthrob,” began performing at age 7, singing lead for the band Dead End for two years, according to an online biography.At 9, he was opening for the Backstreet Boys in Berlin for his first solo appearance. (His older brother, Nick Carter, was a member of the band.)The performance led to a record contract and then the release of his first single, “Crush on You.” He also opened for Britney Spears.Mr. Carter was also an actor, guest-starring in shows like “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” and “7th Heaven.” He also performed on Broadway, appearing in “Seussical,” the Dr. Seuss-themed musical, and “The Fantasticks,” the world’s longest-running musical.On his sophomore album, Mr. Carter also released the song “That’s How I Beat Shaq,” with a music video featuring the basketball player Shaquille O’Neal, who has said that Mr. Carter once beat him in a game of HORSE and later asked if he could make a song about it.In 2019, Mr. Carter’s brother, Nick, and sister, Angel, said they had filed for a restraining order against him. In a statement at the time, Nick Carter said his brother had confessed to having violent thoughts about his wife and that family members “were left with no choice but to take away every measure possible to protect ourselves and our family.” Aaron Carter at the time denied the allegations. The news of the restraining order came one day after he canceled his 2019 tour, according to E! News, saying he needed to put his “health first.”Mr. Carter has been open over the years about his mental health struggles. He told People magazine in 2018 that he felt he had “hit a rock bottom personally and emotionally,” and that he had sought treatment at a wellness facility.Mr. Carter, who appeared on the Nov. 2 episode of the “No Jumper” podcast, said he was focusing on selling real estate and that he had been “Cali sober” for five years, though he said that he occasionally smoked marijuana and had been prescribed anti-anxiety medication. (“Cali sober,” short for “California sober,” is loosely taken to mean avoiding addictive substances with the exception of marijuana and alcohol.)Adam Grandmaison, the host of the podcast on YouTube, said that a close friend of Mr. Carter’s told him about his death.“I just interviewed him a couple weeks ago and it was pretty clear he wasn’t in a great place,” Mr. Gandmaison wrote on Twitter. “He was a good guy despite all the demons he was battling. I’m sad to see him go.”Throughout the interview, Mr. Carter said he considered himself a rapper, a singer, a producer, an artist and an actor, and that he was especially proud of his most recent album. He also said he hoped to make a new one soon.“I cover all bases,” he said. “It means so much more to me than the stuff I did growing up because I wrote and produced it all.”Mr. Carter said he was “never going to give up” on making music and that despite the turbulence, he had enjoyed his career. He also vowed to regain custody of his son, who Page Six reported was temporarily placed in the care of Mr. Carter’s fiancée’s mother amid domestic violence and drug use concerns.“I’m about to be 35 years old,” Mr. Carter said. “I’m a grown man and it’s time to start behaving that way and doing the right thing and focusing on myself, my career, my kid and my family.” More

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      Review: Davóne Tines Hones the Recital Form to a Fine Point

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      This bass-baritone made his Carnegie Hall debut with his carefully curated, personal “Recital No. 1: MASS.”No one could accuse Davóne Tines of lacking ambition.On Thursday night, this bass-baritone made his Carnegie Hall debut in the intimate Weill Recital Hall, presenting a highly personal, carefully curated program with the pianist Adam Nielsen called “Recital No. 1: MASS.”Touching on Bach, spirituals and contemporary art music, the concert was a compelling reconceptualization of the recital format from an artist who molded his warm, strong voice like clay in a bracingly vulnerable, honest performance.In 2019, Tines’s “The Black Clown” landed in New York’s classical music scene like a fireball. Created with the composer Michael Schachter, that show traced the social, political and musical histories of Black Americans with grace, wit, resilience and ferocity. It took them seven years to develop it, and it remains one of my favorite theatrical experiences of the past decade.My subsequent live encounters with Tines have been comparatively disappointing. “Eastman,” at Little Island in 2021, felt impenetrable and unfinished. In September, Tines starred in Peter Sellars’s production of Tyshawn Sorey’s inert chamber work “Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)” at Park Avenue Armory, and in October, the Brooklyn Academy of Music presented “Everything Rises,” in which he and the violinist Jennifer Koh shared their experiences as people of color in the classical industry. Their grievances, sincerely felt but guardedly expressed, couldn’t compete with the genuineness of Tines’s grandmother and Koh’s mother, who stole the show in filmed oral histories projected above the stage.“Recital No. 1: MASS,” which Tines has toured before its arrival in New York, demonstrates what happens when he hones a concept to a fine point. He starts with the idea that religious faith has common impetuses — a plea for mercy, a call to praise, a desire for salvation — that have found expression in various musical traditions across centuries.Tines restructured the Latin mass familiar from Bach and Haydn, beginning, as usual, with the Kyrie but ending with the Benedictus. Caroline Shaw set the Latin text for each movement in brief, deferential ways that clearly signposted each section. Filling that framework, Tines elided spirituals, Bach arias and pieces by 20th-century Black composers into an hourlong monologue. Throughout, soul-searching questions were projected on the wall behind him.The uninterrupted format may have frayed his voice, and a stubborn nasality crept into his otherwise handsome, hearty sound, but the program nevertheless accumulated in power.Sorey’s rewritings of the spirituals “Were You There?” (a slow, dark, pained sequence of chords) and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” (a minor-key, pessimistic realization) echoed Tines’s observation in the program book that many spirituals are about suicide or a will to death. Sorey’s pieces gave new context to a traditional arrangement of “Give Me Jesus,” revealing worlds of hurt and hope in its seemingly simple repetitions. Uplifting and glorious, with bittersweet blue notes and a swing buoyed by faith alone, Tines took us to church with it, prompting at least one “Hallelujah” from the audience.Tines’s personal way with a Bach cantata existed somewhere between stately Baroque chromaticism and churning gospel melisma, but it was a distinct pleasure to hear such a rich voice nestle into the bass writing for “Mache dich, mein Herze, rein” from Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” despite Nielsen’s pedal-heavy, bizarrely Chopinesque accompaniment.The program closed with bravura improvisation: Julius Eastman’s Prelude to “The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc” and “Vigil,” a piece Tines wrote with Igee Dieudonné then transformed into an extemporaneous Baptist sermon. He commanded attention in Prelude, a modern affirmation of faith written by a gay Black man in 1981 about a 15th-century martyr, after including it in “Eastman” last year.At Weill, it emerged with earth-rumbling intensity, as Tines wrapped his luscious voice around its punishing declamations with athletic fervor. Tines’s artistic process may be a personal one, but it is already reverberating through at least one of classical music’s hallowed halls.Recital No. 1: MASSPerformed on Thursday at Weill Recital Hall, Manhattan. More

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      Louis Armstrong’s Last Laugh

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      Private recordings, heard in the new documentary “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues,” add a further dimension to the artist.The tapes are thrilling, revelatory, wrenching: the warm-gravel voice of Louis Armstrong, perhaps the most famous voice of the 20th century, speaking harsh truths about American racism, about the dehumanizing hatred he and millions of others endured in a world he still, to the end, insisted was wonderful. He tells the stories — of a fan declaring “I don’t like Negroes” to his face; of a gofer on a film set treating him with disrespect no white star would face — with fresh outrage and can-you-believe-this? weariness.He also tells them with his full humor and showmanship, his musicality clear in the rhythm of his swearing.The public can hear these stories, privately recorded by Armstrong as part of his own lifelong project of self-documentation, in the Sacha Jenkins documentary “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues” (streaming on Apple TV+). Often, Armstrong recalls getting the last laugh on those who disrespected him — he harangues that gofer, and the studio, too, telling both where to stick their movie.It’s no revelation that a Black man born less than 40 years after the abolition of slavery endured harrowing racism, or that stardom on par with Bing Crosby’s and Frank Sinatra’s offered him no exemption. Armstrong faced blowback in 1957 for speaking against discrimination, and donated to the Civil Rights movement. Usually, though, he avoided controversy.By the 1960s, Armstrong’s reticence — as well as that wide-grinning, eye-rolling performance style that echoes minstrelsy — inspired backlash, most painfully among younger jazz musicians who revered his recordings of the 1920s, the very headwaters of jazz.That backlash has been exhaustively hashed over ever since, with critics often dividing the Armstrong legacy in two. On the one hand: the young genius-artist-virtuoso, who perfected the arts of swing, scat singing, and improvisational solos, hitting trumpet notes so high they tickled God’s toes. On the other: the global entertainer with hits in six decades and a penchant for sentimental pop and discomfiting tunes like “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South.”Well into this millennium, defenses of Armstrong’s later years have been, well, defensive. But Jenkins’s film, following the lead of Ricky Riccardi’s 2012 biography “What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years,” draws deeply on the Armstrong archives to make an assertive argument, often in Armstrong’s own words, that the man called Pops was deeply committed to the cause of racial justice.“The Armstrong story has been in plain sight for so many years — and been so misunderstood for many years,” Jenkins said in a Zoom interview. “America’s going through something. In many ways, things haven’t changed, and in many ways things have gone backward.”Armstrong at home. Apple TV+At the same time of the film’s release, the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Corona, Queens, is preparing for its 20th anniversary and the opening this spring of its new Louis Armstrong Center. The museum’s executive director, Regina Bain, said that the center will exponentially increase the museum’s educational outreach, a core mission with roots in Armstrong’s own development — he was given his first formal musical training as an adolescent at the Colored Waifs Home for Boys in New Orleans. The center also will host concerts, exhibit the Armstrong archives and showcase its Armstrong Now program, which puts artists in dialogue with Armstrong’s legacy.Bain acknowledged that legacy’s complexity. “When you look at him,” she said by phone, “you should see what most people see: an icon and a musical genius with a gorgeous smile and an effusive personality full of joy. And you should also see the racial terror that he and the people around him went through, and affected his life and body, and that he was still able to move through.”“It’s extremely important to tell your story in a way that doesn’t have any tainting or tampering,” said Jeremy Pelt, one of today’s top trumpeters, composers and bandleaders, in a phone interview. He’s published two books of interviews with Black jazz musicians (“Griot” volumes 1 and 2) for just this reason. “To be able to expose yourself, and deal with what you’ve gone through — it’s essential and freeing, even in the last chorus of your life.”For 23 years, David Ostwald has led the Louis Armstrong Eternity Band, playing weekly gigs at Birdland. Ostwald has long championed Armstrong as a pioneer of civil rights, making the case in a 1991 New York Times guest essay that Armstrong, as early as 1929, actually did address race in his music. His example: “Black & Blue,” the song on which Jenkins’s film title riffs. On it, Armstrong sings, “I’m white inside, but that don’t help my case / ’cause I can’t hide what is in my face.”Asked how he feels to see that argument going mainstream, Ostwald released a whoop. “Finally,” he said.“The Armstrong story has been in plain sight for so many years — and been so misunderstood for many years,” said the documentary’s director, Sacha Jenkins.Apple TV+Ostwald credited Wynton Marsalis with having made Armstrong “OK again” in the jazz world. In the film, Marsalis describes growing up hating “with an unbelievable passion” the “Uncle Tomming” that Armstrong has often been accused of. But listening closely to Armstrong’s trumpet jolted Marsalis, the future artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, who has since championed Armstrong. In the documentary, he says that Armstrong “was trying to use his music to transform and reform and lead the country closer to his ideals.”Armstrong’s musical legacy has likewise been contested. His solos, especially from the 1920s, have long been celebrated — in one of Pelt’s “Griot” interviews, the saxophonist J.D. Allen says that for jazz players, “all roads lead back to Pops.” But Ostwald recalled being regarded as “weird” for playing traditional and old-time jazz in New York in the 1970s and ’80s. “People were saying the music’s going to die, but I always felt that Armstrong was too powerful a force to ever go away, even if some people did misunderstand him.”Today, young musicians feel increasingly free to find inspiration throughout Armstrong’s career. Like most Juilliard jazz graduates, the up-and-coming trombonist, composer and bandleader Kalia Vandever studied Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Hot Sevens recordings of the 1920s. But she also prizes his 1950s duets with Ella Fitzgerald: “I love the way that he transitions from singing into playing,” she said. “It’s seamless and sounds like one voice.” Listen to Vandever’s playing on her “Regrowth” album, and you may feel the connection, though the music sounds nothing like “Heebie Jeebies.”With each fresh look at Armstrong’s life and influence, perhaps the old artist/entertainer distinction is fading. In a video introduction shown before the deeply moving tour at the Louis Armstrong House Museum, Bain offers, with welcome precision, a third way to think about Armstrong: as “one of the founding figures of jazz and America’s first Black popular music icon.” The message: He’s both. And both matter. More

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      Selena Gomez’s Boldly Revealing Ballad, and 9 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Yves Tumor, Yo La Tengo, Sipho 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.Selena Gomez, ‘My Mind & Me’Selena Gomez has spoken openly of her mental-health struggles — bipolar disorder, depression, psychosis — in recent years. Her new song, “My Mind & Me,” arrives as the title track of a documentary that reveals some of her low points. The music moves from fragility to determination, from lone, echoey piano notes to a supportive march and a mission statement, as she sings, “All of the crashing and burning and breaking I know now/If somebody sees me like this then they won’t feel alone.” It’s self-exposure in service of empathy, and it tapers back to the hesitant solitude of those piano notes. But the video squanders some of its good will by ending with a product endorsement. JON PARELESLucius, ‘Muse’“Muse,” a one-off single from the indie-pop group Lucius, pairs a cool, clarion arrangement with Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig’s impassioned vocals — a tension of opposites that gives the song its spark. “I’m calling out your name, a desert that needs the rain,” they sing together on the chorus, a kind of prayer for divine inspiration and, as they put it, “the wild and holy window to the truth.” LINDSAY ZOLADZTiësto featuring Tate McRae, ‘10:35’On the sleek “10:35,” the rising Canadian pop star Tate McRae teams up with longtime EDM mainstay Tiësto (the D.J. whose remix of Calum Scott’s “Dancing on My Own” cover has turned into the Philadelphia Phillies’ victory anthem). McRae’s crystalline vocals are a fitting match for Tiësto’s gleaming, synthesized production, and the song is propelled by an effective push and pull between the anxieties of daily life and the blissful comforts of love. “The TV make you think the whole world’s about to end,” McRae sighs, before a lover’s embrace causes time to stop: “All I know, it’s 10:35 and I can feel your arms around me.” ZOLADZIbrahim Maalouf featuring De La Soul: ‘Quiet Culture’Ibrahim Maalouf, a Lebanese-French trumpeter, composer and producer, surrounds himself with guests — the Cuban musician Cimafunk, the New Orleans band Tank and the Bangas, the jazz singer Gregory Porter — on his new album, “Capacity to Love.” De La Soul makes its latest reappearance on “Quiet Culture,” counseling perseverance and relief from noise: “The quieter we become, the more that we can hear.” Maalouf’s track eases between a jazz ballad and unhurried funk, framing and counterpointing the rhymes with his Arab-inflected melodies. PARELESYves Tumor, ‘God Is a Circle’“Sometimes it feels like there’s places in my mind that I can’t go,” Sean Bowie, who records as the gothic glam-rocker Yves Tumor, begins on the haunting single “God Is a Circle.” Rhythmic, shallow breathing provides the percussive backbone of the track and adds a visceral chill to its nightmarish atmospherics. The song suddenly turns revealing, though, when it dredges up memories of a repressive past: “My mama said that God sees everything/My daddy always taught me to say ‘thank you,’ ‘yes ma’am,’ ’no, sir,’ ‘yes, please.’” The whole thing sounds like an exorcism, or maybe the antic, demonic moment just before one is deemed necessary. ZOLADZAlgiers featuring Zack de la Rocha, ‘Irreversible Damage’Irreversible Damage” is an exercise in seething, sputtering tension from the Atlanta-based rock-hip-hop-electro group Algiers. With a nagging electric guitar loop, a pullulating electronic bass, ominous synthesizer chords and programmed drums that keep disrupting their own beat, the song is an onslaught of abstract lyrics — “No rehab for my jihad/A rapture in a grief storm,” Zack de la Rocha (from Rage Against the Machine) raps — hurtling toward some dire but unknown outcome. When the words are done, the song shifts into a six-beat furor that feels both tribal and apocalyptic. PARELESYo La Tengo, ‘Fallout’In February, the New Jersey indie-rock legends Yo La Tengo will release their 16th album, “This Stupid World,” a place from which the calming, immersive first single “Fallout” offers a brief escape. “I wanna fall out of time,” Ira Kaplan sings on the chorus. “Reach back, unwind.” The band self-produced “This Stupid World” and recorded much of it while jamming together live; as a result, “Fallout” sounds as sumptuously shaggy and comfortingly loose as a favorite autumn sweater. This is the sort of timeless Yo La Tengo song that could have reasonably appeared on any of their albums across the last three decades, but something about its combination of prickly frustration and hard-won serenity feels especially appropriate right now. ZOLADZSipho, ‘Arms’The English songwriter and producer Sipho Ndhlovu revels in drama and desperation, with a voice that regularly leaps between grainy declamation and a tearful falsetto. “Arms” is one long crescendo of regrets overwhelmed by desire. He admits to being “led astray” and implores, “Can’t we share the blame?,” but by the end he’s unconditionally enthralled, brought to his knees by lust. Nearly the entire song uses just two chords but brings in massive reinforcements: strings, drums, voices, electronics and an arena-rock lead guitar, all pushing him closer to the brink. PARELESquinnie, ‘Itch’The 21-year-old songwriter Quinn Barnitt, who records as quinnie, has picked up the mixture of tentativeness and bold declaration, bedroom-pop intimacy and multitrack craftsmanship, that has paid off for Clairo and Olivia Rodrigo. In “Itch,” she juggles desire and fidelity, wondering, “What if I never scratched another itch for the rest of my life?/Would I die satisfied, knowing it can always get better than this?” The production often harks back to Simon and Garfunkel’s pristine guitars and the Beatles’ string ensembles, but her frank self-questioning is new. PARELESOld Fire featuring Bill Callahan, ‘Corpus’John Mark Lapham, a composer from Texas who records as Old Fire, called his 2016 album “Songs From the Haunted South,” a succinct self-description for his suspended-time blends of electronics and roots-rock instruments; his new album is “Voids.” On “Corpus.” he has the songwriter Bill Callahan, whose own extensive catalog is generally much folkier, intoning a few enigmatic lines — “I’ve got a child in Corpus/Hey Mac, can you bring that boat back” — in his somber baritone. Instruments and electronic tones gather around him like darkening storm clouds, and there’s no deliverance. PARELES More