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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Bebop

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      Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell: They altered the course of American music and raised the bar for improvisation. Listen to 10 experts’ favorites.What five minutes of music would you play for a friend to make them love Alice Coltrane or Duke Ellington? After a few years of listening to a wide range of classical music, The New York Times has been asking musicians, writers, editors, critics and scholars to share their jazz favorites with readers.This month, our focus isn’t an artist, but a style: bebop. Think of a horn player zipping through a dizzying line, over a swinging beat that sizzles so fast you can almost see smoke drifting from the cymbals. That’s bebop.Forged in the fires of Black urban life during the postwar era, bebop was, as Amiri Baraka writes in “Blues People,” the style that “led jazz into the arena of art.” It was also laced with irreverence. “To a certain extent, this music resulted from conscious attempts to remove it from the danger of mainstream dilution or even understanding,” Baraka says.By way of its corrugated harmonies, its dashing tempos and the particular spotlight it placed on the interplay between horns and drums, bebop altered the course of American music, and raised the bar for improvisation and composition worldwide. And it’s never really gone out of fashion: Bebop is the music Jean-Michel Basquiat painted to, and it’s the foundation of jazz theory that music students around the world are taught when they learn to improvise.Enjoy listening to these tracks selected by a range of the genre’s practitioners, commentators and devotees. You can find a playlist at the bottom of the article, and be sure to leave your own bebop favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Jon Faddis, trumpeterFor me, any discussion of bebop must include Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. This is not to negate the contributions of Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Oscar Pettiford, Kenny Clarke, Fats Navarro, Max Roach and many others. Parker spearheaded bebop; Gillespie, a consummate teacher, conveyed this complex musical style to others. On an autumn evening over 75 years ago, at one of my favorite venues, Carnegie Hall, a groundbreaking concert made many fall in love with bebop. It still inspires and resonates. Although there are many classic bebop recordings, such as “Complete Jazz at Massey Hall,” “Parker’s Mood,” “Koko,” “Groovin’ High,” and another favorite of mine, Bird’s solo on “Lady Be Good,” this version of “Dizzy Atmosphere” epitomizes the genius abilities of Bird and Diz to create at such a high level. Charlie Parker is on fire, and Dizzy Gillespie is right there with him. As Dizzy used to say, “Two hearts as one.”“Dizzy Atmosphere”Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie (Blue Note Records)◆ ◆ ◆Camille Thurman, saxophonist and vocalistCharlie Parker was the epitome of bebop. His improvisations were innovative, limitless, freeing, bold, boundary-pushing and unapologetically groundbreaking in the way he transcended all preconceived understanding of western harmony. This version of “Just Friends” is what bebop is all about in a nutshell. You have this beautiful orchestration of strings, with a whimsical yet eerie backdrop, and like a bolt of lightning, Bird comes in with a highly imaginative, vivid, rapid flow of endless ideas that for four measures is exhilarating, taking you on a virtuosic sonic roller coaster ride. He ever so gracefully lands into the melody of “Just Friends” and perfectly introduces the song at the end of his improvisation. To love bebop is to recognize how musicians like Bird had the gift of hearing beyond the scope of what we might take for granted when listening to a standard. Bird could take something ordinary and recreate it into something that was iconic, sophisticated, unique and timeless while freely and honestly expressing himself. He set the standard for what makes bebop, bebop.“Just Friends”Charlie Parker (Verve Reissues)◆ ◆ ◆Gary Giddins, former Village Voice jazz criticOnly in bebop could you take a pop song, strip it of its melody and lyrics, and create a defining standard from the remains: the chord changes. The British musician Ray Noble’s 1938 “Indian Suite” harkened to the romantic Americana of Victor Herbert and Coleridge-Taylor, yet the first movement, “Cherokee,” was a swing-era hit, despite a slow-moving melody and a fast-moving harmonic episode considered so challenging (B major, A major, G major) that Count Basie relieved Lester Young from having to solo on it. Charlie Parker obsessed over those chords, and in 1945 launched bop with his transformational “Koko.” Several classic versions ensued, none more dazzling than Bud Powell’s masterpiece. He begins with a caricature of Indian music à la Hollywood, witty but also rhythmically intense so that you smile but don’t laugh, which leads to Noble’s often-ignored theme, powered by a contrapuntal plateau of chords, as if he’s laying out the territory before he explores it, which he does in two choruses of electrifying linear invention, against a barrage of bass clef chords. The solo is staged within two octaves, dipping only once as low as the area of middle C, spelled by infrequent breath-like rests, a minimal reliance on triplets, and a few heady riff episodes. After dozens of hearings over six decades, it hasn’t lost one iota of its joy, ingenuity and wonder.“Cherokee”Bud Powell (Verve)◆ ◆ ◆Giovanni Russonello, Times jazz criticAn unforgettable tune, hung loosely upon chord changes that originated in a George Gershwin composition but are adapted here and restructured, turned sideways and adorned with a rockslide of rhythmic melody. A French announcer atop the sound, running through titles and names. A young Miles Davis, not yet 23, blasting forth with enough squiggly canned heat on the trumpet to leave the announcer’s words sounding lifeless, irrelevant. In each of these facets, this recording of “Good Bait” — penned by the quietly revolutionary pianist Tadd Dameron — epitomizes the brilliant moment of bebop: a reckoning for Western modernism, the greeting of its own limitations, the Molotov cocktail concealed under the lapels of a three-piece suit.“Good Bait”The Miles Davis/Tadd Dameron Quintet (Legacy Recordings)◆ ◆ ◆Natalie Weiner, writerScat singing wasn’t a bebop innovation, but it was a core part of the subgenre’s development — right down to its name, derived from common scat syllables. Betty Carter shows why on this 1958 record, cramming a nearly unfathomable number of notes into a whirlwind minute and 48 seconds of slick big band sound. Her tics and riffs sound so familiar because they’ve become standard, but here Carter was forging new ground, extending the scat innovations of Dizzy Gillespie with wild virtuosity and never conceding to the mellow, background music stylings often expected of “girl singers.”“You’re Driving Me Crazy”Betty Carter (Master Tape Records)◆ ◆ ◆Sean Jones, trumpeterThis group’s performance with Thelonious Monk on “Evidence” is one of the greatest displays of bebop musicians communicating at a highly sophisticated level at extremely brisk tempos. This form of communication, improvisation, is one of the world’s best examples of spontaneous composition. The improvised section is based on Jesse Greer’s iconic “Just You, Just Me,” showing bebop’s ability to recontextualize the pop song form. Referencing that title, Monk thought, “Just Us/Justice” — which requires “Evidence.” This track also reflects the most profound aspects of rhythm and its relationship to harmony through the African American experience, creating new sonic phrasing that would become the foundation of hip-hop and other American styles of music.“Evidence”Thelonious Monk Quartet With Johnny Griffin (Riverside Records)◆ ◆ ◆Charles McPherson, saxophonistBird comes from the middle of the country, Kansas City, in the middle of the 1930s, when that area was in a good musical period. But besides absorbing all the Kansas City blues and the Kansas City swing, Bird was pretty eclectic. He very much knew about people like Stravinsky: He quoted passages from “Firebird Suite” or “Petrushka.” Bird listened to cowboy country-western; he listened to everything. So he was like a sponge, musically. He also probably listened to Middle Eastern music — certainly Dizzy did that. So they’re pushing all kinds of envelopes. These guys were particularly smart and wide open, with the technique to merge it all. Billy Higgins, the drummer, said that bebop was the beginning of “sanctified intelligence.” That says it all.The way that Bird and Dizzy play “Shaw ’Nuff,” they’re so accurate it almost sounds like one person playing. It’s a lot of moving parts, it’s very notey — but they’re played very cleanly. And these guys are right with each other. When I talk to California musicians who are of that age, they say: “We just heard Bird and Dizzy on record, they had never come out here to Los Angeles, so we thought it was one person playing. So when they came out there in the 1940s it was the first time we saw them playing, and it amazed us. Because a lot of the compositions that we thought were one person playing — no, it was two people playing.” That floored them.“Shaw ’Nuff”Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie (Savoy)◆ ◆ ◆Marcus J. Moore, jazz writerI’ve always admired the brazenness of the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard: No matter how powerfully the music swirled around him, and whether he was the bandleader or a sideman, his wail scorched through the arrangement every time. On this 1969 version of “Space Track,” from the live album “Without a Song,” Hubbard dots the composition with brisk upper-register notes that float atop the band’s turbulent mix of piano, drums and bass, bolstering the song’s urgency while guiding its shape-shifting journey. “Space Track” dips into occasional silence meant to reinforce its balance of power and tranquillity. With each of the band’s upswings, Hubbard also ascends, at one point following Louis Hayes’s spirited drum solo with an equally blistering tone. To me, the track typifies Hubbard’s command of his instrument alongside the message he wanted to convey. His mastery of tension was unparalleled.“Space Track”Freddie Hubbard (Blue Note Records)◆ ◆ ◆Kenny Barron, pianistThis is a very melodic piece. I know some people may be intimidated by bebop — the lines can be very fast and complicated — but this is a very melodic piece, with a very accessible line. It’s not a simple melody but it’s not super-complicated, either: You can actually sing along with it. And it’s taken at a tempo that’s not too fast, so it’s really very clear. Where the rhythmic emphasis falls, that’s one of the things that makes it work. One of the things that makes bebop work is that the way the one is felt — the first beat of the bar — is actually the “and” of four. So that gives it a certain kind of propulsion and forward motion, at any tempo. So when the tempo’s not that fast, you really hear that forward motion. Bud Powell’s important because he improvised like a horn player. There were some things that he did that were kind of demonic, they were so incredible. Speed-wise, and also some of the things he wrote. He was an amazing pianist.“Celia”Bud Powell (Verve)◆ ◆ ◆Melissa Aldana, saxophonistTo me, this album — “Charlie Parker With Strings” — captures the deepness of Parker’s innovative nature as an artist in a way that is beautiful, lyrical and emotional. Bird’s sound is raw and personal, but this track shows what it means to simply have a beautiful sound. It made a particular impact on me years ago, and continues to affect me now.“April in Paris”Charlie Parker (Verve Reissues)◆ ◆ ◆ More

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      Loretta Lynn, Country Music Star and Symbol of Rural Resilience, Dies at 90

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      Her powerful voice, playful lyrics and topical songs were a model for generations of country singers and songwriters. So was her life story.NASHVILLE — Loretta Lynn, the country singer whose plucky songs and inspiring life story made her one of the most beloved American musical performers of her generation, died on Tuesday at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tenn. She was 90.Her family said in a statement that she died in her sleep at her ranch, which had turned Hurricane Mills, about 70 miles west of Nashville, into a tourist destination.Ms. Lynn built her stardom not only on her music, but also on her image as a symbol of rural pride and determination. Her story was carved out of Kentucky coal country, from hardscrabble beginnings in Butcher Hollow (which her songs made famous as Butcher Holler).She became a wife at 15, a mother at 16 and a grandmother in her early 30s, married to a womanizing sometime bootlegger who managed her to stardom. That story made her autobiography, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” a best seller and the grist for an Oscar-winning movie adaptation of the same name.Her voice was unmistakable, with its Kentucky drawl, its tensely coiled vibrato and its deep reserves of power. “She’s louder than most, and she’s gonna sing higher than you think she will,” said John Carter Cash, who produced Ms. Lynn’s final recordings. “With Loretta you just turn on the mic, stand back and hold on.”Ms. Lynn performing at the Grand Ole Opry in the 1960s. She got her start in the music business at a time when male artists dominated the country airwaves. Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesHer songwriting made her a model for generations of country songwriters. Her music was rooted in the verities of honky-tonk country and the Appalachian songs she had grown up singing, and her lyrics were lean and direct, with nuggets of wordplay: “She’s got everything it takes/To take everything you’ve got,” she sang in “Everything It Takes,” one of her many songs about cheating, released in 2016.Ms. Lynn got her start in the music business at a time when male artists dominated the country airwaves. She nevertheless became a voice for ordinary women, recording three-minute morality plays in the 1960s and ’70s — many written by her, some written by others — that spoke to the changing mores of women throughout America.In “Hey Loretta,” a wry 1973 hit about walking out on rural drudgery written by the cartoonist Shel Silverstein, she sang, “You can feed the chickens and you can milk the cow/This woman’s liberation, honey, is gonna start right now.” Silverstein also wrote the beleaguered housewife’s lament “One’s on the Way,” a No. 1 country hit for Ms. Lynn in 1971.“Loretta always just said exactly what she was going through right then in her music, and that’s why it resonates with us,” the country singer Miranda Lambert, one of countless younger performers influenced by Ms. Lynn, said in a 2016 PBS “American Masters” documentary, “Loretta Lynn: Still a Mountain Girl.”Jack White, the singer and guitarist of the White Stripes, said in an interview with The New York Times in 2004, the year he produced Ms. Lynn’s Grammy-winning album “Van Lear Rose,” that she “was breaking down barriers for women at the right time.” Her songs, Mr. White said, had a message: “This is how women live. This is what women are thinking.” And Ms. Lynn, he added, was taking these strides “in the country realm, where a lot of women weren’t able to do what they wanted.”Ms. Lynn in 1972 with her husband, Oliver V. Lynn Jr., who was also known as Doolittle, Doo or Mooney. They had a long but tempestuous marriage. Gary Settle/The New York TimesShe drew much of her material from her marriage to Oliver Vanetta Lynn Jr., who was also known as Doolittle, Doo or Mooney, the last of these nicknames a nod to his practice of selling bootleg whiskey.Ms. Lynn’s 1966 hit “You Ain’t Woman Enough (to Take My Man)” was based on a confrontation she had with one of her husband’s mistresses; her 1968 single “Fist City” was born of a similar incident. The inspiration for “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind),” in 1966, were those times when Mr. Lynn, his libido roused after a night out, would stumble home expecting to satisfy it.“Doo would always try to figure out which line was for him, and 90 percent of the time every line in there was for him,” Ms. Lynn told the weekly Nashville Scene in 2000. “Those songs was true to life. We fought hard, and we loved hard.” The marriage lasted 48 years, until Mr. Lynn died of congestive heart failure in 1996.His drinking and womanizing notwithstanding, Mr. Lynn was one of his wife’s greatest sources of musical encouragement, certainly early in their marriage, after they moved from Kentucky to Custer, Wash., in the late 1940s. Impressed by how well she sang while doing chores at home, he bought her a guitar and a copy of Country Song Roundup, a popular magazine that included the words and chords to the latest jukebox hits.‘I Fought Back’Mr. Lynn went on to manage his wife’s career, insisting that she perform in honky-tonks and at radio stations even before she was convinced of her musical gifts. Ms. Lynn’s dependence on her husband made him as much a father figure as a spouse to her, even though he was less than six years her senior. He used the term “spanking” to describe the times he hit her. It was not until the couple moved to Nashville in the early 1960s, and Ms. Lynn befriended Patsy Cline there, that she began to stand up to her husband.“After I met Patsy, life got better for me because I fought back,” Ms. Lynn told Nashville Scene. “Before that, I just took it. I had to. I was 3,000 miles away from my mom and dad and had four little kids. There wasn’t nothin’ I could do about it. But later on, I started speakin’ my mind when things weren’t right.”Ms. Lynn’s growing assertiveness coincided with the first stirrings of the modern women’s movement. She rejected the feminist tag in interviews, but many of her songs, including the 1978 hit “We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby,” were fiery expressions of female resolve. In that song she sang:Well, I don’t want a wall to paint, but I’m a-gonna have my say.From now on, lover-boy, it’s 50-50, all the way.Up to now I’ve been an object made for pleasin’ you.Times have changed and I’m demanding satisfaction too.Ms. Lynn’s sexual politics had already taken an emphatic turn with “The Pill” (1975), a riotous celebration of reproductive freedom written by Lorene Allen, Don McHan and T.D. Bayless. Outspoken records like that and “Rated X,” about the double standards facing divorced women, might not have been as popular with country music’s conservative-leaning audience had they not been tempered by Ms. Lynn’s playful way with a lyric. In “Rated X,” a No. 1 country hit in 1972, she wrote, “The women all look at you like you’re bad, and the men all hope you are.”Loretta Lynn in 1976, the year her memoir, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” was published. It became the basis of an Oscar-winning movie. Waring Abbott“I wrote about my heartaches, I wrote about everything,” she said in a 2016 interview with The Times. “But when you get to hear the song, you just grin.”Her most confrontational recordings of the ’70s, in fact, corresponded with her greatest popularity. In 1972, she became the first woman to be named entertainer of the year by the Country Music Association. The next year, her picture appeared on the cover of Newsweek. She became a frequent guest on late-night talk shows and the spokeswoman for Crisco shortening. With the title of her 1971 hit “You’re Lookin’ at Country” as her calling card, Ms. Lynn, in her down-home dresses, came to embody rural resilience and self-respect.Loretta Webb was born in a cabin in Butcher Hollow on April 14, 1932, the second of eight children. Her parents, Melvin Theodore Webb and Clara Marie (Ramey) Webb, liked to decorate the cabin walls with magazine photos of movie stars. Loretta was named after Loretta Young.In “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (1976), her memoir written with George Vecsey of The Times, Ms. Lynn noted that her mother, a woman of Cherokee and Scots-Irish descent, had taught her to sing antediluvian ballads and instructed her in rural storytelling. Ms. Lynn and her brothers and sisters often sang in church and at other social gatherings. Three of her siblings also pursued careers in music, notably Brenda Gail, who under the name Crystal Gayle became a star in her own right in the late 1970s with crossover hits like “Talking in Your Sleep” and “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.”Ms. Lynn quit singing in public when she married in 1948. Wanting to get away from Appalachia, she and her husband moved to Washington the next year, when Ms. Lynn, at 16, gave birth to Betty Sue, the first of the couple’s six children. Ms. Lynn in 1972, the year she became the first woman to be named entertainer of the year by the Country Music Association. Gary Settle/The New York TimesIt was a decade before Ms. Lynn performed again. Not long after she did, though, she appeared on a Tacoma, Wash., television talent show hosted by Buck Owens, and attracted the attention of Norm Burley, an executive with Zero Records, a small label based in Vancouver, British Columbia. She signed with the company and recorded four original songs for it in 1960.Success in NashvilleOn the strength of the airplay received by the single “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl,” the Lynns moved to Nashville, where Ms. Lynn began recording demos for the Wilburn Brothers, a popular country singing duo who became her music publishers, and helped her obtain a deal with Decca Records. She made her debut on the Grand Ole Opry in September 1960. In 1962, “Success,” about the relationship between material wealth and happiness, became her first Top 10 single.Over the next 28 years, Ms. Lynn placed 77 singles on the country charts. More than 50 of them reached the Top 10, and 16 reached No. 1, including “After the Fire Is Gone,” the first in a series of steamy hit duets she made with Conway Twitty. Virtually all of her recordings were steeped in traditional country arrangements suited to Ms. Lynn’s perky backwoods drawl; most were produced by Owen Bradley, who likened her to “a female Hank Williams.”Ms. Lynn performing at the Bonnaroo Music and Art Festival in Tennessee in 2011.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesMs. Lynn wrote fewer songs as the 1970s progressed but continued to tour and record. She also established her own booking agency, music publishing company and clothing line, as well as the tourist attraction Loretta Lynn’s Ranch, a 19th-century plantation house that she and her husband bought in the late 1960s. The Hurricane Mills complex includes campgrounds, a dude ranch, a motocross course, a music shed, a replica of the cabin where Ms. Lynn grew up, a simulated coal mine and museums.The Academy of Country Music named Ms. Lynn its artist of the decade for the 1970s just as “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” the 1980 movie based on her autobiography, returned her Cinderella story to the forefront of the national consciousness. The film starred Sissy Spacek, who won an Academy Award, in the title role, and Tommy Lee Jones as Doolittle Lynn.Ms. Lynn was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1988. Her second autobiography, “Still Woman Enough” (2002), picked up where “Coal Miner’s Daughter” had left off. She was a recipient of Kennedy Center Honors the next year and was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in New York in 2008. She received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 2010. Three years later, President Barack Obama named Ms. Lynn a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.The strength of her influence in the music world was witnessed by “Coal Miner’s Daughter: A Tribute to Loretta Lynn,” a 2010 album featuring Kid Rock, Carrie Underwood, Lucinda Williams, the White Stripes and others. “Van Lear Rose” won two Grammy Awards and was ranked among the best albums of 2004, both in country music publications and in magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone that cater to rock audiences.In 2007, Ms. Lynn quietly began a long-term recording project with the producer Mr. Carter Cash, Johnny Cash’s son, in the studio that had been Johnny Cash’s cabin outside Nashville. Working in the style of her ’60s and ’70s recordings, with seasoned Nashville musicians playing vintage instruments, she recorded more than 90 tracks: remakes of her past hits, Christmas and gospel songs, Appalachian songs from her childhood and a handful of new songs. The first album from those sessions, “Full Circle,” appeared in 2016, followed later that year by a Christmas album; “Wouldn’t It Be Great” was released in 2018 and “Still Woman Enough” in 2021.At her Tennessee plantation home in 2015.Kyle Dean reinford for The New York TimesIn 2020, Ms. Lynn published “Me & Patsy Kickin’ Up Dust,” a book recalling her friendship with Patsy Cline.Survivors include a younger sister, the country singer Crystal Gayle; her daughters Patsy Lynn Russell, Peggy Lynn, Clara (Cissie) Marie Lynn; and her son Ernest; as well as 17 grandchildren; four step-grandchildren; and a number of great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Betty Sue Lynn, and another son, Jack, died before her.She also leaves legions of admirers, women as well as men, who draw strength and encouragement from her irrepressible, down-to-earth music and spirit.“I’m proud I’ve got my own ideas, but I ain’t no better than nobody else,” she was quoted as saying in “Finding Her Voice” (1993), Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann’s comprehensive history of women in country music. “I’ve often wondered why I became so popular, and maybe that’s the reason. I think I reach people because I’m with ’em, not apart from ’em.” More

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      Alvvays, a Dreamy Indie-Rock Band, Cranks Up the Volume

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      Molly Rankin’s group is known for emotional and melodic sophistication. Talking about its latest LP, “Blue Rev,” she reflected on how her family’s deep musical history led her there.When Molly Rankin was a child, she discovered she had some special powers. As a scion of the Rankin Family, the award-winning ’90s Canadian musical group, she adopted as her instrument of choice the fiddle, which her father, John Morris Rankin, also played.“If you play the fiddle, you’re sort of like a Jedi — you have this aura around you,” she said in an interview from her Toronto apartment, a Devo poster and a wall of guitars visible behind her. “And I was, you know, exhibiting signs of the Force at a young age, and encouraged to not squander that.”In 2011, she founded Alvvays, an indie-rock band that wraps fuzzy layers of rock instrumentation around stories of hard lives and hurt feelings. It may not seem connected to her roots, but Rankin, 35, noted that the music of her forbears emerged from Celtic melodies passed down for centuries. “They stand the test of time,” she said, “and they bounce around in your head forever.”From the 2014 release of its self-titled debut LP, Alvvays demonstrated an emotional and melodic sophistication that helped it stand out from its peers. “Antisocialites,” from 2017, was shortlisted for the prestigious Polaris Music Prize and led to the band’s U.S. television debut. Their anticipated third album, “Blue Rev,” out on Friday, was partly delayed by the pandemic but ultimately enriched by additional time.“Sometimes I feel like every song I write is the last one,” Rankin said, with a small grin. “I wouldn’t call that a process; I would probably call that a personality.”The slower pace benefited the band’s thoughtfulness about its own work, and its tightly woven bonds. Rankin lives with her partner, Alec O’Hanley, who co-writes the band’s songs and plays a slew of instruments. When we spoke in late September, the band’s drummer, Sheridan Riley, and its bassist, Abbey Blackwell, were staying in an apartment upstairs; Rankin’s childhood friend Kerri MacLellan, who plays keyboards and sings, is just a short bike ride away. O’Hanley compared the home’s current vibe to “Animal House”: “We’re quite clannish in that regard, but it’s not deliberate — it just seems to shake out that way.”“Blue Rev” pushes the band’s sound toward dreamier and noisier frontiers, while deepening its narrative-driven songwriting. The album takes its name from a Canadian alcoholic beverage Rankin drank as a teenager, which is not enjoyed for its taste.“I like to offset something pretty with something challenging,” Rankin explained. “I love melodies that can be sweet, but I do love when there’s some grit — a little bit of emotional weight and pain, just to make it feel complete.” She added that she was “constantly trying to make the guitars louder,” and cited Alice Munro’s short stories as a recent inspiration. “I love that she has the ability to knock the wind out of you with a 12-page short story, and you’re just left reeling,” she said. “I would love to be able to do that with a song.”The producer Shawn Everett (the War on Drugs, the Killers) helped the band break out of some old habits and refine the loud-quiet-loud dynamics in its songs. “We’re always looking to broaden spectrums, whether they’re emotional or tonal — see how far we can push something before it breaks,” O’Hanley said, referencing records by Neil Young, the Psychedelic Furs, Abba, the Cure and the Magnetic Fields as sonic goal posts. He said the band members spent a lot of time gathering unconventional influences from across pop culture, as though they were “ascending Nerd Mountain.” (Though the band is known for sober subject matter, in conversation, its members displayed a sharp wit.)The single “Belinda Says” began with Rankin messing around with chords in the basement, and lyrics that describe leaving town for an uncertain future — “Moving to the country/Gonna have this baby/See how it goes/See how it grows” — took shape. O’Hanley came up with the line that gives the song its title, which references the 1987 Belinda Carlisle hit “Heaven Is a Place on Earth.” O’Hanley had heard “Belinda Says” as a country song, referencing work by Lucinda Williams and Deana Carter, but said that Rankin was “quite insistent on the need for some scuzz.” The resulting track encapsulates the band’s strengths: plaintive and distinct lyrics, keening melodies, waves and waves of sugar-flecked white noise that envelop without overwhelming, a triumphant guitar solo that hoists the song toward an ascendant climax.On “Blue Rev,” some of the personal pain powering the music is more explicit. John Morris Rankin died in a car accident in 2000, at the age of 40. A photograph of Rankin’s family appears on the album’s cover, which she suggested held a deeper meaning: “It’s the comfort of your parents, and they’re helping you climb onto a wharf, and then behind them is this big, ominous sky of adulthood and what the world is ready to show you.”Rankin said that when her father died, “It was a really chaotic time and obviously traumatic, but I also had brain fog for a long time,” noting she was too young to grasp all of the emotions and thoughts that accompany a parent’s death. Though she continued playing the fiddle, and even performed with the Rankin Family on a reunion tour, she eventually chose to forge her own path.Despite the sonic differences, Rankin said she channels her father’s drive. “I’m not afraid to say if I don’t like something or if something isn’t good enough,” she explained. “It’s really important to me, to not be a yes person. He certainly wasn’t one.”Everett, who was born in Canada but currently lives in Los Angeles, said he hears the Rankin Family’s legacy in Alvvays. “There’s a Northern Lights spirituality you feel growing up in Canada — the miracle of the snow, the weird difference in reality,” he said. “It’s a kind of ethereal question mark that Molly has the ability to weave.”Damian Abraham, the frontman for the Canadian hardcore band F____ Up, recalled bringing Alvvays on tour as a supporting act in 2014, and said its poise and maturity were already evident. “They had this naïve brilliance you want from a band making pop music with a punk approach,” he said. “They had real music chops in the background, but there was an edge to it that we all gravitated toward.”Alvvays moved on to headlining its own shows, and accumulating a small, though loyal, fan base. “I don’t know if Alvvays will ever be more than a cult favorite,” O’Hanley said. “We just want to continue on this pop-art beauty quest for as long as we can; if I can have a job playing music and good songs, then that’s great. I don’t have to work in a poutine bar in Toronto.”Rankin said she could be “pretty hard” on herself, and that it takes a long time to collect material that moves her, but it’s all worth it when the music feels right and resonates. “I’m not expecting a specific trajectory,” she added, with a small laugh. Even a Jedi can’t predict the future. More

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      There Is No Excuse for Ye’s ‘White Lives Matter’ Shirt

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      Not from Ye. And not from his new YZY collection.PARIS — Yeezy is dead. Long live YZY. Stage three of the ambitions of Ye — the artist formerly known as Kanye West — to dress the world has begun.Presumably that was supposed to be the takeaway from the surprise show of Paris Fashion Week, held off-schedule in an empty office tower just down the road from the Arc de Triomphe.Though it turned out to be only nominally a fashion show and more like “The YZY Experience”: a chaotic mess of self-justification, confessional, bone-picking and messianic ambition, with a “White Lives Matter” shot of shock and provocation that overshadowed the clothes on the runway.The rumors began during the weekend, just a day or so before the Balenciaga mud show. Ye was in Paris and was going to stage a fashion show — a little more than two weeks after ending his much-ballyhooed partnership with Gap.Maybe it would happen Monday? Maybe not; Ye had just fired his PR agency. No wait, it was happening; he had found another agency. Then, Sunday night, a digital invite arrived. For the next evening. Guests were asked not to share the address.Monday at 5:45 p.m., the Avenue de la Grande Armée was heaving with screaming fans and photographers. So much for secrecy. They outnumbered the show’s actual attendees by what seemed like 100 to one.Still, Anna Wintour came. So did John Galliano. Demna, the Balenciaga designer, and Cédric Charbit, its chief executive. Alexandre Arnault, the chief marketing officer of Tiffany & Company and a son of the LVMH chieftain Bernard Arnault. Then they all sat, playing with the soap-on-rope that looked like three granite blocks and had been left on every seat, waiting an hour and a half for the show to begin. (Well, OK, Anna and John left before the whole thing ended, but that was because they had another appointment, Ms. Wintour said.)It was as good a reflection as anything this week of just how the culture and power structure of fashion and entertainment has changed in the past decade. Because it was 11 years ago, in early October 2011, that Ye held his first fashion show in Paris.The line at that time was called “Kanye West.” Heavy on the luxury frills — leather and fur and gold hardware — it was widely dismissed by its audience. But this time there they were, the powers that be of the industry, jumping at the last minute to see what Ye had to deliver.Which involved a live choir featuring a host of children from Ye’s new Donda Academy in California as well as his daughter, North, and began with his rambling speech about critics who complained about his shows being late; his former manager, Scooter Braun; his hospitalization (Ye has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder); the pain of being called “crazy”; critics who complained that his clothes might not be well made; the people at Gap who didn’t get his vision; Bernard Arnault, whom he called “his new Drake”; and the news that he was establishing yet another version of his own fashion house and it started now.Because “we changed the look of fashion over the last 10 years. We are the streets. We are the culture.” And when it comes to the culture, “I am Ye, and everyone knows I am the leader.”Except this leader was wearing an oversize shirt with a photo of Pope John Paul II and the words “Seguiremos tu ejemplo” (“We will follow your example”) on the front, and “White Lives Matter” on the back — a phrase that the Anti-Defamation League has called hate speech and attributed to white supremacists (including the Ku Klux Klan), who began using it in 2015 in response to the Black Lives Matter movement.The shirt was impossible to miss because, as he spoke, Ye’s image was projected behind him on a wall four stories high.Besides, Candace Owens, the conservative commentator, was in the audience and wearing one, too. Later the shirt appeared as part of the collection, modeled by Selah Marley, the daughter of Lauryn Hill and granddaughter of Bob Marley. (Matthew M. Williams, the Givenchy designer who worked with Mr. West earlier in his career; Michéle Lamy, Rick Owen’s wife; and Naomi Campbell also walked in the show.)It was the only message garment in the line, which was called SZN9 in reference to the Yeezy shows that had come before, created in conjunction with Shayne Oliver, the former designer of Hood By Air (Ye is nothing if not a great spotter and cultivator of talent). Which made it stand out even more in a show otherwise focused on garments that could simply be pulled onto the body, with no hardware — buttons or zips or snaps — involved, an idea that Ye first began talking about in the context of his work with Gap.As it happened, a lot of this line looked like that line, especially that part of that line engineered with Balenciaga’s Demna, including the full-body catsuits that opened the show, the duvet-like puffer ponchos, the blouson jackets and sweats that made the torso into a sort of steroid-filled G.I. Joe triangle, the lack of seams and the semi-apocalyptic palette.It has potential, but the import got swamped by the shirt, what it symbolized, and how its endorsement by a figure such as Ye — even one with a track record of wearing MAGA hats and toying with Confederate imagery — could be used as a rallying cry by those who already buy into its message.“Indefensible behavior,” wrote Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, the Vogue editor, on Instagram. Later adding, “there is no excuse, there is no art here.” Jaden Smith, in the audience, walked out. So did Lynette Nylander, the Dazed writer and editor.The next day, at the Chanel show, Edward Enninful, the editor of British Vogue and the most powerful Black man in fashion media, called the shirt “inappropriate” and “insensitive, given the state of the world.”Ms. Nylander had posted, “It doesn’t matter what the intention was … it’s perception to the masses out of context.”Indeed, in the end, it is the shirt out of context that made the news: not Ye’s theories about dress, or his allegations that Mr. Arnault promised to set him up in his own house and then reneged and now has become Ye’s biggest competition (an LVMH representative said Mr. Arnault had “no comment”); not even Ye’s assertion that, having disrupted the fashion week spotlight, he still felt “at war.” If so, this was a grenade that backfired.As to why he did it, backstage Ye declined to provide any theoretical framework. “It says it all,” he said, of the shirt. But what exactly does it say?That he truly believes he can appropriate the language of racial violence with irony? That someday the power structure of Black and white will be reversed, and since he says this collection is the future, that’s the world he envisions? That Ye gets a kick out of pushing everyone’s buttons? That he wants to see how far he can go and doesn’t really care about, or think about, the collateral damage in the meantime (including to those children singing at his feet), despite the violence this could feed?Or that, as he said in his speech, “You can’t manage me. This is an unmanageable situation.” More

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      Coming Soon: Met Operas Streamed Live Into Your Living Room

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      The company said it would begin offering live simulcasts this month on its website — but only for some customers.The Metropolitan Opera has over the past 16 years built a lucrative business around broadcasting operas live into movie theaters around the world, attracting an audience of millions for classics like “The Magic Flute” and “Madama Butterfly.”Now the company is hoping to build on that success: The Met announced on Monday that it would begin livestreaming some operas directly into living rooms for customers who live far from cinemas that broadcast its productions.The service, called “The Met: Live at Home,” is part of the company’s efforts to expand the audience for opera, at a time when it is grappling with financial challenges brought on by the coronavirus pandemic as well as longstanding box-office declines.Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said in a statement, “We wanted to make our live performances available to people who don’t have ready access to the movie theaters that carry the Met, whether you reside in the mountains of Montana or on assignment in Antarctica.”The service will be available in the United States and Canada to customers who live at a distance from movie theaters that broadcast the Met’s “Live in HD” series of operas each season; the exact distance will vary depending on the market. It will also be accessible nationwide in another 170 countries and territories where the Met does not offer live transmissions. Depending on the location, each opera will cost $10 or $20 to stream; viewers can watch the operas an unlimited number of times during a seven-day window.The Met is one of many cultural institutions experimenting with livestreaming, which became a popular way of staying connected with audiences during the pandemic, when in-person performances were curtailed. The San Francisco Opera last year began broadcasting some performances live for $27.50.The Met’s movie theater program began in 2006 and before the pandemic generated about $18 million in net profit for the Met each year.The new streaming service poses the possibility of cannibalizing some of those sales, though Gelb said using technology to limit its geographic reach would help mitigate that risk. He said the company had no plans to phase out the movie theater broadcasts, which have sold nearly 30 million tickets and are now available in about 2,000 cinemas in 50 countries.“We don’t want to replace the movie theater experience at this point,” he said. “We want to augment it.”The streaming service will be available starting on Oct. 22, when the Met begins its cinema broadcasts. (This season, 10 productions will be transmitted.) The first performance will be Luigi Cherubini’s “Medea,” which opened the Met season last week to largely positive reviews. More

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      An Opera Festival That Keeps Faith With Shutdown’s Innovations

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      Festival O, back for the first time since 2019, featured two works of dazed horror and a rare staging of Rossini’s “Otello.”PHILADELPHIA — When the pandemic goaded the performing arts to pivot to video, some institutions fared better (and more creatively) than others. Opera Philadelphia was among the most intrepid in America, commissioning a series of short films that embraced a new medium.The company produced a sober version of Tyshawn Sorey’s song cycle “Save the Boys,” as well as “The Island We Made,” a meditative nocturne by the composer Angélica Negrón, filmed by Matthew Placek and starring the drag diva Sasha Velour. The composers Courtney Bryan and Caroline Shaw contributed pieces, and Rene Orth delivered a vibrant dose of K-pop.But even, or especially, for adventurous arts groups like this one, the transition back to primarily live performance has presented a challenge: How to maintain — and even expand on — the lessons learned and experiments ventured over the past few years when returning to the kind of work made in the before times.Opera Philadelphia, once again, offers a way forward. As part of Festival O — its signature burst of productions each fall, and the first since 2019 — the company on Saturday premiered “Black Lodge,” which posited that film and live performance can productively coexist.The order of operations here was unusual: As Michael Joseph McQuilken, who wrote and directed the film element, writes in a program note, “It’s an exceedingly strange task to ‘movie a score’ … one tends to score a movie.”David T. Little’s music and Anne Waldman’s text, and even the tempos and timings, were set by the time McQuilken came on board. He wasn’t without leeway, though: Little and Waldman weren’t telling a clear story that McQuilken would need to depict, but were, rather, obliquely suggesting a grimly poetic vision of a man trapped in a post-life purgatory, reliving brutal encounters with the woman who haunts him.The music — for a rock band and amplified string quartet — embraces Little’s longstanding interest in the grittier side of pop, the dark, pounding industrial “nu metal” style of (I’ll date myself) Slipknot, Korn and System of a Down. Played live under the big screen on Saturday at the Philadelphia Film Center, this grinding score occasionally lightens for moments of mellower mournfulness. But every register, moan to scream, is handled with indefatigable goth aplomb by the charismatically wailing Timur, the film’s star and the frontman of the band, Timur and the Dime Museum.Drawing on David Lynch, William S. Burroughs and Stanley Kubrick, McQuilken’s accompaniment is a fast-cut horror-movie nightmare of ominous fluorescent-lit clinics, severed digits, screams in the desert, guns and hypodermic needles.The mezzo-soprano Kristen Choi, right, with Muyu Ruba in a raven mask in “The Raven,” based on Poe.Steven PisanoThis imagery, coupled with this sound world, evoked turn-of-the-21st-century music videos, which tended to feature starkly contrasting settings within a single piece; enigmatic or nonexistent narratives at a distance from the lyrics; luridly distorted colors; surreal staginess. There’s a reason, of course, that those music videos were three or four minutes long, as opposed to the 60-ish of “Black Lodge,” which is trippy — and wearying. (The film will stream on Opera Philadelphia’s website, at operaphila.tv, starting Oct. 21.)The theme of dazed horror at the border between life and death, past and present, continued in the festival’s production of Toshio Hosokawa’s atmospheric chamber monodrama “The Raven,” based on the classic Poe poem.“Black Lodge,” produced by Beth Morrison Projects, was presented as part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, but “The Raven” felt far more in the fringe-theater tradition. Directed by Aria Umezawa, it was a collaboration with the local performance company Obvious Agency, which provided a participatory prelude to the Hosokawa.On entering the grand old Miller Theater on Saturday, the audience was divided into groups, each of which was then led away by a performer acting as a facet of Lenore, the lost love in Poe’s poem. Heading backstage, my group’s leader played Healer Lenore, a self-help guru who used a question-and-answer session to cleanse us of daemonic energy — or at least make peace with it.The tone of this half-hour was goofy, with a recurring joke on Matt Damon’s name. Perhaps this was the point, but the scrappy clowning couldn’t have had less in common with Hosokowa’s eerie, deadly serious contemporary-Noh score, often hushed, occasionally ferocious.With the audience arranged onstage on three sides around the performers — the orchestra of 12, led by Eiki Isomura, completed the rectangle — the mezzo-soprano Kristen Choi was intense both in rasped quiet and full cry. The Lenores, including one stalking the paper-strewn playing space in a mask that was part bird, part medieval plague doctor, hovered about, but too little was done with the most obvious and elegant ghostly spectacle here: a small bunch of people in a vast empty theater.Daniela Mack as Desdemona and Khanyiso Gwenxane as Otello in Opera Philadelphia’s “Otello.” Steven PisanoAnother ornate space, the Academy of Music, holds the big productions, usually one per year, that anchor Festival O amid the smaller pieces. This time it was “Otello” — not Verdi’s 1887 classic, but Rossini’s far rarer version, from 1816, which Opera Philadelphia deserves great credit for staging.And for staging so admirably. Rossini’s serious operas are serious undertakings: long, notoriously difficult for singers and without obvious means for orchestras to show off. But conducted with steady energy by Corrado Rovaris, the company’s music director, the work felt both spacious and vigorous.The libretto’s differences from the Verdi (and Shakespeare) are sweeping, not least in the absence of the crucial handkerchief and in the importance Rossini places on the character of Rodrigo, who gets some of the most daunting music. The tenor Lawrence Brownlee, Opera Philadelphia’s artistic adviser, was up for the challenge: He has one of the sweetest sounds in the bel canto world, and tautly ringing high notes. If his tone sometimes paled in fast passagework at the final performance on Sunday, he was always winning.Rossini, as was his wont, features a slew of leading tenors; here the trio was filled out by Khanyiso Gwenxane, his voice bold and forthright as Otello, and Alek Shrader, sounding newly robust and insinuating as Iago.Desdemona is, in this version, a fully formed protagonist, something like Donizetti’s Lucia, and the mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack gave the character nobility and eloquence, her voice flexible enough to handle the coloratura and relish the text. She blended perfectly with the mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce, as her maid Emilia, who had a slightly lighter, less earthy, no less classy voice. (Rossini loves to show off tenor-tenor and mezzo-mezzo combinations, reaping excitement from the slightest distinctions.)The story, of course, takes place in 16th-century Venice and Cyprus, but for no obvious reason the director, Emilio Sagi, updated it to an unclear location in early 20th-century Europe — maybe England, maybe Switzerland — and to the whitewashed great hall of a manor house, with a huge staircase.The staging added little to what was essentially old-fashioned emoting. But with a fine cast and a steady hand in the pit, that was enough. More

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      Steve Lacy’s Streaming Smash ‘Bad Habit’ Climbs to No. 1

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      A left-field hit from a 24-year-old master of alternative R&B displaces Harry Styles’s “As It Was” as the top single, while Bad Bunny logs a 12th week atop the album chart.Steve Lacy, a 24-year-old guitarist and producer, started the year with a reputation as a gifted innovator on the fringes of alternative R&B, best known for a D.I.Y. approach in the studio. Now he has the No. 1 song in the country.“Bad Habit,” a spacey, pensive ballad driven by a slightly warped guitar, has been a monster streaming hit since its release three months ago. After gaining traction on pop radio it finally climbs to the top spot on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart this week, with 20 million streams and 40 million “airplay audience impressions,” a measurement of a song’s popularity on radio stations, according to the tracking service Luminate.The song, from Lacy’s second studio album, “Gemini Rights,” replaces Harry Styles’s “As It Was” at the top of the chart, after an on-and-off reign of 15 weeks since April.The ascent of “Bad Habit” has been one of the more surprising stories in the music business this year, but for those watching Lacy’s career it has not come out of nowhere. After emerging as a teenage member of the Internet, an offshoot from Odd Future — the boundary-pushing hip-hop ensemble that gave us Frank Ocean, Syd, Earl Sweatshirt and Tyler, the Creator — Lacy collaborated with Kendrick Lamar, Solange, Vampire Weekend and others, developing a track record as an artist who could comfortably bridge R&B, hip-hop and alternative rock.How long “Bad Habit” will hold, however, is an open question — “Unholy,” the latest from the British singer Sam Smith featuring Kim Petras, is hot on its heels.The Billboard 200 album chart is once again dominated by a familiar face: Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican superstar whose “Un Verano Sin Ti” is the year’s biggest album, with a gigantic stadium tour to match. This week, “Un Verano” is No. 1 for a 12th time.Bad Bunny’s album had the equivalent of 87,000 sales in the United States in its most recent week, including 120 million streams, according to Luminate. As far as No. 1 albums go, that total is modest. So far this year, the albums reaching the top each week have had an average equivalent sales number — a composite figure that incorporates streaming, individual track downloads and old-fashioned purchases of an album as a complete unit — of about 138,000. Even so, the numbers for “Verano” this week are still nearly twice as high as any of its competitors.The Australian pop-rock band 5 Seconds of Summer opens at No. 2 with the equivalent of 48,000 sales of its latest, “5SOS5,” which includes 36,000 copies sold as a complete package and just 16 million streams. (By comparison, in recent weeks Bad Bunny’s “Me Porto Bonito” and “Titi Me Pregunto” — just two of the 23 tracks on “Un Verano” — have each been drawing as many clicks.)Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album,” a chart mainstay for 21 months and counting, is No. 3. Last week’s top seller, Blackpink’s “Born Pink,” falls to No. 4 with the equivalent of 40,000 sales, a 60 percent drop. Styles’s “Harry’s House” is in fifth place. More

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      Les Rallizes Dénudés: Unraveling One of Rock’s Deep Mysteries

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      The Japanese band that emerged in the late 1960s was known for its rumbling rhythms and ear-shredding feedback — but almost nothing was known about its leader, Takashi Mizutani.Makoto Kubota is still amazed by the continuing appeal of his old band, Les Rallizes Dénudés.An accomplished producer and bandleader in Japan, Kubota spent just a few years in the early 1970s playing with the Rallizes, which by the usual measures of rock success barely made a blip. Led by the enigmatic Takashi Mizutani, the band emerged in the late-’60s haze of psychedelia and radical student politics with a scorchingly loud sound, though it ceased performing in 1996 and the handful of raw recordings the group released went out of print long ago. Yet decades later, younger musicians now press Kubota for any information about the band, and fans around the world who likely cannot understand Mizutani’s cryptic Japanese lyrics declare on social media that his music has changed their lives.“I never thought this could touch foreigners’ hearts so deeply,” Kubota said in a recent interview from his home in Tokyo.Les Rallizes Dénudés — known to insiders and acolytes as the Rallizes (pronounced “rallies”) for short — have long held a peculiar place in the annals of underground music as a group more heard about than actually heard, its reputation resting more on legend than fact. Through bootleg live recordings with rumbling rhythms and ear-shredding sheets of guitar feedback, which have been pored over and cataloged by fans, the Rallizes have come to symbolize both the sonic extremes of rock and the ways that online communities can nurture and amplify even the most obscure corners of global culture.David Novak, an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the author of “Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation,” describes the band’s influence by referring to an oft-misquoted remark by Brian Eno that relatively few people bought the Velvet Underground’s albums at the time, but each of them (seemingly) formed a band.“The Rallizes are like that, except there was no record to buy,” Novak said. “There was just this fantasy of some incredibly abrasive, mysterious group that created this wall of impenetrable noise. The power of that story drove a huge renaissance.”Now, after decades of intrigue — and almost three years since Mizutani’s death — Les Rallizes Dénudés are getting the archival treatment. Earlier this year, “The Oz Tapes,” a set of recordings from 1973 that were part of a compilation celebrating Oz, a short-lived venue in Tokyo, were remastered by Kubota and reissued by the American label Temporal Drift. “Oz Days Live: ’72-’73 Kichijoji,” an expanded version of the original compilation, with tracks by the Rallizes, Masato Minami, Acid Seven and others from the same scene, is coming out this month.Later this fall will come long-sought reissues of three CDs from 1991, the only albums the Rallizes released during their existence. And Kubota, working on behalf of Mizutani’s estate, has spent months combing through what he called “a suitcase full of master tapes” from Mizutani’s personal archive.The wave of new releases, and related curatorial work by Temporal Drift — “Oz Days Live” comes with a 112-page book with an oral history of Oz, a CBGB for Tokyo’s early psychedelic scene — offer a chance to contextualize the Rallizes for new listeners. They can also fill in the gaps for longtime followers who have subsisted on scantily labeled bootlegs and digital bread crumbs from fan sites.BUT GETTING A full picture of the Rallizes and its reclusive leader may be impossible. Mizutani, usually pictured in a uniform of black shades and black leather, almost never spoke to the media, and some former bandmates still adhere to an unspoken omertà. Maki Miura, a guitarist, declined an interview request about Mizutani and his former band with a statement that said: “During his lifetime there was a silent understanding that no one would ever talk publicly about him. Honestly, it makes me wonder if Mizutani is pissed off.”Still, interviews with former Rallizes members and other associates of Mizutani paint a picture of a man singularly devoted to his art, and perhaps just as obsessed with cultivating an aura of inscrutability. Even the meaning of the band’s name is obscure. It may be an inside joke about suitcases, or perhaps a reference to William S. Burroughs. Kubota said he never asked about it, but that the name was understood to mean something like the Naked and Stoned. “It’s too embarrassing to say,” he said, and laughed.The band was founded in 1967 at Doshisha University, an elite institution in Kyoto, by Mizutani and other students who were members of the school’s Light Music Club. At the time, Japanese rock was evolving beyond its Beatles-inspired “group sounds” era, and Kubota said that Mizutani’s influences in those early years included the Velvet Underground, Blue Cheer, the Grateful Dead and the avant-garde rock and jazz of the New York label ESP.Mizutani was also heavily involved in the student protest movement of the time. By 1970, the Rallizes gained notoriety that would last for decades when its original bassist, Moriaki Wakabayashi, was part of a Marxist group that hijacked a Japanese passenger plane and flew it to North Korea. After that point, any political dimension to the Rallizes’ music, or Mizutani’s public persona, largely disappeared.Kubota in July. The onetime Les Rallizes member has been working on behalf of Mizutani’s estate, combing through what he called “a suitcase full of master tapes” from Mizutani’s personal archive.Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times“The Oz Tapes” — with Kubota on bass, Takeshi Nakamura on guitar and Shunichiro Shoda on drums — is a rough blueprint for the Rallizes’ sound, which would develop over years of shifting lineups, with Mizutani as the only constant. Songs like “Wilderness of False Flowers” and the 11-minute “Vertigo Otherwise My Conviction” are built over jagged, repetitive grooves that swell and recede as Mizutani plays long solos that resemble Neil Young crossed with Sonny Sharrock. Like the Velvet Underground, the Rallizes can toggle between modes of paint-peeling noise and surreal quiet, as in “Memory Is Far Away,” a mournful ballad with ambiguous lines about a lost love (“The flames of betrayal burn eternally/The shadow of redemption keeps chasing me”).“It’s almost like the people there were brainwashed by his vibrations,” recalled Minoru Tezuka, the proprietor of Oz, who went on to become the group’s manager.In time the group’s style grew more extreme, with peals of feedback, lasting 20 minutes or longer, that can be hypnotic or painful, though sometimes with intriguing reference points. In “Night of the Assassins,” those screaming guitars are juxtaposed with a bass line that closely resembles “I Will Follow Him,” Little Peggy March’s bubble-gum hit from 1963; whether Mizutani meant that as a joke, we may never know.EVEN TO HIS bandmates, Mizutani was a cipher. “Mysterious but lovable,” Kubota said.Acid Seven, a bandleader and prankster who was a regular at Oz, recalled Mizutani interrupting his stoic silence at jam sessions only to utter existentialist riddles. He described Mizutani once taking a drag from his ever-present cigarette and proclaiming, “The smoke coming out of my mouth is extinguishing my ego,” with no further explanation offered.By being totally uncompromising about the band’s sound, Mizutani effectively exiled himself from the Japanese music industry. Shime Takahashi, who played drums with the Rallizes in the mid-70s, recalled the band once working in a professional studio, only to find that the engineer never pressed record because he thought it was still rehearsing. Mizutani had been playing with the Rallizes for more than 20 years before releasing its three albums in 1991 — two sets of early recordings, and another double-CD live set of the band at its noisiest.“It’s that determination not to be commercial, to remain underground, which is the one constant the group had throughout its history,” said Alan Cummings, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and a longtime chronicler of Japan’s underground music.Yet that stance bolstered the Rallizes’ legend, making the band a sort of early inspiration for the so-called Japanoise scene of the 1980s and ’90s — a catchall for a range of aggressive and noisy rock and electronic music that flowered in Tokyo, Osaka and elsewhere — and a symbol for the perseverance of music that was anti-commercial at its core.“You might assume this is just Orientalist reverie on the part of American fans,” said Novak, of U.C. Santa Barbara. “But it’s not, because that sense of mystery is shared by so many in Japan. Rallizes came to symbolize the unknowability of the underground music scene in Japan, for Japanese fans too.”Still, the lovable side of Mizutani comes through in some of his colleagues’ recollections. Kubota remembers him cooking Nagoya-style noodles when they got the munchies in their student days. The dour eminence of noise rock could even break character at times. Kubota sounded stunned when he relayed the story of his friend inviting the Orange County Brothers, a Tex-Mex-style Japanese rock band that Kubota worked with, to spend the night at his parents’ house while on tour.“This is like the Velvet Underground having a party with Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show,” Kubota said, referring to the goofy 1970s country-rock group that sang “The Cover of Rolling Stone.”Les Rallizes Dénudés onstage in 1971.Kyo Nakamura, via The Last One MusiqueTHE LEGEND OF Les Rallizes Dénudés was arguably kept alive through bootlegs — unauthorized recordings, mostly of live concerts, that circulated among fans online and sparked new interest in the band in the 2000s. The source of these tapes has long been a curiosity, with some insiders speculating that Mizutani, or at least someone very close to him, may have been involved, given the high audio quality of some of them.To Temporal Drift, founded by two former employees of the reissue label Light in the Attic who worked on its Japan Archival Series, the popularity of those tapes proves the existence of a broad international fan base, and a potential market for new releases.“The obsession that Rallizes fans have for the band is pretty incredible,” said Patrick McCarthy, one of the label’s founders. “They’re people that are extremely dedicated, in ways you see with the Grateful Dead, where they have to have every article, every version of every bootleg.”The road to the new releases began in 2019, when Kubota traveled to New York to help with a documentary about an old friend, the Japanese folk singer Sachiko Kanenobu, who was playing in Central Park. “Everybody who was there — musicians, radio people — they asked me about the Rallizes. So I said, ‘OK, something is happening. I’ve got to contact Mizutani.’”After leaving the Rallizes in 1973, Kubota went on to a successful career with his bands Sunset Gang and the Sunsetz, and as a producer. But he had not spoken with Mizutani in almost 30 years before that summer. To his surprise, his old bandmate said he wanted to do a “last tour.” Kubota said that Mizutani also denied any involvement in the bootlegs, and expressed a desire to finally release the Rallizes’ music officially. The two had frequent conversations for a month or two, Kubota said, before their text chain went cold that fall. Later, he learned that Mizutani had died in December 2019, at age 71.Kubota then began working with Mizutani’s estate to sort through Mizutani’s archive of recordings; he declined to identify who controls the estate, saying only that it is someone who had been close to Mizutani for many years.Around the same time, he began working with Temporal Drift; Yosuke Kitazawa, the label’s other principal, said that when they began work on the project, they had no idea that Mizutani had died. In October 2021, an official Rallizes site appeared on the internet, announcing that Mizutani had died almost two years before and that a new entity, The Last One Musique — named after a Rallizes epic — had been formed to represent the Rallizes’ music rights, and would begin releasing Mizutani’s work “with far more alive and striking sound than the bootlegs that have been circulating over 20 years.”In a series of interviews this summer, Kubota said he had been working for months to sort through Mizutani’s collection, including numerous studio and live recordings.“Now I have received the material for four full concerts and started working on it,” Kubota said. “It will be monstrous.” More