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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

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      Review: The Met Brings Back a Shorter, Weaker ‘Don Carlo’

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      David McVicar’s staging from last season has returned, but in a four-act, Italian-language form. In this case, less is less.Another week, another set of music without a definitive version.This time it isn’t a variant-strewn album rollout from Taylor Swift or Lil Baby, but rather a work by Giuseppe Verdi, whose “Don Carlo” returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Thursday night in a four-act, Italian-language edition of a staging by David McVicar.When McVicar’s production premiered last season, it was a true event: the company’s first mounting of “Don Carlos,” a version of Verdi’s original, five-act, French-language take, from 1867.Now, the Met has returned to the Italian, based on Verdi’s 1884 conception. But in a puzzling move, it has done away with its vintage practice of presenting the opera in five acts. So on Thursday, the short but crucial opening act was cut.This may sound like hairsplitting, but when it comes to Verdi’s longest opera, less is less, even with a strong cast like the Met’s for this revival.The tenor Russell Thomas is an appealing, emotive Don Carlo; on Thursday, he sounded particularly noble (and ardent) at the higher end of his range. In house-filling phrases, Russell’s bright sound had a brassy, tossed-off assurance, with little sign of strain. Yet in lower-pitched lines, he occasionally sounded swamped by the plush orchestral sound under the baton of Carlo Rizzi.“Don Carlo” demands a lot of strong voices, and the best addition in this revival is the exciting performance, particularly late in the evening, from the bass Günther Groissböck as King Philip II. If the mezzo-soprano Yulia Matochkina was a bit laryngeal during Princess Eboli’s early Veil Song outside the monastery, her take on the character had settled into a gloomy radiance by the time she needed to curse her own beauty (and thirst for machinations) deep into the plot.But what plot, exactly? Without the opportunity to enjoy the first act’s mysterious meet-cute in Fontainebleau, it’s difficult for an audience to root for the doomed pairing of Don Carlo and Elisabeth. (She’s originally Don Carlo’s intended; later she’s his stepmother and queen, after her marriage to his father, Philip.)Element after element in the opera was similarly hamstrung. The soprano Eleonora Buratto brought an elegant tone and brilliant high notes to bear in Elisabeth’s climactic final appearance onstage — yet the hourslong buildup to that moment felt rote. Throughout, Don Carlo’s advocacy on behalf of the oppressed Flemish also came across as muted without the first act’s sketching of diplomatic intrigue between France and Spain. The absence, and its effect on the opera’s momentum, was glaring, particularly in McVicar’s safe and budget-conscious production, which is light on theatrical coups and complex blocking.There was enjoyment, though, in the blends of voices among the singers — with the baritone Peter Mattei, as Rodrigo, seemingly always in the middle of the best moments. He often provided the jolt that the staging otherwise lacked: his big, supple sound worked well alongside Thomas’s Carlo in their early duet and in their jailhouse goodbye, and spurred Groissböck’s Philip into more dramatically varied phrasing during their early political debates.The Met could, in the future, milk McVicar’s staging for a five-act, Italian-language version. But this one was a dramatic fizzle; the big hits were present and accounted for, and largely well sung, but the evening was, strangely, a drag. Cuts aren’t supposed to make operas feel longer.Some fans will want to hear “Don Carlo” in any form. But as is the case with various editions of the same pop album, there’s no particularly urgent need to collect ’em all.Don CarloThrough Dec. 3 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org. More

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      For ‘KPOP,’ a Broadway Transfer Is More Like a Reinvention

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      The show’s creative team talks about revamping the immersive Off Broadway hit so that it moves “around the audience” at Circle in the Square Theater.Back in 2017, the musical “KPOP” had the kind of Off Broadway premiere that showbiz dreams are made of. The buzz around the production — which had the rare distinction of being about a specifically Asian pop-music style and having a largely Asian creative team — was so intense that desperate New Yorkers were pleading for tickets to its sold-out run at the small A.R.T./New York Theaters in Midtown Manhattan.Talk of a Broadway transfer started quickly thereafter, but, for a variety of reasons including the pandemic, it took five years for “KPOP” to finally make the jump. Now, at long last, the show is in previews, with an opening night set for Nov. 20.The musical Broadway audiences will see, however, is a very different beast from the one that opened in 2017: This is not so much a transfer as a reinvention.The original Ars Nova production, presented with Ma-Yi Theater Company and Woodshed Collective, was an immersive spectacle in which audience members followed a bunch of artists from room to room on two floors, and discovered how the Korean music industry relentlessly drills its stars (called idols) into poptastic precision.None of the 41 Broadway theaters could accommodate this sort of staging. But at least the one the show finally grabbed, Circle in the Square Theater, has a unique asset: It’s in the round.“I like to say it’s the world’s smallest arena — it’s a postage stamp of Madison Square Garden,” the director, Teddy Bergman, said. “For a show that traffics in pop, that collective energy and that collective effervescence felt like something we could capture like lightning in a bottle.”To preserve the sense that the audience is getting behind-the-scenes insights, the book writer, Jason Kim, altered the framing device: The show is now set up like a mockumentary about an upcoming American tour for a K-pop entertainment company’s roster — the boy band F8, the girl group RTMIS and the solo singer MwE.“At Ars Nova, the audience moved around and in this production we’re very much trying to move the piece around the audience,” Kim said. “I think the spirit of the show has been preserved, although it is a different format, and we are trying to engage the audience in very much a different way. We loved that the new theater casts an extra member, which is the audience.”The show is now set up like a mockumentary about a K-pop label’s roster, which includes the boy band F8, the girl group RTMIS and the solo singer MwEF8.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesKevin Woo, center, in “KPOP,” now in previews at Circle in the Square Theater. There’s a “whole new appreciation and understanding and reception of this music in the States,” the show’s director said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnother reason for the transformation is the fact that the moment “KPOP” originally aimed to capture has changed dramatically. In 2017, most Americans had no knowledge of K-pop, save perhaps for the song “Gangnam Style,” by Psy. Nowadays, Korean acts like Stray Kids routinely top the U.S. music charts and in May a K-pop artist, AleXa, won NBC’s “American Song Contest” on behalf of Oklahoma, where she was raised.Over the past five years, Bergman said, “BTS happened and ushered in a whole new appreciation and understanding and reception of this music in the States.”He added: “We wanted to focus on what is the journey, the cost, the joy, the exhilaration, the sacrifice of these pathbreakers who are journeying into new territories and spreading this music. I didn’t have to come from a position of having to explain much, or really anything to the audience. It really freed us up to be able to dig deeper psychologically, emotionally.” (The show’s close relationship with South Korea means the deadly crowd surge in Seoul was deeply felt; the Broadway production made a curtain speech last weekend and had a moment of silence, and posted a statement on social media.)One beneficiary of this change in focus has been the character of MwE, played Off Broadway by Ashley Park and now portrayed by Luna, a South Korea-based actress and former member of the K-pop girl group f(x).“What I’m very excited about in this version is the examination of the female characters,” said Helen Park, who wrote the bilingual score with Max Vernon, and orchestrated and produced it for Broadway. “They all have different ambitions, different journeys, different histories, different characteristics. As an Asian woman, that’s something so special.”While MwE, only in her mid-20s, is already a battle-hardened music-industry vet, the new character of Brad is at the start of his idol career and struggling because he is being shunned by his F8 bandmates. Not only was he the last to join the band, but his being mixed race becomes a factor as well. The role had resonance for the actor playing him, Zachary Noah Piser, who has Chinese and Jewish roots: This spring he became the first Asian American actor to play the title role of “Dear Evan Hansen” full time on Broadway.“Brad’s whole situation is very kind of meta because it was very me — I was a newcomer to the Broadway production of ‘KPOP’ and he is the Asian white boy from Connecticut who gets plucked up and placed in this group,” Piser said in a video chat. Brad acts as an entry point into issues centering on identity — which were already present in the first version, but have since been retooled.“When we first started writing, the main idea behind the show was ‘How could K-pop cross over in America?’ — it’s what these Korean artists have to sacrifice in their authenticity in order to be palatable to an American market,” Vernon said on the phone. “Obviously K-pop crossed over, so we asked different questions, like, ‘What’s going on in these artists’ mental state behind the scenes? What kind of pressure is that exerting on their psyche, on their relationships with other people in their band?’”Luna, who got her start in K-pop before turning to musical theater in South Korea (starring in shows like “Legally Blonde,” for example), pointed out that “KPOP” nails the genre’s emphasis on rigorous training.“There are such detailed scenes that are really rooted in the reality of that world,” Luna said via an interpreter in a video conversation. “I feel that people who are actually K-pop singers or who are trainees will really relate. It also gives a sense of consolation for the immense amount of effort and hard work put into creating K-pop.”From left: Park, Kim, Weber, Bergman and Vernon.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesSUCH AN OVERHAUL of the show’s concept and characters also required a reshaping of the score, which The New York Times’s Ben Brantley described as being “as synthetically sweet and perversely addictive as the real thing” in his review. When asked about the balance between old and new songs, the creative team agreed that it was about half and half — “maybe more new than old,” Park said.She and Vernon also had to reflect the changes in the genre at large: The acts that were popular when they started working on the show, back in 2014, are different from the current ones, and fans were sure to notice dated references.“We were responding to Exo, 2NE1, Girls’ Generation, Psy, Big Bang, but K-pop music changes every three to four years so it would be like doing a show called ‘Pop’ and all the music sounds like Britney rather than Billie Eilish or whatever the great artists are that you’re listening to right now,” Vernon said on the phone. “Sometimes by the time musicals are on Broadway, it feels like they’re lagging 15 years behind the culture — we did not want that.”Similarly, the choreographer Jennifer Weber, who is also handling the Max Martin jukebox musical “& Juliet,” had to work within the specific parameters of K-pop dancing. Key elements are point moves, which are the visual answers to the songs’ hooks (one of the most famous remains Psy’s horse-riding gimmick in “Gangnam Style”).And because members of a group trade vocal lines at a quick pace, careful integration is needed to make the choreography work. “You have to almost break it down mathematically about who’s singing at what time,” Weber said on the phone. “You need to constantly be revealing who’s singing, so that person needs to pop out of the formation for their line — and that line could be as little as two bars.”Another way to assure that the show recreates the wondrous, kinetic excitement the best K-pop acts generate was to hire performers who had spent time in the trenches and could share their experience: In addition to Luna, the cast includes BoHyung, a former member of the girl group Spica; Min, formerly of Miss A; and Kevin Woo, once in U-KISS.“A lot of my questions in the first weeks were like, ‘How do you breathe? How do you execute this incredibly intricate choreography?’” Piser said. “The biggest response I got from the K-pop idols in our show was, ‘You’ve got to be patient, you’ve got to be good to yourself and you’ve got to trust the process.’”With “KPOP” now on Broadway, its creators are aware that the show is not just going up against other musicals but against actual K-pop artists — and this time again, the intimacy of Circle in the Square could come through.“We’re competing with Blackpink and BTS,” Bergman said, laughing, “but I don’t know where else you’re going to see BTS with 600 other people. Unless you’re Jeff Bezos or something.” More