Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Review: ‘Midnights’ Finds Taylor Swift Between Yesterday and Tomorrow

      by

      The singer-songwriter’s 10th studio album returns to the pop sound she left in 2019, and explores a familiar subject: how she is perceived, and how she perceives herself.Taylor Swift has always been at her best when writing about Taylor Swift — she is diaristically pinpoint, a ruthless excavator of her own internal tugs of war. But she also thrives when writing about “Taylor Swift” — the idea, the metanarrative, the character. Swift sees the world seeing her, and rather than shut it out, she absorbs it, making those points of view her own, too. Kind of.It’s those songs that stand out on “Midnights,” her overly familiar sounding and spotty 10th studio album, which is in places a careful recitation of raw love, in others a flashback to past romantic indignities, but maybe most pointedly and effectively a commentary on what it feels like to live as a deeply observed figure, constantly narrativized by others.“Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism, like some kind of congressman?” Swift muses on “Anti-Hero,” an eerily shimmering Kate Bush-esque number that’s one of the album’s high points. “Tale as old as time.” At the hook, she returns again and again to the eye-rolled self-own, “I’m the problem, it’s me.” In the song’s video, Swift tosses back drinks with a more exuberantly unhinged version of herself, and a third giantess Swift hovers over the proceedings, bumbling and lightly melancholy.On “Mastermind,” the album’s sparkly closer, she paints her villain origin story, if you’re inclined to see her as a villain: “No one wanted to play with me as a little kid/So I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since/To make them love me and make it seem effortless.”Into each pop star life, some outside perspective must intrude, and Swift has long spun gold from that raw material. But there are limitations to this approach, and Swift has hit a junction all superstars eventually arrive at — whether to continue to reckon with the past, or to forge forward boldly into the future.On this count, Swift is mainly looking backward on “Midnights,” an album that often plays like an extension of her 2019 LP “Lover,” which was similarly inconsistent, though fuller-sounding. The songs here are filled to the brim with syrupy synths, giving the album an astral, slow-motion effect, as if Swift were trapped in a reverb chamber.The Cultural Impact of Taylor Swift’s Music New LP: “Midnight,” Taylor Swift’s 10th studio album is a return to the pop pipeline, with production from her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff. Here is what our critic thought of it. Fight for Her Masters: Revisit the origin story of Swift’s rerecordings of her older albums: a feud with the powerful manager Scooter Braun. Pandemic Records: In 2020, Ms. Swift released two new albums, “Folklore” and “Evermore.” In debuting a new sound, she turned to indie music. Fearless: For the release of “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” the first of the rerecordings, Times critics and reporters dissected its sound and purpose.After a handful of albums that felt like pivots ranging from soft to hard — bonkers pop on “1989”; (relatively) edgy experimentation on “Reputation”; earthy, pandemic isolation character studies on “Folklore” and “Evermore” — “Midnights” feels like a concession to an older, safer idea of Swift, full of songs that are capable and comfortable but often insufficient.Sometimes, those old modes serve her well. On “Karma,” a largely dim song with an aggressively plastic sound, there’s a twinkle in her voice toward the end when she exhales, “Karma’s a relaxing thought/Aren’t you envious that for you it’s not?” On the woozy “Question…?” she’s equally tart: “What’s that that I heard, that you’re still with her?/That’s nice, I’m sure that’s what’s suitable.”But some of the lyrics can be lackluster and bluntly imagistic, with little of the detail that made Swift one of the signature pop songwriters of the 21st century: “Don’t put me in the basement/When I want the penthouse of your heart,” she sings on the metallic and tense “Bejeweled.”“Snow on the Beach,” a collaboration with fellow Great American Songwriter Lana Del Rey, begins with light Christmas music energy and never really ascends. Del Rey excels at a kind of rumbling, oozy stasis — it’s like the ecstasy of being caught in a spider’s web — but Swift’s vocals are a mite too cheery to achieve the same effect.Perversely, though, much of the rest of “Midnights,” which was produced by Swift with her regular collaborator Jack Antonoff, constrains her voice. Throughout the album, on songs like “You’re On Your Own, Kid” and “Maroon,” Swift’s vocals are stacked together to the point of suffocation. Only on “Sweet Nothing,” the romantic playground lullaby Swift wrote with her longtime romantic partner, Joe Alwyn (the actor who uses the pen name William Bowery), does she approach her signature wide-eyed vulnerability.A couple of songs point a way out of the fog. The fleet, breezy and lightly damp “Lavender Haze” includes some sweet singing, though it feels overly reminiscent of the thumping digital folk of Maggie Rogers’s “Alaska.”And the album’s high point is “Vigilante ____,” a slinky, moody electro-cabaret exhale about an antagonist that teems with narrative verve: “Draw the cat eye sharp enough to kill a man/You did some bad things but I’m the worst of them.” Here, Swift is leaning into the character version of herself — it’s funny, wry, slightly perturbing. Swift at her self-referential apex.Apart from her pandemic pivot to the bucolic, Swift has been devoting time to rerecordings of her old albums, an offshoot of the ownership battles spurred by the sale of her old masters. Such energy might be good for business, but bad for art. Perhaps similarly, “Midnights” by and large feels like a fuzzy Xerox of old accomplishments. (At 3 a.m. Friday, Swift released seven bonus tracks, which are comparatively chaotic. Of the new songs, only “Glitch” and “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” aren’t subtractive.)There is, perhaps, a slightly more cynical read to the sonic choices on “Midnights”: Swift hasn’t toured since 2018, after “Reputation.” The songs from “Lover” have never seen a big stage (and the songs from “Folklore” and “Evermore” largely weren’t designed for one). “Midnights” feels like a sonic place holder, with stadiums in mind.Which all prompts the question of where Swift might go as a midcareer pop star, if she were to pivot once more. Many of the other avenues currently open don’t apply to her — the emotionally icy nu-disco of Dua Lipa; a vocal and cultural flexibility that would allow her to freely collaborate with Latin or K-pop stars. There are songs on “Midnights” — “Midnight Rain,” “Lavender Haze” — that suggest an awareness of the ways Drake and the Weeknd have deployed overcast mood in their vocal and musical production, though she rarely commits. (There are also some not wholly cogent pitch-shifted vocals.) And she rather steadfastly has resisted a return to country, or pop-country, or country-pop.But a template for such a perspective-twisting album already exists: It’s called “Reputation,” and Swift released it in 2017. It was, at the time, somewhat derided, and deeply wrongly at that. Rarely has Swift sounded so amused, so aggrieved, so willing to reckon with the chasm between her self-perception and the perception of everyone else. It was a rowdy, sticky and unrelentingly clever album in which Swift took on herself, and also the world. “Taylor Swift” — bring her back.Taylor Swift“Midnights”(Republic) More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Taylor Swift Releases ‘Midnights,’ Her 10th Studio Album

      by

      The singer-songwriter’s 10th studio album is a return to the pop pipeline, with production from her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff.The Easter eggs have been thoroughly examined for clues. The marbled vinyl has been pressed and sorted into collectible variants. The fan hashtags are cued up.It is time for a new Taylor Swift album.“Midnights,” Swift’s 10th studio LP, was released at midnight on Friday, the latest chapter in what has been an extraordinarily productive couple of years for Swift, who at 32 remains one of the most potent creative forces in music. She announced the 13-track “Midnights” two months ago, calling it “the story of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life,” and “a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams.” (True Swifties — or, really, anybody who has paid moderate attention to Swift’s public presentation over the years — knows her fascination with the number 13.)It is Swift’s fifth album in just over two years, following her quarantine-era, indie-folk-style “Folklore” and “Evermore,” and then “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” and “Red (Taylor’s Version),” the first two rerecordings of her early albums, a project she undertook after her former record label was sold without her participation. “Folklore” won album of the year at the Grammys in 2021.In a sense, “Midnights” is Swift’s return to the pop pipeline after her digressions of the past couple of years. Many of the lyrics, as she suggested, resemble late-night ruminations, pondering life’s pressures, aging, the meaning of love. On the third track, “Anti-Hero,” she sings:I have this thing where I get older but just never wiserMidnights become my afternoonsWhen my depression works the graveyard shiftAll of the people I’ve ghosted stand there in the roomAccording to the album’s credits, most of the songs were written and recorded with her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff, and much of it was recorded at Antonoff’s home studio in Brooklyn and at Electric Lady Studios, the Greenwich Village warren founded by Jimi Hendrix.Lana Del Rey is a featured guest, singing on the track “Snow on the Beach.” Some other intriguing names also pop up in the credits. The actress Zoë Kravitz, who has been making an album with Antonoff, is listed as one of the six songwriters of the first track, “Lavender Haze,” alongside Swift, Antonoff, Mark Anthony Spears (a.k.a. the producer Sounwave), Jahaan Sweet and Sam Dew. Swift’s friendship with Kravitz, as fans know, is close enough that she once acted as an uncredited assistant on a pandemic-era remote photo shoot of Kravitz for The New York Times Magazine.Another song, “Sweet Nothing,” was written by Swift with one William Bowery — an unfamiliar name that popped up in the credits to “Folklore,” which Swift later acknowledged was a pseudonym for the actor Joe Alwyn, her boyfriend. “They said the end is coming/Everyone’s up to something,” she sings on the track. “I find myself running home to your sweet nothings.”“Midnights” stands a very good chance of being one of the year’s biggest sellers. Swift’s marketing this time has involved a series of kitschy videos on TikTok that revealed song titles, one at time, taken from Ping-Pong balls in a basket, as if on a decades-old local TV spot. Swift even displayed her release-week plan on Instagram, with items laid out on a daily calendar: a “special very chaotic surprise” on Friday at 3 a.m. Eastern time; the release of the music video for “Anti-Hero” at 8 a.m.; “The Tonight Show” on Monday.The surprise turned out to be an expanded version of the album, titled “Midnights (3am Edition),” with seven additional songs, some featuring writing and production from Swift’s “Folklore” and “Evermore” collaborator Aaron Dessner. On social media, Swift called the extra material “other songs we wrote on our journey,” and described the standard 13-track version of “Midnights” as “a complete concept album.”The video for “Anti-Hero,” written and directed by Swift, is a comic portrayal of Swift’s worries about her public image overshadowing her private life, set as a campy retro horror movie, complete with a tan rotary phone with the line cut. The clip includes a skit dramatizing the song’s lines about a dream in which Swift’s family reads her will after “my daughter-in-law kills me for the money.”Beside the coffin we see a portrait of gray-haired Swift cradling a bunch of cats, while her heirs Preston (the stand-up Mike Birbiglia), Kimber (Mary Elizabeth Ellis from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”) and Chad (the comedian John Early) argue over whether the line “to my children I leave 13 cents” contains a secret encoded message that means something else. Then they read: “P.S. There’s no secret encoded message that means something else.”Swift announced the cast of actors for other videos from the album, including Laura Dern, Laith Ashley, Dita Von Teese, Pat McGrath, Antonoff and the three members of the band Haim.An important factor in the sales and chart prospects for “Midnights” may be Swift’s embrace of physical music formats like CDs and vinyl LPs, which, because of the way Billboard crunches data about how music is consumed, can have a major impact on chart positions. Swift is releasing four standard versions of “Midnights” on vinyl, each with its own disc color and cover art; they also correspond to four variant CD versions. “Collect all 4 editions!” Swift’s website says. Target, which has had a long relationship with Swift, has its own exclusive LP version (on “lavender” vinyl) as well as a CD with three exclusive tracks.The most ingenious or shameless part — take your pick — of Swift’s vinyl strategy is what she has done with the back covers. When turned around and placed on a grid, the four editions display 12 numbers that, when arranged properly, form the hours of a clock. “It could help you tell time,” Swift said, perfectly deadpan, in a recent Instagram video.And not just that. For $49, Swift’s website sells the actual clock — a kit including four walnut wood shelves to hold the LP jackets, “with brass metal clock center piece,” the description reads, “with 2 wooden hands that each have ‘Taylor Swift’ printed in brass ink.”The site adds: “While supplies last.” More

    • 113 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      How the Philharmonic’s New Home Sounds, From Any Seat

      by

      After a major renovation, the acoustics throughout David Geffen Hall are strikingly consistent — but complicated.Over the past week at David Geffen Hall, the New York Philharmonic’s overhauled home, I’ve listened from the new block of seating behind the orchestra — so close to the players that I could almost read the percussionist’s music. I’ve sat in the last row of the third tier, as far from the stage as you can get. And I’ve been in the critic’s usual spot on the main level.It was striking how acoustically similar these three experiences were. The new Geffen seems to have achieved a rare distinction in its engineering for sound: consistency. No seat in the hall — at least the vastly different ones I’ve had in numerous visits so far — is appreciably better or worse than any other.Last week, after a handful of opening events, I wrote that the hall — an acoustical and aesthetic problem since its opening in 1962 — had a mightily improved sound. And I maintain that things have gotten better. But as I’ve spent more time there, and as the Philharmonic has audibly begun to settle into it, my feelings about that “mightily” have become more complicated.Simply being in the new Geffen is more immediate and intimate than it was before this long-awaited, long-delayed transformation. The blond-wood hall now has 2,200 seats, 500 fewer than it did, and the stage has been pulled forward into the auditorium to allow for seating to be wrapped around it. The general impact on what used to be an enormous, dreary barn is a flood of warmth, even conviviality. Substantially expanded public spaces (and more bathroom stalls) haven’t hurt.This all has an effect on our perception of the acoustics, but with each successive concert I’ve begun to detect some subtle gaps between the more inviting visuals and the elusive sound of the hall.The Reopening of David Geffen HallThe New York Philharmonic’s notoriously jinxed auditorium at Lincoln Center has undergone a $550 million renovation.Reborn, Again: The renovation of the star-crossed hall aims to break its acoustic curse — and add a dash of glamour.‘Unfinished Business’: After a 17-year run in Los Angeles, Deborah Borda returned to the New York Philharmonic, which she led in the 1990s, to help usher it into its new home.San Juan Hill: Etienne Charles’s composition for the reopening of the hall honors the Afro-diasporic musical heritage of the neighborhood razed to build Lincoln Center.Expert Assessment: Right after the reopening our critic wrote that the renovation had a mightily improved sound. In the weeks that followed his feelings became more complicated.Geffen sounds clear, clean and straightforward; there’s nothing distorted or echoing, no weird balances or flabby resonances. But that cleanness can sometimes seem like coolness: an objective, almost clinical feeling, matched by the hard white light glaring on the orchestra. (Compare it with Carnegie Hall, in every respect a golden bubble bath.)This quality can make soft passages beautifully lucid at Geffen, and solos come off with precision, as if the hall were pointing an index finger at the players, one by one. In the first subscription program in the new space — a brassy set of pieces that made Christopher Martin, the principal trumpet, the performances’ assured star — the no-fat sound brought the audience to its feet at the superloud ending of Respighi’s “Pines of Rome.” The lack of sonic plumpness also helps make Geffen superb with amplification.But the Philharmonic’s second subscription program — led on Thursday by its music director, Jaap van Zweden — was mellower and more strings focused, featuring Debussy’s silky “Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune”; an American premiere by Caroline Shaw, featuring her vocal octet Roomful of Teeth; and Florence Price’s hearty, recently rediscovered Fourth Symphony.Here a certain lack of warmth and richness of blend — perhaps partly the Philharmonic’s sometimes blunt playing, and partly the room — detracted more from the music. Unlike in the first program, when the strings and woodwinds were occasionally swamped at full volume and density, they were plainly audible on Thursday. But those instruments — the violins and violas, for example, especially higher in their ranges — didn’t have ideal presence and color. Unlike in some halls, their sound doesn’t bloom even up in the third tier.So the Debussy was taut, but not sensual. Price’s Fourth was rhythmically agile and spirited, but lacked the robustness, the lushness — the sense of sonic, and thus spiritual, abundance — that the Philadelphia Orchestra brought to her First Symphony at Carnegie in February.At least these opening programs have been a fresh vision of what a major orchestra can and should play, with women and composers of color, past and present, looming just as large — if not more so — than the grand old masters. Even if that chestnut “Pines of Rome” provided the rousing finale of the first program, living composers dominated it. Marcos Balter’s new “Oyá” paired the Philharmonic with live-produced electronics (by Levy Lorenzo) and flashing lights (by Nicholas Houfek) to turn the hall into a heaving, pounding belly of a beast, darkly — and, over 15 minutes, tediously — evoking the Yoruba goddess of storms, death and rebirth.The Philharmonic’s first concerts this season have been dominated by living composers, including Caroline Shaw, front left, who performed with her ensemble Roomful of Teeth on Thursday.Chris LeeAnd the orchestra brought back Tania León’s “Stride,” which premiered at Geffen in 2020 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize last year. Progressing with somber uncertainty but unfailing nobility, it’s a strong piece. And it’s good general practice to revive successful contemporary works, gradually folding them into the repertory rather than just generating premiere after premiere.Best was the first Philharmonic performances of an underrated 2003 masterpiece by John Adams, “My Father Knew Charles Ives,” which weaves Ivesian controlled chaos into autobiographical musical depictions of sublime mountain vistas on both the East and West coasts, along with tender suggestions of the scratchy radio foxtrots Adams’s parents might have heard as they were courting.On this week’s program, the Debussy standard is just 10 minutes long; the remaining hour of music consists of Shaw’s premiere and the Price symphony, which was written some 80 years ago but had its belated first performances in 2018.The Philharmonic hasn’t played Price’s music on a subscription program before. While her Fourth Symphony lacks the stirring hymn of her First’s slow movement and the inspired slyness of the Juba dance in her Third, it does have a sprawling yet stylishly developing first movement, a sensitive Andante, its own swinging Juba and a feisty finale. Shaw’s “Microfictions,” Vol. 3, is — like her contemporary classic “Partita for Eight Voices” — a combination of the angelic and quotidian, of singing, speech, breathing, pitch bending and wailing, though the piece lacks the inspired variety of “Partita.” The orchestral accompaniment is both playful, with lots of drizzly irregular pizzicato, and ominous.After the concert on Thursday, Roomful of Teeth moved to the hall’s new Sidewalk Studio — visible from the street at the corner of 65th and Broadway — for the first Nightcap program of the season: a set of six pieces, including several world and New York premieres, that showed off the group’s talent for dreamy floating harmonies and uncanny, even otherworldly, effects.The Sidewalk Studio is also being used for daytime chamber music performances under the rubric NY Phil @ Noon; last week, a shaky rendition of Mozart’s “Kegelstatt” Trio was outweighed by a polished, graceful take on Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet. The small space’s acoustics are lively, regardless of whether the music is amplified.Geffen still prompts some raised eyebrows when it comes to tastefulness. A David Smith sculpture has been shoved into a corner of the lobby and blocked by protective wire. Clearly wanting to echo the “sputnik” chandeliers that elegantly rise as the lights dim before performances at the Metropolitan Opera, the hall’s designers devised “fireflies”: flickering polyhedrons that do a tacky little up-and-down show before the orchestra tunes. The public spaces have grown in size, but are also now strewn awkwardly with furniture and stanchions.But some questionable décor hasn’t kept the space from being inviting. With a few minutes left until the concert on Thursday, laptops had been opened; wine was being sipped; newspapers were being read; friends were sitting, chatting, laughing. It was bustling but not even close to unpleasantly packed, like in the old days. It was a space that was, in the best sense, being used. More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Shakira and Ozuna’s ‘Monotonía,’ and 7 More New Songs

      by

      Hear tracks by Caroline Polachek, John Cale featuring Weyes Blood, iLe 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.Shakira and Ozuna, ‘Monotonía’Here’s a rarity: a no-fault breakup song. Well, not entirely. “It wasn’t your fault, nor was it mine,” Shakira offers at the start. “It was the fault of the monotony.” Shakira, from Colombia, meets Ozuna, who was born in Puerto Rico to a Dominican father and a Puerto Rican mother, closer to his musical territory: a Dominican bachata, with staccato guitar arpeggios and flurries of bongos. As they trade verses, accusations emerge: he was a narcissist, she was distant, what was incredible turned routine. Bachata puts heartbreak at a distance by placing it within a neatly syncopated grid; both Shakira and Ozuna sing like they’ll get over it. JON PARELESCaroline Polachek, ‘Sunset’Flamenco might seem an odd sound for the avant-garde pop star Caroline Polachek to embrace — Rosalía’s influence, perhaps? — but her ever-gleaming vocals dance nimbly enough across “Sunset” to make the whole thing work. “These days I wear my body like an uninvited guest,” she sings on the verse, her fleet-footed verbosity conveying a sense of itchy anxiety. But that’s all resolved by the chorus, when Polachek’s vocal pacing suddenly slows, comforted by a romantic embrace: “He said, no regrets, ’cause you’re my sunset.” LINDSAY ZOLADZJohn Cale featuring Weyes Blood, ‘Story of Blood’The legendary John Cale — whose crucial contributions to the development of the Velvet Underground’s sound Todd Haynes refreshingly reasserted last year in his documentary about the band — has long been a generous collaborator with younger artists at this later stage in his career. His forthcoming album “Mercy,” his first collection of new songs in a decade, continues that pattern, featuring contributions from Animal Collective, Sylvan Esso and Laurel Halo. The haunting “Story of Blood,” the first offering from “Mercy,” features bewitching vocals from the indie luminary Natalie Mering, who records as Weyes Blood. Across a patiently paced seven-minute reverie of synth chords and skittish electronic beats, their voices entwine balletically, as if locked in some kind of otherworldly dance. ZOLADZNxWorries featuring H.E.R., ‘Where I Go’Anderson .Paak brings the plush nostalgia of Silk Sonic, his Grammy-winning alliance with Bruno Mars, back to an earlier collaboration: Nxworries, his project with the producer Knxledge, which released an album in 2016. In “Where I Go,” Anderson .Paak professes love, generosity and regrets for past affairs. But H.E.R. sings about lingering suspicions and, in the video, finds solid evidence; neither his blandishments nor the purr of an electric sitar can smooth things over. PARELESKelela, ‘Happy Ending’After a long absence, Kelela wafted back into public earshot with the abstract “Washed Away.” Now, she embraces the beat with telling ambivalence in “Happy Ending.” A double time breakbeat churns far below a vocal that starts out barely paying attention to the underlying propulsion. But as Kelela finds herself in a club and spots her ex, she latches onto the beat: “I won’t chase you but it’s not over,” she sings. “If you don’t run away, could be a happy ending after all.” Then they’re dancing together, and intertwined in a kiss. But the beat falls away, and the song leaves the situation entirely in suspense. PARELESiLe, ‘(Escapándome) de Mí’Romance is often toxic in the songs on “Nacarile,” the new album by the Puerto Rican songwriter iLe. “Everything beautiful about you scares me,” she sings in “(Escapándome) de Mí” (“Escaping Myself”). “It scares me because I like it.” As the track builds around her, from a lone plucked guitar to an electronic citadel, she recognizes her own vulnerability, ponders it and takes the leap anyway. PARELESOkay Kaya, ‘Inside of a Plum’The serene drift of “Inside of a Plum,” from Norwegian American indie artist Okay Kaya’s forthcoming album “SAP,” was inspired by doctor-administered ketamine therapy, which is sometimes used to treat depression. That might sound heavy, but Kaya Wilkins’s characteristically wry approach gives the song an alluring weightlessness and even a sense of humor. There’s an amusing mundanity to the way she describes the procedure (“in a building. in an office, in a chair under a weighted blanket”) and then a vivid psychedelia once her trip begins. Amid floating strings, Wilkins murmurs the song’s indelibly descriptive hook: “Now I’m scuba diving in space.” ZOLADZHagop Tchaparian, ‘Right to Riot’Hagop Tchaparian is a British-Armenian musician whose tastes have led him from playing guitar in the grungy 1990s band Symposium to the electronic music on his new album, “Bolts.” Through the years, Tchaparian has also gathered recordings of performances — live and in video clips — of Armenian and Middle Eastern music and gatherings. The first sounds that leap out of “Right to Riot” are traditional: an aggressive six-beat drum pattern and the nasal, biting snarl of what Armenians call the zurna, a double-reed instrument used under various names across the Balkans, the Middle East, northern Africa and western Asia. Programmed beats, synthesizer swoops, bass drones and layers of percussion only make the track bristle more intensely. PARELES More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      How to Spend a Perfect Weekend in Santa Cruz

      by

      What once felt like a quirky California pit stop is now a popular getaway destination. Here’s a guide to the city’s beaches, bars, bookshops and beyond.Anyone who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1990s will almost certainly have the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk commercials stamped on their subconscious, alongside their best friend’s landline. But Santa Cruz is much more than a West Coast Coney Island. (The Boardwalk, incidentally, is California’s oldest amusement park and is a fine place to ride a historic roller coaster with an ocean view.)Santa Cruz, a city of some 60,000, defies easy categorization. A college town (go Banana Slugs!) and a world class surfing destination, it’s within commuting distance of Silicon Valley. And yet somehow it still manages to feel hidden away.Hugging the northern lip of the scallop shell-shaped Monterey Bay, travelers can reach Santa Cruz via a dreamy coastal drive on California’s Highway 1, or rounding vertiginous curves through the Redwood forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Technically the beginning of the Central Coast, Santa Cruz has been influenced by Silicon Valley without actually becoming a part of it; it is its own county and decidedly has its own vibe. This is a place where, daily and unironically, you’ll see a vintage Volkswagen Vanagon parked next to a Tesla, with surfboards extending from both.As a former Bay Area kid, I’ve been coming to Santa Cruz for as long as I can remember: Memories of foggy summer days ambling alone the Boardwalk with a high-school best friend meld with images of late-night veggie burgers and shakes after backpacking trips in Big Sur. But what once felt like a quirky, crunchy pit stop is now one of my favorite weekend destinations from my home in San Francisco — for unbeatable outdoor adventures, both on land and in the water, a standout live music scene, and excellent food and drink options that can stand up to its higher profile neighbors to the north and south.A group of surfers prepares to enter the water.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesSurf’s upReportedly one of the first places surfed on the mainland, Santa Cruz has spawned more than a few world-class professional surfers and boasts more than 10 surf breaks, with spots for all levels. Popular go-tos include Cowell’s, a cruisey, accessible break best for beginners and beloved by longboarders; Steamer Lane, a famous spot in both Santa Cruz and California at large; and Pleasure Point, a beloved local wave on the city’s sleepy eastern side.The Santa Cruz surf scene is somewhat notorious for a strong locals-only attitude, but tensions can be avoided by respecting the rules, which are helpfully inscribed on signage mounted atop the cliffs above Steamers and Pleasure Point — alongside monuments to fallen surfer comrades. (In brief: Respect the lineup and don’t be a kook.)A surfer rides a wave at Steamer Lane, a popular surfing location.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesA surfer walks past a sign explaining the rules of the waves at Pleasure Point.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesTake the opportunity to learn from local experts at outfits like Surf School Santa Cruz, which offers private surf instruction and group lessons (advanced booking is recommended). If you’re ready to shred on your own and are in need of a board, surf shops, many with rental options, abound, from Cowell’s Surf Shop, right off the water, to the Traveler Surf Club, on the Eastside. The Midtown Surf Shop + Coffee Bar is another worthwhile destination for your gear needs; in addition to boards, wet suits, leashes and fins, they’ve got a nice selection of clothing, gifts, a surfboard shaper (available to rent for $15 per hour) and a cafe serving Verve coffee.Inside Cowell’s Surf Shop, which sits right off the water.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesIf you’re more comfortable as a spectator, or looking for inspiration, then check out the O’Neill Coldwater Classic, a World Surf League qualifying competition that’s returning to Steamer Lane Nov. 15-19 for the first time since 2015.While surfing may be king in Santa Cruz, there are other great ways to get in the water, including stand-up paddleboarding, kayaking and swimming, plus ample beaches for beach volleyball, bonfires and, naturally, lounging. And don’t forget about the many opportunities for land-based adventures: Santa Cruz is a famous hub for mountain biking, with trails snaking along the coast and through the surrounding mountains, and is a hiking and camping destination, too, particularly in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park and Big Basin Redwoods State Park, which is currently open for limited day-use access following 2020’s C.Z.U. Lightning Complex fires.The Rio Theater, one of the city’s many music venues.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesLive musicTempting as it may be to remain in the beautiful wilds of the area, it’s worth a return to civilization to catch a show. Santa Cruz has a wealth of live music venues and draws an impressive mix of indie bands and legacy acts, plus a thriving community of local musicians who often perform at cafes and bars around town. The Rio Theater in Midtown, housed in a converted movie theater, is an intimate venue that draws a range of acts, including Patti Smith, Little Feat and indie legends like Bill Callahan and Built to Spill. Other venues with calendars worth scoping include the Catalyst, which plays host to bands, karaoke nights and DJ events; Moe’s Alley, which has a spacious outdoor patio and food trucks; and the Kuumbwa Jazz Center, a destination for jazz performances and educational programs. Up in the mountains you’ll find the Felton Music Hall, an intimate venue with a solid bar and restaurant attached for pre- and post-show food and drink.Brothel performs at the Catalyst in September.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesWhere to eatAll of this activity is a fine way to work up an appetite, and Santa Cruz more than delivers with delicious options across a range of prices. I’m evangelical about the Point Market, an unassuming shop and cafe out by Pleasure Point that makes my platonic ideal of a breakfast burrito — perfect as pre- or post-surf fuel. (They’ve got a location near Cowell’s now, too, called the Pacific Point Market & Cafe.) Steamer Lane Supply, a low-key stand on the cliffs above Steamers, has a flavor-forward menu of quesadillas, breakfast tacos and bowls bursting with fresh, local ingredients. For a sit-down brunch, Harbor Cafe is unbeatable, with its hangover-busting breakfast platters and hair-of-the-dog cocktails. In Soquel, a small town northeast of Santa Cruz, Pretty Good Advice, a project from chef Matt McNamara (formerly of San Francisco’s Michelin-starred Sons & Daughters), is slinging on-point breakfast sandwiches and burgers; the menu is entirely vegetarian and features produce sourced from Mr. McNamara’s farm in the nearby mountains.The breakfast burrito at the Point Market is perfect as pre- or post-surf fuel.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesInside Steamer Lane Supply, a low-key stand on the cliffs above Steamers.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesFried chicken at Bantam.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesElsewhere in Soquel you’ll find Home, a charming dinner option with fresh pasta and an excellent in-house charcuterie program. Other favorites include Bantam, a wood-fired pizza destination on Santa Cruz’s bustling Westside (the soppressata pie and fried chicken are must-orders); Copal, for outstanding mole and an encyclopedic mezcal selection; and Alderwood, where you’ll find a selection of high-end cuts of beef alongside local produce. While it’s tempting to splurge on a bone-in rib-eye, Alderwood is also an excellent place to grab seats at the bar for their gloriously messy burger and a cocktail. (The mezcal-based Director’s Cut is outstanding.) During my last visit, I ended up in conversation — and sharing bites of the restaurant’s signature maitake mushrooms, also known as also known as hen-of-the-woods, with my neighbors. (Oswald is another local favorite for a burger-cocktail combination.)Dan Satterthwaite, the co-founder and brewmaster of New Bohemia Brewing Co., showcases three of his brews: Festbier, the Hook and the Fizz.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesWhere to drinkWine has long been a fixture in Santa Cruz. (The Santa Cruz Mountains is a dedicated AVA, or American Viticultural Area.) More recently, though, spots dedicated to natural wine — wines made with minimal interventions and no added yeast — have been gaining a foothold. Bad Animal, a rare and used bookstore and natural wine bar, has wines from California and beyond, along with books ranging from $4 paperbacks to $40,000 antiquarian volumes. Dedicated to “the wild side of the human animal,” the shop opened in 2019 and plays host to a rotating roster of chefs-in-residence. (The most recent, Hanloh Thai Food, started this month.) Apero Club, a warm, funky wine bar and shop on the Westside, opened in August 2020 and hosts food pop-ups and, often, raucous dance parties with tunes spun on vinyl.Bad Animal, a rare and used bookstore and natural wine bar, has wines from California and beyond.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesSanta Cruz’s craft beer scene is also outstanding, from Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing, an all-organic brewery founded in 2005, to New Bohemia Brewing Company, which focuses on European-style brews alongside I.P.A.s. Some of my favorites include Soquel’s Sante Adairius Rustic Ales, a destination for funky sours and farmhouse ales, and Humble Sea Brewing, which, in addition to standout hazy I.P.A.s and co-ferments, has some of the best can art around. For a wider array of beers, check out the Lúpulo Craft Beer House in downtown Santa Cruz for a regularly changing selection of brews and Spanish-style small plates, or Beer Thirty, a sprawling beer garden in Soquel with 30 rotating taps. If you’re with a group of beer enthusiasts, you can sign up for a Brew Cruz, a craft beer tour of the area aboard a vintage VW bus.A customer awaits her drink at Cat & Cloud Coffee.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesYour explorations may lead to a sluggish morning; thankfully, Santa Cruz is also a serious coffee destination. Verve, which has cafes around town (plus around California and in Japan), opened in 2007, focusing on equitable business practices and intentionally sourced coffee beans. Cat & Cloud has four cafes in the area; the sunny Eastside location is a particularly nice place to spend a morning. At 11th Hour Coffee, the excellent coffee is roasted in-house and best enjoyed in their plant-filled cafes both downtown and on the Westside. (Their chai is outstanding, too.)Where to stayThere are ample lodging options in Santa Cruz, including Airbnbs and low-key beach motels. The Dream Inn is the city’s only beachfront accommodation; renovated in 2017 in a retro surfer-kitsch style (the hotel’s Jack O’Neill Restaurant got a refresh in 2019), the hotel has 165 rooms (from $299), all of which have an ocean view. The pool deck overhangs Cowell’s Beach, with stairs leading directly to the sand, making for unparalleled ocean and surfing access. Hearing the waves (and the barks of sea lions) from bed is quite nice, too.For a mountainside retreat that’s still close to downtown Santa Cruz, Chaminade Resort & Spa has 200 rooms (from $359) and is on 300 acres in the Santa Cruz Mountains, with direct access to hiking trails. Also on offer are tennis, pickleball, disc golf and Santa Cruz’s only full-service day spa, plus panoramic views of the Monterey Bay from the hotel’s restaurant — fittingly called The View. The property completed a major renovation in 2020 and completed a new pool area in 2022 that includes two pools, cabanas, a bar and a food truck on weekends.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places list for 2022. More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      A New Taylor Swift LP? Metacritic Crunches the Reviews, as Fans Watch.

      by

      As pop fandoms go to battle on social media wielding data about their favorite stars, Metascores averaging critical opinions have become ammunition, much to the site’s chagrin.For Metacritic, a website that collects and quantifies reviews of music, movies, TV shows and video games, a Taylor Swift album drop is one of the best days of the year.“There’s nothing quite like Taylor Swift,” Marc Doyle, 51, one of the site’s founders, said in an interview last week. “We get a great deal of traffic and user participation, a lot of people sharing it on social media.” In 2020, when Swift released “Folklore,” her eighth studio album, traffic swelled by “roughly a half million page views,” including user review pages, he said.Metacritic, as its name suggests, aggregates entertainment criticism using a principle of meta-analysis, stripping reviews of their qualitative assessments and assigning them a value between 0 and 100. And it has helped turn pop culture into a game of sabermetrics.Its tallies, known as Metascores, started off simply as a consumer guide. But over the past decade, as music superfans have gone to battle on social media wielding data — sales and streaming figures, Billboard chart positions, tour grosses, number of Grammys won — Metascores have increasingly become ammunition. Passionate fan armies keep careful track of the scoreboard, and one of the most fervent is devoted to Swift, who will release her 10th studio album, “Midnights,” on Friday.But who is behind Metacritic, and how does it tabulate its figures?In 1999, Jason Dietz, like Doyle, a graduate from the U.S.C. Gould School of Law, had the idea for a website that applied meta-analysis to a range of media, and asked Doyle to join his effort to build one. (The movie aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes went live that year, but Dietz was unaware of it.) Dietz, the site’s current features editor, had learned how to code HTML, creating websites including one called List of Possible Band Names.In late 1999, Doyle’s sister and her husband contributed the majority of Metacritic’s start-up fund. (Earlier this month, Metacritic and six other sites were acquired by Fandom, a developer of entertainment platforms dedicated to superfans, in a deal estimated at $50 million; Doyle declined to comment on the sale.) Together, they began poring over thousands of print and online reviews, compiling them into an Excel spreadsheet and organizing them according to their own schematics — what would soon become their trademark Metascores.Doyle said the group started making daily visits to publications that run reviews. “Every time they publish a review, you throw it in the system,” he said. “Once you get to four reviews, then you generate the Metascore, which is an average score.” For the games section, the site sends outlets a list of questions “so you can really get to know their scoring philosophy,” he added, a process it has only recently started “for potential movies section partners.”Metacritic went live in January 2001 with a film vertical and a rundown of how its staff calculated Metascores. For letter grades (used by publications like Entertainment Weekly), an A represents 100, while an F corresponds to zero. For reviews that aren’t assigned an alphanumeric value, the site’s staff — Metacritic currently has five full-time employees who work remotely from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas and Portland, Ore. — will assess the tone of the review before assigning a value themselves.Metacritic’s page for Swift’s 2017 album “Reputation,” which divided critics. The website Consequence of Sound recently said it regretted its D+ rating. “We get comments all the time like, ‘This review seems so much better than a 3/10,’ so then I’ll take that comment to another editor, ask what they think, and we’ll give it a reread,” Doyle wrote over email. “Over the years, we’ve also been lobbied to either de-publish a review or drop a publication from our system for a variety of reasons. If it’s not a case of plagiarism or fraud (which usually is self-reported from a member publication), such appeals are generally unsuccessful.”Before they are averaged, the scores are weighted according to the critic’s perceived prestige and volume of reviews. “From the very beginning we’ve believed there are so many critics out there who are so incredible at what they do — why should they be treated exactly the same as a brand-new critic at a regional paper?” Doyle said.But Metacritic declined to explain more about which publications and critics are given priority status. “That’s really the secret sauce,” Doyle said. So, how do they avoid biases? “You just have to trust us,” he added. “We’re a professional outfit.” The site makes money from advertising, licensing Metascores and affiliate revenue.Metacritic’s music section began in March 2001 with a scoreboard of recent album releases. Pulling data from 30 publications — today, that number has expanded to 49 — on launch day, Aimee Mann’s “Bachelor No. 2” ranked highest with a Metascore of 90, while Juliana Hatfield’s “Pony: Total System Failure” landed lowest with a Metascore of 25. (The site has tracked reviews from 131 sites in its history.)For almost a decade, the section didn’t gain much online traction. Attention remained mostly fixed on the site’s games vertical, which has had the “greatest notoriety and impact,” Doyle explained; its metrics have affected game design, marketing strategies, even employee compensation.In an interview, the game designer Chris Avellone said that in 2010, Bethesda, the publisher of the game Fallout: New Vegas, “chose to include a clause in the contract that said if you deliver a title with a Metacritic score above 84, we’ll give you a bonus.” The game missed by one point.Metacritic began playing a larger role in music around the same time. In December 2009, after collating 7,000 reviews, the site released its first top artists of the decade list. Its No. 1 came as a surprise: Spoon, the indie-rock band.Before long, users began posting Metascores on Twitter as empirical proof that an artist had succeeded or failed. “Kanye got 93 on Metacritic, Taylor Swift got 75. Yeezy Forever!” one fan tweeted in 2010.“People used Metascores as an argument settler, a metric to put in each other’s faces,” Doyle said. “That really was not the intention of the site, and we hate to see it used as a sword or shield to go into battle with different pop fandoms.”Critics themselves got caught in the crossfire. In 2016, an anonymous Ariana Grande fan started a petition against Christopher R. Weingarten, a writer who had reviewed Grande’s “Dangerous Woman” for Rolling Stone. In June 2020, a Pitchfork editor was doxxed and threatened after writing what fans perceived as an unjust review of Swift’s “Folklore” that would lower its Metascore.“I’ve heard from critics whose inboxes have been slammed with complaints,” Doyle said, noting that low scores are often equated with bias. “Despite this, we certainly want to encourage critics to tell it like it is.”Swift, who has a particularly active online fan base, has been the spark for other Metacritic dust-ups. The music site Consequence of Sound announced last month that one of its biggest regrets was giving her 2017 album, “Reputation,” a D+ and “screwing up the Metacritic score.”The idea of scoring artists may seem unnecessary or make some critics uncomfortable — Rolling Stone recently abolished its star rankings — but there’s a strong appetite among listeners to have numbers at their fingertips. Perkins Miller, the chief executive of Fandom Inc., compared Metacritic to the N.F.L. — where he previously worked — and its Next Gen stats platform, noting, “There is a greater crossover between sports fans and music fans today.”Among very online pop fans, data capital is tied to social capital. “Metacritic is always brought up on Taylor Swift Twitter,” said PJ Medina, a 21-year-old fan from the Philippines. “If she gets a high score, it means that she’s critically acclaimed. It means that more people will care.” More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Mary McCaslin, Folk Singer Who Lamented the Lost Old West, Dies at 75

      by

      A songwriter in her own right, she was known for renditions of pop and rock songs, “Pinball Wizard” among them, that made them sound like mountain ballads.Mary McCaslin, a pure-voiced folk singer who sang plaintive laments for the fading Old West, reimagined pop and rock classics as mountain ballads and was an innovator of open tunings on the guitar, died on Oct. 2 at her home in Hemet, Calif., southeast of Los Angeles. She was 75.The cause was progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare neurological disease similar to Parkinson’s, said her husband, Greg Arrufat.Ms. McCaslin got her start in the mid-60s at the Troubadour, the fabled West Hollywood music incubator, performing at its Monday Night Hoots, as the club’s open-mic nights were known, often hosted by Michael Nesmith, who later found fame as a TV Monkee.John McEuen, a founder of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and Penny Nichols, who was then his girlfriend, were frequent stage mates.“We thought for a moment we might be the next big something or other trio,” Mr. McEuen said in a phone interview. “It was a lot of fun for no money. Mary was a unique singer who always sounded like someone on an old country record. Like Iris DeMent before Iris DeMent, or Ginny Hawker. She had a really natural mountain voice for someone who grew up in Southern California — an authentic and very traditional Americana sound.”Ms. McCaslin was strait-laced and focused on her music, Mr. McEuen added. “She was unusual, even at that time in the ’60s, and all she cared about was getting the music as right as possible,” he said.She would become a hard-working folk festival and coffee house favorite, if not a household name. On her first album, “Way Out West,” in 1974, she wrote of gamblers, rounders and outlaws and, in the title song, of heartbreak and disillusionment:My family left home when I was a childTo head out West, all open and wildI couldn’t wait to ride the prairie on a ponyBut we passed over the plains and on downInto the great suburban stucco forestThe people there all held my dreams in jestSomehow I grew to spite themWay out WestThe album cover shows a serious-looking young woman, her face framed by a curtain of long hair and bangs in the style of the day. In its review, Rolling Stone noted her “clear, delicately affecting vocals,” and how her “unorthodox guitar tunings create unusual, ethereal melodies of striking beauty.”Ms. McCaslin, who also played banjo and ukulele, was self-taught, and her open tuning — tuning the strings to sound like a specific chord, as Joni Mitchell did — distinguished her guitar playing.“While Joni’s tunings were more jazz-inflected,” said Mitch Greenhill, president of Folklore Productions/Fli Artists, who managed Ms. McCaslin and her first husband, the folk singer Jim Ringer, starting in the mid-70s, “Mary’s went the opposite way. They were more angular, more Celtic sounding. And she always put the tunings on her albums, which aspiring musicians always appreciated.”She recorded her albums mostly on Philo, a small independent New England label. One newspaper called her an “L.A. cowgirl who records in Vermont.” Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote that she was known as “the prairie songstress.”Along with her own songs, Ms. McCaslin sang western standards and pop and rock classics, like the Supremes’ “My World Is Empty Without You” and the Who’s “Pinball Wizard,” transforming that classic power rocker into an Appalachian ballad with her clawhammer-style banjo playing.Her “pure, narrow soprano,” as John Rockwell of The Times described her vocal style, recalled that of Kate Wolf or Nanci Griffith. Her songs have been recorded by Tom Russell, David Bromberg and Ms. Wolf, among others.It was in 1972 that Ms. McCaslin met Mr. Ringer, a gruffly charming, rumpled folk singer 11 years her senior with a honky-tonk style and a colorful biography — from freight hopping to logging to a bit of jail time in his youth — and they began performing and touring together. They were a study in contrasts — her unadorned soprano and demure stage presence and his outlaw persona — and when they recorded an album of duets, they called it “The Bramble and the Rose.” They married in 1978.“The tug between Miss McCaslin’s childhood dream of the Old West and the reality of the New West is what gives her music much of its mythic resonance,” Mr. Holden wrote 1981, when Mr. Ringer and Ms. McCaslin played the Bottom Line in Manhattan. “Her point of view suggests a woman who grew up riding horses under the open sky of the high plains. Even Miss McCaslin’s experiments with Motown songs conjure a plaintive rusticity.”Her version of the Supremes’ hit “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” he said, “transforms the tune from an urban teen-oriented lament into a mountain-flavored folk song of quiet, adult desperation.”In her own songs, Ms. McCaslin rued the increasing urbanization of the American West.“I’ve always been attracted by the desert and the beautiful mesas in Arizona and Utah,” she told Mr. Holden. “I get upset that more and more of the land is being developed. Soon there will be no room to graze cattle for food. It’s funny that so many of the people who are singing about cowboys today probably never sat on a horse.”Ms. McCaslin in a 1992 album cover photo. “It’s funny that so many of the people who are singing about cowboys today probably never sat on a horse,” she said.Stuart Brinin, via FLi ArtistsMary Noel McCaslin was born on Dec. 22, 1946, at a home for unwed mothers in Indianapolis and was adopted by Russell McCaslin, a factory worker, and Lorraine (Taylor) McCaslin, a homemaker. Mary grew up in Redondo Beach, Calif., listening to early rock ’n’ roll, bluegrass and country music; her father often took her to concerts.She counted among her influences the ballads of Marty Robbins, the country and western singer popular at midcentury, and the songs of Petula Clark, the English crooner. She bought her first guitar when was 15 with her babysitting money and performed for the first time at 18 at the Paradox, a club in Orange County.In addition to her husband, Ms. McCaslin is survived by her sister, Rose Brass, and a brother, Eric Mauser. She and Mr. Ringer divorced in 1989.On her 1994 album, “Broken Promises,” Ms. McCaslin writes of heartaches and breakups, her wariness and surprise at a new love (that would be Mr. Arrufat, who worked in music production and had been a friend for years) and, on the song “Someone Who Looks Like Me,” her yearning to know her biological parents:’Cause I would almost give it allTo see my family treeIn my life I’ve never seenSomeone who looks like meIn 2013, she did meet her birth mother, Ooh Wah Nah Chasing Bear, a member of the Kiowa Apache tribe, and her brother, Eric. Ms. Ooh Wah Nah Chasing Bear gave her daughter a Native American necklace, Mr. Arrufat said, and he asked if it might be appropriate to give his wife a Native American name.Ms. Ooh Wah Nah Chasing Bear approved his choice, he said, which was Mary Noel Singing Bear. Mr. Greenhill, her former manager, marveled that Ms. McCaslin, who had made a career singing of Western imagery and themes, turned out to be, as he said, “a true Native American artist.” More

    • 113 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      An Artist Embodies an Approach to Music Without Borders

      by

      Steve Lehman’s varied stylistic language draws from classical and jazz traditions as well as funk and hip-hop.On a recent afternoon at David Geffen Hall, the New York Philharmonic’s violins began to play an ensemble pizzicato pattern underneath a turntable-scratch solo by the artist DJ Logic. I couldn’t help but smile.That gratifying moment hit during jazz trumpeter Etienne Charles’s “San Juan Hill,” which Lincoln Center commissioned for the Philharmonic. It was a musical fusion, executed surprisingly well in a surprising space.But while it may have been unusual for Lincoln Center, it isn’t a shock for New York as a whole. In between Charles’s new piece and the Philharmonic’s 1997 performance of “Skies of America” — a collaboration with the composer-saxophonist Ornette Coleman and his Prime Time ensemble — a broad artistic network has cleared fresh paths for American composers, ones in which varied stylistic languages can draw energy from classical traditions, jazz-influenced improvisation and the beat-work of funk and hip-hop.And beyond large institutions like Lincoln Center, musicians have been making this happen in smaller spaces. To take one example, shortly before the Philharmonic premiere of “San Juan Hill,” Roulette, in Brooklyn, hosted a concert that brought together the saxophonist-composer Steve Lehman and the Orchestre National de Jazz with its artistic director, Frédéric Maurin.The compositions were by Lehman, who played in the ensemble, and Maurin, who conducted. In addition to the 15 acoustic players — members of Lehman’s regular ensembles, like the trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson, and artists of Maurin’s group — both composers also employed another electronic musician, who manned a laptop that was running real-time interactive software developed by Ircam, the French electronic music center founded by Pierre Boulez in the 1970s.Ircam checked the box for cutting-edge classical music. The acoustic improvisers channeled the history of jazz performance. And the head-nodding sounds of experimental hip-hop came into view in the rhythms of the half-dozen scores that Lehman contributed to the concert.Roulette posted the concert on YouTube. And from the outset of Lehman’s music, beginning with “Los Angeles Imaginary,” about 11 minutes into the video, the keyboardist plays a complex ostinato pattern across two different manuals: one acoustic, one electronic. The riff is not an obviously danceable one. But after the percussionist comes in — offering a steady syncopation with the keyboard — the vibe of New York’s late 1990s underground hip-hop rears its head.Next comes the addition of the acoustic bass. But the piece really blooms when Lehman triggers the reeds and brasses — along with a granular, spectral wash of electronic sound that comes from the laptop artist embedded within the orchestra. A saxophone solo by Lehman, 44, adds textures that he’s honed on his alto instrument: slantwise methods that he developed in formal training and time on the New York scene. During his undergraduate years at Wesleyan, he studied with the saxophonists Anthony Braxton and Jackie McLean, while also learning from the avant-garde music of Iannis Xenakis. While working on his Ph.D. in composition at Columbia, he worked with the French spectral composer Tristan Murail and the American experimentalist George Lewis.In a recent interview, Lehman recalled studying with Murail and focusing on the limits of what listeners might grasp, in terms of complexity. Lehman obsessed over questions like: “When does a single note start sounding like chord, or vice versa? Or when does an electronic sound start sounding acoustic? Or when does something sound like it’s in a tempo versus out of tempo?”Lehman added that, ever since that time with Murail, he has always tried to “exploit those transitions to make music that’s meaningful or exciting to listen to.” He’s enjoyed wide-ranging success on that front, writing chamber music for Grossman Ensemble and a larger-scale work for the American Composers Orchestra.The show included real-time interactive software developed by Ircam, the French electronic music center founded by Pierre Boulez in the 1970s.Matt Mehlan, via Roulette IntermediumHe has also collaborated with the composer-performers Tyshawn Sorey and Vijay Iyer, and Lehman’s releases on the Pi Recordings imprint have proven broadly influential in jazz circles. Lehman’s latest album on that label, “Xaybu: The Unseen,” was produced with yet another group that he participates in: the international jazz-rap fusion ensemble Sélébéyone.In addition to Lehman, Sélébéyone includes the soprano saxophonist and composer Maciek Lasserre, the drummer Damion Reid, as well as two M.C.s: HPrizm, known to fans of Antipop Consortium as High Priest, and the Senegalese artist Gaston Bandimic, who raps in the Wolof language. (“Sélébéyone” is the Wolof word for “intersection” — befitting perhaps any Lehman ensemble, but particularly one that involves bilingual rhyming.)“Xaybu: The Unseen,” offers yet another way to hear the contemporary cross pollination of classical, rap and jazz. In Lehman’s work “Liminal,” you can hear the influence of spectral harmony on his electronic production. And toward the end of one verse from HPrizm, — after the rapper mentions “riding on bare rims” — Lehman’s polyrhythms pile up, making a wild ride even bumpier.

      Xaybu: The Unseen by Steve LehmanIn the interview, Lehman said that in his work with Sélébéyone, he often samples some of his classical music. “Any time you hear a harp or anything like that, or some kind of spectral, chamber music chord,” he said, it likely came from a piece like “Ten Threshold Studies,” which he wrote for the American Composers Orchestra.That work, which I heard at Zankel Hall in 2018, is ripe for consideration as Lincoln Center and New York Philharmonic branch out. (Sélébéyone would sound good in the newly renovated David Geffen Hall, too.)But regardless of whether Lehman is invited, his work is, thankfully, being well documented by Roulette, Pi Recordings and more.Whether considering large-ensemble jazz writing or experimental rap or orchestral music, Lehman said, “I’m trying to survey the landscape, and figure out: Where do I fit in? What am I sort of uniquely equipped to contribute? And, in a best-case scenario, kind of add on to these histories.” More