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      Jaimie Branch, Trumpeter Who Crossed Genre Lines, Dies at 39

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      One of the most dynamic trumpet players in contemporary music, she forged a direct emotional, and even spiritual, connection with her listeners.Jaimie Branch, an innovative avant-garde trumpet player and composer whose punk-rock intensity and commitment to experimentation and to dissolving the distinctions between genres invigorated the music scenes of New York and Chicago, died on Aug. 22 at her home in Red Hook, Brooklyn. She was 39.Her death was announced by International Anthem, the Chicago-based label that released albums by her groups Fly or Die and Anteloper. No cause was given.Over the last decade, Ms. Branch emerged as one of the most dynamic trumpet players in contemporary music, coaxing a remarkable range of sounds from her horn. She used electronic effects and toy noisemakers (including a Fisher Price Happy Apple from the 1970s) to further extend her sonic spectrum. She would often play a complicated passage, step back and scream, and then plunge back into playing without missing a beat.“I mean every note that I play,” she told the online music journal Aquarium Drunkard in 2019. “When I’m up there, I’m putting it all out on the table. It’s like high risk, high reward.”Ms. Branch forged an emotional, even spiritual, connection with listeners. Her energy could barely be constrained by the stage, filling a room not just with the sound of her trumpet but also with the force of her presence.Offstage, she was just as magnetic. Known to friends as Breezy, she was a gregarious figure, as averse to formality and affectation as she was to capital letters (she preferred her name and song titles lowercase).Ms. Branch was conservatory-trained, but her stage attire was unconventional for jazz circles: an Adidas track suit, a kimono draped over a “Young Latin & Proud” T-shirt, a baggy Outkast “ATLiens” baseball jersey. Her head was always covered, whether by a hoodie, a jauntily askew baseball cap or a knit toque, and her forearms were festooned with colorful tattoos.“She was the quintessential example of ‘honest music,’” Scott McNiece, International Anthem’s co-founder and director of artists and repertoire, said in an interview. “Music that has the capacity to change people’s lives and change the world, which everyone needs now more than ever.”Ms. Branch composed most of the music with Fly or Die, a quartet whose other members were Chad Taylor on drums, Jason Ajemian on bass and Lester St. Louis on cello (who replaced Tomeka Reid after the group’s first album, called simply “Fly or Die”). She favored improvisation for Anteloper, a dub-influenced duo with the drummer Jason Nazary, both of whom also doubled on synthesizers and other electronic gear.While she regularly performed concerts for cultural programmers like Roulette (where she was a 2020 resident artist) and Arts for Art, Ms. Branch was equally at home creating dissonant synthesizer squiggles on a noise-rock bill at Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens, or playing an impromptu jam session at the San Pedro Inn in Red Hook with her most recent trio, c’est trois, with the bassist Luke Stewart and the drummer Tcheser Holmes.In a 2017 article on women in jazz, the New York Times critic Giovanni Russonello described “Fly or Die” as one of “the most startling debut albums in jazz this year,” adding that “Ms. Branch uses extended technique and blustery abstraction to a dizzying effect.” In DownBeat magazine’s 2020 critics poll, Ms. Branch was voted “rising star” on trumpet.Ms. Branch in action with her group Fly or Die at the Winter Jazzfest in New York in 2018.Jacob Blickenstaff for The New York TimesOn the 2019 album “Fly or Die II: Bird Dogs of Paradise,” she revealed her impressive singing voice on two songs, one of which, “prayer for amerikkka pt. 1 & 2,” recounts the story of a young Central American woman detained after crossing the Southern border. (The song was based on the actual case of an El Salvadoran teenager whom Ms. Branch’s mother had assisted.)Despite the power of her trumpet playing, Jaimie felt very vulnerable, her sister, Kate Branch said in an interview, and she felt even more so when singing, adding, “She really cared about the message.”Jaimie Rebecca Branch was born on June 17, 1983, in Huntington, N.Y., on Long Island. Her father, Kenneth, was a mechanical engineer; her mother, Soledad (Barbour) Branch, known as Sally, is a psychotherapist and social worker. “Jaimie” is spelled the way it is, her sister said, because the girls’ Colombian maternal grandmother couldn’t understand why their mother would call her daughter Jaime, a boy’s name, “so my mom added another ‘i’ so my grandmother could properly pronounce it.”Jaimie started playing piano at age 3 and wrote her first song, “My Dreams End in the Sky,” at 6. A small orchestra at the family’s church in Long Island performed it, and Jaimie sang it and dedicated it to a retiring minister.When she was 9, the family moved to Kenilworth, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, where she began playing trumpet in the school band. After playing extensively at New Trier High School in Winnetka (including a stint in a ska-punk group, the Indecisives), she moved to Boston to attend the New England Conservatory of Music, where she studied jazz performance.After graduation Ms. Branch moved to Chicago, where she became a fixture of the jazz scene. “You could hear her all-encompassing sound just by looking her straight in the eyes,” the trumpeter Rob Mazurek, a frequent Chicago collaborator, said in an email.She left Chicago in 2012 to attend graduate school at Towson University in Baltimore, but departed a few credits short of a master’s degree in jazz performance. She told The Chicago Reader in 2017 that she had begun using heroin in 2008, and she struggled with opioids for years, enrolling in multiple inpatient treatment programs, most recently on Long Island in 2015.Following her time in that program, Ms. Branch moved to Red Hook. She gigged constantly, whether as the leader of her own groups or as a guest in the ensembles of the saxophonist James Brandon Lewis and the vocalist Fay Victor.“She was a true collaborator, and that’s why she was so damn good at playing this music,” said the Brooklyn composer and vocalist Amirtha Kidambi, who began improvising with Ms. Branch soon after she arrived in Brooklyn. “She could listen, give and receive in equal measure with an unparalleled generosity. She had so many extremely close friends who also were collaborators, and because of that she wanted each individual to be really strong and strengthen the community as a whole.”In addition to her sister, Ms. Branch is survived by her mother and two half brothers, Clark and Russell. Her father died in 2017; the first Fly or Die album was dedicated to him.Ms. Branch had recently finished mixing Fly or Die’s third studio album. Ever seeking new sounds, she was also discussing potential projects like dub remixes of Anteloper and exploring her interest in the Chicago electronic dance music genre known as footwork.“A lot of her collaborators were jazz musicians,” said Piotr Orlov, a friend and supporter who wrote the liner notes for the 2021 album “Fly or Die Live,” “but ‘the music’ for her was much broader, always filled with rhythm for moving, improvisation for keeping it interesting or unexpected, and camaraderie. Which is why the connections she made between so-called jazz and contemporary classical, beats and electronic music, rappers and dancers, standards and the hard-core songbook, were completely organic, and always fascinating.”On Wednesday night, as news of Ms. Branch’s death spread, about 75 of her friends and fellow musicians gathered on Valentino Pier in Red Hook, a few blocks from her apartment. As “Fly or Die Live” played through a phone propped up against a small, tinny-sounding megaphone, some in the crowd tapped out beats on drums or on the concrete, others banged tambourines and sleigh bells, and the young saxophonist Zoh Amba played melancholic funereal blasts.From across the Red Hook Channel the distant sound of another trumpet could be heard, most likely from a mariachi band in a waterfront bar, joining the music in a phantom collaboration. More

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      Bad Bunny’s Album Ties ‘Encanto’ for Most Weeks at No. 1 This Year

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      “Un Verano Sin Ti,” a streaming blockbuster, notches its ninth time at the top of Billboard’s chart. Rod Wave’s “Beautiful Mind,” last week’s No. 1, drops to second place.Is Bad Bunny the new Bruno?Bad Bunny, a.k.a. Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, the Puerto Rican superstar who just rocked Yankee Stadium for two nights, has clinched a ninth week at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart for his latest release, “Un Verano Sin Ti,” tying Disney’s “Encanto” soundtrack for the most times at the top this year.“Un Verano Sin Ti” had the equivalent of 105,000 sales in the United States last week, including 144 million streams, according to Luminate, the tracking service that supplies the data for Billboard’s charts. In the 16 weeks since it came out, “Un Verano” has bounced in and out of the top spot but never fallen lower than No. 2. (“Encanto” — the source of “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” the inescapable viral smash of early 2022 — had a near-consecutive run at No. 1, missing it only once.)Although no track from “Un Verano” has gone higher than No. 4 on the Hot 100 singles chart, the album as a whole has been a streaming blockbuster. Songs from it have racked up about 2.9 billion clicks so far in the United States, and the full album has garnered 2.1 million equivalent sales, a composite figure that incorporates popularity on multiple formats, including streams and sales.At the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday night, Bad Bunny was named artist of the year, and the broadcast carried his performance of “Tití Me Preguntó” from Yankee Stadium, where the stage was filled with prop palm trees and the Puerto Rican and Dominican flags.Besides Bad Bunny and “Encanto,” the only title with a longer run at No. 1 in recent years is Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album,” which notched 10 consecutive times at the top in the first part of 2021 and has remained a steady hit. It lands at No. 4 on the latest chart, in its 85th week out.Rod Wave’s “Beautiful Mind,” last week’s top seller, falls to No. 2, while Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” holds at No. 3 and Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House” is No. 5. More

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      Taylor Swift Announces a New Album, ‘Midnights’

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      The LP, described by Swift as “the story of 13 sleepless nights,” is due Oct. 21. It will be her 10th studio album, and her fifth release in just over two years.We already knew that Taylor Swift was a restless creative force. Now we know that she is also an insomniac one.Late Sunday, Swift announced her 10th studio album, “Midnights,” to be released on Oct. 21, which she described on social media as “the story of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life.”“This is a collection of music written in the middle of the night, a journey through terrors and sweet dreams,” she added. “The floors we pace and the demons we face.” An image posted to Instagram, sure to be pored over for clues, shows Swift posed at a table in dim light, resting her head in one hand and holding out the receiver of a landline phone in the other.“Midnights,” which Swift began selling through pre-orders on her website — available on “moonstone blue marble” vinyl and CD, as well as on cassette and download — will be the singer’s fifth album in just over two years. In 2020 she released a pair of LPs recorded in quarantine, “Folklore” and “Evermore.” (“Folklore,” which arrived in July 2020, won the Grammy for album of the year.) And in 2021 came “Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” and “Red (Taylor’s Version),” the first of her planned series of rerecorded simulacra of her old albums — a move, prompted by the sale of Swift’s old record label without her participation, that gave her new control over her recordings.The cover of Swift’s “Midnights.”Fans have been buzzing about a possible new version of “1989,” her pop breakthrough from 2014, especially since a new version of “Bad Blood,” from that album, was used in the soundtrack to “DC League of Super-Pets,” a new animated comedy film.“Midnights” will come too late to qualify for the next Grammy Awards; the eligibility window for the 65th annual ceremony closes on Sept. 30. But, particularly with its robust offerings on physical media, the album has a strong possibility of becoming one of the year’s biggest commercial successes, rivaling releases like Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House” (which had the biggest opening of the year, thanks in part to vinyl sales), Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” and Disney’s “Encanto” soundtrack.Swift’s competition this year has also been notably soft. Despite the arrival of new albums by high-profile artists — Drake, Lizzo, Post Malone, Megan Thee Stallion, even BTS — few have had huge debut weeks or much staying power on the charts; one of the few new releases that has held fast in the Top 5 lately is Beyoncé’s “Renaissance,” which also had the biggest opening for a woman this year. The last artist to sell a million copies in a week was Swift, with “Reputation” in 2017.Swift teased the announcement of “Midnights” late Sunday in an acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards, where “All Too Well: The Short Film” — from her “Red” rerecording project — won three awards, including video of the year. About an hour later, her website began taking orders. More

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      Joey DeFrancesco, Reigning King of the Jazz Organ, Dies at 51

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      A prodigy whose playing had drawn raves since he was a teenager, he helped bring the Hammond B3 back into the jazz lineup.Joey DeFrancesco, who was widely credited with bringing the organ back into vogue in jazz circles in recent decades, has died. He was 51.His wife, Gloria, posted news of his death on Facebook on Friday. She did not say where or when he died or cite the cause.Mr. DeFrancesco had musicianship in his genes: His father, John DeFrancesco, has been playing jazz organ since the 1950s. He was dazzling listeners when he was a teenager.“DeFrancesco — whose infectious, imp-of-the-perverse expressions make him as much fun to watch as listen to — can stride, flatten fifths and string together quotes from Bird, Diz, Monk and Miles with the polished resourcefulness of the eight-year veteran that he is,” Gene Seymour of The Philadelphia Daily News wrote in 1986 after observing the Settlement Jazz Ensemble at the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia, where the young Mr. DeFrancesco was then a student.“And all the while you watch and listen,” Mr. Seymour added, “you find a little voice inside yourself chanting: ‘He’s 15 years old!’”Within two years Mr. DeFrancesco had toured with Miles Davis and opened for Bobby McFerrin and Grover Washington Jr. In 1989, at 17, he played at Duke University with well-known musicians like the trumpeter Clark Terry in a concert that announced the forthcoming Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, which would open soon after.“As Mr. DeFrancesco played Duke Ellington’s ‘Sophisticated Lady,’ the elder musicians beamed and whispered encouragement,” Jonathan Probber wrote of that show in The New York Times. “The distinct impression was that Mr. DeFrancesco was an example of hopes on the way to realization.”Certainly he was on the way to a formidable career, one that included more than 30 recordings as a bandleader, numerous others as a sideman and countless concerts. Along the way he brought the organ back into fashion in jazz.The Hammond B3 organ became a favorite in jazz circles in the 1950s, with Jimmy Smith, who had numerous hit albums on the Blue Note label, leading the way. But in 1975 the Hammond company stopped making the instrument, and the trend of organ-based trios in jazz clubs faded.Mr. DeFrancesco was a multi-instrumentalist; he also played trumpet, saxophone, piano and synthesizer. But he built his career playing an old-school B3.“I love the synthesizers and play all that stuff, but you can’t beat the sound of the B3,” he told The Associated Press in 1991. “The instrument has a very warm tone. It’s got the contrasts. It just has all those emotions in it. It’s got little bits of every instrument in it. It’s like having a whole orchestra at your fingertips.”Mr. DeFrancesco’s first album, “All of Me,” was released in 1989, and dozens more followed, with his musical interests ranging far and wide. He recorded his own original music. A 2004 album was called “Joey DeFrancesco Plays Sinatra His Way.” His “Never Can Say Goodbye” in 2010 reimagined the music of Michael Jackson. And he collaborated on albums with Van Morrison, the guitarist Danny Gatton and others.The bassist Christian McBride had known Mr. DeFrancesco since they were students at the Settlement School.“Joey DeFrancesco was hands down the most creative and influential organist since Jimmy Smith,” he said in a statement. “In terms of taking the organ to the next level and making it popular again for a younger generation, no one did it like Joey.”Mr. Seymour, who decades ago wrote about the teenage Mr. DeFrancesco in Philadelphia and later became a critic at Newsday, remembered Mr. DeFrancesco in a Facebook post on Friday.“His meteoric rise to fame didn’t surprise me at all,” he wrote. “What did, over time, was how deeply and consummately he mastered the jazz organ tradition at all ends of the musical spectrum, from blues and funk to post-bop and avant incantations. He fulfilled the obligations of his calling by never standing still, never being complacent.”Mr. DeFrancesco in performance at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island in 2011.Erik Jacobs for The New York TimesMr. DeFrancesco was born on April 10, 1971, in Springfield, near Philadelphia. He didn’t wait long to pick his career path.“When I was 4, my father brought in this monstrous thing, a B3, and he turned it on,” he told The Boston Herald in 1994. “It has a motor and a generator. I started playing it and the sound just moved me. Being a 4-year-old and making up your mind about what you want to do for the rest of your life — I was very fortunate.”He of course credited his father with being his first influence.“You can’t be better off than having a dad who plays the same instrument that you do,” he said. “The music that I heard from the time I was born was jazz.”Happenstance helped propel his career: As a teenager he was performing on a local television show in Philadelphia when Miles Davis was the featured guest. The veteran jazzman was impressed, and Mr. DeFrancesco ended up touring with him for six months.He released a steady stream of albums, five of which received Grammy Award nominations, including, most recently, “In the Key of the Universe” (2019). On his latest album, “More Music” (2021), which features 10 original compositions, he played six different instruments and threw in some vocals well.A full list of survivors was not immediately available.Mr. DeFrancesco was something of a showman, even when he was a sideman. In 2010, for instance, he played with a trio led by the saxophonist David Sanborn. Mr. Sanborn was the headliner, but, as Nate Chinen wrote in The Times of the trio’s gigs, “It’s often as much Mr. DeFrancesco’s show, and sometimes more so.”If he was more flamboyant than some of his contemporaries, that was deliberate, Mr. DeFrancesco told The Buffalo News in 2004.“I think these new players are too damn serious,” he said. “The joy of it, the fun of it, is something that jazz has lost. I mean, we are entertainers, after all. If you don’t look like you’re having fun onstage, how is anyone in the audience supposed to?” More

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      Sy Johnson, Arranger Who Worked Closely With Mingus, Dies at 92

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      A jazz Renaissance man, he arranged many of the bassist’s later works and also wrote reviews, took photographs and composed his own music.Sy Johnson, a Renaissance jazz master — pianist, composer, journalist, photographer — who made his biggest impact as a frequent arranger, orchestrator and all-around right-hand man for the celebrated bassist Charles Mingus, died on July 26 in Manhattan. He was 92.His wife, Lois Mirviss, said the death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of Covid-19.The jazz critic Gary Giddins called Mr. Johnson “one of those indispensable people you never heard much about,” and few in the jazz world would disagree. He started out in the late 1950s playing piano, first in Los Angeles and then in New York. He soon branched out to arranging, working not just with Mingus but also with a host of musical luminaries including the saxophonist Lee Konitz and the arranger and bandleader Quincy Jones.He also wrote words: He conducted a seminal interview with Miles Davis and contributed record reviews to the short-lived quarterly Jazz magazine in the 1970s. He worked on Broadway and even composed his own musical, based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. And all along, he toted a 35-millimeter Leica camera, crafting spontaneous, intimate portraits of the jazz scene of the 1960s and ’70s. Many of his photographs were collected in a 2014 book, “Jazz: Personal Encounters.”Yet for all that, Mr. Johnson remained just outside the limelight, onstage but in a dark corner.“Gifted as he was, Sy seemed quite content to function as an invisible man making a slew of celebrated musical figures sound better than they might have without him,” Mr. Giddins said in an email.Mr. Johnson’s work with Mingus covered the last decade of the bassist’s life, before he died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in 1979. Mr. Johnson understood how to arrange Mingus’s compositions to fit the big-band formats that he preferred later in his career, without pushing them into a standard big-band sound or losing the lush texture of Mingus’s work.Just as important, Mr. Johnson knew how to navigate around Mingus’s famously exacting, often explosive personality, where other collaborators often feared to tread. Mingus trusted Mr. Johnson to write melodies and organize his sometimes chaotic flow of musical insights into a workable piece of music.Mr. Johnson “often accompanied our family in our home and retreats, regularly providing a photographic chronicle to Mingus’s private moments,” Roberto Ungaro, the president of the Charles Mingus Institute and the son of Mingus’s widow, Sue, said in an email. “In a world of struggle and populated with adversaries, Sy was one of the people Mingus truly trusted.”Their relationship did not end with Mingus’s death. Sue Mingus created a series of bands — the Mingus Big Band, the Mingus Orchestra and Mingus Dynasty — to play his music, and once again Mr. Johnson often provided arrangements.“He knew how to capture on paper exactly what Mingus wanted,” Mr. Giddins said, “and seemed to have stoked his ambition instead of trying to reduce it.”Charles Mingus and his wife, Sue, at their home in Manhattan in 1978, as photographed by Mr. Johnson. In addition to working in music, Mr. Johnson documented the jazz scene of the 1960s and ’70s with his 35-millimeter Leica camera.Sy JohnsonSivert Bertil Johnson Jr. was born on April 15, 1930, in New Haven, Conn. His parents were both immigrants: His father, a homebuilder, came from Sweden, and his mother, Elizabeth (Werning) Johnson, from Lithuania.Along with his wife, he is survived by his sister, Elizabeth Keppel.Young Sy admired jazz long before he mastered it. He later recalled the first time he heard Charlie Parker play, on a recording one of his teenage friends brought home.“At that age I wasn’t capable of analyzing it,” he said in a 2018 interview. “All I knew was that suddenly, the winds had changed.”After high school he joined the Air Force, where his friends included John Williams, who would go on to achieve fame as a composer of film scores. Following his discharge he settled in Los Angeles and studied at the University of California, Los Angeles, with plans to become a lawyer. He studied English and graduated in 1958, but by then he had fallen in with the city’s jazz scene and set his plans for a legal career aside.His first encounter with Mingus was promising. Soon after he arrived in New York, in 1960, the bassist invited him to play with his band at the Showplace, a club in Greenwich Village.Things soured quickly. At one point during a performance, Mingus ordered Mr. Johnson to play “pedal tones, just pedal tones” — sustained low notes — but Mr. Johnson struggled to find the right pattern.Mingus got angry. He threw down his bass, ran to the piano and put his face up to Mr. Johnson’s.“I see these maniacal eyes an inch away,” Mr. Johnson recalled. “And he’s just glaring and making these funny breathing noises.”Mingus hammered four times on the bass end of the piano, then ran back to his instrument and resumed playing, furiously.At other times, though, Mingus seemed to appreciate Mr. Johnson; he once told the audience, “This white boy can play!”Then one evening Mr. Johnson arrived to prepare for a show, only to find the piano closed and the renowned saxophonist and flutist Yusef Lateef standing beside it.“If you were me and had the chance to hire Yusef Lateef or you,” Mingus said by way of apology, “who would you hire?”Mr. Johnson went on to play with other groups and eventually found a career as an arranger with Emil Charlap, a jazz musician who ran an arranging and copying company.One day in 1971 Mingus came to the office, looking for someone to arrange music for an upcoming album. He had someone specific in mind, but that person wasn’t there — so he thrust the sheet music into Mr. Johnson’s hands, apparently not remembering their earlier collaboration.His first arrangements for Mingus were for two pieces on his album “Let My Children Hear Music,” released by Columbia in early 1972: “The Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife Are Some Jiveass Slippers” and “Don’t Be Afraid, the Clown’s Afraid Too.” In his liner notes, Mingus called it “the best album I have ever made.”Mr. Johnson also helped pull off a concert at Philharmonic Hall (now David Geffen Hall) in New York, which was recorded and released that same year as “Mingus and Friends Live in Concert.” Taken together, the two recordings showed that, thanks in part to Mr. Johnson’s arrangements, Mingus had mastered the big-band sound he had been seeking for so long.Mingus would later also record two of Mr. Johnson’s compositions, “Wee” and “For Harry Carney.”Mr. Johnson’s work went beyond his collaboration with Mingus. Before and after the bassist’s death, he worked with a number of leading musicians as an accompanist, arranger and composer. He did the arrangements for two Broadway musicals, “Blues in the Night” (1982) and “Black and Blue” (1989). He also wrote a little-seen musical, “Hobbit, Hobbit,” based on the work of J.R.R. Tolkien.“He was just a master,” Tom Stites, who was Mr. Johnson’s editor at Jazz magazine, said in a phone interview. “He was a master jazz writer. The master photographer. He was just a master of everything he touched.” More

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      Britney Spears and Elton John’s Mash-up, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Margo Price, Julia Jacklin and Michael Kiwanuka.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.Elton John & Britney Spears, ‘Hold Me Closer’By presenting Britney Spears’s first new music since the end of her conservatorship, Elton John adds newsiness to his already canny late-career playbook. As he did last year with Dua Lipa in “Cold Heart,” he has reclaimed hooks from his old songs over a plush disco track, then enlisted a headlining duet partner. “Hold Me Closer” — with choruses from “Tiny Dancer” and verses from “The One” — is produced by Andrew Watt with an echoey, nostalgic haze, floating into earshot and eventually dissolving like a mirage. In between, Spears and John mostly sing in unison, but she grabs just enough melismatic flourishes — and a distinctive “baby” — to make her presence known. JON PARELESRema & Selena Gomez, ‘Calm Down’Exposure to new audiences, or colonialism? Let’s hope the lawyers worked it out. “Calm Down,” by the Nigerian singer Rema, has been an international hit — more than 100 million plays on Spotify — since February. It’s carried by a cunningly syncopated track that uses acoustic guitar and a synthesizer blip alongside Afrobeats drum programming. Now, Selena Gomez has wisely latched on to it, and she coos boasts — “My hips make you cry when I’m moving around you” — to Rema’s own seductions. The rhythm leads; the voices affirm. PARELESMargo Price, ‘Been to the Mountain’Margo Price contains multitudes on her rollicking new single “Been to the Mountain”: “I’ve been a dancer, a saint, an assassin,” she sings with a hard-living swagger atop a chugging guitar riff. Perhaps representing a new sonic chapter for the Nashville singer-songwriter, “Mountain” hews closer to straight-ahead rock than her usual alt-country sound — there’s even a punky freakout in the middle of the song that allows her to show off the more guttural side of her voice. The striking, desert-hued music video finds Price exploring and embodying the many different aspects of her identity during a particularly potent ayahuasca trip. Embracing psychedelia may have allowed Kacey Musgraves to get spacier than ever, but here, Price sees it as an invitation to unleash her wildest side yet. LINDSAY ZOLADZJulia Jacklin, ‘Be Careful With Yourself’The Australian singer-songwriter Julia Jacklin implores a loved one to take care on the sweetly cautious “Be Careful With Yourself,” the latest single from her third album, “Pre Pleasure,” which comes out Friday. In her conversational delivery, Jacklin offers a font of healthy and practical advice: Quit smoking, drive the speed limit and put away some money in case of an emergency because, as she admits, “I’m making plans for my future and I plan on you being in it.” It’s a tender sentiment, but the song crackles with an undercurrent of jangly, distorted guitar and palpable anxiety, as Jacklin frets that a love so pure is doomed to be lost. ZOLADZThe National featuring Bon Iver, ‘Weird Goodbyes’The National and Bon Iver — a.k.a. Justin Vernon — have long been close. Aaron Dessner has worked with both as songwriter, musician and producer. Their overlap is in stately songs with hymnlike chords, and that’s what “Weird Goodbyes” is: Matt Berninger of the National and Vernon sharing harmonies in lyrics about self-doubt. It’s glum and thoughtful and neatly crafted for both; it’s not particularly new, but it is substantial. PARELESMichael Kiwanuka, ‘Beautiful Life’A love song could hardly sound more desperate than “Beautiful Life,” a song Michael Kiwanuka first released in 2021 for the Covid documentary “Convergence: Courage in a Crisis.” With mournful vocals over descending chords, eventually joined by full orchestra and choir Kiwanuka sings about how love “rescued me from a nightmare.” Now he has re-upped the song with a grim video by Phillip Youmans that envisions a game of Russian roulette and makes life seem even more precious. PARELESNoah Cyrus and Benjamin Gibbard, ‘Every Beginning Ends’Here’s an unexpected collaboration that works: Noah Cyrus with, of all people, Benjamin Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie. “Every Beginning Ends” is a bleak folk-rock waltz about lovers growing estranged: “I can’t remember the last time you touched me,” he sings, in his plaintive high tenor, and she answers, “I can’t recall you making the move.” It’s matter-of-factly heartsick. PARELESNosaj Thing featuring Julianna Barwick, ‘Blue Hour’Nosaj Thing — the electronic musician Jason Chung — conjures nothing less than rapture with the multilayered “Blue Hour.” Julianna Barwick sings forgiveness and “flying into bliss” in a track that swathes a brisk, double-time beat in edgeless, reverberating synthesizer chords, her voice answered by the raw tone of a viola, balancing the ethereal and the earthy. PARELESBitchin Bajas, ‘Amorpha’Bitchin Bajas is the jokey name of a serious instrumental trio from Chicago that explores the possibilities of repetition where minimalism, psychedelia, jazz, dub and electronica overlap. “Amorpha” starts with plinking mallet percussion patterns that recall Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians,” but the 10-minute piece soon takes its own dizzying path, with undulating synthesizers, flickers of hyperspeed and slyly shifting meters behind its steady pulse. PARELES More

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      Decades Later, a Composer Revisits the Piano Concerto

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      William Bolcom’s recent work, written for the pianist Igor Levit, is streaming after its premiere earlier this year.It took the composer William Bolcom over 40 years to follow his first piano concerto with a second one.When Bolcom was putting the finishing touches on that first concerto, in 1976, he had already gained fame as part of the era’s ragtime revival. A pianist as well, he interpreted pieces by Scott Joplin and other originators, while also contributing to a new wave of writing for the form, on albums like “Heliotrope Bouquet.”Milestones came after the concerto’s premiere. Bolcom’s prismatic “Twelve New Etudes for Piano” — which contained a crucial dollop of ragging energy — won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1988. That decade, his expansive and astute setting of William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” was a polyglot achievement, full of music that might take stylistic succor from reggae or Tin Pan Alley, from one minute to the next.Even as symphonies and other works for soloist and orchestra kept coming from the Bolcom workshop, no new piano concerto followed — a peculiar development, given his own stature as a keyboardist. But this April, that streak came to a close when Igor Levit and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra gave the world premiere performance of Bolcom’s Piano Concerto No. 2.Don’t bother asking whether the premiere took place in the United States, where major presentations of music by Bolcom, an American, have fallen out of fashion. Instead, this new concerto was presented in Germany, at the Heidelberger Frühling Festival. That organization, which commissioned Bolcom’s new concerto with Levit in mind, thankfully also documented the performance. And recently, it posted the video on YouTube.In a phone interview, Levit described Bolcom as one of “the very essential composers of our time,” and also recounted with delight the way in which this composer, now 84, participated in the rehearsal process: by video conference, from his home in Ann Arbor, Mich. “You can tell that this piece, and writing music — any music — really means the world to him,” Levit said. “He was, in the most beautiful way, childishly happy.”Bolcom, in a joint interview from his home with Joan Morris — his wife and collaborator, who finished some sentences and added cabaret-style jokes — recalled seeing, and enjoying, Levit’s performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 at the Kalamazoo Festival in 2018.“I said,” Bolcom added, “‘Now this is a guy I could write for.’”(He also called the Beethoven “probably my favorite concerto.”)A photograph of Bolcom, left, with Joan Morris, his wife and collaborator, and the pianist Peter Mintun.Erin Kirkland for The New York Times“I’m interested in a dialogue,” he said, describing his ideal relationship between a pianist and an orchestra, “like in a Mozart concerto, in which nobody is expecting the other person to try to win over the other.”Bolcom’s second piano concerto, at a running time of 24 minutes, reflects that balance while synthesizing various musical traditions. In the early going, some tender yet mystic motifs suggest the songful chromaticism of Olivier Messiaen. But before long, in a transition that few composers could handle so successfully, stark pianistic marching leads the orchestra into the punchy environs of percussive Americana.In an accompanying documentary that the festival produced and posted online, Levit says that Bolcom described the concerto to him as “a gentle piece for non-gentle times.” There is a hint, there, of Bolcom’s proclivity for political commentary. He described the finale of his Trio for Horn, Violin and Piano, from 2017, as a “resolute march of resistance” in response to the 2016 presidential election. And as far back as that first piano concerto, written during the post-Watergate bicentennial of American independence, Bolcom wrote that it was one of “one of the bitterest pieces” he’d conceived so far.Bolcom’s new piano concerto synthesizes various musical traditions.Erin Kirkland for The New York TimesBut such steady disillusionment has not staggered Bolcom’s imagination. Whereas his first concerto ends in a parade of riotous, Ives-like quotations — a cynical pileup of putatively patriotic melodic sentiments — the second is less obvious in its moods. Its melancholy, though impossible to miss, is also leavened by some ebullient twists, all of which are well served by Levit and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Elim Chan.This blend of delight and an almost pained, Romantic yearning likewise comes to the fore in another recent recording of Bolcom’s music — by the pianist Marc-André Hamelin, who first recorded “Twelve New Etudes” and has also released an album with the first piano concerto.Hamelin’s new recording, “Bolcom: The Complete Rags,” is — truth in titling! — the only survey of this catalog that manages to sweep up a few stray syncopated pieces the composer has ventured this century. If it lacks just a touch of the rambunctious energy that Bolcom himself brought to rags like “Seabiscuits Rag,” as heard toward the end of “Heliotrope Bouquet,” Hamelin’s interpretations are a marvelous, moving account of this lushly complex music.Bolcom’s ability to move between poles of emotion, in his rags and concertos, is part of the great charm of his music. When I asked him about the surprising appearance of an electric keyboard part in his Symphony No. 3, I described it as sometimes sounding like a parody of midcentury American modernism and at other points as reminiscent of fusion-era Miles Davis. He let out a belly laugh.Morris, left, with Bolcom at their home. She has recorded works of his including his cabaret songs.Erin Kirkland for The New York Times“First of all: What’s not interesting to me is to make it all completely explicable,” he said. “It’s not explicable to me. I mean, I fly by the seat of my pants, musically.” And although he declined to be pinned down on any point of musical reference, he did admit, “Since the beginning, I’ve had love for the theater.”That’s evident not only in his comic operas, such as “Lucrezia,” but also in the wild transitions embedded within his instrumental works. The new piano concerto, too, manages to surprise even as it is not interested merely in shock value.For Levit, the concerto has “a great mastery of writing and level of seriousness and dedication to every little detail.” But for all that refinement, Levit said, it also shares a key trait with music of American artists like Esperanza Spalding, Fred Hersch and Frederic Rzewski — all of whom Levit cited as carrying a form of the colloquial spirt that is also present in Bolcom’s music.“They never lost the connection to the people who would listen to the music,” Levit said. “This wire to the audience, the wire to the dimension in the hall, is really something which I find deeply inspiring.” More

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      Baryshnikov Arts Center Chooses Dance Veteran as Leader

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      Sonja Kostich, a cultural administrator and dancer, will lead the group as it works to expand its audience amid the pandemic.The pandemic brought a series of changes to the Baryshnikov Arts Center in Manhattan, forcing it to cancel two years of live performances and find new ways to connect with the public, including starting a streaming platform.Now, as it looks to its next chapter, the center announced Friday it had chosen a new executive director: Sonja Kostich, a veteran arts administrator and dancer. She succeeds Cora Cahan, a dynamic figure in arts administration who has held the job since in 2019.Kostich, who now serves as chief executive and artistic officer of Kaatsbaan, a cultural park in Tivoli, N.Y., said in an interview that she would focus on expanding audiences and attracting a wider variety of artists to the group’s residencies and other programs. She is expected to start in October.“It should be an art center for everyone,” Kostich, 50, said. “I would love to see it become a place that everybody wants to be a part of, whether or not you’re a die-hard dance fan or someone who works in a completely different field.”The center, with an annual operating budget of $3.5 million and more than a dozen staff members, was founded in 2005 by Mikhail Baryshnikov, the ballet star whose defection from the Soviet Union in 1974 stunned the dance world. He praised the choice of Kostich, saying she had the expertise to lead the center through the pandemic and beyond.“I am honored that she will bring her talents to B.A.C. and am confident that her creative vision, financial savvy and love of the arts is precisely what B.A.C. needs to head into the future,” he said in a statement.The center, which presents dance, music and other programming, resumed live performances only in March, later than many other performing arts groups, as it awaited a long-planned replacement of its heating, ventilation and cooling systems.In 2020, when the coronavirus forced cultural institutions to suspend live performance, the center began a commissioning program focused on digital works as a way of sustaining the organization and encouraging artists to continue creating during the pandemic.The fall season begins in October with a series of salon concerts. Among the performers are Owls, a string quartet, and the Westerlies, a brass quartet. More