Music

BERKELEY, Calif. — “I have to apologize,” the composer John Adams said as he approached his car. “The front seat was torn up by a bear.”Patches of the passenger seat were slashed open, revealing the stuffing inside. Bears aren’t a hazard in the hilly neighborhoods of “the People’s Republic of Berkeley,” as Adams wryly referred to his town, but they are in the Sierra Nevada, where he sometimes retreats to work at his cabin.One night, while Adams was in the mountains with his dog, Amos, beer exploded in the car’s trunk because of the altitude, and a bear wreaked havoc trying to get a taste. “It’s probably a problem that Stravinsky didn’t have,” he said.Adams and Stravinsky might not have that in common, but they share much else: a recognizable yet constantly evolving musical language; a body of work across a wide breadth of genres and forms; and, above all, something close to supremacy in the classical music of their time. And, at 75 — the same age as Stravinsky when he took a stylistic turn for his late masterpiece “Agon” — Adams is making a swerve with his latest opera, “Antony and Cleopatra,” which premieres at San Francisco Opera on Sept. 10 ahead of future productions, including at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.There is an easy argument to be made that Adams is the greatest living American composer. He is an artist for whom Americanness truly matters, as much as the tradition of Western classical music — both heritages treated not with nostalgia, but with awareness and affection. Whose DNA carries traces of Beethoven and Ellington, Claude Debussy and Cole Porter. Whom younger composers regard with a mixture of awe and fondness, and who, in turn, is quick to give advice and life lessons. And who has made opera, as the singer Gerald Finley said, “a force for social commentary.”That corner of Adams’s output, which began in 1987 with “Nixon in China,” has never been mere art for art’s sake. “Nixon” — an essential American opera of the last 50 years, along with Meredith Monk’s “Atlas” and Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha” — made myth of recent history. Even more immediate was “The Death of Klinghoffer” (1991), an account of the Achille Lauro hijacking, which had happened just six years earlier. “Doctor Atomic,” from 2005, reached farther back to meditate on J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project; and in 2017, “Girls of the Golden West” revisited a 19th-century California with eerily coincidental connections to the Trump era.“Doctor Atomic” had its Metropolitan Opera premiere in 2008. Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times“Nixon in China,” Adams’s first opera, at the Met in 2011.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAdams has brought contemporary politics “into the cultural sphere,” said Finley, the bass-baritone who originated the role of Oppenheimer, and opened discussion “about the role of opera and music in society, and who we are as people.”As the classical music world celebrates Adams’s 75th year — not least with a new 40-disc box set of collected works from the Nonesuch label — and San Francisco Opera (itself marking a milestone of 100 seasons) prepares for the premiere of “Antony and Cleopatra,” he was understandably anxious during a recent hike in Tilden Regional Park.He followed a ridge trail that, to the left, revealed a vista of the foggy San Francisco Bay, with the peak of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County emerging from the clouds, and, to the right, sun-streaked hills and valleys leading to the distant Sierras. In between pointing out a bunny or sharing a story about Amos and coyotes, he — a composer who cares about public reception and reviews — said that while the new opera was at least obliquely relevant, in the way that Shakespeare tends to be, he worried people would be expecting something like “Nixon.”“When you get to be my age, you’re not compared to other composers,” he said. “You’re compared to your earlier works.”COULD ADAMS BE ANYTHING other than a deeply American composer? “Not with my name,” he said with a chuckle. But that name — John Coolidge Adams — “so blue-bloodedly Yankee in its import,” he wrote in his 2008 memoir, “Hallelujah Junction,” “was in fact a conjunction of a Swedish paternal grandfather and a maternal grandfather I never knew.”Born in Massachusetts and raised around New England, with a singer for a mother and clarinetist for a father, he grew up around big band music and the Great American Songbook alongside symphonic classics. On the family turntable he listened to Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” and an album called “Bozo the Clown Conducts Favorite Circus Marches,” conducting along with a knitting needle.Adams with music for “Antony and Cleopatra” at his longtime home in Berkeley, Calif.Marissa Leshnov for The New York TimesBy adolescence he aspired to composing, while playing clarinet and formally learning to conduct. During one formative summer, he saw the film adaptation of “West Side Story.” “It was the moment,” he wrote in his memoir, “when I felt most aroused to the potential of becoming an artist who might forge a language, Whitman-like, out of the compost of American life.”That did not come easily during his years at Harvard University, where he studied with teachers including Leon Kirchner, David Del Tredici and Roger Sessions, in the spirit of the mid-20th century high modernism that was fashionable around composers of the Darmstadt School. On the side, Adams continued with the clarinet, subbing at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, including at the American premiere of Schoenberg’s “Moses und Aron.” Aaron Copland, Adams wrote, once heard him play and remarked, “Yeah, the kid knows his stuff.”After college, Adams moved to the Bay Area — his first views of the untamed California coast later found their way into “The Dharma at Big Sur” (2003) — and took a teaching job while programming concerts packed with works by avant-gardists like John Cage, Robert Ashley and Ingram Marshall. He also toiled away at electronic music, blending it with acoustic sounds in “American Standard,” from 1973; the middle movement, “Christian Zeal and Activity,” stretches a hymn melody to glacial beauty alongside, on Edo de Waart’s recording with the San Francisco Symphony, a looping sermon.“Phrygian Gates,” a Minimalist yet sprawling piano solo from 1977, is Adams’s first mature work. More accomplishments quickly followed, like “Shaker Loops” and the chronically underrated “Common Tones in Simple Time” — which, he wrote in his memoir, summed up the goals of Minimalism in its title alone, and served as a farewell to the “chaste, scaled-down aesthetics of that particular style.”He wasn’t long for the Minimalism of Glass and Steve Reich, two composers a decade older than him. “I felt that in obeying that kind of rigor, there wasn’t a lot of potential for not only emotional surprise and emotional expression, but also formal flexibility,” Adams said. “I wanted to make a music that had potential for surprise, because that’s always what we’re looking for in any kind of artistic experience.”You can hear, in Adams’s strain of Minimalism, a harmonic language that grabs listeners by the heart, and a gift for layering lyricism with the style’s trademark pulses, as in “Harmonium” (1981). Robert Hurwitz, the longtime president of Nonesuch — who brought Adams to the label and created the new box set — said that while Glass and Reich “looked at music a different way,” Adams was continuing the path of music in the 20th century.“I think whether or not he was influenced at different points by Steve and Phil,” Hurwitz added, “he passed through those in the way that Picasso passed through Cubism or Stravinsky passed through Neo-Classicism. He is of the moment, and yet his music is always his own.”Adams was most brazenly idiosyncratic, and surprising, in his 1982 work “Grand Pianola Music,” which begins in comfortable, Minimalist territory before giving way to a cascading excess and a sweeping melody both familiar and unplaceable. The piece left early listeners perplexed — or angry at what they perceived as a thumbed nose at the hyperseriousness of modernism. It wasn’t a joke, though: It was a glimpse of a more honest voice in the making, one that would bloom with the symphonic “Harmonielehre” and “Nixon.”Adams also diverged from other Minimalists in his medium: At the time, they largely operated outside institutions, writing for their own ensembles and performing in lofts and galleries. But Adams’s music was popular among orchestras and institutions, and he brought Minimalism to the concert hall in the process.“The thing that he did is, I think, the hardest thing to do,” said the composer Nico Muhly. “Which is to take the influences of — let’s pretend that it’s a kind of American Minimal tradition — and the time space that you find in Wagner, and figure out how to make those things live next to each other, to work together.”As Adams’s more personal style developed, it carried traces of the Western classical tradition — with the colorist acuity of Debussy and the American vernacular of Ives and jazz — in a way that could be mistakenly labeled postmodern but isn’t. The composer Dylan Mattingly said that Adams brings an element of the familiar into his work with sincerity because “John just loves that music, and so he’s interested in writing music that uses the instrument of the orchestra, while still being totally revolutionary and totally exploratory.”Whiffs of popular idioms in, say, “The Chairman Dances” (1985) were a clear break from the Darmstadt School brand of modernism that had dominated Adams’s youth — the music of composers like Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen — but had begun to be overtaken by Minimalism and a broader return to tonality. And it coincided with what Adams called “one of my Saul on the road to Damascus moments,” when he started reading Dickens novels in his 30s.“The first thing that struck me was that there was a person making great art,” Adams recalled. “I mean, sometimes terrible, sappy sentimentalism, but you turn the page as fast as you can. And, like Tolstoy or Victor Hugo, he was writing important work with social connections or social influence. They had enormous audiences. I thought about our time; we composers have sort of surrendered that to pop music.”A pop star Adams isn’t, but he is one of the few composers who approaches that status, second only, perhaps, to Glass. And from that perch he has, in the vein of his literary heroes, written music of conscience and consequence. Alongside exercises in form and timbre, like the Violin Concerto (1994) and, more recently, “Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?” (2019), have been “On the Transmigration of Souls,” Adams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning response to the Sept. 11 attacks, and collaborations with the director Peter Sellars that explored contemporary social issues through classic lenses: “El Niño” (2000), a Christmas oratorio with the mastery of Handel’s “Messiah,” or the “The Gospel According to the Other Mary,” a retelling of the Passion from 2012.Davóne Tines and Julia Bullock in “Girls of the Golden West” at San Francisco Opera in 2017.Cory Weaver/San Francisco OperaAlong the way, Adams has also provided an invaluable service to the next generations of composers. He doesn’t teach, but he curates concerts, championing younger artists, some of whom he has helped as a mentor, like Mattingly and his peer Gabriella Smith, who said, “I hardly know any composers who have not been influenced by his music.”Adams is known to look at scores and give frank, productive feedback, but also lessons applicable beyond the work at hand. Smith described their time together as “more like hanging out,” but also a confirmation that her two biggest interests — music and nature — could coexist, as they do in Adams’s life. He got her thinking, she said, “about what it would be like to have my own, unique compositional voice.”Mattingly said that Adams once responded to a piece of his by pulling out a Mahler score and talking about the physicality of it. Mattingly eventually realized the conversation was about how music could be embodied. Adams was pushing him to think about “music as the amorphous, invisible thing that it actually is,” Mattingly said, “instead of as specific durations and straight lines. I remember thinking about it nonstop for months, and then creating something that was way more compelling afterward.”“THE MOST TEDIOUS THING an artist can do,” Adams said, “is brand himself or herself.” If there’s a genre in which this most applies to him, it’s opera. Although all his stage works are on some level political, they occupy distinct sound worlds. In “Nixon,” created with the librettist Alice Goodman and Sellars, the mode was, Adams wrote in his memoir, “Technicolor orchestration.” But when the team reunited for “Klinghoffer” — their triumph, though, as a magnet for controversy over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one that is virtually impossible to produce in the United States — the text called for “something that was intensely poignant and lyrical, but also violent,” Adams said.Adams and Sellars assembled the libretto for “Atomic” from found texts. Critics called the result of their method undramatic, but the work has been increasingly accepted in recent years, in part because of a 2018 recording that, with the soprano Julia Bullock as Kitty Oppenheimer, brought the dramaturgy more into focus. Such a turnaround has yet to come for “Girls of the Golden West,” whose libretto had few fans, despite a lean, focused score that will have its moment in the sun when the Los Angeles Philharmonic presents it in concert in January.John Adams with his dog, Amos, in Tilden Regional Park, where they take daily walks.Marissa Leshnov for The New York Times“Antony and Cleopatra” is a departure in more ways than one. Its libretto is almost entirely chipped from the Shakespeare original, in collaboration with Lucia Scheckner and Elkhanah Pulitzer, who is directing the premiere in San Francisco. And as such, it is a work of written-through drama, rarely pausing for reflection and moving propulsively toward its tragic climax.The title roles were written with Finley and Bullock in mind (along with Paul Appleby, another Adams veteran, as Caesar); Bullock, though, is pregnant and withdrew from the San Francisco run, so Cleopatra will be sung by Amina Edris. During recent rehearsals, the orchestra and cast were settling into the score, whose breakneck pace is set from the start by “archetypal” rhythms, Adams said, that may remind listeners of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or Wagner’s Nibelheim music from “Das Rheingold.” The vocal writing, meanwhile, largely follows the pace of speech like Debussy in “Pelléas et Mélisande,” or Janacek in his operas.“He really went from the words,” said Eun Sun Kim, the opera company’s music director, who is conducting the run. “It’s really about storytelling, but he also challenges us to be precise and at the same time musical.”As in Adams’s partnership with Sellars, the production’s concept seems conceived alongside the development of both the libretto and score. Pulitzer said that their entry point was “manifestations of Cleopatra, mostly through the lens of Hollywood, whether it’s Liz Taylor winking at the camera or the de Mille ‘Cleopatra’ integrating glamour and ancient Egypt.” That led them to the idea of movie palaces and news reels, which were then woven into the show.The approach is one way to bring the opera’s themes to the fore — principally, its depiction of one nation’s fall and the rise of another. “We all worry that America is in decline with Donald Trump and this horrible polarization,” Adams said. “I thought the dichotomy between Rome, which is ascendant, and Egypt, which is in decline, is very much a contemporary topic.”During the hike in Tilden, Adams followed a lot of reflections on the new opera with a “we’ll see.” Unsure of what audiences will think of it, he also doesn’t know what a success now would mean for the future. “I keep a mental picture of Meyerbeer,” he said, referring to the once ubiquitous and now rarely heard 19th-century composer, “just to remind myself: Here today, gone tomorrow.”He brought up about a performance that he conducted recently, of Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, with the Juilliard Orchestra. At one point, near the end, he got “this absolute chill running up my back.”“A chill is not the right word, because it was warm,” he continued. “It was just the feeling having a genuine, deep experience with a great creation. I know that it’s impossible not to sound trite, but that’s something that makes life and culture worth it. So, if somebody has an experience like that at some point from a piece of mine, then that’s all I really care about.” More

“I must now give priority to my health and concentrate on my complete recovery,” the conductor said.A new production of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle at the Berlin State Opera, featuring the eminent conductor Daniel Barenboim, was one of the most highly anticipated events on the classical music calendar this season.But on Tuesday, the production, which opens in October, suffered a setback when Barenboim, who has been grappling with a variety of health issues in recent years, announced he was withdrawing.“I am deeply saddened not to be able to conduct the new ‘Ring,’” Barenboim, 79, said in a statement. “I must now give priority to my health and concentrate on my complete recovery.”The Berlin State Opera, in a statement, said that the conductor Christian Thielemann would take over for the first and third planned “Ring” cycle this fall, and the conductor Thomas Guggeis for the second. The production, which runs through early November, is being staged by Dmitri Tcherniakov.It was the latest setback for Barenboim, a titan in classical music, who has withdrawn from performances lately.“I am still struggling with the consequences of the vasculitis I was diagnosed with in the spring, and with this decision I am following the advice of my attending physicians,” he said in the statement.Matthias Schulz, director of the Berlin State opera, said it was “extremely sad” that Barenboim could no longer take part. In a statement, he called the production “a unique undertaking that is very close to his heart and that of the entire house.”“Preparations have been underway for many years, and we have done everything in our power to make the ‘Ring’ with Daniel Barenboim possible, especially in the year of his 80th birthday,” Schulz said.As music director of the State Opera and principal conductor for life of its orchestra, the Staatskapelle, Barenboim is a towering figure in the European cultural scene. He is also a founder of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, an ensemble of young musicians from around the Middle East, and he helped create a conservatory, the Barenboim-Said Akademie, as well as a concert hall, the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin.In his statement, Barenboim said the Berlin State Opera was “very close to my heart.” He praised the conductors who will replace him.“I wish them and everyone involved all the best with this production,” he said. More

The 21-year-old Scottish folk singer-songwriter found a sudden hit by tapping into the platform’s appetite for melancholy with a striking, sorrowful chorus.If TikTok has made you cry sometime this month, it’s likely thanks to Katie Gregson-MacLeod.On Aug. 4, the 21-year-old Scottish singer-songwriter posted a minute-long chorus to an unreleased song she’d written called “Complex” — an elegiac capturing of the hollow, zombielike experience of loving someone far more than they can, or will, love you back. Her voice is lovely and affecting, somewhere between wistful and determined as she sings about a relationship that’s ongoing, but already over:I’m wearing his boxersI’m being a good wifeWe won’t be togetherBut maybe the next lifeGregson-MacLeod had just written the song, and had no plans to release it. But by the following morning, TikTok had supersized it, finding the eyes and ears of several young female singer-songwriters who have been successful on the app, including Gracie Abrams, Lennon Stella and Maisie Peters.Suddenly, Gregson-MacLeod was a meme, embodying the app’s potential as an amplifier of melancholy. In just a couple of days, “Complex” became a trigger for what felt like a global group hug.“When the chorus did so well, I swore to myself, I am not changing one word of the rest of the song,” Gregson-MacLeod said of the full version of the song released to streaming services.Jaime Molina for The New York TimesTikTok is well-suited to this particular stripe of intimacy, because “people seem to love hearing going as in-depth of someone’s life as they can,” Gregson-MacLeod said last week in a video chat from her family’s home in Inverness, in the Scottish Highlands. “It’s a very online thing, but it’s also the same essence of what people love about people like Elliott Smith and Joni Mitchell. There are so many serious songwriters on there, but the ones that I’ve noticed doing really well are super raw, emotional and very stripped back.”Vulnerability is contagious, and TikTok, which allows users to both imbibe and amplify at the same time, is an optimal accelerant. The success of “Complex” reflects the evolving priorities of TikTok, which in its first couple of years was best known as an accelerant for dance trends, novelty songs and meme-able comedy, but is now just as often a home for sorrow. The shift reflects a partial maturation of the medium somewhere beyond pure escape.With her song gaining so much traction so quickly — the original post currently has 6.9 million views — Gregson-MacLeod did what any savvy young musician would do: She TikToked through it, posting duets with singers covering her, answering fan questions, making new memes, taking note of the interest from people she looked up to (“fletcher and olivia o’brien now know I have an anxious attachment style I was tryna play hard to get”). On Friday, Gregson-MacLeod formally released the full song — now titled “Complex (Demo)” — to streaming platforms, a few days after she signed a deal with the British arm of Columbia Records.The full song is, apart from one small tweak, identical to what she’d already written before her TikTok eruption. “When the chorus did so well, I swore to myself, I am not changing one word of the rest of the song,” she said. “It worked because it was just a moment, and it was a moment that was very real and raw. And then I was kind of like, if I changed too much or anything, then I’m going to be writing reactively and I’m going to be trying to think of what other people are going to want. And actually, it worked because it’s just what happened to me.”She didn’t elaborate on the specific scenario that prompted the song, but said, “For the most part, I write completely autobiographically, pretty much 100 percent.” She continued, “With this song, it was very much just like a very emotional moment, as you can probably tell. Literally just a moment where it all kind of poured out.”Until now, Gregson-MacLeod has been splitting her time between home and college, where she is studying history at the University of Edinburgh. She’s been releasing music on her own for a couple of years, including a frisky indie-pop EP last year, “Games I Play,” and a recent song, “Second Single Bed,” that’s almost as emotionally laserlike as “Complex.” In the last year, she’s found a welcoming home in the Edinburgh folk music scene that congregates around Captains Bar. She is a student of classic folk singers like Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, and also younger ones like Laura Marling, Lucy Dacus and, naturally, Phoebe Bridgers: “She’s a bit of a god.”Gregson-MacLeod began posting to TikTok in 2020, a few months into the pandemic. She has a natural way with humor in her posts — part sincere, part can-you-believe-we’re-all-doing-this. Before “Complex” took off, she was a barista at Perk Coffee & Doughnuts (“Inverness’s first doughnut shop,” she noted), and handled the shop’s social media posts. Perk was also where all the A&R representatives who traveled to Inverness to meet her this month ended up hanging out at different tables.“Complex” has allowed Gregson-MacLeod to take her place in an impressive lineage of female singer-songwriters who have used TikTok as an engine over the last two years: Lauren Spencer-Smith (“Fingers Crossed”), Sadie Jean (“WYD Now?”), Lizzy McAlpine (“You Ruined the 1975”), Jensen McRae, poppier singers like Gayle and Tate McRae. (The McRaes are not related.) And of course, the alpha of this phenomenon: Olivia Rodrigo, whose “Drivers License” began life as an acoustic snippet on TikTok before becoming the defining pop song of 2021.Gregson-MacLeod began posting to TikTok in 2020, a few months into the pandemic, and had been studying at college and working in a coffee shop when her song took off.Jaime Molina for The New York TimesOne of the particular quirks of putting vulnerable sentiment into a song is that, if it becomes popular, it no longer truly belongs to you. To have that happen so quickly with “Complex” has been lightly head spinning for Gregson-MacLeod, who is still getting acclimated to the way her song is being absorbed out in the wild.Mostly, she finds it humorous. When someone covers it with a slightly different sentiment in their caption, “I always comment ‘me for real,’” she said. Some people are using her melody and adding different lyrics. “The trend is now to rewrite it, which is, like, mildly insulting,” she said, laughing. “It’s like mainly lovely but you’re like, ‘Hey guys, can the trend be to appreciate what I wrote?’” She participated in a TikTok duet chain with Gayle and Catie Turner, shouting absurdist ad-libs over her tender tune.There have also been a few versions written from a male point of view. “Whenever I hear ‘She’s wearing my boxers,’ I’m like, ‘No,’” she joked. “Read the room, man.”Gregson-MacLeod put “(Demo)” in the title of the finished song because she wanted to be clear that this is just a way station. “I knew that this version had to be first, it had to be the raw emotional moment that it was in the video,” she said. “But it also leaves room for whatever I want to do in a few weeks, a few months or whatever, because I think it’s going to have a long life.” The sentiment belongs to everybody, but the song remains hers. More

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

“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

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

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

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