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      How a Jazz Musician and Entrepreneur Spends His Sundays

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      The jazz bass player Matthew Garrison doesn’t like to slow down. “I’m always thinking, doing,” he said.As a performer, he has toured with Herbie Hancock and has upcoming shows with the pianist Jason Moran, the drummer Jack DeJohnette and others. But most days, he is focused on producing music events through ShapeShifter Lab and its nonprofit arm, ShapeShifter Plus. He also created the app Tunebend, which facilitates virtual collaborating and recording among musicians.Mr. Garrison, who is the son of Jimmy Garrison, the bassist for John Coltrane, seems to like pushing boundaries in the jazz world. “I’m really tired of the stagnant music scene, where this club only books a certain type of band and that club only books musicians that play this genre,” he said.For a decade, Mr. Garrison ran a performance space in Gowanus, Brooklyn, also called the ShapeShifter Lab, but it closed last year. Soon, he will open a new venue. “My new space will be a place for performers, those genius rejects, who would not otherwise be able to play in the city.”Mr. Garrison, 52, lives in Park Slope with his business partner, Fortuna Sung, 51.DARK AND QUIET Time has been wonky post-pandemic. It sounds horrible, but sometimes I wake up as early as 4 a.m. I get a lot of work out of the way. I code for my apps, including Tunebend, and organize things on my computer for a few hours because everyone is asleep. There’s no one around calling, texting or bugging you.Mr. Garrison plans to open a new performance space near the one he ran for a decade in Gowanus, Brooklyn, which closed last year. Danielle Amy for The New York TimesCAFFEINATED NAP I might have some coffee and a light breakfast. I have a weird relationship with coffee these days. It doesn’t keep me awake. I now use coffee as a sleep aid. I don’t know how that works. So after I work for a few hours and drink some coffee, I often go back to sleep.WORKING WEEKEND I wake up again around 9 or 10 a.m. and I’ll have another cup of coffee. The music industry is a 24-hour thing. I communicate with folks in Europe and Japan all the time, so my weekends don’t count as a day off. I have to divide my work hours and devote certain days to my three ventures to get everything done. On Sundays, I try to get to the stuff I couldn’t do during the weekday. But I make a mess if I multitask too much.STEPS Then I might compose for several hours. Or I go take a walk in Prospect Park or zigzag through neighborhood streets. Sometimes I venture out into Gowanus and Carroll Gardens. Fortuna says I walk too fast, but I need to get my heart rate up. My body is telling me I need it.Mr. Garrison’s piano used to belong to Ravi Coltrane, the son of John Coltrane.Danielle Amy for The New York Times“When you’re coding or composing music, you’re problem-solving.”Danielle Amy for The New York TimesSONG LAYERS I listen to music on Tunebend while I walk. I listen to see how all the bits and pieces that were recorded can become layers in a song. You can swap out different performers for the same part, so I do a lot of listening and rearranging. But I’m also interacting with the app as a user to see if anything needs to be tweaked. I know it doesn’t seem like it, but this is how I decompress.PIECING IT TOGETHER When you’re coding or composing music, you’re problem-solving. You’re in continuous research mode to figure out why something is done in a particular way. In the jazz world, there’s so much that you have to know and be able to play in a fraction of a second. In coding, you also have to remember all these bits and pieces to build something. The only difference between the two worlds is the pay!From left, Mr. Garrison, his mother, Roberta Garrison, and Fortuna Sung, his business partner, at Littleneck in Brooklyn.Danielle Amy for The New York Times“Fortuna says I walk too fast, but I need to get my heart rate up. My body is telling me I need it.”Danielle Amy for The New York TimesNEW SPACE I finally got the keys to a new performance space that we’ll open by the end of the year. So far I’ve done a livestream workshop on how to use the Tunebend app, but I’m gearing up for a lot of fund-raising so we can put on shows and events for all types of musicians here.SUSTENANCE We get our errands done in the neighborhood, including groceries from the Park Slope Food Co-op. Fortuna, whose family is from Hong Kong, is the better cook. Her family owned and operated many restaurants, so she knows her way around a kitchen. When we eat out, it might be Japanese or Thai. Today we had dinner with my mom at Littleneck.OLD-PEOPLE TIME After dinner, I’ll watch TV or read. I’m news-centric: There’s so much stuff to keep up with, which makes me understand how I can make this world a better place. I also like tech stuff, like articles about the newest plug-ins for music software. My mom still scolds me that all my reading is done on a screen. Now I’m on old-people time: I’m in bed by 9 or 10 p.m.“I’m really tired of the stagnant music scene, where this club only books a certain type of band and that club only books musicians that play this genre,” said Mr. Garrison, above with Ms. Sung. Danielle Amy for The New York TimesSunday Routine readers can follow Matthew Garrison on Instagram and Twitter @garrisonjazz. More

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      M.I.A. Takes Aim at Fame, and 7 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Nicki Minaj, Gayle, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.M.I.A., ‘Popular’It’s a little hard to tell if M.I.A. is skewering the self-involvement of social media culture on “Popular” or if she’s vying for a TikTok hit herself — but hey, who says you can’t have it both ways? “Love me like I love me, love me,” she intones, as the skittish but thoroughly hypnotic beat (from the producers Boaz van de Beats and Diplo) lulls the listener into nodding along. The accompanying video is a wild, creepy trip into the uncanny valley, as M.I.A. confronts and ultimately destroys her A.I. alter ego, the appropriately named “M.A.I.” LINDSAY ZOLADZGayle, ‘Indieedgycool’A concept song about the resurgence of anti-pop posturing rendered with the dryness of 1990s alt-rock delivered by a singer whose breakout came via a record label-initiated TikTok. It’s a catchy eye roll that’s an ouroboros of TikTok-addled hype-cycle collapse, meshing microtrend and backlash all together into one. JON CARAMANICAWillow, ‘Hover Like a Goddess’“Hover Like a Goddess,” from the upcoming album “,” is further proof that Willow has finally found her lane in the space where bouncy pop-punk and anguished emo-rock converge. “I’ll never be fine if you won’t be mine,” she sings with pent-up intensity amid a number of other lusty confessions (“Just meet me under the covers/Baby, I wish”), before the song suddenly transforms into a dreamy reverie. That bliss is fleeting, though, and by the next verse Willow is just as quickly jarred back into her endearingly anxious reality. ZOLADZYeah Yeah Yeahs, ‘Burning’Yeah Yeah Yeahs unexpectedly interpolate Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’ 1967 version of “Beggin’” for their fiery new single “Burning,” from their upcoming album “Cool It Down,” expanding the original’s feeling of romantic desperation into a more vast and ominous conflagration. Nick Zinner’s guitar riff snakes through the song like a lit fuse as Karen O croons devilish come-ons like, “Lay your red hand on me as I go.” The whole thing’s a little bit retro, and a little bit neo-apocalyptic. ZOLADZNicki Minaj, ‘Super Freaky Girl’As the title would suggest, this is simply a series of intense, gum-snapping Nicki Minaj raps over Rick James’s “Super Freak,” a combination so obvious and winningly bubbly that it’s shocking it didn’t already exist. CARAMANICAIce Spice, “Munch (Feelin’ U)”Few things have better mouth feel than a fresh piece of slang. The way the lips, teeth and tongue contort to form a word as the neural pathways connect that word to a new concept — it’s invigorating. So it goes with “Munch (Feelin’ U)” by the Bronx drill rapper Ice Spice, who in the past week received a boost following an embrace by Drake. In a frenzied genre, she’s a calm rapper, which is part of what makes this song so frosty — the beat is skittish and portentous, but Ice Spice sounds at peace. She’s rhyming quickly, but also calmly and slightly dismissively, probably because of the subject matter. That would be a man who might be useful in some ways, but is easily dismissed — someone who’s on call, but barely needed. He’s good at one thing, and when that’s done, not much else — he’s a munch. Get used to saying it. CARAMANICARex Orange County, ‘Threat’A tender take on self-doubt by the goofily warm British singer Rex Orange County. “I don’t wanna keep you in a boring life/I can pick up when you’re calling/Keep it real with you always,” he sings, wondering if he’s worthy of the object of his affection. It’s all delivered over a guitar figure that suggests the early Vampire Weekend revival is just around the corner. CARAMANICAAri Lennox, ‘Hoodie’Hoodies have never sounded sexier than they do on Ari Lennox’s slinky new homage to loungewear and whatever’s going on “underneath your North Face.” The track from the R&B singer’s forthcoming album “Age/Sex/Location,” which comes out on Sept. 9, has a few playful lines (“spread it like some queso”) but Lennox’s powerhouse vocal performance imbues the whole thing with a mature, pulsing sensuality. ZOLADZ More

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      Bill Pitman, Revered Studio Guitarist, Is Dead at 102

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      As a versatile member of the loose association of musicians known as the Wrecking Crew, he was heard on many of the biggest pop and rock hits of the 1960s and ’70s.Bill Pitman, a guitarist who accompanied Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Barbra Streisand and others from the late 1950s to the ’70s, and who for decades was heard on the soundtracks of countless Hollywood films and television shows, died on Thursday night at his home in La Quinta, Calif. He was 102.His wife, Janet Pitman, said he died after four weeks at a rehabilitation center in Palm Springs, where he was treated for a fractured spine suffered in a fall, and the past week at home under hospice care.Virtually anonymous outside the music world but revered within it, Mr. Pitman was a member of what came to be called the Wrecking Crew — a loosely organized corps of peerless Los Angeles freelancers who were in constant demand by record producers to back up headline performers. As an ensemble, they turned routine recording sessions and live performances into extraordinary musical moments.Examples abound: Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” (1966). Presley’s “Blue Hawaii” (1961). Streisand’s “The Way We Were” (1973). The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” (1963). The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” (1966). On “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” from the Paul Newman-Robert Redford hit movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969), Mr. Pitman played ukulele.In a career of nearly 40 years, Mr. Pitman played countless gigs for studios and record labels that dominated the pop charts but rarely credited the performers behind the stars. The Wrecking Crew did almost everything — television and film scores; pop, rock and jazz arrangements; even cartoon soundtracks. Whether recorded in a studio or on location, everything was performed with precision and pizazz.“These were crack session players who moved effortlessly through many different styles: pop, jazz, rockabilly, but primarily the two-minute-thirty-second world of hit records that America listened to all through the sixties and seventies,” Allegro magazine reminisced in 2011. “If it was a hit and recorded in L.A., the Wrecking Crew cut the tracks.”Jumping from studio to studio — often playing four or five sessions a day — members of the crew accompanied the Beach Boys, Sonny and Cher, the Monkees, the Mamas and the Papas, Simon and Garfunkel, Ricky Nelson, Jan and Dean, Johnny Rivers, the Byrds, Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett, the Everly Brothers, Peggy Lee and scads more — nearly every prominent performer of the era.The pace was relentless, Mr. Pitman recalled in Denny Tedesco’s 2008 documentary, “The Wrecking Crew.”“You leave the house at 7 in the morning, and you’re at Universal at 9 till noon,” he said. “Now you’re at Capitol Records at 1. You just got time to get there, then you got a jingle at 4, then we’re on a date with somebody at 8, then the Beach Boys at midnight, and you do that five days a week.”Mr. Pitman was heard on the soundtracks of some 200 films, including Robert Altman’s Korean War black comedy “M*A*S*H” (1970), Amy Heckerling’s comedy “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (1982), Emile Ardolino’s romantic musical drama “Dirty Dancing” (1987) and Martin Scorsese’s gangster fable “Goodfellas” (1990).On television, Mr. Pitman’s Danelectro bass guitar was heard for years on “The Wild Wild West.” He also worked on “I Love Lucy,” “Bonanza,” “The Deputy,” “Ironside,” “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In,” “The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour,” “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour” and many other shows. He was credited with composing music for early episodes of the original “Star Trek” series.While generally indifferent toward rock, colleagues said, Mr. Pitman played it well, sometimes expressing surprise at the success of his work in that genre. He was far more enthusiastic about jazz, especially the work of composers and arrangers like Marty Paich, Dave Grusin and Johnny Mandel.Mr. Pitman, who grew up in New York City and had music tutors from the time he was 6 years old, came home from World War II and headed west determined to make a living in music. He attended the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music, learned arranging and composing, and essentially taught himself the skills of a master guitarist.In 1951, at a club where Peggy Lee was singing, he met the guitar virtuoso Laurindo Almeida, who was quitting Ms. Lee’s band. After an audition, Mr. Pitman was hired to take Mr. Almeida’s place, and his career was launched.In 1954 he joined the singer Rusty Draper’s daily radio show. Three years later, he sat in for the guitarist Tony Rizzi at a recording date for Capitol Records. It was his big break.Word soon got around about the comer who could improvise with the best. Mr. Pitman got to know the session guitarists Howard Roberts, Jack Marshall, Al Hendrickson, Bob Bain and Bobby Gibbons, and he was soon one of them.Mr. Bill Pitman and a fellow studio musician, the bassist Carol Kaye, in a scene from the documentary “The Wrecking Crew” (2008).Magnolia PicturesHis fellow studio musicians included the drummer Hal Blaine, the guitarists Tommy Tedesco and Glen Campbell (before he had a hit-making singing career), the bassists Carol Kaye and Joe Osborn, and the keyboardists Don Randi and Leon Russell (who also went on to a successful solo singing career). They coalesced around Phil Spector, the producer known for his “wall of sound” approach, who regularly employed them.While not publicly recognized in its era, this ensemble is viewed with reverence today by music historians and insiders. Mr. Blaine, who died in 2019, claimed that he named the Wrecking Crew. But Ms. Kaye insisted that he did not start using the name until years after its musicians stopped working together in the ’70s. In any case, there was no disagreement about Mr. Pitman’s contributions.In his book “Conversations With Great Jazz and Studio Guitarists” (2009), Jim Carlton called Mr. Pitman a mainstay of the crew. “Perhaps no one personifies the unsung studio player like Bill Pitman does,” he wrote. “Few guitarists have logged more recording sessions, and fewer still have enjoyed being such a legitimate part of America’s soundtrack.”William Keith Pitman was born in Belleville, N.J., on Feb. 12, 1920, the only child of Keith and Irma (Kunze) Pitman. His father was a staff bassist for NBC Radio and a busy freelance player in New York; his mother was a Broadway dancer. The family moved to Manhattan when Bill was 6, and he attended the Professional Children’s School.Mr. Pitman in 2012. He performed in Las Vegas and on film soundtracks well until the 1980s, and continued to play guitar at home after that.Jan PittmanWhen he was 13, his parents split up. His mother joined a firm that made theater costumes. His father gave him guitar lessons, and young Bill played 50-cent gigs with musicians who would later become famous, like the trumpeter Shorty Rogers and the drummer Shelly Manne. But his schoolwork at Haaren High School in Manhattan suffered, and he dropped out. He joined the Army Air Corps in 1942, became a radio operator and flew many supply missions over the Himalayas from India to China during World War II.In 1947, he married Mildred Hurty. They had three children and were divorced in the late 1960s. In the ’70s he married and divorced Debbie Yajacovic twice. In 1985 he married Janet Valentine and adopted her daughter, Rosemary.Besides his wife, he is survived by his son, Dale; his daughters, Donna Simpson, Jean Langdon and Rosemary Pitman; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.Mr. Pitman quit session work in 1973 and went on the road, performing in concert with Burt Bacharach, Anthony Newley, Vikki Carr and others for several years. In the late ’70s he moved to Las Vegas, where he joined the music staff of the MGM Grand Hotel, playing for headliners well into the ’80s. He also continued to play on film soundtracks until he retired in 1989.Mr. Pitman performed professionally only once in retirement — at a memorial concert in 2001 in Pasadena, Calif., for an old friend, Julius Wechter, leader of the Baja Marimba Band. Mr. Wechter, who died in 1999, had Tourette’s syndrome and was a spokesman for people with the disorder.Mr. Pitman continued writing arrangements, and at 99 he was still playing music — and golf.“He plays the guitar at home just about every day,” his wife said in an interview for this obituary in 2019. “I am a bass player. We play only jazz. No rock ’n’ roll.” As for golf, she said, “He can still beat me.” More

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      The Lucerne Festival’s Push for Diversity Stirs Debate

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      The Lucerne Festival in Switzerland is trying to shine a light on race and gender disparities. But some are skeptical of its efforts.LUCERNE, Switzerland — The Lucerne Festival here, one of classical music’s premier events, has long had a reputation for exclusivity.For much of the event’s 84-year history, women and people of color have struggled to be heard onstage, and audiences have remained overwhelmingly white and wealthy.But this summer, the festival, which officially begins on Friday, is trying to remake its image, programming its season with an emphasis on diversity: a series of concerts featuring Black and Latino artists, as well as women.“We don’t have to be radical, but we should be aware,” Michael Haefliger, the festival’s executive and artistic director, said in an interview. “We should have this feeling of shaking the ground a little bit and realizing that we have for a long time excluded a certain part of the public.”That drive is part of a broader effort to address severe racial and gender disparities in classical music, a field in which women and people of color are still underrepresented among performers, conductors, composers and administrators.Chi-chi Nwanoku, the founder and leader of the Chineke! Orchestra, which will be featured at the Lucerne Festival this year.Patrick Hürlimann/Lucerne Festival“This is a big step toward shining a spotlight on the problems in our field,” said Chi-chi Nwanoku, the founder and leader of the Chineke! Orchestra, a British ensemble made up largely of musicians of color that will be featured at Lucerne this year. “A lot of the classical music that we pride ourselves on today is inspired by Black artists, Black musicians and Black composers. But we don’t hear that side of the story.”Lucerne’s leaders hope that the focus on diversity will help prompt discussions about racism, sexism and exclusion across classical music. They have tried, with mixed success, to capture the public’s attention. A series of talks related to the theme have been added to the agenda, including a recent one called: “Seeing is Believing? Black Artists in Classical Music!” A marketing campaign features an assortment of chess pieces reimagined for an era of inclusivity: a knight reborn as a purple unicorn, a bishop bearing zebra stripes.But the festival’s efforts have been met with skepticism by some artists, audience members and commentators, who see the drive as mere publicity and say it will do little to address systemic disparities in the industry. And others say the festival’s focus should be on art, not social problems.“This kind of P.R. may alienate the natural audiences of this festival,” said Rodrigo Carrizo Couto, a freelance journalist based in Switzerland. “Why are we doing this? Why are we following some sort of California agenda?”Since the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the wave of Black Lives Matter demonstrations that followed, orchestras have come under pressure to appoint more women and minority artists as music directors; opera companies have faced calls to program more works by overlooked composers; and performing arts organizations have been criticized for not moving swiftly enough to recruit leaders of color. Some groups have been denounced for having performers use dark makeup in productions of operas like “Aida,” long after racist caricatures had disappeared from many stages.At Lucerne, the debate about equity and inclusion has been particularly heated. The festival’s board is made up mostly of white men. Its orchestra includes 81 men and 31 women; only two musicians represent ethnic minority groups.“We don’t have to be radical, but we should be aware,” said Michael Haefliger, the festival’s executive and artistic director. Daniel Auf der Mauer/Lucerne FestivalHaefliger said that he had begun thinking before the pandemic about ways in which the festival could use its platform to shine light on issues of racism and sexism across the industry — inspired by the festival’s 2016 theme, “PrimaDonna,” which featured female conductors. He said he wanted to “break the ice” around discussions of race and gender.“We’re not a political organization,” he said. “But in a way, culture is also social responsibility, and we’re part of society.”The idea of devoting this year’s festival to diversity quickly prompted pushback in Switzerland.Der Bund, a German-language newspaper in nearby Bern, published an article calling the theme “an affront,” saying that while it seemed well intentioned, it could have the effect of making guest artists feel they were invited only because of their skin color.Although this year’s festival, which runs through mid-September, will feature regulars like the Vienna Philharmonic and the Berlin Philharmonic, there are many newcomers. All of the soloists making debuts this year, including the trumpeter Aaron Akugbo, the violinist Randall Goosby and the pianist Mishka Rushdie Momen, are people of color. Several renowned artists of color will also take part, including the cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the sopranos Golda Schultz and Angel Blue, and the composer Tyshawn Sorey. As part of the pre-festival programming, Ilumina, an ensemble of young South American musicians, performed works by Schubert, Bach, Villa-Lobos and others.Ilumina, an ensemble of young South American musicians, is among Lucerne’s newcomers.ManuelaJans/Lucerne FestivalA particular emphasis will be placed on music by Black composers; 16 will be featured over the course of the festival. At the red-carpet opening on Friday, the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, who is also on Lucerne’s board, played a concerto by Joseph Boulogne, a Black composer born in the 18th century.Some musicians said they were pleased that Lucerne’s leaders were tackling issues of representation head-on. Still, they said it was too early to judge the success of the effort, and that the festival could demonstrate its sincerity by inviting back performers and composers of color in the future.“I don’t believe we should embrace diversity as a buzzword,” said Schultz, who will sing a recital at the festival and appear in a semi-staged production of Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess.” “I appreciate their willingness to grapple with these issues. Someone has to take a risk, and it’s not going to be perfect.”Gerard Aimontche, a pianist of African and Russian descent who performed in the run-up to the festival this week, said it was important to make a special effort to feature Black and Latino artists, given the lack of diversity on the world’s top stages. Still, he added that he longed for a day when it would no longer be necessary to use terms like “diversity” at a festival.The pianist Gerard Aimontche performed in the run-up to the festival.Emil Matveev“For now, you have to provide a special introduction because otherwise no one would never know about us,” he said. “But I hope that in 50 years from now it will be different. Even if the whole orchestra consists of people of color, we will be just another orchestra, and people will come just like they do to hear any other orchestra.”On Tuesday evening, Lucerne’s main concert hall was filled with the sounds of the Chineke! Junior Orchestra, which performed pieces by the Black composers Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Stewart Goodyear, as well as a Tchaikovsky symphony. The auditorium was not full, but the orchestra was warmly received, with whistles and shouts of “Bravo!”During rehearsal, the Venezuelan conductor Glass Marcano, who led the concert, told the orchestra’s players that performing in Lucerne was a special opportunity. She took selfies with the orchestra and assured the musicians that they would rise to the occasion.In an interview, Marcano said that classical music would thrive only if it welcomed a wide range of voices.“We are presenting classical music in all its richness and diversity,” she said. “From now on, this should be seen as normal.” More

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      Lea Desandre Gives a Modern Voice to Early Music

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      The mezzo-soprano will sing with the Jupiter Ensemble in a concert of 17th-century Italian compositions at the Salzburg Festival.The mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre, a member of the Jupiter Ensemble, does not distinguish between the Baroque era and the age of rock ’n’ roll.“We grew up with this music,” she said by video call from Montreal. “Just like we grew up with the Beatles and Amy Winehouse.”The 28-year-old has established herself as one of today’s most exciting voices in early-music performance. She also cultivates 18th- and 19th-century operatic repertoire from Mozart to Meyerbeer, at prominent houses such as Zurich Opera and the Paris Opera.The singer has appeared annually at the Salzburg Festival, on both the opera and concert stages, since 2018. On Saturday, she and musicians of Jupiter arrive at the Stiftung Mozarteum with the program “Lettres amoureuses” (“Love Letters”). The concert of 17th-century Italian music — which the group has thus far performed in France and the Netherlands — juxtaposes arias and instrumental music from well-known composers such as Monteverdi and Handel with exciting discoveries such as Tarquinio Merula and Andrea Falconieri.Ms. Desandre has sung at prominent houses on both sides of the Atlantic, from the Paris Opera to Carnegie Hall, above, where she took the stage with the Jupiter Ensemble. Jennifer TaylorMs. Desandre enjoys something of a symbiotic relationship with the ensemble, which was founded by the lute player Thomas Dunford in 2018. They joined forces last year for her first solo album, “Amazone,” exploring French and Italian repertoire written about the female warriors of Greek myth known as Amazons. Their next recording, scheduled for release this fall, is a lineup of numbers from Handel oratorios titled “Eternal Heaven.”Mr. Dunford, 34, promotes a democratic spirit, taking suggestions from members of the ensemble in the curation of programs. “It’s a bit like a jazz group in that way,” he said by phone from Montreal, where he and Ms. Desandre were on tour with the ensemble Les Arts Florissants (the two met performing with that group in 2015 and maintain a close relationship with its founder, William Christie). “It’s people who love spending time together and working on the music.”For Jupiter’s first album, “Vivaldi,” the members started a poll on Facebook asking about friends’ favorite arias. In another surprising twist, each of Jupiter’s albums ends with a newly composed surprise track: For “Amazone,” Mr. Dunford contributed “Amazones,” a song that addresses the importance of environmental consciousness.Mr. Dunford, a French native with American roots, cited Jordi Savall, a player of the viola da gamba (with whom both his parents studied), and Mr. Christie as among the trailblazers who set the stage for today’s generation of players. “The best lesson we can learn is to be authentic and passionate,” he said. “Because we don’t really know what Vivaldi sounded like [in his time] — we can just understand his music in a logical way and put our personalities into it.”Ms. Desandre contributes a particular affinity for Italian Baroque music. The singer, who is of French-Italian heritage, left the conservatory track to study with the contralto Sara Mingardo in Venice, who had access to unpublished manuscripts by Vivaldi, along with works by rarely heard composers.Spiritual songs by Tarquinio Merula quickly became a starting point for “Lettres amoureuses.” In “Hor ch’è tempo di dormire” (“Now That It’s Time to Sleep”), the text hovers between tenderness and violence as the Virgin Mary has a vision of Jesus’ crucifixion while rocking him as a baby.Ms. Desandre, who debuted at the Salzburg Festival in 2018, has particularly strong memories of singing the role of Despina in the 2020 production of “Così Fan Tutte,” above.Christian Bruna/EPA, via ShutterstockMs. Desandre compared the music to “a beating of the heart” or a kind of spiral. “She says ‘sleep peacefully,’ but she knows that something tragic is going to happen,” she explained.Her studies with Ms. Mingardo were based on a holistic, rather than technical, approach to vocal studies. At a certain point, Ms. Desandre said, she was advised to “go out and have a good time, find a boyfriend and live — so that you can transmit this experience onstage.”Further singer-mentors include Natalie Dessay (who inspired Ms. Desandre to enter the profession when she saw her on television at age 12), Vivica Genaux, Véronique Gens and Cecilia Bartoli. The latter two singers perform on “Amazone”; Mr. Christie also joins for an instrumental work by French composer Louis Couperin.“The album is a kind of homage to key people in my life,” Ms. Desandre said. The singer also personally chose the photographer, Julien Benhamou, who works with dancers at the Paris Opera, to create the cover art.This is also a nod to Ms. Desandre’s training as a ballerina, which she says allows her to let go physically onstage. “It is one of the best ingredients for singing,” she said. “To be anchored and not become mentally stressed.”For her Salzburg Festival debut in 2018, the director Jan Lauwers gave her full artistic freedom to dance onstage while singing the comprimario roles of Amore and Valletto in Monteverdi’s “L’incoronazione di Poppea.” The singer said that, if Paris was the city in which she was born and raised, Salzburg had become a “city of the heart, because I found a kind of family there — people who are willing to take risks with me.”A lover of nature, she also pointed to the city’s inspiring landscape. “To leave rehearsals and find oneself in front of a mountain and surrounded by greenery in five minutes is extremely nourishing,” she said. “These are moments of communion which allow us to connect with our energy, center ourselves and be very focused.”Singing the role of Despina in a production of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” that took place at a scaled-down Salzburg Festival in August 2020, amid the coronavirus pandemic, remains a particularly strong memory. “There was an intensity during rehearsals,” she recalled. “Of remembering why we love to make music and be together.”A similar spirit drives the Jupiter Ensemble. The group’s members take the time to work on a program until it comes to full maturation, and they always live in the moment.“There are also the experiences we share offstage,” Ms. Desandre said. “Which means that when we perform, we take confidence in each other, we listen to each other, we adore each other. We want to share this happiness with the audience.” More

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      A Renaissance in American Hardcore Music

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherAmerican hardcore music is experiencing a creative burst at the moment, owing to bands including Gulch, Scowl, Drug Church, Drain, Mindforce and End It. The scene has its own network of YouTube channels, podcasts and websites that catalog it. And last month’s Sound and Fury Festival in Los Angeles was a powerful statement of purpose.There have been some recent precedents for this current moment — the ongoing crossover success and musical evolution of the Baltimore band Turnstile; the way the California act Trash Talk made inroads into hip-hop, skating and streetwear communities. But these have been moments in which outsiders took a gander at hardcore. Right now, the center itself is growing and thriving.On this week’s episode, a survey of contemporary hardcore bands, a look at the genre’s purposely porous boundaries, and a discussion of the hardcore scene as music, ethic and feeling.Guests:Tom Breihan, senior editor at StereogumChris Ryan, editorial director of The Ringer and co-host of The Watch podcastConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Sylvan Esso’s New Album of Electro-pop Challenges All Expectations

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      The duo’s fourth LP, “No Rules Sandy,” revels in constantly shifting sounds that are “surreal but free.”The electronic vertigo revs up immediately and rarely lets up on “No Rules Sandy,” the fourth studio album by Sylvan Esso. “How can I be moved when everything is moving,” Amelia Meath calmly muses in the opening track, “Moving,” over a hissing, scurrying beat, octave-swooping blips and stereo-panning whooshes that keep things spinning. It’s a whirlwind start to an album that celebrates renewed, unconstrained motion: lighthearted on the surface, purposeful at its core.Sylvan Esso — the duo of Meath and her husband, Nick Sanborn — has created its own niche of electro-pop: transparent yet intricate, airy but serious, fond of pop structures yet eager to bend them. The duo skillfully deploys the hardware and software of electronic dance music, even as it eludes genres and warps standard patterns. The technology makes repetition all too easy, but Sylvan Esso has better ideas.“No Rules Sandy” is a pendulum-swing sequel to “Free Love,” the subdued, wistful album that arrived in September 2020, when pandemic stasis and isolation were sinking in. “Free Love” contemplated, from a distance, the shared pleasures that were once taken for granted, with songs that longed to be, as one put it, “Shaking out the numb.”In Sylvan Esso’s new songs, pleasure is back within reach. “Sunburn” celebrates overindulgence — too much sun, too many sweets — with a track punctuated by the happy sample of a bicycle bell. “Didn’t Care” revels in an unexpected romance with a euphoric blend of Afro-pop guitars, Balkan choral harmonies and bubbly synthesizers.Sylan Esso hasn’t stayed isolated during the pandemic. Back in March 2021, it gathered fellow musicians around its North Carolina home base and completely reworked the electronic tracks from “Free Love” for a hand-played, full-band livestream set, titled “With Love” — a reminder of concert camaraderie. In September, the duo returned to touring. Still, “No Rules Sandy” sounds like Sylvan Esso had ample time to fool around in the studio.There’s a spirit of try-anything, knob-twirling whimsy throughout the new album, a determination that any parameter can change at any time. The album’s watchwords are the refrain of “Your Reality,” a track that meshes syncopated, ambiguous synthesizer chords and a sighing string quartet: “Surreal but free — it’s your reality.”Typical electronic pop and dance music offer reassurance through predictability: an obvious and reliable beat on the bottom, crisp verse-chorus-verse delineations for songs, or measured four-bar buildups leading to anticipated payoffs in dance tracks. Sylvan Esso challenges all those expectations. Throughout “No Rules Sandy,” beats appear, fracture and suddenly vanish and return; vocals are intimate and naturalistic one moment, glitchy or multitracked or pitch-shifted the next.In “Echo Party,” Meath sings about “a lot of people dancing downtown,” with hi-hats and piano chords that hint at disco and house music. But the track craftily refuses to settle into a club groove. The sliding bass line slows down to trip things up (or out); later, the beat drops away completely, leaving Meath on a looped a cappella syllable: “by, by, by.”The tweaks keep coming. “Look at Me” takes on the attention economy — “All I want is to be seen,” Meath sings — with production suggesting a constantly pinging internet; the rhythm is defined almost entirely from above by pecking, tapping, booping, clicking offbeats. “Cloud Walker” flickers in and out of a sense of 4/4 and 3/4, subdivided by the fibrillating cymbals of breakbeats, while Meath’s voice is overdubbed into chords as she sings about fear and acceptance: “learning disaster/relax in style.” As that line suggests, “No Rules Sandy” is upbeat but not oblivious. “Everybody’s hearing along with me/the alarm the alarm the alarm,” Meath sings in “Alarm,” near the end of the album. For all the fun Sylvan Esso was clearly having in the studio, the music also reflects just how unstable the 2020s feel. All the whizzing, zinging, twinkling, morphing sounds promise there are ways to cope with what’s coming at us.The album’s final track switches up once more. “Coming Back to You” is a simple, folky ballad, strummed on acoustic guitar (though Sylvan Esso can’t resist adding some filtered vocal harmonies). It promises a homecoming, a connection, a refuge: “I am the root, I am the leaf/I am the big tree you grew beneath,” Meath sings. After all the motion, the song offers a place to rest.Sylvan Esso“No Rules Sandy”(Loma Vista) More

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      The Art of Disappearance

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.The problem — or at least a problem, I’ve been told — is that I am not very concerned about being missed upon any of my exits, not the ones that are voluntary nor the ones that swoop down without warning to cover me in a quilt of dark feathers. I think about this often, and if there is a remedy for it. I read the sometimes long, sprawling announcements people make when they leave or take breaks from social media platforms, or I watch someone announce that he or she is departing on the way out of a crowded party, and I sometimes find myself puzzled by the practice. I slip out of parties unannounced. I make up excuses for why I didn’t make the rounds, or say goodbye. I see the concerned texts, I tell myself I’ll reply later and sometimes I do. I am indifferent about being missed, which isn’t to say that I don’t believe that I have been missed, or will be missed again. It is very likely that there are people missing me right now, reading this admission and shaking their heads at what they’ve always known, even if I wasn’t bold enough to explicitly speak it out loud before walking out of a door that I’d never again be on the better side of.This feeling is acute during the long, endless-feeling Ohio winters, when leaving a physical space is scarcely an option. This is most challenging in late March, when temperatures can barely rise above the 30s and snow is still accumulating. During that season within a season, when hope tails off, spinning into the still-early darkness, I return to the music of the cult favorite singer-songwriter Connie Converse. When I am most seduced by the idea that sunlight might be a cure for an emotional descent I can no longer trace, I return to the same song: Converse’s “We Lived Alone.” Clocking in at just over a minute, it’s both an ode to contentment with loneliness and an expression of intense longing. When the song begins, Converse is reveling in her own isolation: “We lived alone/my house and I/we had the earth/we had the sky/I had a lamp against the dark/and I was happy as a lark.” She describes her beloved stove and window, and the chair wearing a “pretty potato sack,” and the roses blooming around her doorstep. And then, right before the listener is evicted from the tune, there is the Volta: “I had a job/my wants were few/they were until I wanted you/and when I set my eyes on you/nothing else would do.” I first heard the songs of Converse in 2009, five years after Gene Deitch, who initially recorded Converse’s music in his kitchen with a Crestwood 404 tape recorder in the 1950s, played a cluster of recordings on WNYC. The songs were compiled and then released as the 2009 album “How Sad, How Lovely.” The release ignited a fascination around Converse, whom most people had never heard of. There are few things that seduce like scarcity — the reality that you can briefly traverse a single small world built by someone who left, and then built nothing else for the public to find or access. These were the only songs Converse ever recorded: She disappeared from Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1974, and hasn’t been seen or heard from since.If Connie Converse were alive today, she would be 98. On the internet, she is mostly assumed dead. Written of and spoken of in the past tense. For some, it might be hard to separate the shock of how her story ended from the songs themselves, but there is an abundance of brilliance in the work. Converse mastered the art of sparseness, relying on her ability to create a tiny chamber in which all that could survive is a voice and the pin pricks of a guitar’s strings, moving along inch by inch. It is very possible that even if nothing about her disappearance were spectacular beyond the disappearance itself, even if she spent decades in the mountains or forest, or simply driving from place to place, the years might have accumulated, her body might have reached its limits. But I find myself uncomfortable with the assumption of finality.I realize that I am projecting. Converse was someone who, it seemed, made a path for her life, post-music, that was rooted in refusal. A refusal to be known, a refusal for access. Her musical legacy suggests that an exit — both the life it leaves behind, and the elsewhere that it hints at — can echo, be endless. An elsewhere can offer relief, or at least an idea of relief, whether that desire for an elsewhere leads one to consider death, or whether it leads one to simply exit her circumstances and seek new ones, seek a place where she is unreachable. I am drawn to Converse because she offers a model for these questions that I have weighed and carried in the past, questions that I will almost certainly be confronted with again. I live with multiple anxiety disorders and depression. I have, in the past, had to do hard math around the subject of staying: staying alive, staying present in the place that I am, the world I know best.I have found myself newly sensitive to the art of disappearance, and how it is not — or at least not always — aligned with death. Sometimes a desire to be gone is simply a desire to be gone. It may be foolish, but there’s something comforting about imagining Converse living, moving through the back end of her ninth decade, in defiance of the dissatisfying “here” that haunted her over 40 years ago.Connie Converse is a person with a life ripe for the writer’s gaze. There are incompletions, large holes that can be filled only through imagination, through wishing, through myriad projections, for better or worse. But there are, of course, some concrete facts.Converse was born Elizabeth Eaton Converse in Laconia, N.H., on Aug. 3, 1924. Her father was a minister, and her mother ran a strict Baptist household. She was the middle child, sandwiched between two brothers: Paul, nearly three years older, and Phillip, four years younger. Converse excelled academically and earned a scholarship to Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. She was continuing a tradition — her mother and grandmother each graduated from Mount Holyoke — but dropped out abruptly after two years and moved to New York City. It was there, working at a printing house in the Flatiron district and living in Hell’s Kitchen and Greenwich Village, that she shed the name Elizabeth and began going by Connie. She started writing songs and playing them for friends. She also took up drinking and smoking, which reportedly enraged her religious parents. Still, Converse gave in to the joys of reinvention. Photo illustration by Itchi. Source photograph: Courtesy of the estate of Elizabeth Eaton Converse.When we speak of artists as being “ahead of their time,” we often mean that they were operating in a time, place or space that was not prepared for them, and wouldn’t be prepared for years or decades to come. A very specific ache in the Connie Converse story is that she was ahead of her time, but by only minutes. Or, she was ahead of her time but unrecognized as an innovator perhaps because of immutable factors: her gender, her personality. In New York, before the enormous success of singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan, Converse got in good with the right crowd, rolling with a crew of budding young folk musicians like Pete Seeger. In 1954, she played songs on the CBS “Morning Show.” In photos from this moment, she is sitting next to Walter Cronkite, who leans in while Converse answers a question, her arm slung over her guitar, a half-grin on her face. But then there was nothing. The TV appearance came and went with little interest from the public. The work to get her music in front of producers and managers yielded no results. She was considered too hard to sell, according to Deitch. She would mail her brother Phillip some of her recordings monthly. When her listener base didn’t expand as she’d hoped, she moved to Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1961, in part to be closer to Phillip. She worked as a secretary for two years before taking a job as the managing editor for The Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1963. She stopped writing songs altogether, seemingly content with her newfound life of relative certainty. By that time, the folk scene in New York had taken off, bursting with singer-songwriters who were aligned with the work Connie had already done.By the end of 1972, The Journal, which she had helmed for nearly a decade, left the University of Michigan, where it was housed, and was acquired by Yale. This was an inciting event for Converse, whose loved ones saw her growing increasingly depressed, bored and burned out on the routine of work, though it seemed to be the routine that sustained her. Friends pooled money to send her on a sabbatical to London, where she lived for around half a year, though it didn’t appear to have an impact on her demeanor upon her return. When she did return, her mother coaxed her into taking a trip to Alaska. Converse, who was by now drinking with noticeably more frequency, was not interested. But that trip, too, just furthered her dissatisfaction. In a quote attributed to Converse from 1974, she reportedly told her brother Phillip, “Human society fascinates me and awes me and fills me with grief and joy; I just can’t find my place to plug into it.” Shortly after that, she placed her meager belongings into her Volkswagen Beetle, left behind a batch of goodbye letters and vanished, entirely. In the interview, Phillip says that he didn’t know where his sister was. That he wouldn’t know what to say to her even if he knew where to find her. In the 2014 documentary “We Lived Alone,” Phillip reads a letter his sister left behind. The language in the letter is much like the language in her songs, poetic and direct. Speaking of things as they are, not as she dreamed they could be: “I’ve watched the elegant, energetic people of Ann Arbor, those I know and those I don’t, going about their daily business on the streets and in the buildings, and I felt a detached admiration for their energy and elegance. If I ever was a member of this species perhaps it was a social accident that has now been canceled.” In another letter, she wrote: “Let me go, let me be if I can, let me not be if I can’t.”Beautiful and jarring and haunting as it may be, what has most remained for me, in the back of my mind at a low hum, is its opening: Let me go, let me be if I can, let me not be if I can’t. About a decade after her disappearance, Converse’s family hired a private investigator to find her, or to at least confirm whether she’d taken her own life. In the documentary, Phillip says that the investigator declined, telling the family that even if he did find Connie, it was her right to disappear. He couldn’t bring someone back who didn’t want to return to the place from which they fled.To drill down on the definition of “being alive,” I have always come to a core definition that I can understand and make peace with: being someone who participates in the ever-shifting world. But I have no control over the world, and I don’t mean only the world in the sense of a blue rock twirling along endless dark. I also mean the smaller worlds. The worlds of the country I live in, the worlds of my city, the worlds of my neighborhood. There are edges of these worlds simultaneously sharpening and softening, even now, and I do not know which edges they are, or when they’ll come for me or comfort me, depending on their intent. And so I decide that living, then, is also a contract. I’ll stay for as long as I can, and I hope it is a good, long time. I’ll stay as long as staying gives more than it takes. In the times I’ve not wanted to stay, I have been showered with familiar platitudes. I’ve been told I have “a lot of life left,” or I’ve been told to think about all the people who will miss me when I’ve gone. Once, a doctor who was tasked with keeping me alive for longer than I wanted to be at the time told me to envision my funeral. It didn’t work, because I’d buried enough people I’d loved by that point. I had begun to believe in the funeral — at least as it serves the still-living — as a portal. Something you enter with one understanding of grief, and exit with a newer, sharper understanding of grief. I began to believe the funeral as a simple moment of transience, not of any grand enough consequence to keep me grounded in an unsatisfying life. I have still not gotten good at explaining this to anyone who has always wanted to be alive, or at least people who have rarely questioned their commitment to living, but there is a border between wanting to be alive and wanting to stay here, wherever here is to you, or whatever it means. It’s a border that I have found to be flimsy, a thin sheet overrun with holes. But it is a border, nonetheless. Similar to the border between, say, sadness and suffering. All these feelings can intersect, of course. But I have found it slightly more confusing when they don’t. When I maybe want to be alive, but don’t want to be in the world as it is. When I haven’t wanted to be alive, but want to cling to the varied bits of brightness that tumble into my sadness, or my suffering, which isn’t the same as a temporary haze of sadness, or a rush of anxiety. I mean suffering that requires a constant measuring of the scales between staying and leaving. Suffering that requires a consideration of how long the scale can tilt toward leaving before it becomes the only viable option. There are a lot of things in any life that aren’t left up to the people doing the living. If there is anything for a suffering person (or any person) to self-determine, it should be how they live, or if they choose to live at all.There are few thoughtful bits of advice for those who drift between those borders, or those who have a foot on each side simultaneously. And so, in a bad week, I turn my phone off, and then on again. I play piano in a quiet room. I look at maps. I admit, of course, that there are many intersections of Converse’s story that allow for me to map myself onto both her apparent frustrations and dissatisfactions. This is, I’m sure, why I’m here again. Why I have been here before, picking apart her old tunes and searching tirelessly for more and hoping that she is somewhere, alive, and away from anywhere that reminds her of any ache she has carried. I feel some compulsion to defend against the dominant idea that is attached to her songs: that they are terribly, poignantly sad. I bristle at this, not only because I know sadness to be a shorthand description for deep, vibrantly aware feeling. What Converse seemed to aspire to was a removal from the world on her own terms. From what is known about the time leading up to her disappearance, Converse was seeking newness. Her close friends pooled money to send her on a six-month trip to England in 1973, and she returned home, her mood unchanged. Not long before her disappearance, her mother pushed her into the Alaska trip, which worsened her discomfort and depression. These are the gestures people make when they love us, when they see us suffering. The idea is about what can be done to fix a person gripped by a sometimes unexplainable condition. Someone who is folding further into herself, and becoming seemingly unreachable. There is something I understand about the letter Converse left behind. She wanted to be let go, perhaps not only for the sake of not feeling like a burden on loved ones, but also to figure out, on her own, if the world was worth living in.I am sure that no small part of me takes some offense to Converse being referred to in the past tense is because it rushes to a conclusion about her motivations and fate — neither of which we have access to — and assumes that what seemed to be her relentless dissatisfaction was a form of selfishness. In the words she left behind, it seems as if she was most eager to be gone, away from a world that dissatisfied her, that had failed her after a half century of living. But to live in a world that often can’t make sense of someone self-determining their own exits, death is the easiest presumption to make. Photo illustration by Itchi. Source photograph: Courtesy of the estate of Elizabeth Eaton Converse.What I hear fighting its way to the surface in Converse’s songs is a type of questioning discontent, opening up to a sky of insatiable desire. In her songs, her voice doesn’t sound weighed down by grief, or weariness. It doesn’t sound as if it is nested in some web of dilemmas from which it can’t untangle itself. It tends to leap at the end of each line she sings. It’s a playful voice, a curious and constantly seeking voice. It splashes in the gaps of silence left by the space in her sparse guitar playing. It is almost a child’s voice — which, yes, can sometimes be sad — but is often trying to make sense of the otherwise unexplainable world that is newly coming into focus. I hear longing, and something that seems like hope.What stands out most is a sort of eager dreaming. Exuberant wishes that aren’t as sad as they appear on the tracks themselves, but maybe became sad for her as the years accumulated and she continued to seek them. What Converse seemed to know in her songs was that there was somewhere better, or a little more satisfying. And then, when she was done recording, she spilled back into a world where all of that satisfaction became increasingly out of reach. I am aware, more often now than I used to be, that I am up against time, same as anyone else. I can work to be happy where I am, and I do. I can work for my satisfaction with what I have at my disposal, which, to be clear, is a life full of privileges and sometimes pleasures, even if it is difficult to make that clear to myself some days. But in my wishing, my satisfaction is endless. In my dreams, I want to live forever. To come back to earth, swept into the many jagged realities of the present, is small damage. It accumulates, though in my case, that accumulation is met with other moments that make survival worthwhile: A pink flower that didn’t grow in my front yard last year pokes out of a brown patch. My dog, somehow, still excited to see me when I walk through the door. It didn’t rain when I wanted to go shoot ball and I made a few shots in a row. But even those pleasures work against a clock. Everything is a balance. When I think back to “We Lived Alone” and what I love about that song, I am grateful for its celebration of building the world you want amid life’s wreckage. It’s a song about understanding that what some people might see merely as absence is not only that. Like most of Converse’s songs, it is an ode to the delights of small pleasures, the things worth staying for.It might be hard for some listeners to hear this aspect of her music. I find myself uncomfortable with how people — not just in the case of Connie Converse, but broadly — tend to flatten the idea of what sadness is, or looks like, without considering its varied face. The music of Connie Converse teems with longing, desire and relentless dreaming. We are to believe that the outcome of her life is sad; therefore, she and her music have retroactively been branded as sad. But Converse reminds us that sadness is a complex color, a result of other, primary colors intersecting over time. I’m thankful for Converse’s vanishing act, even if I’ll never know its destination. She wrote and sang of all the places she hoped to go, and I listen to her songs now and hope that she got to where she wanted, even if it wasn’t where the people who loved her wished that she would be. If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to Speaking of Suicide for a list of additional resources.Hanif Abdurraqib is a contributing writer for the magazine as well as a poet, an essayist and a cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. More