Music

As the sound of country music has shifted, the emotive whir of its classic instrument has often been sidelined. The complicated antique has found new life in surprising forms.When DaShawn Hickman was 4 years old, living just 32 steps from the tiny granite House of God church in Mount Airy, N.C., he picked up a lap steel his uncle had built for his mother. Stretching the electric guitar across his tiny knees for the first time, using a D-cell battery as his slide, he traced the hymns his mother sang.Hickman soon graduated to the pedal steel, the lap steel’s byzantine successor, with as many as 24 strings controlled not only with two hands but also with both feet and knees. A quick study, Hickman was 13 when he began leading services at House of God with his steel/strings, the centerpiece of a century-old style of Black gospel called Sacred Steel.“This instrument is a ministry, a tool to help someone overcome,” Hickman, now 40, said by phone from Mount Airy. “Where the human voice can’t fully reach, the pedal steel can.”In June, Hickman released “Drums, Roots & Steel.” More restrained than many of its Sacred Steel predecessors, his solo debut is a showcase for the instrument’s emotional breadth, equally capable of prayers for the wounded and paeans for the joyous.It is one of several recent recordings that suggest that the pedal steel — familiar mostly for the lachrymal textures it has long lent to country music — is finding renewal in unexpected places. As the sound of slick modern country shifts from this large and esoteric accessory, ambient and experimental musicians have tapped it for much the same reason as Hickman’s Sacred Steel lineage: its ability to harness and even rival the expressiveness of the voice itself.“Since its existence, you had to learn how to play one way to get a backing role in some country band,” said Robert Randolph, the son of a New Jersey House of God deacon and minister who came to prominence more than two decades ago when he dared to take his 13-string purple behemoth out of the church. He was soon opening for the Dave Matthews Band at Madison Square Garden. “So it’s an instrument that’s never been fully explored.”With his boisterous Family Band, Randolph expanded Sacred Steel’s reach by turbocharging its sound, strings screaming for three hours over soulful marches and Allman-sized jams. His sound and style have since mellowed, and he has collaborated with Carlos Santana and Ozzy Osbourne. “Guitar, trumpet, piano, keyboard — they’ve all had nine million babies,” he continued. “But the pedal steel is so new to so many people they don’t even know what it is. There are so many ways to evolve this instrument.”Robert Randolph helped expand pedal steel’s reach, collaborating with musicians including Carlos Santana and Ozzy Osbourne.Michael Nagle for The New York TimesThat evolution is accelerating: The modern steel icon Greg Leisz played on half of Daft Punk’s final album, while the funk band Vulfpeck recently commissioned the Los Angeles whiz Rich Hinman to interpret a Bach chorale. The Texan Will Van Horn went viral in 2016 for covering Aphex Twin with pedal steel, while Dave Harrington, half of the haute electronic duo Darkside, used it as his compositional tool for Alanis Morissette’s recent meditation album. A new fleet of stirring steel players has emerged, and an 11th volume of the long-running guitar compilation “Imaginational Anthem,” out Friday, offers a snapshot of the evocative instrument’s intrigue.“One reason it has taken so long to grow out of the genre it’s been pigeonholed in is because it’s so technically complex, and that complexity has kept a lot of people in the country world,” said Luke Schneider, the Nashville player who curated the new collection, by phone. He detailed how the knees push levers that bend strings, how the feet trigger pedals that stretch them, how the hands work in constant harmony. “It might be the most difficult instrument in the Western world to learn,” he concluded.Schneider, 42, once thought he might have to stay in the country world, too. A longtime devotee of ambient music who knew of other Nashville players flirting with experimental sounds, he instead backed the singer-songwriter Margo Price in her early country years and later joined the masked musician Orville Peck’s band. Nashville sounds, Nashville paychecks.But he then encountered Susan Alcorn, one of the instrument’s rare iconoclasts alongside the tinkerer Chas Smith and the famed producer Daniel Lanois. Her 2006 album, “And I Await the Resurrection of the Pedal Steel Guitar,” felt like a pioneer’s sketchbook of exotic places a young player might take the antique. Schneider followed her lead, trying to use the pedal steel’s stature to his advantage.“You’re literally playing this instrument with your whole body. You have to conjure your feelings, then connect them to your toes, your knees, your fingers, your eyes, and your ears,” Schneider said. “All of that combined can express the voice of a musician in a way few other instruments can.”Schneider recorded his solo debut, “Altar of Harmony,” which arrived early in 2020 lockdown, using only pedal steel, shaping sighing strings into hypnotic drones. “By its very nature, the sound the instrument produces is ethereal, so it’s calming for the player and listener,” he said. “That still comes through at the edges of modern music.”Likewise, before he began collaborating with Morissette during the pandemic, Harrington discovered a postmodern poignancy inside the pedal steel’s mechanics. For years, he’d played a solo guitar rendition of “Pure Imagination” from “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,” often as a soundcheck warm-up. When he added steel, he spotted the song’s bittersweet heart and cut it as an album finale.“You’re literally playing this instrument with your whole body,” Luke Schneider said. “You have to conjure your feelings, then connect them to your toes, your knees, your fingers, your eyes, and your ears.”Morgan Hornsby for The New York Times“It unlocked a little trap door into the feeling of one of my favorite songs of all time, like the camera had been turned 45 degrees,” Harrington, 36, said via video chat. “It’s a happy song that’s just so sad.”Despite the pedal steel’s manual demands, this rush of applications and ideas is a result, in many ways, of digital accessibility. The Danish guitarist Maggie Björklund, 57, stowed her pedal steel in a closet for two years when she first tried to learn around 2000 because its mechanics proved too difficult and she knew maybe three men in Denmark who played it. She ultimately flew to Nashville to study with Jeff Newman, a beloved instructor who informed her she’d been doing it all wrong.“I thought I knew a little bit about pedal steel, but he said, ‘You sound like a German hausfrau,’” she recalled by phone from north of Copenhagen, laughing. “He ripped all that away from me and gave me the basis I still play.”Just five years later, the New York guitarist Jonny Lam decided to pursue pedal steel as a way to differentiate himself in a city with a glut of guitarists. He stumbled upon The Steel Guitar Forum, where amateurs building instruments in garages argued with the likes of Buddy Emmons, who had revolutionized the instrument’s design, tuning and sound.Those cranky older denizens (“No one ever knows how to post a picture,” Lam, 42, joked) became his gateway, offering a low-stakes way for a Chinese American neophyte to learn the lessons of Nashville. He devoured classic instructional texts and records, but the forums (and, now especially, YouTube) remain founts of inspiration for Lam and younger players, reducing barriers to entry for an expensive and isolating instrument.“Twenty years ago, I didn’t know what a pedal steel was. There was this monoculture of white males,” Lam said. “But now people are doing quirky things with it online, and different kinds of people are being exposed. That representation matters.”Still, for both Björklund and Lam, pushing past the pedal steel’s conventional territory took time. Lam played pristine honky-tonk fare with his band Honeyfingers and supplied old-school textures for Norah Jones and Miranda Lambert. Björklund cut two elegant folk-rock albums as a steel-wielding songwriter, then played in Jack White’s backing band.Their tracks on “Imaginational Anthem XI,” however, feel like coming-out parties. During “Rainbows Across the Valley,” Lam’s high and low tones slowly curl around chattering birds. Björklund’s “Lysglimt” backs a sinister Spaghetti Western theme with unsettling noise and electronic throbs, like a storm cloud commandeering the horizon. Lam has composed a modern Chinese opera for the pedal steel, and Björklund is now finishing a series of solo pedal-steel abstractions. These are new starts for their old instrument.“Traditional pedal steel is beautiful, but the notes have already been played. It would be such a shame for it to be a dusty instrument in country music,” Björklund said, sighing. “It is much more interesting to explore the outer edges, where it comes into contact with the modern world.” More

The Wu Tsai Theater will honor a $50 million gift from Joseph Tsai, a founder of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, and Clara Wu Tsai, a philanthropist.In late 2020, as coronavirus infections surged and cultural institutions shuttered, the fate of the long-delayed renovation of David Geffen Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic, was uncertain.Then came a $50 million gift from Joseph Tsai, a Taiwanese-born billionaire co-founder of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, and his wife, Clara Wu Tsai, a philanthropist. The donation moved the project forward, accelerating construction so the hall could reopen in October, a year and a half ahead of schedule.In a nod to role of the Tsai family, Lincoln Center and the Philharmonic announced on Wednesday that the main auditorium in the hall would be named the Wu Tsai Theater.“It really took courage,” Katherine Farley, the chairwoman of Lincoln Center’s board, said of the gift in an interview. “And that courage inspired other people, and it made a big, big difference.”The gift represents one of the Tsai family’s biggest ventures so far into the performing arts. Joseph Tsai, who trained as a lawyer and serves as vice chairman of Alibaba, is more frequently associated with athletics. He is the primary owner of the Brooklyn Nets and has played an important role in helping the N.B.A. expand in China. The couple has previously contributed to universities, hospitals and social justice projects, among other gifts.Clara Wu Tsai, who is also a member of Lincoln Center’s board, said in an interview that she and her husband were moved by the opportunity to create jobs for New Yorkers and help make the performing arts more accessible. Also being named for the Tsais: a concert series aimed at increasing racial and ethnic diversity in the arts and bringing together performers of different genres.“My dream is that we have a full hall of diverse audiences and that we get programming in there that really showcases the versatility and flexibility that the hall was created to offer,” she said.Geffen Hall’s $550 million renovation will bring both aesthetic and acoustic improvements, with wavy beech wood walls and seats that wrap around the stage. Other additions meant to draw people in include a 50-foot digital screen in the lobby that can broadcast concerts to the public and a studio looking out onto Broadway.The hall is set to reopen on Oct. 7, with a concert featuring Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” among other pieces, before an audience of emergency medical workers and construction workers who took part in the hall’s renovation. Two galas and an open house weekend will follow later in the month.Clara Wu Tsai said she was confident that audiences would turn out, despite lingering concerns about the coronavirus and changing habits around going to live performances.“Everybody’s waiting to hear what will be one of the best concert halls in the world,” she said. “The timing is going to be good.” More

Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherBeyoncé’s seventh solo album, “Renaissance,” is a rich tribute to the long history of Black dance music, from disco up through ballroom house. It functions both as collage and history lesson, and also captures an evolution in her songwriting and personal presentation toward more modern directions.For Beyoncé, who is 40, it is a strong midcareer pivot that asserts her singular place in pop music, capable of essentially disappearing for several years then re-emerging on her own terms, and still finding her audience.On this week’s Popcast, a deep dive on Beyoncé’s new album, her push-and-pull between tradition and futurism, her relationship to queer music communities and the ways in which she reframes understanding of authorship and ownership.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterWesley Morris, a critic at large at The New York TimesJon Pareles, The New York Times’s chief pop music criticSalamishah Tillet, a contributing critic at large at The New York TimesConnect 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 [email protected]. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

We asked jazz musicians, writers and others to tell us what moves them. Listen to their choices.A few years ago, Zachary Woolfe, a New York Times critic and editor, posed a question: What are the five minutes or so that you would play for a friend to convince them to fall in love with classical music? How about Mozart? Or the violin? Or opera?Over the course of more than 25 entries, dozens of writers, musicians, critics, scholars and other music lovers attempted to answer, sharing their passions with readers and one another.Now, we’re shifting the focus to jazz — and what better place to start than with Duke Ellington? A nonpareil composer, pianist and bandleader, he arrived in New York from Washington, D.C., just as the Harlem Renaissance was getting underway; soon, the Duke Ellington Orchestra had become the soundtrack to an epoch. He grew to be a Black American icon on the national stage, and then an ambassador for the best of American culture around the world. Jazz’s status as a global music has a lot to do with Ellington: specifically, his skill as a leader, collaborator and spokesman, who rarely failed to remind his audience, “We love you madly.”Here are 13 tracks that we think will make you love Ellington. Enjoy the listening, and be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Darcy James Argue, bandleaderAn underappreciated part of Ellington’s artistry is his mastery of misdirection. You think you know where the music’s going … then you blink and realize Duke’s taken you on a wild detour. This sleight-of-hand animates the A-side of “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” Ellington’s 1937 inverted arch-form masterpiece. It’s a blues; what could be more straightforward? But Ellington bobs and weaves, stretching out chords and turnarounds, twists the 12-bar form back on itself like an ouroboros, and careens through a dizzying set of modulations: five keys in under three minutes! But the journey isn’t just loud to soft — it’s discombobulation to clarity. The ’56 live version from Newport is legendary for the saxophonist Paul Gonsalves’s immortal 27-chorus “wailing interval,” but it’s “Diminuendo” that sets the stage.“Diminuendo in Blue”Duke Ellington (Columbia/Legacy)◆ ◆ ◆Ayana Contreras, criticMahalia Jackson’s resonant yet winged vocals float masterfully across the expressive string and horn arrangement of “Come Sunday,” Ellington’s ode to the singular day that Black workers historically, clad in Sunday best, could shed the sweat and grit of labor: emerging as glistening butterflies, gathered to praise the Lord. According to Irving Townsend’s 1958 liner notes for “Black, Brown and Beige,” the album it’s taken from, Jackson “hums an extra chorus as if she were aware of the power of her performance and wanted to let it linger a moment more.” Of course she knew. “Come Sunday” communicates with crystal clarity Ellington’s admiration for laborers and his elegant insistence on unconditional respect.“Part IV (with Mahalia Jackson) — a.k.a. Come Sunday”Duke Ellington, Mahalia Jackson (Columbia/Legacy)◆ ◆ ◆Giovanni Russonello, Times jazz criticHere’s Johnny Hodges, delivering four minutes of the most seraphic alto saxophone playing to be found on record, on this chestnut from Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s “Far East Suite.” That title is more or less a misnomer: Almost every piece in the suite has a Middle Eastern inspiration. And Strayhorn — Ellington’s composing and arranging partner of over 25 years — actually wrote “Isfahan” before their visit to that Iranian city in 1963. (Its original title was “Elf.”) This is one of Strayhorn’s classic cascading melodies, and the arrangement is Ellingtonian balladry at an apex, with its luxuriously dragged tempo and drumlike dabs of trombone harmony. As usual, it’s a featured band member that really makes the recording — this time, Hodges, cradling each note between his teeth, firm but not too tight, smearing and giving them all kinds of feeling without muddying or obscuring a thing. It’s a standard, but when’s the last time you heard a pianist cover this tune? That’s Hodges’s doing.“Isfahan”Duke Ellington (Legacy Recordings)◆ ◆ ◆Billy Childs, pianistI cannot listen to the first 50 seconds of the opening credits to “Anatomy of a Murder” without seeing shapes: Cubist shapes like a Picasso painting, with fragmented shards of sound from the different sections of the band, punctuated by the pointillistic drum pattern. From the opening “wah” of the cupped trombone, through the white-hot trumpet bursts, to the saxophone mini-cadenza, this piece grips me like a vise. The main body of the tune, a gutbucket blues passacaglia over which trumpet, clarinet, saxophone and piano solo, conjures in my mind a sublime sense of foreboding which perfectly sets up the mood for the entire movie.“Main Title and Anatomy of a Murder”Duke Ellington (Columbia/Legacy)◆ ◆ ◆Marcus J. Moore, jazz writerDuke Ellington always had this way of pulling strong emotions from the keys of his piano. On the 1962 version of “Solitude,” featuring the bassist Charles Mingus and the drummer Max Roach, Ellington properly evokes the feeling of isolation through sullen, spacious chords reflecting dark and light textures. Where the 1934 original elicited a certain optimism, this one, from the album “Money Jungle,” sounds gloomier — headphone music made for inclement weather. By the time Mingus and Roach arise near the song’s back end, Ellington has locked into the upper register of his solo, shifting the sound from ambient to a bluesy number with light drum brushes and subtle bass. It was a grand victory lap for one of jazz music’s pioneers.“Solitude”Duke Ellington (Blue Note Records)◆ ◆ ◆Harmony Holiday, poetMingus and Roach accompanied Ellington on the first recording of “Fleurette Africaine,” for “Money Jungle.” Left alone with his reflection in this solo version, Duke’s sway and almost-smile conjure longing and remembrance. He plays with the ghosts of his friends and spares them blunt nostalgia. He hesitates as if approaching a sacred altar of sound, and then surrenders to his solitude, allowing himself to be haunted by their absence but not diminished by it. This version is more jagged than the original, as Ellington confronts the missing tones by blurring them with his own. For a man who spent so many years maintaining a large orchestra that could play back the tones he heard in his head, Ellington seems to find the most solace alone. It’s as if all of that time spent in public was in pursuit of this isolated spiral, either as a soloist or with the phantoms of a couple of friends in a garden he invented for them. He’s soloing here, but he’s not alone, which would be frightening if it weren’t so beautiful.“Fleurette Africaine”Duke Ellington (via YouTube)◆ ◆ ◆Maurice Jackson, jazz historian“Black, Brown and Beige” encapsulates the full orchestration of Ellington’s work. The suffering of Black people through the wailing of the trumpeter Rex Stewart. Their struggles through the saxophonist Harry Carney’s musings. Triumphs using the “tom tom” of the drums. Duke called it “a tone parallel to the history of the Negro in America,” dedicated to Haitians who fought to save Savannah, Ga., from the British during the Revolutionary War. “I have gone back to the history of my race and tried to express it in rhythm,” Ellington said. “We used to have a little something in Africa, ‘something’ we have lost. One day we shall get it again.”“Part I (with Mahalia Jackson)”Duke Ellington, Mahalia Jackson (Columbia/Legacy)◆ ◆ ◆David Berger, musician and scholarRecorded March 6, 1940 — the first Ellington recording session with Ben Webster’s tenor saxophone and Jimmy Blanton’s propulsive bass completing what I would call the greatest band in jazz history. If Ellington’s oeuvre can be reduced to the marriage of the unschooled and the sophisticated, “Ko-Ko” is his finest example: a three-chord minor blues that tightly develops the motif introduced in the first measure through six dissonant, wild and imaginative choruses, serving notice on jazz composers and arrangers for decades to come. Modern jazz began here with an explosion.“Ko-Ko”Duke Ellington (Columbia/Legacy)◆ ◆ ◆Jon Pareles, Times chief pop music criticEllington’s music stayed open to jazz’s younger generations. “In a Sentimental Mood,” from an album he recorded in 1962 with John Coltrane and members of his quartet, leans into the ambiguities of a composition first heard in 1935. Ellington’s opening piano figure tiptoes around the chords it implies; Coltrane’s saxophone wafts in as if the melody is nearly too exquisite to disturb. Later, Ellington’s piano solo summons and then dissolves its own hints of 1930s swing, and Coltrane just teases at his own sheets-of-sound approach before returning to the grace of the original melody. The track is a paragon of mutual respect and shared, subtle exploration.“In a Sentimental Mood”Duke Ellington, John Coltrane (Impulse!)◆ ◆ ◆Miho Hazama, bandleaderThe happiest music in the world! I’ve had the privilege of conducting this “Nutcracker” suite a couple of times, and it always makes me wish I had annual gigs to keep performing it every holiday season. With a huge admiration for Ellington and Strayhorn, who wrote specific notes for each band member, this score is phenomenally done. The performance on the record is hard-swinging, exhilarating and authentic, from one of the orchestra’s later golden ages.“Peanut Brittle Brigade (March)”Duke Ellington (Columbia Jazz Masterpieces)◆ ◆ ◆Fredara Hadley, ethnomusicology professor“A Rhapsody of Negro Life,” from Ellington’s score for the 1935 film “Symphony in Black,” demonstrates his deep engagement with the moods and shades of Black life. In nine minutes he moves us musically from the plodding pulse of work songs to the swing of 1930s Harlem nightclubs. He matches the drama and the wail in “The Saddest Tale” with the beauty and the contemplation of “Hymn of Sorrow.” This music isn’t a treatise; it is a rhapsody in the best sense, in that each musical vignette is full of heart and intimate understanding of the joys and pains of Black humanity.◆ ◆ ◆Guillermo Klein, bandleaderI was immediately captivated by the storytelling of this tune — simple, yet profound and witty. The core of “Searching (Pleading for Love)” relies on the conclusion, which he states at the very beginning of the piece, as an intro, like a narrator sharing what it’s all about in a prologue. The theme follows a standard model: three times an idea and a conclusion. The bridge of the tune modulates two times, and that conclusion motif is present throughout. Right at the climax he varies it, giving a sense of pleading. His use of sound and space is just his own. Even on a trio recording like this, you can definitely hear the big band in his playing.“Searching (Pleading for Love)”Duke Ellington (Columbia/Legacy)◆ ◆ ◆Seth Colter Walls, Times music criticI recommend including this 1936 masterpiece in party playlists. When “Exposition Swing” comes on — with Ellington’s locomotive writing pulling listeners aboard — watch as guests tilt toward your speakers. Next, Harry Carney opens his baritone sax feature with a strutting, descending figure. As he finishes the solo, the orchestra cheers him with a modernist swell built from sustained tones, complex and cool. After another minute of dexterous soloist-and-orchestra interplay, stride-piano and blues accents from Ellington trigger the piece’s climactic phase, which incorporates collective shouts of that same descending motif heard during Carney’s opening. It’s a perfect hangout in microcosm.“Exposition Swing”Duke Ellington (Naxos)◆ ◆ ◆Song excerpts via Spotify and YouTube. More

Eblis Álvarez’s albums are “collaborations” with fictional bands. His latest, with the imaginary El Grupo Renacimiento, is a psychedelic fever dream and a critique of technology’s encroachment.One day Artemio Morelia, a singer and maracas player for an obscure Colombian salsa band called Grupo Renacimiento, awoke and found himself transformed into a robot. Haunted by visions of HAL 9000, he was suddenly acutely aware of the coldness and the distractions of a constantly plugged-in world. “Memory is dying,” he sings on his band’s new single, “Metamorfosis.” “They’ve already connected the internet to my lung/to my heart.”Or at least that’s what Eblis Álvarez, an academy-trained Colombian singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, wants you to believe with the release of his new album, “Meridian Brothers and El Grupo Renacimiento,” out Friday. Meridian Brothers is a moniker Álvarez uses on many of his albums — “collaborations” with fictional bands, in this case Grupo Renacimiento. Although he plays all the instruments and handles all the vocals on the album, he also performs live with a regular Meridian Brothers Band that features four of his friends from Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá.For Álvarez, “Meridian Brothers and El Grupo Renacimiento,” the first release on the renowned Ansonia Records in 30 years, is a Latin American novel disguised as a “B-salsa” album — his term for forgotten, B-list salsa performers, or salseros, like Orquesta Kool, who recorded under “precarious conditions.” It’s at once a psychedelic fever dream, a deep dive into salsa’s past, a critique of society’s surrender to technology, and a new musical encounter between Colombia’s sophisticated capital of Bogotá and its rustic Caribbean coast.“Grupo Renacimiento is like writing a book about the rebirth of a group of artists who fall into vice and re-emerge because of their Christian faith. It’s just a crónica about a classic salsa story, like the story of Richie Ray and Bobby Cruz,” Álvarez said in a video interview last month, referring to the classic 1970s New York salsa combo. “This is a record that tries to emulate the ’70s sound of the golden age of salsa dura,” or hardcore salsa.Invoking the crónica, a Latin American literary genre that combines journalism and fiction — and making a self-produced “mockumentary” that describes his encounter with Grupo Renacimiento in a Colombian church — Alvarez has injected the project with a playfully surreal flavor. According to the mockumentary, the group was formed in a small town called Las Tinas in the state of Magdalena, just a couple of hours down the road from Aracataca, which the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez reimagined as the fictional town of Macondo.Álvarez can come off like a pedantic ethnomusicologist until he veers off into theories about creating a 3-D space to rescue humans from a 2-D world of information technology, and his search for the salsa groove. Animatedly holding forth from his office in Bogotá, his long scraggly hair was part ’70s rocker and part medieval jester, and his singsong accent — emblematic of a uniquely Colombian charm — was both lilting and dead serious.Álvarez, 45, has released more than 25 albums since 2005, some as Meridian Brothers and others under other names, all of which have poked, investigated and tried to tease out a sense of authenticity in Colombian music. Some, like “Paz en la Tierra” in 2021, focus on the traditional vallenato genre, a storytelling folk music popularized by Carlos Vives in the 1990s, while others fall into the category Álvarez calls “neo-tropical,” excavating rhythms like champeta, a Colombia analog to Caribbean dembow.“I’m trying to describe a futuristic past,” Álvarez said. “It’s not a futurism that owes machines or technology, it’s an acoustic future.”Juan Jose Ortiz Arenas for The New York TimesHis effort is part of a decades-long Bogotá-based nation-building mission to mine the music of coastal areas, pioneered by artists like Ivan Benavides, once a Carlos Vives bandmember; Richard Blair, a British expatriate who founded his group Sidestepper with Bogotá-based musicians; and Bomba Estéreo, whose keyboardist and programmer Simón Mejía recently premiered “El Duende,” a short documentary about an African-descended family that makes marimbas and lives on Colombia’s Pacific Coast.“Meridian Brothers and El Grupo Renacimiento” has a stripped-down aesthetic, which is the essence of salsa itself — an uptown, urban genre born after the decline and fall of the flashy big-band Palladium Mambo era, much like punk arose in the wake of grandiloquent British progressive arena rock. Álvarez focuses most of his attention on a dubby, echoing psychedelic electric guitar and tinny keyboards, supplemented by a synched-in rhythm section of timbales and congas. You can hear hints of West African highlife and Congo-derived soukous, a hybrid of Cuban rumba.With his skanking guitar marking time at the center of the riffs, Álvarez’s lyrics comment on police brutality (“La Policía”), the purity of roots salsa (“Poema del Salsero Resentido”) and concern over nuclear weapons (“Bomba Atómica”). “Descarga Profética,” which imagines a Bogotá salsa jam as an ancient Greek algorithm with African influences, dizzily riffs on the 1930s Cuban classic “El Manisero.”In the mockumentary, Artemio Morelia says that his bandmates’ interests ranged from vallenato to Italian ballads, but that he felt compelled to play the kind of lo-fi, roots salsa practiced by the ’60s Venezuelan group Federico y su Combo (who released a song called “Llegó la Salsa,” one of the first to mention the term, in 1967). He also cites Ray Pérez, the legendary Afro-Puerto Rican bandleader Rafael Cortijo, and most importantly, Brooklyn’s Lebrón Brothers, a group central to the creation of salsa that evolved from early experiments with English-language, Cuban-derived boogaloo and hit its stride with “Salsa y Control” in 1969, yet saw little commercial success.“I identify with the rejection that the Lebrón Brothers experienced in their time,” Álvarez said. “I was attracted to their way of playing, the aggressiveness, but also their slowness, their introverted-ness.”The album’s final track is a cover of a Puerto Rican jíbaro classic, “La Mujer Sin Corazón,” by La Calandria, a.k.a. Ernestina Rivera, who was born in Puerto Rico and died in the Bronx in 1994. Álvarez chose the track to honor Ansonia Records’s vast catalog, one that still resonates strongly for fans of Ramito (Florencio Morales Ramos, known as the king of jíbaro, or Puerto Rican country music); Johnny Rodríguez’s bolero trios; Mon Rivera’s bomba and plena recordings; and Dominican merengueros like Dioris Valladares and Joseíto Mateo.The label, founded by Ralph Pérez, who moved from Puerto Rico to New York in 1920, was a family-run business with Pérez’s daughter ultimately teaming up with the music entrepreneur Herman Glass, and later his son, Gerard. “I was just fascinated how these musicians, most of whom could not read music, would make music that would touch people so much and make them get up and dance,” said the younger Glass, who grew up listening to Ramito and hanging out at the Teatro Puerto Rico on 138th Street in the Bronx’s Mott Haven.In 2019, the Glass family sold Ansonia Records to the former KCRW D.J. and film music supervisor (“Y tu Mamá También”) Liza Richardson. “We’ve digitized 5,000 songs about two-thirds of the way through, and we’ve released probably 20 percent of that for streaming,” Richardson said in an interview. “Ansonia is a time capsule that is just going to get better with age. There is so much beauty in it. Hopefully we can do a lot more new releases, but right now we think we can afford to do one new release a year.” At the suggestion of her longtime friend Camilo Lara (who records electronic music as Mexican Institute of Sound), she agreed to acquire Álvarez’s new Meridian Brothers project for Ansonia’s rebirth.In the spirit of Ansonia, Álvarez is hoping not only to recapture the treasured moments of the past, but to slow down humanity’s rush to embrace the artificiality of digital life. “I’m trying to describe a futuristic past,” he said. “It’s not a futurism that owes machines or technology, it’s an acoustic future. When Elvis Presley, in his first recordings with Sam Phillips, tried to create reverb in the studio, they didn’t have corporate technology. They worked with the creativity of the mind and heart.”The Meridian Brothers will perform at SummerStage Staten Island on Aug. 6; cityparksfoundation.org/summerstage. More

With surprising concerts performed at the highest level, the Ouverture Spirituelle is part of the Salzburg Festival but outshines it.SALZBURG, Austria — Shostakovich’s “Babi Yar” Symphony, a celebration and condemnation of Russian life and cultural memory, was met at the Grosses Festspielhaus here on a recent evening with a standing ovation that lasted over five minutes.Preceded by a setting of the Kaddish and opening with an evergreen reproof of antisemitism, the symphony is the kind of music that welcomes reflection. But it was understandably difficult to keep quiet after a performance of a masterly art delivered with mastery.And that was only the first concert of the night.Such a lengthy, substantial evening is typical of the Ouverture Spirituelle — a Salzburg Festival series separate from the main slate, and originally designed to ease into it — which started with the “Babi Yar” on July 19 and continued through Thursday, often with at least two programs a day.Now in its 10th edition, the Ouverture Spirituelle is still in the shadow of the rest of the festival. Not all performances sell out; the audience is visibly less international; and the press coverage doesn’t come close to comparing with, say, the main-stage glamour of a starry new “Il Trittico” at the Grosses Festspielhaus last week.Videos by the artist Shirin Neshat, who is staging “Aida” at the festival, were screened at the Kollegienkirche.Marco BorrelliNight by night, though, the Ouverture Spirituelle is the superior event this year — it’s also the finest I’ve attended all summer. Each program holds some sort of surprise: unfamiliar repertoire, illuminating juxtapositions of music old and new, opportunities to hear works that are typically reserved for concert halls but shine in spaces like the airy Kollegienkirche, or Collegiate Church. Above all, its artists are as top-tier as those at the main festival. And some, like the pianist Igor Levit, appear at both but break new ground at the Ouverture Spirituelle.Alexander Pereira, a former artistic director of the festival, introduced the Ouverture Spirituelle in 2012, with the aim of focusing each edition on the music of one world religion. But that approach had exhausted itself by the time Markus Hinterhäuser took over as artistic director, presenting his first slate in 2017.“The idea from my predecessor was wonderful,” Hinterhäuser said in an interview. “But this is done. I cannot repeat that, and I don’t want to repeat that.”Instead, he and Florian Wiegand, the director of concerts, have organized the Ouverture Spirituelle around themes, like “Transfiguration,” “Pax” and, this year, “Sacrificium,” meant in both a sacred and secular sense. Intentionally broad, they allow for “the whole geography of music history to be used,” Hinterhäuser said.The pianist Igor Levit introduced new repertory in Paul Dessau’s “Guernica” and Hartmann’s “27. April 1945” sonata.Marco BorrelliCrucially, he and Wiegand have a direct hand in organizing the concerts, which is less the case with the main festival, in which touring artists and orchestras often come with their own traveling repertory. “Of course when you ask Jonas Kaufmann to do a recital,” Wiegand said, “he delivers the program.”But for the Ouverture Spirituelle, the process works in something like the reverse. Hinterhäuser and Wiegand spend a lot of time listening to music and discussing what could work with the theme. They have some goals, like pairing early and contemporary repertoire to essayistic effect, or giving the quasi-religious themes a political edge. Then they begin to match the programming with artists, sometimes calling them directly instead of going through managers.This results in concerts that artists — including this year’s guests, like the Tallis Scholars, the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and John Eliot Gardiner with his Monteverdi Choir — don’t perform anywhere else. “That is what a festival should be,” Wiegand said. “If it’s going to Lucerne or the Proms, why should people come to Salzburg?”Maxime Pascal led a one-night-only performance of Honegger’s enormous “Jeanne d’Arc au Bûcher,” featuring, at his left, the French actress Irène Jacob.Marco BorrelliTrue. As a critic, I’m less inclined to dip into other festivals when I see programs that have already taken place elsewhere or that will make their way to New York. The Ouverture Spirituelle, however, is densely packed with music that I haven’t even heard of, and that I’m not likely to come across again.That Shostakovich concert — played by the Mahler Youth Orchestra under the baton of Teodor Currentzis — was about as traditional as the Ouverture Spirituelle got this year, aside from Handel’s “Messiah,” which was led by Jordi Savall but with smaller, clearer forces than usual and at the less-than-400-seat Kollegienkirche.With its pride of place on the Ouverture Spirituelle’s opening night, the “Babi Yar” — nicknamed for its setting of a poem about remembering the massacre of over 30,000 Jews at the site in Ukraine — might have seemed a response to the war there, where Russian missiles struck the area around the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in the early days of the invasion. But, in an eerily prescient move, it was programmed last year.Beyond that, the program was conducted by Currentzis, who with his ensemble MusicAeterna is under scrutiny for ties to the Russian state. (On Tuesday, he announced the formation of a new group, Utopia, with Western backing; tellingly, the news release referred to him as Greek instead of Greek-Russian, as he had been identifying himself, and made no mention of what this development means for the future of MusicAeterna.)At the “Babi Yar” concert, though, the audience’s focus seemed to be more on the performance itself, given the ecstatic response to the orchestra and Currentzis — not to mention members of the MusicAeterna Choir and the Bachchor Salzburg. The soloist, Dmitry Ulyanov, had a characterful, sonorous bass that was reason enough to forgive indulgences by Currentzis like having the instrumentalists stand at an emotional climax (a gesture that doesn’t trust the music), or interminably holding his arms up to keep the hall silent at the end of the symphony (a gesture that doesn’t trust the listeners).The evening took a more adventurous turn not long after at the Kollegienkirche, where members of Cantando Admont and Klangforum Wien presented two harrowing and hauntingly resonant works by Luigi Nono, one inspired by horrors in Poland during World War II (“Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatti in Auschwitz”), the other by oppressive Soviet rule (“Quando stanno morendo. Diario polacco n. 2”).Threading one concert to the other in the same night, or one piece to another within a single program, is part of the planning thrill. “It has to do with knowledge and intuition,” Hinterhäuser said. “There’s always this kind of balance, what Robert Musil would say is between the sense of possibility and reality.”The possibilities, with the Salzburg Festival’s cachet and budget of nearly 60 million euros ($61.5 million), are extensive. This year, it has meant bringing the Monteverdi Choir to the Kollegienkirche for the brief but exquisite Carissimi oratorio “Jephte”; a pickup ensemble including Kopatchinskaja for Giya Kancheli’s “Exil,” from the 1990s and now unimaginable in a space without that church’s acoustics; and, on that same program, the Tallis Scholars making a cameo appearance in 16th-century music by Orlande de Lassus.Jordi Savall led an intimate “Messiah” at the Kollegienkirche.Marco BorrelliIt has meant one-night-only performances of Josef Myslivecek’s “Abraham ed Isacco,” an oratorio with turns of phrase that prefigure Mozart, by Collegium 1704; Honegger’s “Jeanne d’Arc au Bûcher,” with a magnetic Irène Jacob as the heroine and a tireless Maxime Pascal on the podium; Levit in Paul Dessau’s tintinnabulary “Guernica” and Hartmann’s doleful, trudging “27. April 1945” sonata (just the first part of a concert that also included the Hagen Quartet in Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 and the MusicAeterna Choir in Shnittke’s Requiem for Soloists, Mixed Choir and Instruments).Some programs were mercifully given two performances, like the “Messiah,” sublimely intimate with agile soloists joined by Le Concert des Nations and La Capella Nacional de Catalunya. The visual artist Shirin Neshat, who is back in Salzburg to restage her “Aida” from 2017, screened four works — on a spectrum from subversive to shallow — at the Kollegienkirche, which attracted an audience not typically seen at concerts there. And, as part of the festival’s homage to the living composer Wolfgang Rihm, his 1979 chamber opera “Jakob Lenz” was given a welcome showing, with terrifying intensity and utter commitment from Le Balcon, under Pascal, and its phenomenal Lenz, the Austrian baritone Georg Nigl.If this sounds a bit overwhelming, it is. (Imagine being Hinterhäuser and Wiegand, who were spotted at every performance.) But for fans of classical music — especially the most curious among them — it doesn’t get much more fulfilling than the Ouverture Spirituelle.As it heads into its second decade, Wiegand said, the series can promise more of the same — at least through 2026. That’s when Hinterhäuser’s contract expires. “The plan until then is to continue with the themes,” Wiegand added. “Then, we see what comes next.” More

At the helm of Warner Bros. Records from the 1960s into the ’90s, he worked closely with some of the most successful and influential performers of his era.Mo Ostin, who in his many years as the powerful chief executive of Warner Bros. Records made a point of putting the artist first, in the process encouraging the most important works of musicians like Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young and Prince, died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 95. The death was confirmed by his granddaughter Annabelle Ostin.“Between the early ’60s and the mid-’90s, under legendary record man Mo Ostin, no company was more successful at artist development — or operated with more sophistication,” the music industry trade publication Hits wrote in 2016.The list of artists signed to the constellation of affiliated Warner Bros. labels when they were guided by Mr. Ostin reads like a dream-world music hall of fame. It includes pivotal singers of the 1950s like Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Sammy Davis Jr.; innovators of the 1960 and ’70s like Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell and the Grateful Dead; and game-changers of the ’80s and ’90s like Madonna, R.E.M. and Green Day.“One of the great things about Warners, I always felt, was our emphasis and priority was always about the music,” Mr. Ostin told The Los Angeles Times for a profile of him in 1994.After a corporate power struggle led to his departure from Warner Bros. in 1995, he helped form DreamWorks Records, the music arm of the entertainment conglomerate created by David Geffen, Steven Spielberg and the former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg. There he signed fresh mavericks like Rufus Wainwright, Elliott Smith and Nelly Furtado, along with veterans like the Isley Brothers and Burt Bacharach.One crucial factor in Mr. Ostin’s scouting and shaping of the brightest talents during Warner’s most vaunted years was his ability to hire and hold onto a tight executive team, highlighted by a prolific group of producers and A & R people like Lenny Waronker, Russ Titelman, Ted Templeman and Joe Smith.Another key was his saviness in creating joint-venture deals with a variety of labels, including Sire (which brought to the stable New Wave stars like Talking Heads, the Pretenders and Depeche Mode); Bizarre/Straight (tapping the netherworld of Frank Zappa, Alice Cooper and Captain Beefheart); Tommy Boy (hip-hop); Slash (punk and alternative music); and Quincy Jones’s Qwest (R&B).Mr. Ostin, right, and the producer Joe Smith appeared on a Los Angeles billboard in about 1973. Ginny Winn/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesFor all his success, Mr. Ostin underplayed his role in public. Unlike his music-business peers Ahmet Ertegun, David Geffen and Clive Davis, who swooned before the spotlight, he granted very few interviews and kept a low profile on the party circuit.“To me, the artist is the person who should be in the foreground,” Mr. Ostin said in 1994.Still, the industry recognized the significance of his work. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2003, and the Recording Academy honored him with a President’s Merit Award in 2014 and a Trustees Award in 2017.He was born Morris Meyer Ostrofsky on March 27, 1927, in Brooklyn to immigrant parents who had come to the United States from Russia during the Communist revolution of 1917. When he was 13, he moved with his parents and his brother, Gerald, to Los Angeles, where the family ran a produce market.He was a music fan from an early age, but his introduction to the music business came by happenstance. Living next to his family was the brother of Norman Granz, who owned the jazz label Clef Records and promoted concerts in the 1940s and ’50s. During his college years at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he majored in economics, Mr. Ostin wound up helping Mr. Granz by selling programs for his concerts. He married Evelyn Bardavid in 1948.Earning a bachelor’s degree with honors, Mr. Ostin enrolled in U.C.L.A.’s law school but dropped out in 1954 to support his wife and their young son. A job opportunity also came about through Mr. Granz, who hired him to be the controller for Clef at a time when the label’s roster included such important jazz artists as Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald and Charlie Parker.Clef eventually changed its name to Verve; about the same time, Mr. Ostin changed his name as well.Toward the end of the 1950s, Frank Sinatra tried to buy the label, inspired by its artist-friendly approach. But he lost out to MGM Records, a disappointment that led him to form his own company, Reprise, in 1960. He named Mr. Ostin executive vice president, with the mission to model the new company on Verve.“Frank’s whole idea was to create an environment which, both artistically and economically, would be more attractive for the artist than anybody else had to offer,” Mr. Ostin said in 1994. “That wasn’t how it was anywhere else.”For the first few years, Reprise’s economics did not match its artistic efforts, in part because of Sinatra’s ban on signing any of the promising new rock ’n’ roll acts. “I went to Frank and said, ‘Look, we’re not going to be able to survive unless we become competitive,’” Mr. Ostin told Hits in 2016. “He hated rock ’n’ roll, but he realized what I was saying made a lot of sense. So he lifted the ban. That was a big, big turning point.”The first rock band Mr. Ostin signed, in 1964, were the Kinks, who scored a Top 10 hit that year with “You Really Got Me,” followed by another in 1965 and four more Top 40 entries by early the next year. By that point Sinatra, in need of cash, had sold Reprise to Warner Bros., which merged the companies and gave Mr. Ostin creative control.Along with Mr. Waronker and Mr. Smith, Mr. Ostin signed successful pop acts like Petula Clark, the Association and Harpers Bizarre before moving on to more hard-edge rock bands like the Dead, Fleetwood Mac and Jethro Tull. Mr. Ostin himself signed Jimi Hendrix in 1967, drawn by the early buzz Hendrix was stirring in Britain.Mr. Ostin, standing at left, and Mr. Smith, standing second from left, with three members of Fleetwood Mac in 1973: seated from left, Christine McVie, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood. Warner Brothers ArchiveThat year, Mr. Ostin was named president of Warner-Reprise. By 1970, he was chairman and chief executive, a post he would hold for nearly a quarter-century.In the early ’70s, the company greatly magnified its power by launching the WEA distribution system, filtering in the rich catalogs of Elektra and Atlantic Records. By adding more and more affiliated labels, Mr. Ostin gained enough muscle to take on the music industry’s unchallenged market behemoth at the time, CBS Records.Rivalry between the two corporations escalated into a tit-for-tat battle starting in the late 1970s, when CBS’s chief executive, Walter Yetnikoff, lured James Taylor away from Warner Bros.; Mr. Ostin retaliated by signing Paul Simon away from CBS. In the 1980s, Mr. Ostin pulled off the same feat by poaching Miles Davis from his longtime home at CBS. (By that time WEA had overtaken CBS as the market champion.)The signing of Mr. Simon paid off particularly well in 1984, when his album “Graceland” became a major hit and, by incorporating influences from South Africa and elsewhere, stood as a game changer in Western awareness of global music.“There was no indication whatsoever when we started that the album had any chance of a commercial payoff,” Mr. Simon told The Los Angeles Times in 1994. “But Mo loved the idea and encouraged me to take the risk.”Scores of culturally important or commercially mighty acts were nurtured by Warner Bros. in Mr. Ostin’s era. The list includes the bands Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Van Halen, Dire Straits, ZZ Top, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Sex Pistols, as well as George Benson, Rod Stewart, Rickie Lee Jones, Chaka Khan, Randy Newman, Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt and Ice-T.During those years Fleetwood Mac went from a cult band to a historic album seller with the blockbuster “Rumors” in 1977. The next year, Mr. Ostin wooed Prince to the company. Other top labels had been vying for him, but Mr. Ostin bested them by taking the rare risk of guaranteeing Prince a three-album deal and by giving him creative control.Of all the artists signed during the peak of his reign, Mr. Ostin singled out Neil Young and Prince as perhaps the most significant, in large part because their prestige became the incentive for important later artists to sign. “I can’t tell you how many new artists mention Neil Young when we’re trying to sign them — R.E.M., Dinosaur Jr. and tons of others,” he said.Mr. Ostin being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2003.Frank Micelotta/Getty ImagesMr. Ostin’s departure from Warner Bros. in 1994 came in the wake of a corporate reshuffling in which he would have had to report to Robert Morgado, the new chairman of Warner Music Group, greatly limiting his autonomy. “This business is about freedom and creative control,” Mr. Ostin told The Los Angeles Times. “An executive has to be able to make risky decisions with minimal corporate interference.”The next year, he joined with his son Michael, who had worked with him at Warner Bros., and Mr. Waronker to manage DreamWorks Records. Mr. Ostin retired from the music industry in 2004, after the DreamWorks label was sold to Universal Music Group, but he continued to do consulting work for Warner Bros.In addition to his granddaughter Ms. Ostin, he is survived by his brother, Gerald; his son Michael; three other grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter. His wife died in 2005. Two of his sons died: Randy, a record promoter, in 2013, and Kenny in 2004.Mr. Ostin’s unflagging support for artists led them to lionize him. Flea, whose band the Red Hot Chili Peppers had been signed by Mr. Ostin, said in an interview for this obituary in 2019: “Mo was an exceptionally kind and intelligent man. When I talked to him, I felt understood.”That connection inspired Flea to write and record “a little country ditty,” in honor of Mr. Ostin after his departure from Warner Bros. — to Mr. Ostin’s great delight, he said.“Mo, Mo, why did you have to go?” the unreleased song began. “You’re the first record company guy/That looked me in the eye.”Alex Traub More

The pop star’s decision to replace two words in her song “Heated” follows Lizzo’s removal of the same term, which has been used as a slur against disabled people, from her track “Grrrls.”Days after the release of her latest album, “Renaissance,” Beyoncé will modify the lyrics of one of its songs, a representative for the singer said on Monday, in response to an outcry from disability rights advocates who say the pop star should not have used a word that has historically been employed as a derogatory slur.In “Heated,” a dancehall-inspired track, the singer uses the words “spaz” and “spazzin’” in an energetically recited portion of the song that’s a callback to the freestyles at some ballroom events. Activists condemned the use of the word in social media posts, pointing out that another pop star, Lizzo, had removed the same lyric from a song following similar backlash in June.“The word, not used intentionally in a harmful way, will be replaced,” a spokeswoman for Beyoncé said in an email.The word at issue is based on spastic diplegia, a form of cerebral palsy that causes motor impairments in the legs or arms. In June, Hannah Diviney, a writer and disability advocate from Australia, tweeted about Lizzo’s use of the word, noting that to a person with cerebral palsy like her, spasticity referred to an “unending painful tightness” in her legs, and urged the singer to “do better.” In response to the criticism from fans and activists, Lizzo changed her song, “Grrrls,” and wrote in a statement that “this is the result of me listening and taking action.”Diviney wrote in an op-ed, published in The Guardian on Monday, that her “heart sank” when she learned that Beyoncé’s new album had used the same word.“I thought we’d changed the music industry and started a global conversation about why ableist language — intentional or not — has no place in music,” Diviney wrote. “But I guess I was wrong, because now Beyoncé has gone and done exactly the same thing.”Disability right advocates have noted that the word has been more commonly used as a derogatory term in the United Kingdom compared to the United States. Scope, a group in Britain that campaigns for equality for people with disabilities, tweeted, “Disabled people’s experiences are not fodder for song lyrics,” and urged Beyoncé to follow Lizzo’s example. More