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      Lizzo Conquers Self-Doubt With an ’80s Jam, and 7 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Brent Faiyaz, Pink, Marcus Mumford 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.Lizzo, ‘2 Be Loved (Am I Ready)’“2 Be Loved (Am I Ready)” — from Lizzo’s new album, “Special” — is a self-questioning self-help pop track with 1980s drum machines and synthesizers pumping syncopated octaves and handclaps over an aerobics-friendly beat, heading toward the upward key change of a classic pop single. As Lizzo sings about temptation and insecurity contending with the promise of pleasure, it’s clear what’s going to win.Pink, ‘Irrelevant’Self-doubt turns to defiance and then to righteous anger in “Irrelevant,” a thumping, guitar-strumming, generalized pop-rock protest that makes up in spirit and momentum what it lacks in focus. As the arrangement builds behind her, Pink sings about fear, calls out religious hypocrisy, makes common cause with “the kids” and finally, backed by a mass of vocals, belts, “Girls just wanna have rights/So why do we have to fight?”Demi Lovato, ‘Substance’After all Demi Lovato’s travails, the singer wails a 21st-century plaint about superficiality and loneliness: “Am I the only one looking for substance?” The backup is pure professional punk-pop, pushing those loud guitars and muscular drums as Lovato works up to a near-shriek and flings “whoa-oh” as a hook. But the frustration comes through as loudly as the guitars.Brent Faiyaz, ‘Loose Change’Brent Faiyaz, an R&B singer, songwriter and producer, has landed collaborations with Drake, Alicia Keys and Tyler, the Creator. His surprise-released second album, “Wasteland,” which is full of songs and skits about romantic suspense — both good and bad — is poised for a big debut on the Billboard 200 album chart. “Loose Change” backs him with an implied beat — no drums, lots of space — sketched by syncopated chords from a string ensemble, skulking synthesizer tones and his own imploring voice. In a tremulous tenor croon that echoes Usher, he sings about how infatuation can turn to irritation, indicting his own worst impulses and wondering, “What’s left of us, what’s left of our lives?”The A’s, ‘When I Die’“When I Die” is morbid but practical, and ultimately affectionate. The A’s are Amelia Meath, from the electronic band Sylvan Esso, and Alexandra Sauser-Monnig from Daughter of Swords. Their new album, “Fruit,” is mostly other people’s songs, but “When I Die” is their own. Singing close harmony in what could almost be a nursery-rhyme melody, they add percussion and synthesizer bass lines over what sounds like marching feet. And they calmly provide instructions for a memorial — loud music, flowers, dancing, toasts and a funeral pyre “to light your way back home” — to remind survivors that “I’m sorry I left you behind/and I’m kissing you through this song.”Marcus Mumford, ‘Cannibal’Marcus Mumford, from Mumford and Sons, confronts deep and confusing trauma in “Cannibal,” from a solo album due in September. He doesn’t specify what happened, but he insists, “That wasn’t a choice in the mind of a child.” Most of the track is just his voice and a few guitar notes picked on low strings. But as he faces up to how hard it is to speak about the events, and pleads “help me know how to begin again,” a arena-filling band suddenly materializes behind him; it’s the breakthrough he longs for.Sabrina Carpenter, ‘Because I Liked a Boy’Things go wrong fast in Sabrina Carpenter’s “Because I Liked a Boy” from her new album, “Emails I Can’t Send.” It starts out sounding cozy and old-fashioned, with just an echoey electric guitar playing 1950s chords as she sings about what could be a rom-com flirtation: “We bonded over black-eyed peas and complicated exes,” she coos. “It was all so innocent.” But the chorus changes everything; an ominous synthesizer bass tone arrives and she’s being accused of being “a homewrecker” and “a slut” and getting truckloads of death threats, and the bass and drum machine heave beneath her like the ground is shaking. She keeps her composure, but just barely.Pantha du Prince, ‘Golden Galactic’Pantha du Prince — the electronic musician Hendrik Weber — works where ambient and dance music overlap. He’s fond of nature imagery and pretty, consonant sounds, but his music is changeable and contemplative rather than saccharine. “Golden Galactic,” from his upcoming album “Golden Gaia,” uses plinking, harplike motifs, repeating them a few times and moving on, constantly changing up the implied rhythms instead of settling into a loop. That restless motion is enfolded in swelling string-section chords, going nowhere in particular yet not staying still. More

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      Maude Latour, a Columbia Student, Makes Existential Pop

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      The 22-year-old singer-songwriter just graduated with a degree in philosophy.Name: Maude LatourAge: 22Hometown: New York CityNow lives: In a four-bedroom apartment near Columbia University, with the same four roommates she has lived with since freshman year.Claim to fame: Ms. Latour is a singer-songwriter whose plush indie pop grapples with impermanence. She writes about composing a letter to her future self, cleaning a bedroom that always gets messy and, on her recent single “Trees,” mourning the loss of her grandmother, whom she searches for in the space between branches. Ms. Latour filmed the song’s music video during her final semester as an undergraduate at Columbia this spring, between classes on Virginia Woolf and the history of philosophy. “I’m majoring in, ultimately as a philosophy major, life being fleeting,” Ms. Latour said.Big break: A self-described choir kid, Ms. Latour began songwriting at 15 and uploading her music to Spotify at 17. In March 2020, during the early pandemic lockdown, Ms. Latour posted a video of herself singing “One More Weekend,” an upbeat rendering of an early college heartbreak, to TikTok, where it has been viewed more than 455,000 times. (It has more than 28 million streams on Spotify.) In 2021, during her junior year, Ms. Latour was applying to summer jobs when record labels approached her. She signed with Warner Music and released an EP, “Strangers Forever,” last October.Latest project: Ms. Latour went on a North American tour this spring, squeezing in six shows during spring break and the rest on weekends. Ms. Latour said she cried onstage at Bowery Ballroom in Lower Manhattan, while dedicating her song “Lola” to friends in the audience who are survivors of sexual assault. (“Keep my girls protected/ I’m turned on when I’m respected,” she sings.) “Diderot says you can’t have authentic emotions onstage,” said Ms. Latour, referencing the French philosopher’s “Paradox of the Actor.” “I was like, ‘What?’ All I do is go onstage and feel and bleed out my emotions in front of people.”“The way I feel at the old age of 22 is so much more complicated than when I was 19,” Ms. Latour said.Braylen Dion for The New York TimesNext thing: Later this month, Ms. Latour will play Lollapalooza, her first festival, on the same day as Metallica. “I’m on the same stage as them, so their drum kit and stuff is going to be behind me,” she said. Ms. Latour is also working on an EP she described as a queer coming-of-age set in the “enchanted forest” that is New York City. “The way I feel at the old age of 22 is so much more complicated than when I was 19,” she said. “I’m trying to grow up with my music.”Borrowed threads: Ms. Latour’s iridescent, Y2K-era stage outfits are a joint effort between herself and her four roommates. The magenta corduroys, rhinestone belt and rust-orange Nike jacket she wore on tour were sourced from her roommates’ closets. Wearing her friends’ clothes helps ease Ms. Latour’s nerves. “I feel hugged by their presence,” she said. More

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      Revisiting the Pyramids’ ‘Avant-Garde African Jazz,’ Four Decades Later

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      The group that started at Antioch College in Ohio went to Africa and returned “transformed,” one of its members said. A new boxed set collects its little-heard albums from the 1970s.In the early 1970s, as many jazz musicians looked directly to Africa for rhythms and inspiration, a group of students from Antioch College pushed even further, creating music that was so overtly African, you would have thought it was coming direct from Kenya or Senegal, not a small liberal arts college in Yellow Springs, Ohio.Between 1973 and 1976, the Pyramids released their music independently and sold albums hand-to-hand to classmates and during their travels on the road. Though the group earned a smattering of fans, its music — “avant-garde African jazz,” its bassist Kimathi Asante called it in an interview — was impossible to market.“It was a little bit too much for people,” said Margaux Simmons, who played flute in the group. “We were so eager and open and we went there.”On Friday, a new boxed set titled “Aomawa: The 1970s Recordings” will mark the widest release of the Pyramids’ music to date, reintroducing the band’s first three studio albums — “Lalibela,” “King of Kings” and “Birth/Speed/Merging” — and unearthing a 1975 live session for KQED TV in San Francisco.The group’s members started to come together after its future leader, Idris Ackamoor, returned to Antioch following a work-study period in Los Angeles, where he was mentored by the saxophonist Charles Tyler. Ackamoor founded a band with Simmons called the Collective, which Asante later joined. For the next year, they played original compositions influenced by Pharoah Sanders, Cecil Taylor, mid-60s-era John Coltrane and classical music.In the fall of 1971, the three students joined the Black Music Ensemble, a group started by the free jazz pioneer Cecil Taylor, who came to teach at Antioch in the late 1960s, and began an intense period of musical training. “He would have us practice from 10 o’clock at night until 2 in the morning, seven days a week, for months on end,” Asante said. “We had chops that were just off the charts.”Nine months into their tenure with Taylor, Ackamoor had an idea: Antioch had a work-study program that allowed students to travel overseas, so he wrote a proposal to study the source of Black art. “I said, ‘I want to go to Europe, I want to form a band, and then I want to go to Africa for nine months and just study African music,’” Ackamoor recalled in a video interview.The school approved the request, requiring six weeks at a university in France. Ackamoor and Simmons flew to Paris in July 1972, where they befriended a young percussionist named Donald Robinson, who was studying there under the drummer Sunny Murray. At a university in Besançon, Ackamoor, Simmons and Asante played their first show as a trio, then played gigs around Amsterdam after Robinson officially joined the group. In France, they had lived in separate dorms that formed a triangle, giving the group its name. (An unrelated band called the Pyramids produced surf rock in the 1960s.)But the most pivotal part of the band’s journey was yet to come. After a week in Morocco and Senegal, the Pyramids spent seven months in Ghana, Kenya and Uganda, engaging in spiritual practices, playing in drumming circles and buying instruments. As Black Americans, an almost indescribable feeling set in once they landed there.Ackamoor in Ghana in 1973. He applied for a program at Antioch College that allowed students to study overseas and traveled with fellow musicians to Europe, then Africa. Margaux Simmons/Pyramids Archive“It was the sense of community,” Simmons said. “It came from a place of spirituality, rather than something just to make music.”Ackamoor said when the group was in Africa, “We just wanted to be vessels,” adding, “We wanted to take in as much as we could, and fortunately, we were blessed and we were directed to the right sources.”The Pyramids returned to Ohio “transformed,” Asante said. “We were not the people or the musicians that had left Yellow Springs a year before.” The group bolstered its sound with Moroccan clay drums, a bamboo flute and Ugandan harp, giving its music a distinct African flair.Back in Ohio, the conga player Bradie Speller joined the Pyramids, adding even more percussive depth. The band played shows on campus and even opened for the jazz fusion band Weather Report in Dayton and Cincinnati. The Pyramids emphasized theater and costumes as a part of their live shows, eschewing street clothes for colorful face paint, ornate kente cloth and interpretive dance. “We had a pageant going on,” Ackamoor said, “a ritual pageant that was a visual feast, not only for the music, but for the eyes and the movement and the dance. We were a multimedia spectacle.”There was a consciousness-raising element to the group’s music, akin to experimental jazz luminaries including the Sun Ra Arkestra and Art Ensemble of Chicago. But Ackamoor said concerns about “humankind” were top of mind. “Although we were Afrocentric, we never defined ourselves as being Afrocentric,” he said. “We, at a very early point, were talking and speaking to all languages, all colors, all races, but we were African American doing it.”The Pyramids recorded their 1973 debut, “Lalibela” — inspired by Ackamoor and Simmons’s trip to the city in Ethiopia of the same name — in a friend’s Yellow Springs living room on a four-track tape. “A lot of it was on the first take,” Asante said. “It was a very pure album.” Its 1974 follow-up, “King of Kings,” was made during a marathon all-night session at a studio in Chillicothe, Ohio. Both albums contain long percussive suites, with searing saxophone wails and upper-register flute solos that work best when played front to back without interruption. The results were daring then and now.Simmons performing as part of the Collective, a group that pre-dated the Pyramids, in 1970.Idris Ackamoor/Pyramids Archive“We were more concerned with the progression of the music and creating a sound that was our own,” Speller said in a phone interview.By the time the Pyramids recorded their third album, “Birth/Speed/Merging,” in 1976, they had moved to the Bay Area to be closer to some sort of music industry. Ackamoor’s brother, who lived in San Francisco, helped fund the LP and put the band in a studio with better facilities and multitracking equipment. The Pyramids printed 5,000 copies of the LP, but they couldn’t find a record company to distribute it. Then the group began to splinter, and members relocated around the world.The Pyramids were trying to make a living as an avant-garde band when even the most popular jazz musicians struggled to find their footing in a marketplace dominated by funk. “It got deep,” Ackamoor said. “Those early days I had to pawn my instrument, do different things to survive. We were in the serious red, and once we were out of the college environment, we ran smack up to the reality of Black creative musicians trying to survive in America.” The Pyramids opened the Berkeley Jazz Festival in 1977, then broke up.The band was defunct until 2007, when Ackamoor organized a reunion concert after fielding requests to reissue the Pyramids’ 1970s music. By then, the music had reached a new generation of listeners, and the group’s albums were selling for hundreds of dollars on eBay. Three years later, a German agency organized a European tour for the band.In the years since, Ackamoor has resurrected the group in different forms, releasing the albums “We Be All Africans” in 2016, “An Angel Fell” in 2018 and “Shaman!” under the name Idris Ackamoor & the Pyramids in 2020. But you don’t get those albums without the foundation laid by the original Pyramids in the ’70s, and the courage it took to trek into the unknown.“We were the original Do It Yourself musicians, producers, label, the whole nine yards,” Speller said. “Everything cats are doing now, we did 50 years ago.”Ackamoor isn’t done with the Pyramids yet — a new album is in the works — but he said the boxed set captures a bold moment. “It is an amazing historical document, but it’s also a living document,” he said. “The past is a wonderful thing, but I’m in the future and the band is in the future.” More

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      black midi Bristles at a Bleak World With ‘Hellfire’

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      The British trio’s third studio album is a virtuosic exploration of brutality that showcases its technical mastery, expanded orchestrations and sardonic humor.War, disease, murder, exploitation, sleaze, cynicism, callousness. Humanity isn’t exactly humane in the songs on “Hellfire,” the caustic, exhilarating third album — a masterpiece — by the English band black midi.Each song on “Hellfire” is a whirlwind of virtuosity and structure, an idiom-hopping decathlon of meter shifts, barbed harmonies and arrangements that can veer anywhere at any moment. The lyrics present an assortment of fractured narrative strategies featuring largely unsavory characters engaging in deadly sins like lust, greed, pride and gluttony. The songs’ protagonists include killers, brutal military commanders and a performer whose last show is his own death. There’s also some grim philosophizing, like the lines Geordie Greep rattles off in “Hellfire,” which opens the album: “No such thing as luck/Only chance and rot, inevitable loss.”But the songs don’t lament. They bristle.The members of black midi, all in their early 20s — Greep and Cameron Picton, playing guitars and many other assorted instruments, and the indefatigable drummer Morgan Simpson — met at the BRIT School, England’s celebrated performing-arts high school. From the beginning, the band has flaunted its technical mastery and omnivorous listening, and its tastes encompass prog-rock, post-punk, pop, funk, jazz, contemporary classical music, cabaret, electronics, flamenco, noise and more.Most black midi songs, old and new, are as frenetically choreographed as the climactic scenes of a martial-arts extravaganza. Speed, precision, complexity and sudden change have always been at the band’s fingertips, which can move incredibly fast. And while the musical and verbal constructions are meticulously cerebral, the effect is jolting and visceral.“Schlagenheim,” black midi’s 2019 debut album — when it was a quartet including the guitarist Matt Kwasniewski-Kelvin — was puristically recorded by the band members alone. But with the album “Cavalcade” in 2021, and even more so on “Hellfire,” black midi has expanded and orchestrated its songs. The contrasts of blitz and delicacy are even greater, as daintily arranged string sections or screaming winds and brass appear and vanish at will.Even in their occasional quiet moments, the songs on “Hellfire” have a white-knuckle momentum. This album fully surfaces Simpson’s remarkable drumming, always at the service of the composition: crisp cymbal taps and surging across-the-kit rolls, high-speed fusillades and cymbal whispers, snappy marching-band snare drum, patiently repeated funk or Latin beats that suddenly explode. This time around, black midi’s music often moves so fast that Greep doesn’t bother with melody. Many of his vocals arrive spoken, working up to an auctioneer’s hyperspeed in songs like “The Race Is About to Begin,” which is not so much rapped as spewed.A sardonic, deeply British gallows humor infuses the songs, along with the conviction that no scenario or structure is too convoluted. “The Defence” is the rationalizations of a smug brothel owner — “My girls are destined for hell or so says our priest/But find me a Christian who spends as much time on their knees” — delivered as something like a big-band show tune from a vintage Hollywood musical.In “Dangerous Liaisons,” a farmhand becomes a hired killer who realizes that the employer who stiffs him is Satan; the music is a jazzy lilt that moves in and out of waltz time and other, much trickier meters, eventually swarmed by saxophone and brass before Greep finally barks “Futile regret!”As if the songs don’t provide enough puzzles, black midi previewed the album with a video for “Welcome to Hell” — a gnashing, snarling, tempo-shifting chronicle of a hapless soldier’s shore leave — that had viewers deciphering a cryptic graphic alphabet. With “Hellfire,” black midi envisions a decadent, collapsing, zero-sum culture, a war of all against all. The music — brainy, hyperactive, overloaded, bitterly absurd — is a ferocious counterattack.black midi“Hellfire”(Rough Trade) More

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      This Trumpeter’s Legacy Also Includes Composing String Quartets

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      A new boxed set of string quartets by Wadada Leo Smith, an anchor of American experimental music, reveals his sustained engagement with the form.The trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith has played an outsize role in American experimental music for the last 50 years.His early writings on “creative music” — distinct from both classical and jazz traditions — proved influential to a wide swath of artists in the 1970s, including the pianist and opera composer Anthony Davis.In more recent years, Smith’s work has incorporated collaborations with the pianist Vijay Iyer and the indie-rock group Deerhoof. Another major project was his “Ten Freedom Summers,” an ambitious, four-hour-plus suite that traces the civil rights movement over a long timeline, including sonic evocations of the Dred Scott case and the Jim Crow era.The string quartet writing in the suite — the four-CD recording was a finalist for the music Pulitzer in 2013 — gave most listeners their first chance to hear his work in that vein, previously found on just a few low-profile releases. “String Quartets Nos. 1-12,” a new seven-CD boxed set on the Finnish label TUM, fills out that history, revealing his sustained dedication to the format, going back to 1965 and his String Quartet No. 1 (revised in 1982).In a phone interview from his home in New Haven, Conn., he described string instruments as being in a four-way tie as his “favorite instrument,” along with piano, drums and his cherished trumpet. “The other instruments you can give or take away from me anytime.”These string pieces rarely start at full throttle. Instead, Smith offers an idea in a contemplative way: a polyphonic passage, a drone or a melody that starts, pauses and repeats with a slight but crucial change. Then those changes begin to proliferate and pile up. Unlike stun-gun experimentalists, Smith has a complex style that sneaks up on you, and feels all the more ravishing for its patient progress.That style will be familiar to fans of Smith’s work with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (or A.A.C.M.), a collective born on the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s. Autodidacticism was a cornerstone of the association’s ethos, a way to expand on members’ formal training. (During a stint in the Army, Smith studied in a U.S. Military band program; he later studied at the Sherwood School of Music and Wesleyan University.)By the time he joined the collective in 1967, Smith was already a practiced string quartet composer. “I had already finished at least two versions of String Quartet No. 1,” he said. “When I came to the A.A.C.M. nobody had string quartets, not a single person. And my string quartet had a really big impact — even though nobody ever heard it, because it never was played. But I showed it to people.”A lot of thought and revision went into the first quartet. “I wrote movement No. 1 over and over for three years,” he said, “because that was my initial training of how to write and how to think about strings.” Also part of the training: studying quartets by Debussy, Bartok, Beethoven and Ornette Coleman.In the new recording of that first quartet, you can hear traces of Bartok’s advanced harmony and Coleman’s intensity of attack. By the second quartet, though, Smith has found his recognizable, mature language, especially in the pacing.Smith’s compositional voice and approach to group performance are so strong that listeners may have a hard time teasing out the wide-ranging stylistic inputs. In the liner notes, Smith describes the inspiration of blues guitarists, like B.B. King and Muddy Waters, on his writing for strings.“If people can’t hear that, I don’t understand what’s wrong,” he said in the interview, with a laugh. “I can hear!”What about his String Quartet No. 3, “Black Church,” from 1995: Can the way the players tear through sequences of semitones be seen as a tip of the hat to fast-picked streaks of electric-guitar blues?“Yes, that’s a blues connotation feeling,” Smith said. “Secretly, I say that that string quartet is a blues and a spiritual — at least the first movement.” But the second movement, he said, is about rhythm and repetition.In his later string quartets, Smith has doubled down on those repetitions. In his notated scores, he often puts brackets over phrases in each string part, with numbers above a given bracket indicating methods of repeating the melodic material.While his five-line-staff writing is idiosyncratic, it seems conventional compared with the image-based “language scores” in his Ankhrasmation series. (The scores double as detailed artworks, and have been presented in galleries.) Players use a “constructed key” of Smith’s design when interpreting and creating their responses to the symbols and colors on each page. Some of his quartets require players to move back and forth between traditional notation and Ankhrasmation pages, within a single movement.An Ankhrasmation page from the score for String Quartet No. 11, Movement 9.Wadada Leo SmithNavigating this takes practice and dedication. And for decades, it meant there were strikingly few performances of this music. Smith said he stopped approaching established quartets in 2000. But after taking a teaching position at the California Institute of the Arts in 1996, he found a group of talented young musicians in and around Los Angeles who were eager to learn his languages.That group, now called RedKoral — heard on the boxed set — boasts players with solid contemporary classical résumés. Shalini Vijayan (first violin) has worked with Southwest Chamber Music. Mona Tian (second violin) is part of the celebrated Los Angeles group Wild Up. The cellist Ashley Walters has played with several of Smith’s groups, and records as a solo artist.And the violist Andrew McIntosh is also a composer whose music was recently performed at the Ojai Festival. McIntosh said Smith had influenced his approach to composition. “I’m more willing now to take risks with the way material unfolds over time than I was five or 10 years ago,” he wrote in an email.Smith has called the ensemble “the most advanced advocate and performer of my music, ever.” RedKoral’s recent live performance of String Quartet No. 10 — “Angela Davis Into the Morning Sunlight” — helped to show how they’ve achieved this.Presented at Roulette in Brooklyn as part of this year’s Vision Festival, that rendition was slightly different from the recorded version. But the lyrical feeling of Smith’s motifs was also immediately identifiable.In an interview, Vijayan said Smith was rarely prescriptive when handing out new directives before a concert. Instead, she said: “It was always from a place of emotional inspiration. ‘What is the feeling behind this tonight?’ And it could be different every night.”That well-drilled flexibility allows the group to handle the Bartokian language of the first quartet as well as it handles the blues connotations of the third. Quartet No. 11, the 100-minute opus that takes up two discs in the boxed set, seems like a summation of the players’ ability to absorb everything Smith can throw at them.The second movement, dedicated to Louis Armstrong, is a three-page, multicolored Ankhrasmation score. It omits a traditional staff, but features repeating structures. Its final page indicates a chord in a low string range. Bracketed instructions specify that this chord be played six times, before a pause. Then four times (with another rest after). And finally five more times. It makes for a dramatic, arresting climax.String Quartet No. 11, Movement 2: Louis ArmstrongWadada Leo Smith and TUM RecordsThe next movement, dedicated to Smith’s mother, is more traditionally notated — and offers the riddling complexity that Smith builds from motivic repetition.String Quartet No. 11, Movement 3: Sarah Bell Brown-SmithWadada Leo Smith and TUM RecordsSmith’s sound is all over these performances. And his trumpet joins the mix for String Quartet No. 6 (one of four in the set that features guest players). There, RedKoral responds to the trumpet’s virtuosic shifts of instrumental color and dynamics with intimate, collaborative intelligence.“My playing of the trumpet — my drawings and construction of Ankhrasmation pieces — all of that goes into the expression of who I am,” Smith said. “All of my works express precisely who I am.” More

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      ‘Elvis’ vs. Elvis

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherThe Baz Luhrmann biopic “Elvis” has been one of this summer’s box office success stories, demonstrating the ongoing appetite for stories about Elvis Presley, one of pop music’s dynamic and contentious figures, as well as the cinematic power of Luhrmann’s vivid, overwhelming style, which is optimized for the big screen.The film is loyal to Presley (Austin Butler), and uses his manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) as a narrator and also a moral foil. It emphasizes Presley as a performer and cultural agitator more so than as a person, while combining or rewriting historical moments to serve the larger narrative.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Presley’s career, how the film smooths out the rough edges of his story, and the role that fantasy and imagination play in remembering pop culture heroes.Guests:A.O. Scott, co-chief film critic of The New York TimesAlanna Nash, author of “The Colonel: The Extraordinary Story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley,” “Baby, Let’s Play House: Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him” and several other booksConnect 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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      Rare-Book Dealer Charged After Pilfered Eagles Lyrics Come to Light

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      Glenn Horowitz and two other men are accused of conspiring to sell Don Henley’s notes, including the words to “Hotel California.”In the late 1970s, as Southern California’s Eagles sailed into rock superstardom, one of the band’s main songwriters generated reams of handwritten lyrics and notes — among them, the words to such FM-radio staples as “Hotel California.”And then, the papers vanished.Nearly five decades later, Glenn Horowitz, a New York rare-book dealer, and two other men were charged on Tuesday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan with conspiring to sell about 100 pages of the stolen notes written by the songwriter, Don Henley, lying to law enforcement authorities and fabricating stories about the provenance of the papers, which are valued at around $1 million.“This action exposes the truth about music memorabilia sales of highly personal, stolen items hidden behind a facade of legitimacy,” Irving Azoff, Mr. Henley’s manager, said. “No one has the right to sell illegally obtained property or profit from the outright theft of irreplaceable pieces of musical history.”Those charged include Mr. Horowitz, 66, who helped create a frothy market in writers’ archives, curating filing cabinets’ worth of manuscripts, drafts, letters and ephemera into a coherent and sellable whole. He placed the papers of Norman Mailer, Gabriel García Márquez, Tom Wolfe, Alice Walker and others in leading university libraries, and brokered major deals with musicians: In 2016, he sold Bob Dylan’s vast archive to two institutions in Oklahoma for a sum estimated to be as high as $20 million.Lawyers for Mr. Horowitz and the other defendants, Craig Inciardi, 58, and Edward Kosinski, 59, denied the charges.“The D.A.’s office alleges criminality where none exists and unfairly tarnishes the reputations of well-respected professionals,” the lawyers said in a statement. “These men are innocent.”A lawyer for Mr. Inciardi added that the men had turned themselves in and had been released on their own recognizance.The indictment is a stunning turn for Mr. Horowitz, a mainstay of New York City’s rare book and manuscript market who is known for mixing a keen business sense with deep literary learning and a showman’s flair.A visit to his Midtown Manhattan office with its terrace overlooking the Museum of Modern Art sculpture garden might offer a glimpse of a choice historical letter or a jaw-dropping literary artifact — accompanied by a comment that the viewing was off the record.“As Glenn himself says, he’s a terrific combination of a scholar and a grifter,” Rick Gekoski, a book dealer in London who regularly did business with Horowitz, told The New York Times in 2007.The notes at the heart of the case announced on Tuesday are the lyrical spine of what would become one of the most recognizable, ubiquitous albums of the 1970s. The Eagles made music that drew on blues and country rock but that was suffused with the particular malaise of Southern California in its post-hippie, pre-punk period.Half a century since its 1976 release, the “Hotel California” album and Mr. Henley’s gnomic musings — “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave” — have fueled unending speculation among fans about the lyrics’ meaning. The band’s continuous world tour, on which it plays the album front to back with a full orchestra, has filled arenas for more than two years.Mr. Horowitz obtained Mr. Henley’s notes in 2005, according to a news release from Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney. The manuscripts were originally stolen from the songwriter in the late 1970s by a writer working on a book about the band, the release said. The notes include handwritten lyrics to “Hotel California,” the albums’s title track.Mr. Henley became aware of the notes’ reappearance when Mr. Horowitz sold them to Mr. Inciardi and Mr. Kosinski, fellow collectors who tried to market them further. According to the district attorney’s office, Mr. Henley filed police reports and told the collectors the notes were stolen.“Rather than making any effort to ensure they actually had rightful ownership, the defendants responded by engaging in a yearslong campaign to prevent Henley from recovering the manuscripts,” the district attorney’s release said.The men sought to launder the notes through Sotheby’s auction houses and engaged in a five-year effort to hide where the documents had come from, the district attorney’s office said. Mr. Horowitz later tried to leverage the 2016 death of Glenn Frey, the Eagles’ other frontman, as possible cover, suggesting that Mr. Frey was the initial source for the papers, according to the news release.Mr. Frey “alas, is dead, and identifying him as the source would make this go away once and for all,” Mr. Horowitz said in a fabricated statement of provenance after the notes were seized by investigators from a Sotheby’s warehouse, the district attorney’s office said.Mr. Horowitz was charged with conspiracy, attempted criminal possession of stolen property and hindering prosecution. Mr. Inciardi and Mr. Kosinski were charged with possessing stolen property and conspiracy.Alex Traub More

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      Far From Kabul, Building a New Life, With Music and Hope

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      LISBON — On some nights, when her dorm room here turns dark and the church bells stop ringing, the young trumpet player thinks about the distant afternoon when her uncle took her to the graveyard to gather stones.That was in Afghanistan, in the chaotic days after the United States withdrew last year and the Taliban reasserted control. Her uncle had insisted that they pay respects at the family cemetery before they packed their bags with walnuts and spices and books of poems by Rumi, before they began their lives as refugees.Standing by the graves, she watched as her uncle closed his eyes and listened to the wind. The ancestors, he said, were displeased with their decision to leave Afghanistan. Even the stones, he said, seemed to speak, urging them to stay.Zohra Ahmadi, 13, could not hear the voices her uncle described. But as she scooped rocks and soil from the cemetery into a plastic container, following her uncle’s instructions, she said she heeded his words, and vowed one day to return.CULTURE, DISPLACED A series exploring the lives and work of artists driven far from their homelands amid the growing global refugee crisis.On a sweltering May morning, when the sun had already melted buckets of ice at the seafood market and the priests at Nossa Senhora da Ajuda church were just beginning their morning verses, a series of unfamiliar sounds emanated from the top of a former military hospital in western Lisbon.The Afghanistan National Institute of MusicThe orchestra gathers for one of its first rehearsals since its members left Kabul for Lisbon.The strumming of a sitar, the pounding of tablas, the plucking of a violin — these were coming from the hospital, now the makeshift home of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music. More than two dozen of its young musicians had gathered for one of their first rehearsals since arriving as refugees in December.Under the American-backed government in Kabul, the institute, which opened in 2010, had flourished, becoming a symbol of Afghanistan’s changing identity. It was a rare coeducational establishment in a country where boys and girls were often kept separate. While many programs focused exclusively on Afghan culture or Western music, it embraced both, preparing hundreds of young artists, many of them orphans and street hawkers, for careers in the performing arts.Ahmad Naser Sarmast, the school’s leader, on the compound’s roof.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesMusic students playing soccer at the compound.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesThe Taliban had long treated it as a threat. Fearing for their safety, more than 250 students and teachers as well as their relatives, fled Afghanistan and sought shelter abroad in the months after the American withdrawal, eventually arriving in Portugal, where they were all granted asylum. In their absence, the Taliban commandeered the institute, damaging instruments and turning classrooms into offices and dorms.As students prepared to make music that morning, Ahmad Naser Sarmast, the school’s leader, spoke about the role they could play in countering the Taliban, a presence even in the rehearsal room, with news of starvation, violence and persecution back home lighting up the students’ phones.“We can show the world a different Afghanistan,” said Sarmast, who was wounded by a Taliban suicide bomber who infiltrated a school play in 2014. “We will show how we can raise the voices of our people. We will show where we stand.”The orchestra rehearses in Lisbon. After the students fled Kabul, the Taliban commandeered their school and damaged instruments.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesThe students readied their instruments. First, they played a popular Afghan song, “Sarzamin-e Man,” or “My Homeland.” Then they turned to a new work, “A Land Out of Earth?” written by a conductor of the orchestra, Mohammad Qambar Nawshad. He explained the inspiration for his piece: Aug. 15, 2021, the day the Taliban seized Kabul. He had stayed home, scared and shaking.“That was the day everyone left us alone, and we were in the hands of evil,” he said. “There was no longer any guarantee that a team of Taliban would not come search for each of us and kill us.”Reporting From AfghanistanInside the Fall of Kabul: ​The Taliban took the Afghan capital with a speed that shocked the world. Our reporter and photographer witnessed it.On Patrol: A group of Times journalists spent 12 days with a Taliban police unit in Kabul. Here is what they saw.Face to Face: ​​A Times reporter who served as a Marine in Afghanistan returned to interview a Taliban commander he once fought.A Photographer’s Journal: A look at 20 years of war in Afghanistan, chronicled through one Times photographer’s lens.He lifted his arms, locked eyes with the students, and the room filled with the sounds of violin and sitar.‘My Homeland’The orchestra plays a passage of a popular Afghan song, “Sarzamin-e Man,” or “My Homeland.”First, it was the music of Tchaikovsky that captured Zohra’s imagination: the Neapolitan Dance from “Swan Lake,” which she liked to play on repeat as she danced around her room. Then she fell for more popular fare: big-band hits and standards by the singer Ahmad Zahir, the “Afghan Elvis.”By 9, Zohra was convinced: She wanted to be a professional musician — and a ballerina, a mathematician and a physicist. She decided to start with the trumpet. Her parents enrolled her at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, sending her from her native Ghazni Province, in southeastern Afghanistan, to Kabul to live with her uncle.She excelled at her music studies, mastering Afghan folk songs as well as classical works. But when the Taliban took power last year, her trumpet became a liability.Zohra was convinced from a young age that she wanted to be a professional musician.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesThe Taliban had banned nonreligious music when it last held power, from 1996 to 2001. In the weeks after the American withdrawal, Taliban fighters harassed and intimidated musicians, and pressured radio stations, wedding halls and karaoke parlors to stop playing nonreligious songs.Zohra’s relatives worried she would be punished if she were caught playing her trumpet. In August, her uncle sent the instrument back to Zohra’s mother in Ghazni, along with a violin, a flute and a harmonium.“We didn’t want to keep anything in Kabul that showed we were playing music,” Zohra said. “I didn’t know what could happen to me if I were caught.”The books and paintings inside their home were also a risk, her uncle had determined. One night, in the wood stove they used to keep warm in the winter, he burned the family’s most prized possessions: works by Freud, novels by Salman Rushdie and portraits that his brother had painted.Zohra tried not to watch, running from the fire. But from a distance, she caught glimpses of her favorite books being destroyed. “My heart,” she said, “was burning.”Juma Ahmadi, Zohra’s uncle, in his room at the former military hospital.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesIn Portugal, the Afghans enjoy newfound freedoms. The boys and girls can go swimming together. They can date. The girls can wear shorts and skirts without fear of judgment. The older students can drink alcohol.But life in Lisbon has also been a challenge. The students spend their days largely inside the military hospital, where they eat, sleep, rehearse, wash clothes and play table tennis, nervous about venturing too far or making new friends. Unaccustomed to Portuguese food, they keep bottles of curry, cardamom and peppercorn in their rooms to add familiar flavors to traditional dishes, like grilled sardines and scrambled eggs with smoked sausage.On weekdays, they go to a local school for special classes in Portuguese and history, practicing phrases like “Bom dia” and “Obrigado” and learning about the country’s Roman Catholic heritage.Some students, including Mohammad Sorosh Reka, 16, a sitar player, made the 5,000-mile journey to Portugal alone. He has watched from a distance as friends and family share news of bomb attacks, mass unemployment and corruption scandals.Sorosh Warms UpAt an afternoon sitar class, Sorosh plays a traditional Afghan song.In phone calls and WhatsApp messages, Sorosh tells his family to stay strong and to imagine a day when the Taliban loses power. Not wanting to add to his families’ troubles, he avoids speaking about the challenges he faces adapting to life in Portugal. He wears a golden ring that his mother gave him two days before he left Afghanistan, to remember his family.“Sometimes they’re giving me hope,” he said, “and sometimes I’m giving them hope.”Mohammad Sorosh Reka, 16, with his sitar at the compound. “Sometimes they’re giving me hope,” he said of his family in Afghanistan, “and sometimes I’m giving them hope.”Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesHe blames the United States and its allies, at least in part, for the turmoil in his home country.“They were our friends and helping us, telling us they were here to help us at any time,” Sorosh said. “When the Taliban took Afghanistan, they just left and disappeared. That’s why we are very hopeless and sad.”At night, the students often dream about Afghanistan. Amanullah Noori, 17, the concertmaster of the school orchestra, has recurring nightmares about Taliban attackers, armed with guns, descending on his parents’ home in Kabul. Sometimes he dreams about trying to return to Afghanistan, only to be blocked by the Taliban.He receives messages from friends back in Afghanistan, fellow musicians who have given up their careers because of Taliban restrictions on playing music. They tell him they have hidden their instruments inside closets and cellars, fearing they might be attacked for being artists.“The Taliban doesn’t want to hear music anymore,” Amanullah said. “They want a world that is silent.”Embracing Afghan IdentityStudents from a sitar ensemble play traditional songs, part of their effort to preserve Afghan culture.For months on end last fall, Zohra was trapped in Kabul, unable to get a passport to leave Afghanistan.She watched with envy as her classmates fled for Doha on special flights arranged by the government of Qatar. (A global network of philanthropists, artists, educators and officials helped the school get its students and staff, and their relatives, to safety.)As the weeks stretched on, Zohra began to doubt whether she would ever be able to join her friends and teachers. She remembered the days in Kabul when she and her classmates played music late into the night and sang together in the school choir.At her uncle’s home, Zohra passed the time by learning to weave handkerchiefs, bags and scarves. There were only a few books left in the home, which she read so many times, she said, that she could recite some passages by memory.Sometimes, when no one was watching, she said she put her hands in the air and pretended to play her trumpet.“I could hear it in my head,” she said, “just like when I was in the practice room.”Farida Ahmadi, left, and her cousin Zohra, in their room at the compound. When the Taliban took power last year back home, Zohra’s trumpet became a liability.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesThen, in mid-November, nearly three months after the Taliban seized power, Zohra, her uncle, Juma Ahmadi, and her cousin, Farida, 13, who also studied at the institute, got their passports. They boarded a flight for Doha, where they were quarantined and awaited visas to enter Portugal.When they landed, Sarmast, the school’s leader, hugged them and cried as they rushed off the plane. They were the last three in the group to make it out of Afghanistan.“There was never a moment,” he told them, “when I doubted that I would get you out.”On her first day in Doha, Zohra started a journal. She wrote that she was heading to Europe to begin life as a refugee.“I am hopeful,” she wrote, “that the future in Portugal is bright for us all.”Sevinch Majidi, 18, and Shogufa Safi, 18, students at the institute, walking in the Lisbon neighborhood near the compound. Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesOver time, the girls — who make up about a quarter of the school’s 100 students — have begun to feel more at ease. They have learned to ride bicycles in the school’s courtyard. They occasionally join the boys for lunch at McDonald’s, teasing them about their stylish sunglasses. They go out on weekends, to the beach or shopping for clothes or chocolate chip cookies.Sevinch Majidi, 18, a violinist, said she felt she had the freedom to pursue her own education and interests in Portugal, free from expectations around marriage and child-rearing and the restrictions of Afghanistan’s patriarchal society.“When I was walking on the streets of Kabul, I was scared,” said Sevinch, who plays in an all-female ensemble at the school. “This is the first time I can walk without fear, without being scared.”The boys, too, are changing. While many of them felt pressure in Kabul to go to mosques regularly, some have taken a more relaxed approach to their faith in Portugal, choosing to sleep through services during the Eid holidays.Sami Haidari, 15, a cellist, enjoying a swim in the Tagus River. “We have water in Afghanistan,” he said, “but not like this.”Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesAfter rehearsal one day for upcoming concerts in Portugal and abroad, a group of boys went swimming in the Tagus River, on the edge of the Atlantic.Sami Haidari, a 15-year-old cellist, paused before he went into the water. He took in the ocean scene — men in fluorescent shorts stretched out on the sand next to women in bikinis — and wiggled his toes in the sand. Joining hands with his friends, he charged toward the water.“I feel free; the ocean brings us freedom,” he said after returning to shore, his teeth chattering. “We have water in Afghanistan, but not like this. Afghanistan’s water is very small. That’s not free.”Remembering HomeLife in Lisbon has at times been a challenge, but the students turn to music to remember Afghanistan and their families.In Lisbon, Zohra has embraced the strangeness of her new surroundings. She is a star student in Portuguese, she plays jazz in the wind ensemble, and she has learned to cook eggs and potatoes on her own.In her journal, she jots down her plans to lead a music school of her own one day, alongside reflections on music and a few short stories, including one about gamblers in New York City.“There are not any human beings without wishes and dreams,” she wrote in her journal. “I am one of these humans too. One can’t be without dreams because dreams give us hope.”“If you have a dream, follow it, even if it’s the worst of dreams,” she added. “One has to struggle for the best of dreams and for the worst of dreams.”Zohra at school. She is a star student in Portuguese.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesPortuguese vocabulary in Zohra’s room.Isabella Lanave for The New York TimesInside Room 509 of the former military hospital, where she lives with her uncle and her cousin, she has hung drawings of ballerinas and horses. A poster lists the Portuguese words for family members: mãe, pai, irmão, irmã.There are reminders of Afghanistan: photos of her grandfather, decorated with hearts and butterflies; a book of poems; and a painting of her grandmother.Below a gold vase on the windowsill is the container of rocks and soil from the ancestral grave. Next to it, she keeps another container filled with the soil she collected from the campus of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music in Kabul.Zohra said she still remembered peaceful days in Ghazni Province, when her family gathered near the mountains and made chicken soup and kebabs. She said she hopes that her parents can join her some day in Lisbon, too.Looking out at the Tagus River from her room, she said the people of Afghanistan needed music, just like residents of other countries.“I really want to go back to Afghanistan some day,” she said. “When the Taliban are not there.”Zohra’s room with a view. She would like to return to Afghanistan one day, she said, “when the Taliban are not there.”Isabella Lanave for The New York Times More