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      Lil Durk and Morgan Wallen Return to the Top of the Album Chart

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      The country star’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” has had tremendous staying power, landing at No. 2 in its 66th week out.The Chicago rap mainstay Lil Durk returns to No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, with his latest LP, “7220,” beating out new releases by Jack White and Fivio Foreign after its debut a month ago.But the greater accomplishment this week may be the continued staying power of Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album,” which is No. 2 in its 66th week out.Released in January 2021, “Dangerous” held the No. 1 spot for its first 10 weeks, and has remained in the Top 10 every week but one, last December, when it was pushed out by holiday albums. Incredibly, 49 of its 66 weeks have been in the Top 5; quite a few of those were spent while Wallen was in a form of industry purgatory — removed from many radio playlists, ignored by the Grammy Awards — after he was caught on video using a racial slur. He apologized (more than once), though Wallen’s fans never gave up on him, and he has largely returned to the mainstream with a major tour.For its latest week, “Dangerous” had the equivalent of 46,500 sales in the United States, according to Luminate, the tracking service behind the Billboard charts. That means Wallen came within about 500 copies of retaking No. 1: Lil Durk’s “7220” was credited with 47,000. (Luminate’s publicly reported numbers are rounded.) Wallen may even have contributed to holding himself at second place: he is featured on “Broadway Girls,” the most popular cut on “7220.”In a slow sales week, however, neither total is impressive. The 47,000 equivalent sales figure for “7220” — which incorporates its 69 million streams and about 1,000 copies sold as a complete package — is the lowest for a No. 1 album in more than three years, since “Hoodie SZN” by the rapper A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie notched its third time at the top in February 2019 with similar numbers.Also this week, White’s “Fear of the Dawn” opens at No. 4 with 42,000 equivalents, including 24,000 copies sold on vinyl.The “Encanto” soundtrack is No. 3 and Olivia Rodrigo’s “Sour” is No. 5. Two hip-hop albums open in the lower half of the Top 10: 42 Dugg and EST Gee’s “Last Ones Left” is No. 7, and Fivio Foreign’s debut studio album, “B.I.B.L.E.,” starts at No. 9. More

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      She Never Stopped Loving Otis Redding. Her City Never Stopped Needing Him.

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      The soul singer has been gone for more than half a century. Zelma Redding’s love affair with him — and his with Macon, Ga. — has never ended.MACON, Ga. — Zelma Redding is involved in one of those complicated long-term relationships — fueled by passion, pain and habit — that her husband, Otis Redding Jr., once sang about with the singular mix of combustibility and tenderness that made him a global star.Mrs. Redding, 79, still lives on the sprawling ranch outside of Macon, Ga., that Mr. Redding bought for his family in 1965, two years before his small private plane nose-dived into a Wisconsin lake on the way to a concert. She had him laid to rest next to her driveway by a stand of tall pine trees. Her name is carved into the empty tomb next to his.She likes the fact that she can see the graves from her living room window. In the 54 years since his death, she has not remarried.“Never will,” she said. “I love being Mrs. Otis Redding. I’m the only one.”When Zelma Redding looks out the living room window, she can see her husband’s grave. Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York TimesSuch are the contours of Macon’s greatest contemporary love story. But for decades, it has also fallen to Mrs. Redding to manage another love story, this one involving her husband and Macon itself. Beset by poverty and bedeviled by the ghosts of segregation, Mr. Redding’s hometown, an old cotton hub 85 miles southeast of Atlanta, has long looked to the soul singer as a symbol of unity, holding up his tale of African American success as the best of what the city might be. For years, a portrait of the musician has been prominently displayed at Macon City Hall, as if the singer of “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” were a founding father.Today, Mrs. Redding is preparing what is likely to be her life’s crowning project: a 9,000-square-foot educational complex that the family nonprofit, the Otis Redding Foundation, is planning to build downtown. Mrs. Redding has donated $1 million to buy the property. The new home of the Otis Redding Center for the Arts will be a place for children to learn, practice and perform, with scholarships for poor students — a machine, if such a thing is even possible, for turning out more Otis Reddings.After her husband’s death in December 1967, Mrs. Redding found herself, at age 25, terrified and grieving, without a high school diploma and responsible for raising the couple’s three small children. These days, locals refer to her as the Queen. The honorific suits her in many ways — not least because of her calculation, over the decades, that the Redding family should be deeply involved in Macon’s civic life yet somehow float above its politics and petty grievances, in keeping with her husband’s music, which was both apolitical and universally beloved.In a recent interview, Mrs. Redding, a diminutive woman with a quick wit and occasionally salty tongue, noted with pride that the new arts center would be on Cotton Avenue, in the heart of the city’s historic Black business district. A bronze statue of Mr. Redding at the center will stand three blocks from a towering Confederate statue.If Mrs. Redding sees her husband’s statue as a rejoinder to the Confederate monument, she does not let on. She can also be evasive when asked what it is like to miss him. To hold the grief at bay, she said, she keeps his memory close with a sea of mementos — at the couple’s old ranch house, and at the Otis Redding Foundation offices — though sometimes she imagines him alive and growing old with her.Otis Redding performing on stage, circa 1960.RB/Redferns“I tell my daughter all the time, I say, ‘Oh, Karla, I just wonder what Otis would look like. I’m almost 80. I got gray hair. I wonder would he have gray hair?’“Karla says, ‘Mama, what are you talking about?’”Mrs. Redding can still talk about him almost as if he were still alive, recreating their verbal sparring, the old push-pull tension of men and women bound together — the arguing, loving and working things out that was at the heart of so many songs in the blues and R&B canon.Their relationship was not perfect. According to a 2017 biography by Jonathan Gould, Mrs. Redding endured her husband’s infidelities as he ground out an incessant touring schedule. She knew what it was like to miss him long before he died; she once expressed her longing with a poem she gave him after he returned from a tour of Europe.“You ain’t no songwriter,” she recalled Mr. Redding saying as he took the poem. Eventually, he used it as the basis for “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember,” one of his most stirring ballads.Mrs. Redding noted that she received a writing credit for the song, which she did not know he had recorded until after he died. “Oh yeah,” she said, chuckling. “And I get paid.”Mr. Redding’s posthumous release “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart in 1968. The next year, Mrs. Redding flew to Los Angeles and accepted two Grammy Awards on his behalf, self-conscious all the while about her Southern accent.But her vulnerability had always come with an independent streak: “I’m not your baby,” she told Mr. Redding when they first met, after he had dared to call her baby.Soon after his death, Mrs. Redding earned a high school equivalency degree, enrolled in business classes and went to work at a booking agency owned by Phil Walden, Mr. Redding’s former manager. She eventually opened her own booking business, then a record store, then a nightclub. Making sure her family was receiving the royalties and other payments due to them became a major preoccupation. She studied the sharks of the music business, and learned to swim with them.Zelma Redding at the Zelma Redding Theatrical Agency offices in the late 1970s.Family photoKarla Redding, Dexter Redding, Zelma Redding, and Otis Redding III at the Big O Ranch in the 1970s.Family photoRacial tensions, meanwhile, flared in Macon in the late 1960s and early ’70s, exacerbated at times by Mayor Ronnie Thompson. A flamboyant white gospel singer, Mr. Thompson once issued “shoot to kill” orders against Black activists and earned the nickname “Machine Gun” after firing on a suspected sniper during a particularly tense moment in July 1971, after declaring a state of emergency. But by 1974, on the seventh anniversary of Mr. Redding’s death, Mr. Thompson had invited Mrs. Redding to a ceremony in which he renamed a bridge across the Ocmulgee River in her husband’s honor.“Mayor Ronnie Thompson, according to most people in the community, was a stout racist,” said Karla Redding-Andrews, Mrs. Redding’s daughter. “But he loved Otis Redding.”After the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, protesters in Macon demanded the removal of their city’s Confederate statuary. Mayor Lester Miller raised the possibility of having the Otis Redding statue replace the Confederate statue on Cotton Avenue, which was once the site of a major slave market.The family, which owns the Redding statue, said that was not its decision to make. Mrs. Redding said she did not want people in Macon to think the family “was pushing everything on them.”A Confederate statue stands next to the Otis Redding Foundation offices, the light tan building at right.Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York TimesThe Macon-Bibb County Commission voted to relocate the Confederate monument, although that plan has been postponed by a lawsuit filed by a group called the Military Order of the Stars and Bars.But it is the Otis Redding Foundation, and Mrs. Redding’s family, that has been more influential in setting the tone in modern Macon. Mrs. Redding’s children and her grandson Justin Andrews have been regulars on boards and commissions, addressing issues from downtown redevelopment to food insecurity. Since 2007, the foundation has offered music classes and arts camps to thousands of children.Mrs. Redding sees this as an extension of her husband’s loyalty to Macon, a sentiment that puzzled his pop-music contemporaries: In the 1960s there were certainly easier places for a famous Black man to settle down and raise a family. Mr. Gould, the biographer, noted that another hometown hero, Little Richard, was banned from the city stemming from a 1955 arrest on a “lewd conduct” charge. But Mr. Redding, who died at age 26, had co-founded a record label in the city and had dreamed of it becoming a hub of Southern musical creativity, a mini-Memphis in the heart of middle Georgia.The dream flourished, for a while, though in a curious way. In 1969, Mr. Walden co-founded Capricorn Records, promoting the Allman Brothers and a number of mostly white “Southern Rock” acts that were influenced by Black performers like Mr. Redding, but were sometimes marketed with Old South imagery like the Confederate battle flag. Today, a small downtown museum dedicated to Capricorn notes, in a wall display, that such imagery “complicates the legacy of an otherwise progressive label.”In addition to Mr. Redding’s commercial ambitions, Mrs. Redding said, her husband — who was, like her, a high school dropout — had also begun thinking hard before his death about philanthropic efforts geared toward children and education. In his absence, Mrs. Redding and her family have allowed themselves to to be creative about what it might mean to produce the next Otis Redding.Memorabilia adorns the Redding home and helps to hold Zelma Redding’s grief at bay.Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York TimesIn 2005, they learned that a local high school student of modest means named Roderick Cox was dreaming of studying French horn in college but did not own an instrument. Word got to Mrs. Redding. Mr. Cox got his horn. In November 2018, the Redding family was at Walt Disney Concert Hall to watch Mr. Cox, the recipient of that year’s Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award, lead the Los Angeles Philharmonic as it performed Francis Poulenc’s Organ Concerto and Saint-Saëns’s Symphony No. 3.“I knew his mind, the way he thought,” Mrs. Redding said of her husband. “And if you love somebody, you’re going to always keep that in your mind — you know, ‘Otis did it this way, and I’m going to do it this way.’ And it worked.” More

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      Paul Siebel, Singer Whose Career Was Notable but Brief, Dies at 84

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      He arrived on the Greenwich Village folk scene in the mid-1960s and drew comparisons to Dylan. But he left the music business not long after.Paul Siebel, a folk singer and songwriter who drew comparisons to Bob Dylan in the 1960s and ’70s but dropped out of the music business, hindered by stage fright and disappointed by the lack of attention his work received, died on April 5 in hospice care in Centreville, Md. He was 84.The cause was pulmonary fibrosis, his nephew, Robert Woods, said. Mr. Siebel had lived in nearby Wye Mills.In the mid-1960s, Mr. Siebel (pronounced SEE-bel) moved from the folk music scene in Buffalo to the more thriving one in Greenwich Village.“He knocked me out,” the folk singer and multi-instrumentalist David Bromberg, who backed Mr. Siebel in performances and remained his friend for decades, said by phone. “He was a great singer and songwriter. But he had the worst stage fright of anyone I ever met. If not for the stage fright, he would have continued.”Mr. Siebel, whose music was infused with a country sound, sang in a nasal voice and wrote evocative songs with strong narratives. In “Louise,” his best-known composition, he sang about the death of a truck-stop prostitute:Well, they all said Louise was not half badIt was written on the walls and window shadesAnd how she’d act the little girlA deceiver, don’t believe her, that’s her tradeLinda Ronstadt, in her book “Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir” (2013), recalled seeing Mr. Siebel at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village in 1969.“We saw the last part of his very impressive show made rich with his cowboy falsetto and a song about a poignant, sad girl of a certain reputation named Louise,” Ms. Ronstadt wrote.She recorded “Louise” and included it on her album “Silk Purse” (1970). It was subsequently covered by Bonnie Raitt, Leo Kottke and at least 20 other artists. Another of Mr. Siebel’s songs, “Spanish Johnny,” was recorded by Emmylou Harris and Waylon Jennings and by Mr. Bromberg.Mr. Siebel signed with Elektra Records after Mr. Bromberg set up a concert for him at the Folklore Center, in Greenwich Village, so that Peter Siegel, a producer for the label, could hear him.When Mr. Siebel’s first album, “Woodsmoke & Oranges,” was released in 1970, Gregory McDonald, a critic for The Boston Globe, wrote that it “justifies his currently being compared with Bob Dylan.” He called Mr. Siebel “the big new name in folk music.”But “Woodsmoke & Oranges” did not sell well and neither did his follow-up album, “Jack-Knife Gypsy,” released the next year.There would be only one more, a live album recorded with Mr. Bromberg and the singer-songwriter Gary White in 1978 and released in 1981.“He was very critical of himself,” Mr. Bromberg said. “After those two albums, he wrote another bunch of songs, but he destroyed them. He said they weren’t as good as the ones on the albums.”By the early 1980s, he had left the business altogether.“I started drinking, things started coming apart,” he told the magazine American Songwriter in 2011. “I guess I wasn’t getting the recognition I wanted, and without that, how can you write? And then after a while I just couldn’t go out and do those same songs again and again. I soured. It soured.”Mr. Siebel in the 1970s. “I guess I wasn’t getting the recognition I wanted,” he said of his decision to leave the music business, “and without that, how can you write?”Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesPaul Karl Siebel was born on Sept. 19, 1937, in Buffalo. His father, Karl, was a farmer and restaurateur. His mother, Dorothy (Hosmer) Siebel, was a homemaker and seamstress.Paul studied classical violin as a child and later became proficient at the guitar. After attending what is now the University at Buffalo, he served in the Army in Europe before beginning to perform on the folk circuit in Buffalo. When he moved to New York City, he supported himself by working in a baby carriage factory in Brooklyn.Robert Zachary Jr., his manager, told Dirty Linen, a folk and world music magazine, in 1996 that, before Mr. Siebel signed with Elektra, he didn’t have a telephone. “I used to have to send him telegrams, you know, to get him to come uptown and see us and talk to us or sign a contract,” he said.After Mr. Siebel walked away from the music business, he became a bread baker for a restaurant and a county park worker in Maryland.He leaves no immediate survivors.Asked in 1996 how he thought he would be remembered, Mr. Siebel said: “He was a guy who wrote a couple of pretty good songs. What ever happened to him?” More

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      Art Rupe, Who Brought Rhythm and Blues to the Mainstream, Dies at 104

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      As the founder of the independent label Specialty Records, he helped set the table for the rock ’n’ roll era by signing performers like Little Richard.Art Rupe, the founder of Specialty Records, an innovative independent label based in Los Angeles that brought rhythm and blues into the mainstream and helped set the table for the rock ’n’ roll era with singers like Little Richard and Lloyd Price, died on Friday at his home in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 104.His death was announced by his daughter, Beverly Rupe Schwarz.Mr. Rupe created Specialty in 1946 with a niche audience in mind (hence the name). The major labels of the time, focused on mass-market pop hits, ignored the urbanized, blues-based music that appealed to Black audiences in the big cities. Mr. Rupe hoped to capitalize on this oversight by showcasing acts with “a big-band sound expressed in a churchy way,” as he put it to Arnold Shaw, the author of “Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues” (1978).In the late 1940s and early ’50s, artists like Roy Milton, Percy Mayfield and Joe Liggins consistently put Specialty in the Top 10 of what were known as the “race record” charts until Billboard magazine began using the term “rhythm and blues” in 1949. In 1952, on a scouting trip to New Orleans, Mr. Rupe recorded Lloyd Price, then 19, singing his own composition, “Lawdy Miss Clawdy.” That record, which featured Fats Domino on piano, became the top-selling R&B record of the year and broke through to white listeners, too.Mr. Rupe hit one of rock ’n’ roll’s mother lodes when he signed Richard Penniman, known professionally as Little Richard, on the strength of a scratchy audition tape. SpecialtyThree years later, Mr. Rupe hit one of rock ’n’ roll’s mother lodes when he signed Richard Penniman, known professionally as Little Richard, on the strength of a scratchy audition tape. During a lunch break at a recording session in New Orleans, Little Richard sat down at the piano and shouted out a risqué song he used in his nightclub act: “Tutti Frutti.” With hastily rewritten lyrics, the song became one of rock’s early classics, and the first in a string of Little Richard hits that included “Long Tall Sally,” “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” “Rip It Up,” “Lucille,” “Keep a-Knockin’” and “Good Golly, Miss Molly.”“Art Rupe had a tremendous impact on rock ’n’ roll,” said John Broven, the author of “Record Makers and Breakers” (2009), a history of early rock ’n’ roll’s independent record producers. “‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy’ was really the first record to cross over and reach a teenage white audience, and then came Little Richard with ‘Tutti-Frutti’ and ‘Long Tall Sally.’ These were monumental records that almost created rock ’n’ roll in themselves.”Art Rupe was born Arthur Newton Goldberg on Sept. 5, 1917, in Greensburg, Pa., a suburb of Pittsburgh, and grew up in nearby McKeesport, where his father, David, was a salesman at a secondhand furniture store and his mother, Anna, was a music lover. After attending Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Miami University in Ohio, he moved to Los Angeles in 1939.He enrolled in business courses at U.C.L.A. with the idea of entering the film business; he also changed his last name to Rupe after being told by a relative that it had been the family’s original surname in Europe. After World War II broke out, he worked at a local shipyard on an engineering crew that tested Liberty ships.The movie business, he found, was tough to enter, and he shifted his attention to the recording industry. Responding to a newspaper ad, he invested $2,500 in a new label, Atlas Records, which lost most of his money and failed to produce hits by its two main artists, Nat King Cole and Frankie Laine.Roy Milton and His Solid Senders in a publicity photo. Mr. Milton, standing, a jump-blues singer, recorded numerous Top 10 R&B hits for Specialty.Courtesy of Colin EscottAfter selling his interest in Atlas for $600, Mr. Rupe created his own company, Juke Box Records, in 1944. “I called it Juke Box because the jukebox was the medium then for plugging records,” he told Arnold Shaw. “If you got a record into the boxes, it was tantamount to getting it on the top stations today.”Mr. Rupe was methodical. He bought $200 worth of race records and, stopwatch in hand, began analyzing musical structure, tempo and even titles to identify the common characteristics of the best-selling releases. Since the word “boogie” appeared in a disproportionate number of hit songs, Juke Box’s first record, an instrumental by the Sepia Tones, was given the title “Boogie No. 1.” It sold a more than respectable 70,000 copies, and Mr. Rupe was on his way.The jump-blues singer Roy Milton and his band, the Solid Senders, gave Juke Box its first big hit: “R.M. Blues,” released in 1945, which was said to have sold a million copies. Mr. Milton went on to record nearly 20 Top 10 R&B hits after following Mr. Rupe to Specialty, which he founded the next year after breaking with his Juke Box partners.In 1950 the pianist and bandleader Joe Liggins gave Specialty its first No. 1 hit, “Pink Champagne,” which became the top-selling R&B record of the year. Percy Mayfield, a singer and songwriter with a relaxed, swinging style who would later contribute “Hit the Road, Jack” and other songs to Ray Charles’s repertoire, topped the charts a year later with “Please Send Me Someone to Love.” Guitar Slim gave the label yet another No. 1 hit in 1954 with “The Things That I Used to Do,” one of the earliest records to put the electric guitar front and center.“Specialty was a little like the Blue Note label in jazz,” said the singer and music historian Billy Vera, who produced “The Specialty Story,” a boxed set of the label’s best sides released in 1994, and wrote “Rip It Up: The Specialty Records Story,” published in 2019. “Art was dollar conscious, but he did not let that stop him from going into the better studios and taking the time to rehearse. He took great pride and care to make quality records with quality musicians.”Specialty exerted a powerful influence on the British invasion bands of the 1960s, and even its second-tier acts had a ripple effect. Larry Williams, a New Orleans singer groomed by Specialty to fill the void when Little Richard left the music business in 1957, had solid hits with “Short Fat Fannie” and “Bony Moronie,” but even his lesser singles made an impression overseas. His single “She Said Yeah” was covered by the Rolling Stones and the Animals. The Beatles recorded three of his songs: “Bad Boy,” “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” and “Slow Down.” Don and Dewey, another Specialty act, never had a hit, but their sound greatly influenced the Righteous Brothers and Sam and Dave.Mr. Rupe, a longtime fan of gospel music, quickly made Specialty’s gospel division an industry leader, signing the Pilgrim Travelers, the Swan Silvertones, Alex Bradford, Brother Joe May and Sister Wynona Carr. Two of the label’s most famous gospel groups generated crossover stars for other labels: Sam Cooke became a pop star after leaving the Soul Stirrers, as did Lou Rawls, who recorded with the Chosen Gospel Singers.Mr. Cooke was the one that got away. In 1956, he recorded a pop tune, “Lovable,” produced by Specialty’s Bumps Blackwell with a lush background chorus and released with the singer’s name thinly disguised as Dale Cook. Mr. Rupe disliked the smooth pop treatment and let Mr. Blackwell and Mr. Cooke leave the label with the other recordings from that session in hand. One song, “You Send Me,” became a chart-topping hit and ignited Mr. Cooke’s remarkable career.“In all candor, I did not think ‘You Send Me’ was that great,” Mr. Rupe told an interviewer for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2011. “I never dreamed it would be a multimillion seller.”Mr. Rupe in 2019. He sold Specialty’s catalog in 1990 and created the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation in 1991.Rauh Jewish Archives, Heinz History CenterBy 1960, Mr. Rupe was growing disenchanted with the record business, particularly with the widespread system of payola, which required record companies to pay off disc jockeys and distributors to get their records heard.Increasingly, he let assistants like Harold Battiste, in New Orleans, and Sonny Bono, in Los Angeles, produce and market the label’s records. In 1990, he sold Specialty’s catalog to Fantasy RecordsWhile still at Specialty, Mr. Rupe invested successfully in oil and real estate and started his own oil company. In 1991 he created the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation, whose stated goals include “achieving positive social change by shining the light of truth on critical and controversial issues” and providing support for caregivers of people with dementia.In addition to his daughter — from the second of his three marriages, to Lee Apostoleris, which ended in divorce — Mr. Rupe is survived by a granddaughter; a step-grandson; and two step-great-granddaughters. His third wife, Dorothy Rupe, and three siblings died before him.In 2011, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame gave Mr. Rupe the Ahmet Ertegun Award for Lifetime Achievement, an honor given to record-company executives.“When I got into the business, few white people fooled around with this kind of music,” Mr. Rupe told Arnold Shaw. “I had no idea that it would ever appeal to so many white people.” More

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      Review: ‘Ten Thousand Birds’ Turns the Armory Into an Aviary

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      The ensemble Alarm Will Sound spread throughout the Park Avenue Armory’s drill hall for the installation-like music of John Luther Adams.By now, the Park Avenue Armory’s Recital Series concerts are a known quantity: art song and chamber music in ornate, intimate spaces.Whether the programming is classic or contemporary, the packaging is the same, with only a few surprises — as when the soprano Barbara Hannigan turned Erik Satie’s music into semi-staged monodrama. But there hasn’t been a performance quite like the one by the ensemble Alarm Will Sound on Thursday.Abandoning the traditional Recital Series rooms, the group’s members spread throughout the Armory’s capacious drill hall for John Luther Adams’s characterful and moving “Ten Thousand Birds,” an installation-like project that’s as much environmental — in presentation, but also in its preoccupations — as it is musical.Brandon Patrick George played flute and, here, piccolo.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesAdams, our reigning musical ambassador of the natural world, hasn’t written a score here in the usual sense. It is an Audubon book in translation: each page, the portrait of a bird in sound. Together the sketches form an open-ended and modular folio, with minimal guidance. “The size of the ensemble and the duration of a performance may be tailored to the specific site and occasion,” Adams writes in a note for the published version. “It is not necessary to play all the pieces in this collection. It’s not even necessary to play all the musical material within a particular piece.”He also calls for “the largest possible physical space”; the drill hall is about 55,000 square feet, which Alarm Will Sound occupied with both freedom and precision in a staging by Alan Pierson, the group’s artistic director, and the percussionist Peter Ferry, its assistant artistic director. (Early in the pandemic, Pierson and these players made a short video adaptation called “Ten Thousand Birds / Ten Thousand Screens”; imaginative and often funny, it remains a high point of a low moment in classical music.)At the Armory, Alarm Will Sound arranged “Ten Thousand Birds” into a roughly 70-minute experience that follows the cycle of the day: Beginning with a gentle breeze, it traces the awakening accumulation of morning, the liveliness of afternoon and the long pauses of night before returning to that peaceful wind. Overhead the lights gradually dimmed, and on the floor, the audience was invited to move among the musicians. Just as there is no one way to present this work, there are no rules for how to hear it.The horn player Laura Weiner among audience members, who were free to move among the musicians throughout the work.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesOn Thursday, people weren’t entirely prepared for the piece to begin, with some preshow chatter lingering alongside the wind. But it’s difficult to miss a breathy bassoon being waved around, and audience members more clearly understood what was happening as other musicians took their places. A flute, hazy and lightly arpeggiated, introduced melody to the mix, which grew richer: percussion in the familiar falling interval of bird song in classical music, and harmonic runs in the strings.Adams has in the past evoked immense natural forces — such as in his “Become” trilogy, which includes the Pulitzer Prize- and Grammy Award-winning “Become Ocean” — and here he balances both abstraction and transcription. For every passage of lyricism that emerges from instrumental dialogue, there is a phrase with the uncanny exactitude of Messiaen: a piccolo call, an agitated piano flutter.And, as staged at the Armory, there was a subtle sense of drama. Zoomorphic in their movement, the players shifted throughout the space less like musicians and more like characters. A timpani rumble dispersed a small ensemble that had been crowded around it. Some performers were elusive or difficult to place, perched in the mezzanine or in the frame of a Juliet balcony but obscured by darkness. Strings zipped through listeners in a buzzing swarm. By the time the work reached its nocturnal scenes, though, that kind of levity gave way to serene patience — long silences punctuated by passing song.Some in the audience lay as if in meditation while others paced around the drill hall. Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesAs in “Inuksuit,” another of Adams’s installation works, the audience’s engagement varied. Curiosity kept me in constant motion; some people stayed in chairs, or sat in groups on the ground like picnickers. A few lay flat, eyes closed, as if in meditation. David Byrne strolled with a bicycle helmet in hand, scrutinizing unattended percussion instruments. One man knitted, while another played Scrabble. Many — too many — pulled out their phones to take photos or record, their flashes distracting in the dark.Which is unfortunate because what “Ten Thousand Birds” offers, above all, is an opportunity to marvel, not document. If I were to attend again, I would be in the camp of those who rested in one place and let sounds come to them, the way they might during a day at the park. Regardless, focus is all it takes for this piece, and Alarm Will Sound’s thoughtful realization of it, to achieve its aim: a heightened aestheticization of nature, and perhaps a renewed connection with it.Whether Adams accomplishes something more with this work — whether its spirit of appreciation rises to the level of advocacy — is, like the experience of the music itself, up to the audience.Alarm Will SoundRepeats on Friday at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org. More

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      City Ballet Plans Ambitious Season to Help Dancers Get Back Up to Speed

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      The company will present a mix of new and old works, including a full-length premiere to Aaron Copland by Justin Peck.The pandemic has been disorienting for New York City Ballet, disrupting the careers of many rising stars and resulting in the loss of millions in ticket revenue.Next season, the company hopes to restore a sense of normalcy by presenting an ambitious mix of new and old works, it announced on Friday, including many ballets meant to help train a younger generation of dancers.“This is a vitamin shot of what we’ve been known for,” Wendy Whelan, City Ballet’s associate artistic director, who helped plan the new season, said in an interview.The 2022-23 season, which will feature 48 ballets from September through May, will include new works by the choreographers Christopher Wheeldon, Keerati Jinakunwiphat and Alysa Pires, among others. The fall fashion gala will feature premieres by the choreographers Kyle Abraham and Gianna Reisen, a recent graduate of the School of American Ballet.In January, the company will present a full-length exploration of the music of Aaron Copland, by Justin Peck, the resident choreographer and artistic adviser, featuring visual designs by the painter Jeffrey Gibson.A major focus will be on presenting large-scale, foundational classics — what Whelan called “very big and very team-oriented ballets” — as part of an effort to train City Ballet’s younger dancers after a series of high-profile retirements.The lineup includes George Balanchine’s “Vienna Waltzes” and “Raymonda Variations” in fall; Jerome Robbins’s “West Side Story Suite” and Peter Martins’s staging of “The Sleeping Beauty” in winter season.“We have a lot of young talent and a lot of flowers blooming,” Whelan said. “We’ve got a lot of people that we want to keep feeding at a high level.”The season will also include several works by the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, the former artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet who is now an artist in residence at American Ballet Theater, including his “Concerto DSCH” and “Pictures at an Exhibition.”The pandemic forced the cancellation of City Ballet’s entire 2020-21 season. After returning to the stage in the fall, Whelan said that some dancers expressed an interest in getting more exposure to the rigorous training provided by classics.“Some of them were like: ‘We just want to do ballet. We haven’t done ballet for two years,” she said. “They said, ‘We want to get razor sharp and at this level.’ ”The coming season is “going to make everybody a better dancer,” she added.The coronavirus continues to loom over the performing arts. City Ballet estimates that it has lost $55 million in anticipated ticket sales since the start of the pandemic.While many cultural institutions have pushed forward with full seasons this year, the Omicron variant still poses a challenge. The surge in cases forced City Ballet to cancel 26 shows in December and January, including performances of “The Nutcracker,” typically its most lucrative show of the year.Audience behavior is also changing. At City Ballet, attendance is about 80 percent of prepandemic levels.The possibility of another outbreak is “always at the back of our minds,” Whelan said.Dancers have recently started wearing masks again in studios, she said, amid the uptick in cases in New York.“We’re doing everything we can to keep everybody safe,” she said. More

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      Tokischa, la nueva rebelde de la música latina

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      SANTO DOMINGO, República Dominicana — Era una tarde de mediados de marzo, aquí en la capital, y una multitud de cientos de asistentes al festival vestidos con alas de hada, pedrería y pintura facial de arcoíris comenzó a corear. “¡Po-po-la!”, gritaban, empleando la jerga local para referirse a la vagina. La escena parecía la invocación al líder de un culto, y la incendiaria dominicana Tokischa, una rapera conocida por sus letras impúdicas y sus colaboraciones de alto nivel, salió al escenario.Durante la siguiente hora, la artista de 26 años habló de su bisexualidad, de los placeres carnales y de las drogas, todo acompañado de un ritmo estridente de dembow y trap. Esa noche llovía en el festival de la Isla de la Luz, el tipo de diluvio caribeño que llega en un abrir y cerrar de ojos. “¡Ay, pero yo me quiero mojar con ustedes!”, gritó, al salir de debajo del toldo del escenario y adentrarse en la multitud. Se desabrochó la blusa color azul, dejando al descubierto un sujetador cónico de satén color rosa intenso, y el público se volvió loco.El suelo, antes cubierto de hierba, ahora era una pista de obstáculos con charcos de lodo. Al parecer a nadie le importaba. Los admiradores coreaban cada palabra, con voces roncas. Una mujer se subió a una valla metálica y perreó por encima de la multitud. Cuando terminó su actuación, Tokischa, radiante, se sacó la ropa interior de debajo de la minifalda y se la lanzó a una mujer del público.Este es un pequeño ejemplo de la provocación que define a Tokischa Altagracia Peralta. Sus audaces letras, que se deleitan con la rebelión lingüística del argot dominicano y abrazan la euforia del sexo son, en su mayoría, impublicables. En “Tukuntazo”, se jacta de acostarse con otras mujeres junto con su hombre. En su himno “Yo no me voy acostar”, proclama: “Tengo pila ‘e Molly en la cabeza/ Tengo una amiguita que me besa”.“No tener miedo de expresar mi sexualidad, mi pensamientos, es como algo bonito”, aseguró la cantante.Josefina Santos para The New York TimesTokischa colecciona escándalos como si fuesen recuerdos de vacaciones. El año pasado, se vio obligada a pagar una multa municipal y a pedir disculpas públicas después de publicar fotos subidas de tono delante de un mural de la Virgen de la Altagracia, la patrona de la República Dominicana. En otoño, se presentó a una entrega de premios con un disfraz de vagina de tamaño natural, vestida como un personaje al que llamó “Santa Popola”. En un artículo de opinión ahora borrado, un columnista del periódico dominicano La Información afirmó que sus letras explícitas “faltan el respeto de una población que lucha por conservar los valores de la familia”.Sin embargo, también hay toda una generación de jóvenes dominicanos que se ven reflejados en el alegre rechazo que Tokischa despliega contra la respetabilidad. Para ellos, es una rebelde queer que ve la sexualidad de manera positiva, el tipo de figura cultural cuyas actuaciones apuntan a la liberación de las políticas opresivas y retrógradas.En una calle apartada del Malecón, el paseo marítimo que rodea la costa de Santo Domingo, Tokischa reflexionó sobre su irreverente reputación. Días antes del festival, la rapera acababa de llegar a las oficinas de Paulus Music, la discográfica y el equipo creativo que está detrás de sus videos. Llevaba puestos unos pantalones para correr de color verde oliva y una camiseta a juego con una imagen conocida y que se ha usado incontablemente para memes: el GIF de Homero Simpson escondiéndose en un arbusto.“Dicen muchas cosas de mí”, comentó. “Ah, que no es artista, que ella es loca, que es una drogadicta”, continuó. “Yo no me ofendo, porque yo soy clara de qué es lo que pasa conmigo. Yo sé quién es Tokischa, yo sé qué es lo que Tokischa está haciendo”.Tokischa y Rosalía en el escenario durante una actuación en 2021. Tokischa participa en “La Combi Versace”, una canción del último álbum de la estrella del pop español.John Parra/Telemundo and NBCU Photo Bank, vía Getty ImagesTokischa Altagracia Peralta nació en Los Frailes, un barrio obrero de Santo Domingo Este, pero tuvo una juventud itinerante. Sus padres se separaron y ella vivió con su madre hasta los 3 años. Cuando su madre se trasladó a Estados Unidos, Tokischa se mudó muchas veces, viviendo con tías, padrinos u otros familiares. Su padre fue encarcelado cuando ella era joven.Tokischa es la primera en admitir que era revoltosa en la escuela. “Yo peleaba. Me encontraban chuleando. ¡Siempre alguien me encontraba chuleando!”, dijo riendo. Solía responderle a sus maestros, por lo que fue expulsada de varias escuelas y, con frecuencia, era castigada físicamente, agregó.“Siempre era creativa”, recordó. “Dibujaba, escribía. Me trancaba en la habitación a verme en el espejo y actuar en el espejo”. Creció rodeada de géneros dominicanos como el merengue, el dembow y la bachata, pero cuando tenía 14 años descubrió todo un nuevo universo musical en línea con bandas como Pink Floyd y artistas como Bob Marley, Nicki Minaj, Rihanna.“Vivía imaginando mi vida, imaginando lo que iba a ser”, relató. “No sabía en qué rama, pero sabía que sí iba ser gran artista”.El primer tema oficial de Tokischa fue “Pícala”, una canción de trap con Tivi Gunz que se lanzó en 2018.Josefina Santos para The New York TimesCuando cumplió 18 años, una amiga la introdujo al sitio de anuncios clasificados Craigslist, y dijo que se convirtió en una sugar baby, que es como se le llama a una persona joven que acepta salir por mutuo acuerdo y con condiciones predefinidas con personas mayores que pueden ser hombres o mujeres; Tokischa recibía regalos de turistas sexuales estadounidenses mayores y adinerados. Uno de ellos le compró unas Puma Fenty, su primer par de zapatos deportivos. “Un tíguere tenía fotos montado en un camello”, dijo pícaramente sobre un hombre. “Yo dije: ‘¡Este tipo tiene cuartos!’”, refiriéndose a la jerga para el dinero.Aunque se muestra juguetona cuando habla al respecto, a Tokischa no le gustaba ese trabajo, sobre todo cuando los clientes cruzaban las líneas del consentimiento. De ahí pasó a OnlyFans, la plataforma por suscripción en la que la gente puede cobrar por dar acceso a fotos y videos, y con el tiempo empezó a modelar y a incorporarse a la comunidad creativa de Santo Domingo. Aprendió a escribir y grabar música tras conocer a productores de la escena a través de su representante, Raymi Paulus. Rápidamente cultivó su estilo vocal, que ahora es su arma principal: un inconfundible gemido agudo y tímido que rezuma sexo y permite que sus endiablados y sensuales raps se pronuncien con precisión.Su primer sencillo oficial fue “Pícala”, una canción de trap con Tivi Gunz que lanzó en 2018. Luego vino una serie de sencillos del estilo dembow, igualmente picantes: “Desacato escolar”, con Yomel El Meloso; “El rey de la popola”, con Rochy RD; y “Yo no me voy a acostar”, del año pasado, entre muchos otros.Las grandes discográficas no tardaron en llegar: el verano pasado, lanzó “Perra” con la estrella colombiana del reguetón J Balvin. Luego vino “Linda” y, más recientemente, “La combi Versace”, ambos con la estrella española Rosalía. En marzo, terminó su primera gira por Estados Unidos, al agotar las entradas de la Terminal 5 de Nueva York en 30 minutos. A finales de mes publicará un sencillo con el productor de EDM Marshmello y tiene previsto grabar un álbum completo en los próximos dos años.“Ella es diferente de lo que la gente ve, o sea, ella es muy profesional, muy disciplinada”, dice LeoRD, el superproductor de dembow que ha colaborado con Tokischa en varias canciones. Durante una llamada telefónica, dijo que su ascenso no tiene precedentes en el mundo del dembow. “En tan poco tiempo, con tan pocas canciones, he visto la evolución de ella que ha ido a millón”.“Dicen muchas cosas de mí”, comentó. “Yo no me ofendo, porque yo soy clara de qué es lo que pasa conmigo. Yo sé quién es Tokischa, yo sé qué es lo que Tokischa está haciendo”.Josefina Santos para The New York TimesEl rápido ascenso de Tokischa ha sido polarizador. Para algunos, es una desviada sexual que pone en peligro a los niños, o una víctima del abandono y las circunstancias difíciles. Para otros, es una mujer que se cosifica a sí misma y que solo satisface las fantasías masculinas. Y para otros, es una feminista intrépida cuyo espíritu insurgente está abriendo camino. El verano pasado, actuó en Santo Domingo en el desfile del orgullo gay dominicano y presentó a mujeres trans como extras y bailarinas en el video de “Linda”, lo que atrajo elogios de toda la comunidad LGBTQ. El blog de belleza Byrdie escribió que ella se “aleja de manera activa de la mirada masculina y hacia la liberación femenina”, y lo hace en una industria de la música latina que a menudo favorece a los artistas blancos.Sin embargo, no todo ha sido color de rosa. En otoño pasado, las activistas feministas y el vicepresidente de Colombia condenaron la representación de las mujeres negras en el video de “Perra”, la canción de Tokischa y J Balvin, donde las mujeres negras estaban caracterizadas como perros, y Balvin, un colombiano blanco, caminaba con una actriz que andaba a cuatro patas con una cadena alrededor de su cuello.Después de que se eliminara el video de YouTube, Balvin emitió una disculpa. Luego, Tokischa le dijo a Rolling Stone que realmente lamentaba “que la gente se haya sentido ofendida”, pero que la puesta en escena era conceptual y estaba destinada a ilustrar las metáforas de la canción. “Estábamos en RD [República Dominicana]; allá toditos somos morenos”, dijo sobre las críticas del video en una entrevista para un pódcast en diciembre. “No fue que nosotros fuimos a África, ni a los Estados Unidos para buscar esas mujeres”. Como era de esperarse, el comentario suscitó críticas de algunos fanáticos en Twitter que creían que estaba desestimando las preocupaciones válidas sobre la representación de las mujeres negras como animales.La reacción muestra cómo los fanáticos demandan cada vez más que las estrellas pop sean progresistas, en especial las figuras vanguardistas como Tokischa. “Desde el primer día que empecé hacer musica, yo dije: ‘Voy a hablar mi verdad’”, dijo. En una entrevista de radio que concedió el año pasado, lo dijo de una manera diferente: “Yo solo hablo de mí. De mi vivencia. Yo no me siento responsable de arreglar la sociedad”.Tokischa sigue siendo una agitadora, y resulta necesaria. “No tener miedo de expresar mi sexualidad, mi pensamientos, es como algo bonito”, aseguró. “Hay mucha gente que tiene miedo de decir lo que son, porque los botan de su casa, los botan del trabajo, pierden amistades. Pero tú no estás mal. Tú estás haciendo lo que tu corazón te dice”.“Yo tengo mucho más mensajes que dar”, continuó. “Pero es el momento de este mensaje, y yo me lo disfruto”.Isabelia Herrera es crítica de arte del programa de becarios del Times. Da cobertura a la cultura popular, con especial atención a la música latinoamericana y estadounidense. Antes fue editora colaboradora en Pitchfork y ha escrito para Rolling Stone, Billboard, GQ, NPR y más. @jabladoraaa More

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      Lizzo’s Disco Dance Party, and 11 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Phoebe Bridgers, KeiyaA, Wild Pink 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, ‘About Damn Time’The disco revival continues on Lizzo’s “About Damn Time,” which features a rubbery, “Get Lucky” bass line and a bridge overflowing with Diana Ross glitter (“I’m comin’ out tonight, I’m comin’ out tonight”). More of a crowd-pleaser than last year’s Cardi B duet “Rumors,” “About Damn Time” is the first official single from Lizzo’s long-awaited album “Special,” which will be out July 15. If this track is an indication, she hasn’t switched up the formula too much, and at times — the Instagram-caption one-liners; the obligatory flute solo — it can feel a little paint-by-numbers Lizzo. But the song is best when she leans more earnestly into its emotional center, belting, “I’ve been so down and under pressure, I’m way too fine to be this stressed.” LINDSAY ZOLADZAmelia Moore, ‘Crybaby’In “Crybaby,” Amelia Moore moans, “Do you like to make me cry, baby, because you do it all the time.” The production heaves and twitches with up-to-the-minute electronics: reversed tones, programmed drums, little keyboard loops, computer-tuned vocals. But the song’s masochistic drama stays rooted in the blues, and in the ways a human voice can break and leap. JON PARELESCisco Swank and Luke Titus featuring Phoelix, ‘Some Things Take Time’The multi-instrumentalist bedroom beat-makers of Instagram, who live by the loop and have lately turned overdubbing into a visual art form — or, at least, into visuals — are a mini-movement by now: Jacob Collier, DOMi and JD Beck, Julius Rodriguez. The list continues, and it’s bound to grow. If they’re all different, most are united in their worship of Stevie Wonder, more for his solo-studio mastery than for the extended-form genius of his compositions. The moment is understandably more interested in texture and groove than in duration or arc. Then it tracks that “Some Things Take Time” — the fun-loving debut album from Cisco Swank and Luke Titus, a duo of young polymaths — is barely the size of a mixtape: just 24 minutes across 11 tracks. And wisely, the tracks themselves aren’t overstuffed. The album’s title tune is a breezy blend of Titus’s sizzling snare patter; Swank’s rich piano harmony, no-notes-wasted bass line and synthesizer strings; and the falsetto flurries of Phoelix, the Noname accomplice who contributes a guest spot. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOKay Flock featuring Cardi B, Dougie B and Bory300, ‘Shake It’A deeply strategic song that sounds deliciously happenstance, “Shake It” solves a few conundrums at once. First, for more than a year, sample drill has been the prevailing sound of New York rap, primarily from Brooklyn and the Bronx. But even though artists like Kay Flock and B-Lovee have had minor radio breakthroughs, the sound could still benefit from an ambassador. Enter Cardi B, who is due for a re-emergence, and is almost certainly the only mainstream rap star currently working who could hop on this rowdy of a drill song so seamlessly. Which isn’t to say without effort: This is a return to adaptable form for Cardi, reminiscent of the way she adopted Kodak Black’s flow on her breakout single “Bodak Yellow.” Her verse here is punchy and clipped — she’s morphing to the sound, not imposing herself onto it.Inside Lizzo’s WorldThe Grammy-winning singer is known for her fierce lyrics, fashion and personality.‘Big Grrrls’: The singer wanted a new kind of backup dancer. In her pursuit of proper representation, she created a TV show.‘Feel-Good Music’: Lizzo says her music is as much about building yourself up as it is about accepting where you are.Why ‘Truth Hurts’ Matters: In 2020, The New York Times Magazine put her No. 1 hit on its list of songs that define the moment.Diary of a Song: Watch how Lizzo made “Juice,” a party song that packs all of her joy and charm into three danceable minutes.Technically, this song belongs to Kay Flock, who is currently in jail: He was arrested in December and charged with murder. It also features Bory300 and Dougie B, another promising Bronx rapper who has the most limber verse here. Unlike the sublimated anxiety of the recent Fivio Foreign hit “City of Gods,” which strains to mold his brusque style into something soft-edged and arena-scaled, “Shake It” is nothing but abandon. It’s true to sample drill heritage, with bits of Akon’s “Bananza (Belly Dancer)” and Sean Paul’s “Temperature” woven throughout. But it has its eyes on bigger targets. An early snippet was made available as part of the highly viral New York video show “Sidetalk,” a favorite of insiders and voyeurs alike, giving “Shake It” a running start toward the kind of online ubiquity that makes for a contemporary pop hit without forsaking the essence of drill. JON CARAMANICAEdoheart, ‘Pandemonium’“Pandemonium” is the explosive title track of a new EP by Edoheart, a singer and producer who was born in Nigeria and is based in New York. It’s four minutes of brisk, skewed, constantly shifting African funk with rhythmic double vision: staggered guitar arpeggios, sputtering drumbeats, distant horns and overlapping voices proclaiming, “Change must come!” and, believably, “I’m free!” PARELESKeiyaA, ‘Camille’s Daughter’KeiyaA — the songwriter, instrumentalist and producer Chakeiya Camille Richmond — liquefies everything around her in “Camille’s Daughter.” Keyboard chords melt into wah-wah and echo, the beat drifts in late and haltingly, and KeiyaA starts and ends verses where she pleases, trailed by ever-shifting clouds of her own backup vocals. “Never will you replicate me,” she taunts, utterly secure in every self-made fluctuation. PARELESNaima Bock, ‘Giant Palm’Weightless and unpredictable (“I float high, high above it all”), the Glastonbury-born artist Naima Bock’s “Giant Palm” sounds a song you’d hear in a pleasant dream. Bock used to be in the British art-rock group Goat Girl, but her solo material leans more into the traditions of European folk and the off-kilter pop she heard during a childhood spent in Brazil. There’s a bit of ’70s Brian Eno in her vocal delivery and an echo of John Cale in her arrangements, but the fusion of her disparate cultural influences makes for an enchanting sound entirely Bock’s own. ZOLADZPhoebe Bridgers, ‘Sidelines’In Phoebe Bridgers’s world, even the most wholehearted love song is usually bittersweet: “Had nothing to prove, ’til you came into my life, gave me something to lose,” she sings on “Sidelines,” her first new song since her breakout 2020 album “Punisher”; it will be featured in the forthcoming Hulu adaptation of Sally Rooney’s “Conversations With Friends.” “I’m not afraid of anything at all,” Bridgers insists at the beginning of the song, before listing off a series of potential fears (earthquakes, plane crashes, growing up) in the sort of granular detail that makes her previous statement sound a little ironic. “Sidelines” features what has by now become Bridgers’s signature multi-tracked vocals — here, they glimmer with an almost Vocoder-like iridescence — which make her sound at once numb and, quite poignantly, wrestling with something ghostly right under the surface. ZOLADZWild Pink, ‘Q. DeGraw’Wild Pink hails from Brooklyn, but the group specializes in the sort of open-air, stargazing indie rock that usually gets associated with the Pacific Northwest. Like its acclaimed 2021 album “A Billion Little Lights,” its towering new single “Q. Degraw” shows Wild Pink’s flair for the epic, but it’s less an anthemic rocker than a slow-smoldering mood piece. The frontman John Ross’s muffled vocals are buried under distortion that obscures them as diffusely as a moon behind clouds, though the moments they become legible are especially affecting. “I’ve been to hell and back again,” he murmurs, before adding tenderly, “I know you’ve been to hell too.” ZOLADZKisskadee, ‘Black Hole Era’Kisskadee pulls together progressive-rock (the Canterbury school to be precise), astronomy, chamber-pop, computer sound manipulation and faith in resurrection in “Black Hole Era.” The music is rooted in a lurching piano more-or-less waltz — the meters shift — and it grows ever more programmed, overdubbed, manipulated and elastic. A lot of transformations happen within five minutes. PARELESFKA twigs, ‘Playscape’FKA twigs keeps working her art and fashion connections. “Playscape,” with a diversely cast video that she directed, is a showcase for wool clothing and Isamu Noguchi sculptures. After a sustained intro — isolated syllables and vocal harmonies — that hints at both Meredith Monk and Take 5, she goes full late-1970s punk, channeling the wail and saxophone of X-Ray Spex to remake a song with terminology that survived into the 21st century: “Identity.” With a mostly one-note melody, FKA twigs wails, “Identity! When you look in the mirror do you see yourself?” It’s not a new song, but it’s still pointed. PARELESJoel Ross, ‘Benediction’With his octet, Parables, the vibraphonist Joel Ross plays what could be called chorales, though they involve no vocals. The group’s repertoire grew out of a series of casual improvisations that Ross played and recorded years ago with the saxophonist Sergio Tabanico. Ross went back and pulled small curves and dashes of melody out of those recordings, then taught them to the octet by ear. They developed into entire pieces over time, through a process of collective weaving, until each tune had taken on an illusion of contained endlessness, like Maya Lin’s land sculptures or an old song of praise. Indeed, Ross built the octet’s new album, “The Parable of the Poet,” around the structure of a church service. But these seven tracks don’t seek to raise the rafters so much as waft slowly up toward them. “Benediction,” the final track, begins with a sublimely peaceful intro from the young pianist Sean Mason; at the end, the track fades with the band still savoring the melody in harmonized communion. RUSSONELLO More