Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      Remembering Betty Davis, a Futuristic Funk Force

      by

      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherThe three albums Betty Davis released in the 1970s — “Betty Davis” in 1973, “They Say I’m Different” in 1974 and “Nasty Gal” in 1975 — were not huge commercial successes, but they were profoundly advanced statements of funk futurism.Davis, who died this month at 77, was far ahead of her time, a Black woman exploring the connections between blues vocalizing and funk rhythms making music that only would begin to have company a few years — or really, a decade or two — later. She had been married to Miles Davis, and pushed him toward the psychedelia that he explored on “Bitches Brew” and beyond. And her inheritors range from Rick James and Prince to Joi and Janelle Monáe.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Davis’s unique music, the forces that conspired to make her career a short one and the path that led to her rediscovery.Guests:Jon Pareles, The New York Times’s chief pop music criticMaureen Mahon, associate professor in NYU’s department of music and the author of “Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll”Oliver Wang, professor of sociology at California State University, Long Beach, and the author of the liner notes on the late 2000s reissues of Betty Davis’s first three albumsConnect 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

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Review: A Pianist Explores Mozart the Late Bloomer

      by

      Víkingur Ólafsson made his Carnegie Hall debut with a hypnotically unfurling program based on his recent album “Mozart and Contemporaries.”Mozart, the pianist Víkingur Ólafsson deadpanned from the stage at Zankel Hall on Tuesday evening, was a “late bloomer.” The audience chuckled at the thought of one of history’s great child prodigies, dead at 35, taking a long time to find his gifts.It was the rare occasion I’ve heard a laugh during a recital. Most musicians seem a bit lost when you hand them a microphone. Ólafsson grabs it near the base and manipulates it confidently, like a stand-up comic: wry and self-deprecating.At 38, he has appeared little in New York, and never before at any of Carnegie Hall’s spaces. It is as a recording artist that many here have known him, an identity he embraced on Tuesday, playing without alteration — and, other than an intermission, without pause, as if you were listening to the CD — the program of his most recent album, “Mozart and Contemporaries.”His late bloomer comment was a joke, but only partly — fitting for a concert that focused on Mozart’s artistic growth in the 1780s, his final full decade. Ólafsson’s aim was both to bring the master down to earth — interspersing him with pieces from around the same time, in a similar style, by Haydn, C.P.E. Bach, Domenico Cimarosa and Baldassare Galuppi — and to elevate him back to the heavens, bathing the audience in just shy of 90 minutes of aching beauty.Yes, there was some variety, but not so much. Ólafsson’s enemy here is the traditional piano recital, defined by vivid contrasts — of period, of mood. His touch is acute and pearly, his attack is hardly muted when warranted, and not nearly all of this music is slow or mellow. Even so, “Mozart and Contemporaries” came off as an unbroken, unfurling, hypnotically broad, almost dreamlike silk of sound, inward-looking and wistful in both major and minor keys, in both andante and allegro.For the listener — particularly to the live version, its peaks and valleys smoother than on the recording — the feeling eventually approached that of an insect encased in amber: surrounded by beauty, even trapped by it. So much sublimity is hard to take.Which doesn’t mean it isn’t sublime — in the essayistic bursts of a Bach rondo or in the wintry-field longing of Mozart’s Fantasia in D minor (K. 397); the delicacy of that composer’s K. 494 Rondo or the dash of another, K. 485; an alert rendition of Haydn’s B minor Sonata; intimate movements from Galuppi and Cimarosa; and a clear, keen interpretation of Mozart’s “Sonata Facile” in C (K. 545).Ólafsson’s lucidity was ideal for the high spirits of the not even two minutes of Mozart’s K. 574 Gigue — but he also brought out its subtly sophisticated, world-spanning harmonies, the sense of bounding over an immense distance. (He said after intermission that the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen told him this is a “cosmic” gigue.)The second half was dominated by three expansive adagios, starting with Ólafsson’s arrangement of the slow movement from the String Quintet in G minor (K. 516). A movement from Galuppi’s Sonata in C minor (evoking, like so much of Scarlatti, the strum of a Spanish guitar) led into the intensity of Mozart’s Sonata in the same key (K. 457) — the obsessiveness of its finale, the snow-globe tenderness of its Adagio. Then came the brooding, singing Adagio in B minor (K. 540), and Liszt’s ivory-pristine transcription of the “Ave Verum Corpus.”“It’s very hard to play something after ‘Ave Verum,’” Ólafsson said, quieting the applause by sitting back down at the piano bench. And then, with perfect timing: “But it’s not impossible.”He did the slow movement from J.S. Bach’s Organ Sonata No. 4, pealing yet contained, and superb.Víkingur ÓlafssonPerformed on Tuesday at Zankel Hall, Manhattan. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Mark Lanegan, 57, Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age Singer, Dies

      by

      Known for his deep, world-weary voice, he was part of a generation of Seattle musicians who put grunge music on the map.Mark Lanegan, a singer for Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age and an integral part of the 1980s and 1990s grunge scene in the Pacific Northwest, died on Tuesday at his home in Killarney, Ireland. He was 57.SKH Music, a management company, confirmed his death in a statement but did not specify a cause.In the statement, SKH Music called Mr. Lanegan “a beloved singer, songwriter, author and musician.”Though his stints in the bands Screaming Trees, Queens of the Stone Age and the Gutter Twins never brought him the kind of fame achieved by Nirvana and Soundgarden, other Seattle grunge bands, he was known for his scratchy yet full-bodied voice that could take a song to both soaring heights and melancholy lows.Mr. Lanegan’s voice was a defining element of hits like Screaming Trees’ 1992 song “Nearly Lost You” and Queens of the Stone Age’s 2000 record “Feel Good Hit of the Summer.” He wrote candidly about drugs and a self-destructive lifestyle.Mark William Lanegan was born on Nov. 25, 1964, in Ellensburg, Wash., a small farming city, according to his IMDb page.He is survived by his wife, Shelley, SKH Music said. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.A full obituary will appear shortly.Ben Sisario More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Review: Two Years Later, a Beethoven Cycle Reaches Its Finale

      by

      Delayed by the pandemic in 2020, then again in January, the Philadelphia Orchestra brought a long-awaited Ninth Symphony to Carnegie Hall.The Philadelphia Orchestra’s cycle of Beethoven symphonies was supposed to come to Carnegie Hall in spring 2020. It should go without saying: It didn’t.But that series of concerts belongs to the lucky class of canceled performances that have found their way back to the stage. The journey, however, has been a mirror of our continued pandemic uncertainty. Although the cycle started last fall when the Fifth Symphony opened Carnegie’s season, it was delayed once again in January when the Omicron variant pushed off Beethoven’s Ninth — and its full-choir “Ode to Joy.”So only on Monday did the cycle reach its conclusion, with the Philadelphians’ music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, at the podium for the First Symphony and the mighty Ninth, alongside a world premiere inspired by it, Gabriela Lena Frank’s “Pachamama Meets an Ode.”In New York, Nézet-Séguin has taken on something like the role of resident conductor, even to the point of exhaustion; the performance on Monday came exactly a week before he leads a new production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos” at the Metropolitan Opera, where he is also the music director.And because the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Beethoven concerts were an addition to its others planned at Carnegie this season, it has become the hall’s de facto house band. The ensemble was just there two weeks ago, with departures from the standard repertory (and Beethoven) that Zachary Woolfe applauded in The New York Times, while wagering that “nothing the Philadelphians do at Carnegie this season will be more impressive.”At the very least, there won’t be much competition from Monday’s appearance. Beethoven’s extremes — the consummate Classicism of the First, and the controlled excess of the Ninth — were absorbing but imperfect in this reading. But it was nevertheless a moving program, in large part because of Frank’s premiere.At their best, Beethoven cycles that fold in new commissions offer a conversation between past and present. Frank’s is quite literally a dialogue, however imagined, with the composer she calls “Great Man.” And who better to contend with Beethoven? As a composer with hearing loss, Frank has written about perceiving him as a kindred spirit. The world-spanning background that inspires her practice — as the American daughter of a father with Lithuanian-Jewish heritage and a Peruvian mother of Chinese and Indigenous descent — provides a nuanced perspective, and check, on the brother-embracing aspirations of the “Ode to Joy.”Her new work is a fantastical encounter between Beethoven and a contemporaneous Cusco School painter, tracing the climate crisis of today to the exploitation of natural resources and the global expansion of European powers in Beethoven’s time. In the piece’s 10 minutes, the text, written by Frank, invokes colonialism, animal extinction and images like a river “on oily fire.”Nézet-Séguin, right, conducted a program that included a pairing of Beethoven’s Ninth and a Gabriela Lena Frank premiere inspired by it.Chris LeeUsing the same orchestration as Beethoven’s Ninth, minus its four vocal soloists, “Pachamama” is big, and deploys the emotive force of the “Dies Irae” from Verdi’s Requiem. Distinct textures do break the waves of sound: chromatic chattering in the strings, and dissonant humming in the choir — a nod, Frank notes, to Indigenous South American vocal music. The words are set straightforwardly, transformed only in the end to elongate the questions “What of odes?” and “What of joy?” Then a horn lingers indefinitely, a looming punctuation mark and a subtle bridge to the first bar of the Beethoven.The two symphonies here demonstrated the Great Man’s enormous transformation in the 24 years between their premieres, but also how much of his late style was gestating in his youth.His First is transparently indebted to Mozart and Haydn, until it isn’t. That moment, the Menuetto, is where Nézet-Séguin’s interpretation found its footing. Before, the strings — too many of them — were still mired in the introduction’s flowing phrases. But their articulation came sharply into focus with the Menuetto, a kind of artistic coming-of-age, with flashes of the Beethoven to come.Nézet-Séguin is a gifted Mozart conductor, and his treatment of the finale — witty and nimble — could have been the overture to one of that composer’s operas. It was dampened only by the inflated orchestra; Beethoven can benefit from fewer instruments, for balance, clarity and, above all, energy.Outsize scale was more problematic in the Ninth. Nézet-Séguin took a long view of the work, beginning in mysterious quiet, as if descending into the symphony from a great height, and building toward relentless grandeur in the “Ode to Joy” finale. But 25 minutes is a long time to sustain a climax, and the effect wore off long before the ending came.The orchestra was at its best in the second movement, in which the strings maintained a fleet lightness that allowed for pronounced contrasts and, crucially, made room for the winds and brasses, drowned out elsewhere. Later, the players were sensitive accompanists to the vocal soloists, though the bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green needed no help commanding the stage with his booming entrance.Green pulled back to mix, beautifully, with his fellow soloists. His voice was a surprising complement to the more slender brightness of the tenor Matthew Polenzani, and together, they wove rich textures with the soprano Angel Blue and the mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb. The Philadelphia Symphonic Choir was more difficult to follow. If you listened closely, you could make out an “alle Menschen” here and there, but the group’s sound was for the most part cloudy, as if coming from backstage, blending into the orchestra when it should have been heard above it.Even the best performance of this symphony, though, would have been haunted by the Frank, which rendered Beethoven’s ecstatic finale a tad delusional, and his naïve optimism difficult to stomach — a reminder of how this work’s universal message has been dangerously put to universal use, and of its Enlightenment hopes yet to be realized, nearly 200 years later. In the fermata rest of the Ninth’s final bar, Frank’s horn still resonated in the mind, still asking: What of odes? What of joy?Philadelphia OrchestraPerformed on Monday at Carnegie Hall, Manhattan, and returning there on April 8 and 21; carnegiehall.org. More

    • 88 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      ‘Encanto’ Soundtrack Continues to Dominate Billboard Charts

      by

      An album of music from Disney’s animated movie earned its sixth week at No. 1, while Eminem and Dr. Dre benefited from small Super Bowl boosts.A new album catches fire at the dawn of a new year and dominates the Billboard chart throughout the winter doldrums, helped by insatiable fan demand and a shortfall of competition.That is a common pattern in the music industry, and it was manifested most clearly last year, when “Dangerous: The Double Album,” by the country singer-songwriter Morgan Wallen, held No. 1 for 10 weeks. It’s being repeated now by the soundtrack to Disney’s “Encanto,” which has ruled the album chart almost every week this year, led by a song, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” that has also become the most popular single.This week, “Encanto” leads the Billboard 200 album chart for a sixth time with the equivalent of 98,000 sales in the United States, including 123 million streams and 12,500 copies sold as a complete package, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. The one week it wasn’t No. 1, “DS4Ever,” by the Atlanta rapper Gunna, took its place.For the last month, “Encanto” has had a lock on both of Billboard’s key rankings. This week, “Bruno” — if you’ve opened TikTok in the last month, you’ve seen that song’s appeal — holds at No. 1 on the Hot 100 singles chart for a fourth time. According to Billboard, it is the first time that a soundtrack and a corresponding song have dominated both charts at the same time in nearly 30 years — the last to do so was “The Bodyguard” and “I Will Always Love You,” sung by Whitney Houston, which led the charts simultaneously for 12 weeks in late 1992 and early 1993.Also this week, Gunna’s “DS4Ever” holds at No. 2, and Wallen’s “Dangerous” — now in its 58th week out — rises one spot to No. 3. Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy” is No. 4, and “The Highlights,” a year-old compilation album by the Weeknd, is No. 5.Eminem and Dr. Dre, who performed at the Super Bowl halftime show on Feb. 13, had chart boosts this week. Eminem’s “Curtain Call: The Hits” rises 118 spots to No. 8, and Dr. Dre’s 1999 album “2001” moves up 99 spots to No. 9. More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Jamal Edwards, Force in British Rap, Dies at 31

      by

      Edwards set up SB.TV, one of the first YouTube channels dedicated to British rap music, and was also key to Ed Sheeran’s early success.When Jamal Edwards founded his YouTube channel in 2006, it was a rare platform dedicated to British rap music. Chris Jackson/Chris Jackson Collection, via Getty ImagesLONDON — Jamal Edwards, the founder of a music YouTube channel that gave an early platform to British rap stars including Stormzy, Skepta and Dave, as well as pop stars like Ed Sheeran, died on Sunday. He was 31.His death of “a sudden illness” was confirmed by his mother, Brenda Edwards, a well-known TV presenter in Britain. “Jamal was an inspiration to myself and so many,” she said in a statement.Edwards set up the YouTube channel SB.TV in 2006, at first posting clips of rappers performing on street corners and in public housing projects. A few years later, he widened the channel’s focus to include interviews, and music in other styles, including pop from emerging artists. Edwards posted a video of Ed Sheeran in 2010, more than a year before the British singer-songwriter released his first single on a major label.Sheeran went on to make several videos for the channel. In a clip from 2017, he credited SB.TV with “starting my career properly.”Edwards grew up in Acton, a suburb of London. When he was 15, his mother gave him a video camera for Christmas, which he used to record friends rapping. Edwards told the BBC in 2014 that he started the YouTube channel after friends expressed frustration that they didn’t know how to get their music on MTV. “I was like, ‘I’ve got a camera for Christmas, I’m going to start filming people and uploading it,’” he said.His first clip — a rough and ready recording featuring the rappers Soul and Slides — was made during a college trip to a chocolate factory and uploaded to a YouTube channel Edwards named SB.TV after the name he sometimes rapped under: SmokeyBarz.Friends were initially sceptical of the project, Edwards told the BBC. But soon, SB.TV was getting attention from young British rap fans who had few other platforms catering to their tastes.The channel had accumulated 1.2 million subscribers at the time of Edwards’s death, and was seen as a key force in British rap for several years, even as other YouTube channels like GRM Daily gained more subscribers and a higher profile.On Monday, numerous British music stars praised Edwards. The singer Rita Ora, who recorded clips for SB.TV early in her career, paid tribute in an Instagram post to the belief Edwards had shown “in me and so many of us before we even believed in ourselves.”Dave, one of Britain’s highest profile rappers, shared a picture of Edwards on Twitter, with the message, “Thank you for everything.”Despite the underground roots of Edwards’s fame, he had long been recognized by Britain’s establishment. In 2014, he went to Buckingham Palace, the home of Britain’s royal family, to receive one of the country’s highest honors for his services to music. Edwards also founded a charity, JE Delve, that works with young people in the suburb where Edwards grew up.“Most kids who come from where I come from would never believe they could go to Buckingham Palace in a million years,” Edwards told The Guardian newspaper in 2017. “Maybe seeing me do that will give them more self belief.” More

    • 100 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      Scrappy and Invaluable, a Unique Music Ensemble Returns

      by

      The Boston Modern Orchestra Project turned 25 last year, but celebrated on Friday at Symphony Hall with a characteristic mix of rarities.BOSTON — It has been a theme of this troubled time: If the pandemic has ruined your big birthday party, simply celebrate a year (or two) later.The Boston Modern Orchestra Project — BMOP, universally — turned 25 last April. But this unique, invaluable ensemble, which under its founding conductor Gil Rose offers performances and crucial recordings of contemporary scores and long-ignored, often American music from the past 100 years, only got the chance to make merry earlier on Friday, with a sprawling free concert here at Symphony Hall.The program was an endearingly eccentric if thoughtful one, starring the organist Paul Jacobs in Stephen Paulus’s sensitively scored, rather bewitching Grand Concerto for organ and orchestra (2004) and Joseph Jongen’s entertainingly vast Symphonie Concertante (1926) for the same forces. Those were paired with an organ work rewritten for orchestra — Elgar’s 1922 arrangement of Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in C minor — and an orchestral work that would later be rewritten for organ: Messiaen’s early, lovely “L’Ascension” (1933).If it was not exactly a quintessential BMOP concert — one might have expected Aaron Copland or Lou Harrison instead of Jongen, and certainly a living composer, if expectations were something Rose bothered himself with — it was still characteristically creative, often excellent and always committed. It was a happy reminder of what a potent force this band of freelancers has become in music that few other groups dare touch.Even so, this was not just a cause for celebration, but also for reflection — not least on the financial and infrastructural inequities that are shaping our musical emergence from the pandemic.Two years ago, it was widely predicted that some smaller ensembles would fold in the face of public health restrictions, and perhaps even some larger ones. Although individual musicians have struggled desperately, and some have left their chosen profession, economic assistance programs largely forestalled that ultimate outcome at the institutional level, though the effects will be felt everywhere for years.Major orchestras have been able to get back on their feet relatively quickly, if unsteadily: On Friday afternoon, I heard Herbert Blomstedt conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra, whose resources have allowed it to maintain a basically full schedule this season.Smaller ensembles have been forced, or have chosen, to take more time. Employing freelancers who encounter frequent exposure to the virus as they travel for work, these groups face the costs of underwriting testing; the difficulties of finding replacements at short notice; and the risks of cancellation — if, that is, their habitual venues are available for rent at all. Symphony Hall aside, many larger halls that once were in regular use in Boston are under the control of universities, which have imposed stringent restrictions on outside groups in the name of protecting students.Rose in the Granoff Music Center at Tufts University in 2015. “When I started this thing, everybody thought it was about new music, but it was always about an orchestra model,” he said of BMOP. “I’m glad that I don’t rely on a ‘Nutcracker’ or a ‘Messiah.’”Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times“The big institutions just have a different reality,” Rose said in an interview a few days before the concert, noting that he has been able to avoid laying off any of his five staff members.“I said to a lot of freelancers that it was going to be really hard on the players the first year, and the second year was going to be hard on the organizations,” he added. “In the first year, nobody was really producing that much, but they were getting government aid and foundations were stepping up, so you were getting more income than you normally would, and not spending as much. Now that’s all stopped, it feels like reality is coming.”BMOP has always been a distinctive ensemble, conceived in lean opposition to the subscription season model, and remarkably competent at raising funds. Although it has never been short of critical acclaim, it has rarely drawn large audiences — though Friday was a gladdening, if not a lucrative, exception.“When I started this thing, everybody thought it was about new music, but it was always about an orchestra model,” Rose said, nodding to the “project” part of BMOP’s name. “I’m glad that I don’t rely on a ‘Nutcracker’ or a ‘Messiah.’”What BMOP has come to rely on instead is its award-winning catalog of recordings. Rose’s eclectic tastes had been documented in 69 recordings on his own BMOP/sound label before March 2020, including the three commissions — Lisa Bielawa’s “In medias res,” Andrew Norman’s “Play” and Lei Liang’s “A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams,” the last two winners of the prestigious Grawemeyer Award — that the orchestra will perform at its Carnegie Hall debut in spring 2023.Rather than experimenting with streaming or community concerts, Rose spent the pandemic clearing a huge backlog of audio files that had built up over more than a decade — releasing 16 more recordings, and in June restarting sessions at Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Mass.BMOP’s albums are a mix of forgotten gems and impressive new music, with a valiant focus on Boston composers and a giddy stylistic diversity, encompassing Charles Wuorinen and Matthew Aucoin. A press into a broader diversity is coming: Rose’s next big project, a five-year effort to present and record operas by the Black composers Anthony Davis, Nkeiru Okoye, William Grant Still, Ulysses Kay and Jonathan Bailey Holland, was, he said, in the works long before the reckoning with racism that has swept the music industry since the death of George Floyd.BMOP turned 25 last April, but only got the chance to celebrate on Friday with a free concert at Symphony Hall.Sam BrewerThat’s for the future; on Friday, the focus was on the past. If Jongen needed a little more tonal depth and lyrical bloom for his Symphonie Concertante to really shine, that made Paulus’s Grand Concerto benefit by comparison. The attractive work was his third concerto for organ, and it proves him a master of the genre; Jacobs’s smart registrations at Symphony Hall’s famed but rarely heard Aeolian-Skinner suggested that there have not been many composers with similar facility at blending the organ into the orchestral palette while also giving the instrument space to shine.It was exactly the kind of insight in which BMOP specializes, a chance to grapple with music that other ensembles leave to wither. Long may this group continue. More