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      Inside Eminem's Restaurant Mom’s Spaghetti

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      Eminem opened a restaurant in Detroit. We checked it out.DETROIT — On Sept. 27, a strange 30-second film appeared on Eminem’s YouTube channel: not a music video teaser, or the first few verses of a new rap single, but a quick-moving advertisement.In the video, cartons brimming with marinara sauce spin hypnotically on checkered tablecloths. A voice-over rattles off vaguely Italian dishes: spaghetti, spaghetti and meatballs, and a “‘sghetti sandwich” — a scoop of pasta squeezed between two pieces of buttery white bread. Eminem, dressed in a thin gold chain and an eggplant-colored flight jacket, holds up what the viewer can only assume are two middle fingers, their message censored by twin takeout containers bearing the phrase “Mom’s Spaghetti.”Marshall Mathers, the man who brought white working-class angst to the top of the charts, was opening a restaurant.Two days later, the rapper surprised fans at the grand opening in downtown Detroit, where he served heaping ladlefuls of pasta to a queue of customers that snaked around the block. A photo of the rapper standing behind the order window — flipping the bird, of course — quickly shot to the top of Reddit’s front page.Mom’s Spaghetti is named for the famed first verse of “Lose Yourself,” a single written for the movie “8 Mile” that sold more than 10 million copies and earned Eminem a pair of Grammys in 2004. The lyrics are imbued with nauseating, do-or-die dread: Our protagonist is locked in a bathroom, drenched with sweat, washing off a regurgitated wad of pasta clinging to his hoodie. “Knees weak, arms are heavy, there’s vomit on his sweater already, mom’s spaghetti.” It was only a matter of time before the lyric became a meme.Nearly two decades later, the restaurant appears to be Eminem’s way of embracing — or one-upping — the joke.On a visit to Mom’s Spaghetti in December, three months after the initial fanfare, the place did not immediately register as a shrine to a rapper’s career. Instead, I found myself at a small counter-service restaurant, tucked in an alley next to the Little Caesars World Headquarters. (Yes, the pizza chain.) I perused the abbreviated menu and placed my order at an outdoor cashier. Almost as soon as my credit card cleared, a steaming, carb-laden paper bag was handed to me through the window.The restaurant’s abbreviated menu includes spaghetti and meatballs, served in an oyster pail, and a ‘sghetti sandwich.Elaine Cromie for The New York TimesAfterward, I was escorted inside a gastropub called Union Assembly, where all of the food served at Mom’s Spaghetti is prepared, to a tiny suite of tables and bar stools where customers can eat.Here is where the Slim Shady aesthetic becomes apparent: Most of the “E’s” on the menu and packaging have been turned backward, and the kitchen is made to look like a street corner bodega. I tucked into a booth, already overwhelmed, preparing for a long night in the afterlife of Eminem’s cultural empire.Curt Catallo, 54, is the owner of Union Joints, which operates several restaurants around Detroit, including this one. He described Mom’s Spaghetti as a “true joint venture” between his business and Eminem. The restaurant first appeared as a pop-up shop in 2017 and has been a fixture at the rapper’s various festival performances since. (During the pandemic, Union Joints and Eminem’s Shady Records delivered the pasta to frontline medical workers.)Mr. Catallo said the restaurant’s busiest periods occur “postgame and pregame,” where the staff harvests customers from the foot traffic pouring through Detroit’s pro sports district. Spaghetti is not typically deployed as a takeout food — noodles take a while to cook — but Mr. Catallo’s staff makes all the pasta a day ahead, then reheats the product in a pair of woks. He believes that method blesses the spaghetti with a delectable down-home texture.“Today’s spaghetti is better tomorrow,” Mr. Catallo said.I’d ordered the spaghetti and meatballs, which was served in an oyster pail and covered with a snowy dusting of Parmesan, as well as a ‘sghetti sandwich. This is not Italian cooking, nor does it try to be. Instead, it might be best described as … well, downright motherly. The greasy slop of the pasta, the sugary tang of the red sauce; it’s the spaghetti that emerges from your pantry on the last night before a grocery trip. Mr. Catallo said the noodles possess an inscrutable leftover chemistry. He means that as an endorsement, and he should.Emily Davenport prepares an order of spaghetti.Elaine Cromie for The New York TimesIan McManus, the general manager of the Trailer.Elaine Cromie for The New York TimesEminem is not here, nor should he be expected anytime soon. Ian McManus, 22, who manages the Trailer — a merchandise shop above the dining area — told me the rapper has dropped by the restaurant a “handful” of times since it opened. “He only lets a few of us know when he’s coming,” Mr. McManus said. “And he only lets us know day-of. If he’s coming through, I’ll find out when I’m on my way downtown.”A smattering of Eminem-themed pint glasses, T-shirts and sneakers filled the room, but the real pièce de résistance was at the back: the Robin costume from the music video for “Without Me,” encased in glass. The sound was the soundtrack to the year I turned 10; seeing a relic of it up close felt like being in the Louvre.Eminem has been famous, and will remain famous, for a long time, but it has also been eight years since his last No. 1 hit. Perhaps that’s why he’s preserved himself in a mini-museum. The rapper is entering that vexing post-prime era that inevitably hunts down every enormously successful person. How should Eminem structure his third and fourth acts? Ideally with some humor and some grace. If Paul Newman could sell salad dressing and enjoy his golden years, maybe Marshall Mathers can do the same with spaghetti.After all, the Eminem brand is still strong, even now. Misty Jesse, 49, and her 15-year-old son, Romeo Jesse, who were dining at Mom’s Spaghetti that December night, told me they grew up with Eminem, which sounds confusing but is honestly quite plausible if you do the math. “I saw him live at the old Detroit Tigers stadium,” said Ms. Jesse, who made the trip to the restaurant from the Dearborn Heights suburbs so that Romeo could shop for some Eminem gear. “It’s crazy how it all circles back around.”Eminem’s Robin costume from the music video for “Without Me” is kept in a glass case inside the Trailer.Elaine Cromie for The New York TimesFans will also find notes and lyrics written by Eminem on display.Elaine Cromie for The New York Times“She was surprised that he was one of the first people I started listening to,” Romeo said. “She’s happy that we could bond over his music and sing along to it in the car.”The Jesses are locals, which makes them outliers here. Almost everyone else inside the restaurant, save for the employees, was visiting Detroit for business, pleasure, or a combination of both. A trio of auditors from Atlanta crowded around a table glazed with spaghetti sauce; they were only in town for a few days, and they’d arrived at Mom’s Spaghetti out of passive curiosity — the same gravitational force that pulls New York City sightseers into the Times Square Madame Tussauds.Morgan Martin, 28, said that Eminem’s 2010 album “Recovery” got stuck in her car’s CD player when she was in high school. For 10 years, she exclusively listened to that record as she drove around Georgia. Her friends claim that the experience endowed her with the ability to rap with a near-perfect Eminem cadence.“I’ve since gotten a new car that connects to Bluetooth,” Ms. Martin said, “so now I’m learning more of his work.”For her, Mom’s Spaghetti was a destination. “When I learned we were coming to Detroit, I knew where we were eating,” she said.An illuminated sign above the order window outside Mom’s Spaghetti.Elaine Cromie for The New York TimesHer friend and dinner date, Caylen Hemme, 27, was not apprised of that plan. “I didn’t know this was Eminem’s restaurant,” she said from across the table. “I just saw that they had vegan meatballs.”John Farran, a 32-year old service engineer from Orlando, had dined at a high-end Italian restaurant the previous night. The experience, he said, paled in comparison what Mom’s Spaghetti had to offer. “Their sauce was like a soup,” Mr. Farran said, “plus they didn’t give you bread.” He then gestured toward the caramelized chunk of starch half-submerged in the noodles. “It made the whole trip for us, pretty much,” he said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have had anything to look forward to.”“No offense to Detroit,” Mr. Farran said. “Great city.”Mr. Catallo, the restaurant operator, said Mom’s Spaghetti is planning on expanding its menu. Soon there will be Bolognese sauce, from a recipe Mr. Mathers has taste tested. I imagined the rapper, whose career was once defined by rage and controversy, letting a meat sauce linger on his palate for a moment before giving it his stamp of approval. Could Eminem become a latter-day Jimmy Buffett, bringing Mom’s Spaghetti to tourist districts around the country? He declined to be interviewed for this article, so I can’t say for sure.But I can tell you with certainty that on a cold night in Detroit, after scarfing down a pound of pasta, I felt changed. Knees weak, arms heavy. More

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      Watching My Mother Watch Music

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      Our pop music critic remembers going to concerts with his mom, who died last year.Getting gifts for my mother was never easy — she was particular, as am I, and not always in overlapping ways. But when I saw that Tina Turner was going to be performing around her birthday in 2008, I bought tickets as soon as they were available.Growing up, there was a lightly worn hardback of “I, Tina” above the refrigerator. My mom spoke about “Tiiina” like an old friend, someone she used to get in trouble with. If you were alive and watching television in the mid-1980s, the image of Turner ecstatically stomping across the screen, hair pointing to the moon, was indelible. Here was a woman in charge of her destiny.Because I got them quickly, our seats were in the center of the second or third row. There’s a thing that happens at a concert, especially in an arena, when you are seated right up front. The speakers are generally booming sound to the middle and back of the room, but up close, you can actually hear what’s happening onstage, and also what’s going on right around you. Which is why for most of that night’s show, I couldn’t really hear the roar of the crowd, but I could hear my mom yelling encouragement, loudly, at Turner.It was a pointillist way to experience a show — an almost literal call and response. My mom was in no way chill. Turner vamped, my mom hooted. Turner sang of brittle love, my mom pumped her fist in assent. I can’t quite tell you how the concert was, because for those two hours, I felt like I was eavesdropping on private communiqués.More than anyone, my mother — who died late last year — gave me music. She gave me the idea that there was freedom, or identity, to be found within. My mother was raised in an ungenerous home, and from her youngest years was looking for any safe space available to her. That often meant music, which would become a constant in my young life: WBLS or Z100 in the car, Whitney Houston or Andreas Vollenweider or the Bee Gees in the house.At the time of the Turner concert, I’d been writing about music for more than a decade, and had been reviewing shows regularly for The Times for a few months. Those nights out were alternately riveting and glum, and always experienced at a little remove. I had become a professional observer.Which, in fairness, I always had been, dating back to the first proper concert I attended: Ryuichi Sakamoto at the Beacon Theater. This was in 1988, not long before my parents separated. My mother had me very young, and for the majority of my childhood until that point, had mostly been a stay-at home parent. But she had recently begun working, and finding success, in Manhattan. Our lives were changing, subtly for the moment.I don’t remember much about that night apart from the need to dress up — it was a long way from Sheepshead Bay in outer Brooklyn to the Upper West Side. The Beacon Theater crowd was disciplined. It was the most reserved I ever witnessed my mother at a concert.But the chic cosmopolitanism of the performance reflected a future she was envisioning and willing herself toward. She was also manifesting a range of imagination for me far vaster than the one she’d been afforded as a child. After the show, my mom, grandmother, great-grandmother and I all waited by the stage door exit to grab a glimpse of Sakamoto as he left — for months, years even, my mom insisted he reached through the crowd, looked me in my eyes and shook my hand.She had a way with narrative — she was the main character long before main-character energy was a thing. And she wanted that for me even if I was always a little naturally reticent. A studied and practiced mama’s boy, I learned to navigate the world by bending myself around her shape, a fearless mother’s careful son.Tina Turner, as photographed on the writer’s BlackBerry in 2008.Jon CaramanicaRyuichi Sakamoto onstage at the Beacon Theater in 1988.Bell Biv DeVoe on the 1991 Club MTV Tour.Raymond Boyd/Getty ImagesAretha Franklin, captured on the writer’s old iPhone in 2017.Jon CaramanicaEveryone was playing their part when, a couple of years after the Sakamoto show, I cajoled her into taking me to see the Club MTV Tour at the Jones Beach amphitheater. The lineup, frankly, was jacked: Bell Biv DeVoe, C+C Music Factory, Gerardo. The highest of NRG.I was still learning how to navigate those spaces, trying to figure out just how loudly I could declare my enthusiasms in public. So even though I knew every word of every song of every performer, I mostly sat still.My mom, though, was just as exuberant then as at the Turner show. Like any sullen teenager, I was embarrassed — but I also was learning firsthand it was safe to be yourself, even while Bell Biv DeVoe was calisthenically attacking the stage during “Do Me!”She was giving me a blueprint to feel free, though even now, I experience exuberance at concerts far more intensely on the inside than the outside. Maybe that’s part of my origin story as a critic — watching the show, and watching my mother watch the show, and watching others watch my mother watch the show. It’s all part of the experience.BY THE TIME of the Turner show, my mom had been living with lung cancer for about three years. She’d been diagnosed, miraculously, on a scan following a car accident. The years that followed were harrowing and unpredictable.Nothing will strip your varnish quite like watching someone you love wither. It made me tentative, as if any wrong move on my part might put her in peril. When, in 2017, she told me she wanted to see Aretha Franklin perform, all I could think about were the liabilities — What if the show ran late? What if my mom started to feel weak during the performance? What if Franklin seemed … ill? Would it be too much to bear?Over the years, as a critic, I’ve had to watch many late-career concerts from onetime titans — it can be grim. That was part of my hesitation, too, that the effort that I knew my mother would put into going to the show would somehow not be repaid. I wanted to protect her, and myself too.As anyone who’s seen Franklin perform knows, though, I truly needn’t have worried. She was a little frail, but vigorous and stubborn, perhaps powered by the determination of someone who was not in flawless health. (Franklin died the following year; this ended up being one of her last shows.)There were so many stretches of time during my mother’s illness when I felt I had nothing to give, that nothing I did would be useful. Faced with the scale and nimbleness of a wily cancer, you can’t help but feel insufficient.This, however, I’d gotten right. As at all the other shows, I watched my mother watch the stage. All night long, she radiated hope. Franklin was in declining health, but my mother saw none of that. Or maybe she saw it, but just not how I saw it. For her, Franklin was indomitable. A beacon of resilience.The days just after the show were difficult — for me. I felt awful that I couldn’t give her that sensation every day. My mother, on the other hand, talked about it for weeks. About how Franklin was bossing the band around. About how she brought her purse out onstage and someone ran after her with it when the show was done. About her fur coat. In every telling, Franklin was very much alive, and so was she. More

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      Jeanine Tesori’s Gift: Conjuring the Storytelling Potency of Music

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      In shows like “Caroline, or Change” and “Kimberly Akimbo,” the composer excels at translating her astute insights about characters into music.Jeanine Tesori can take apart music and put it back together as well as any composer who’s put note to paper. She can write a recitative worthy of Janacek, or a pop tune that could have charted on 1970s AM radio. She can conjure a gospel number, a tap soft-shoe, or a folk-rock confessional like a seasoned pro.And as the co-creator of “Caroline, or Change” (now in a widely acclaimed revival on Broadway) and the Tony-winning “Fun Home,” she has helped to expand the boundaries of the American musical in a way that recalls such forebears as Stephen Sondheim and Elizabeth Swados.But you don’t come away from a Tesori musical — not the soulful “Violet,” the jazzy “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” the snarky “Shrek the Musical,” the meta-cultural “Soft Power,” nor the offbeat “Kimberly Akimbo,” now in a well-reviewed premiere at the Atlantic Theater Company — marveling at her formal innovation.For all her formidable tools and training, Tesori understands that “craft is the conduit for a really fresh and profound encounter with human experience,” her “Fun Home” co-writer Lisa Kron said. “It’s not an end in itself.”Said David Lindsay-Abaire, with whom she adapted “Shrek” for Broadway, and who adapted his play “Kimberly Akimbo” with her: “She thinks like a playwright. She understands story and narrative and character, and the architecture of a scene.”It’s not just structure she’s attuned to, said Tony Kushner, with whom she wrote “Caroline, or Change,” but subtext as well.“She either comprehends or intuits, not what necessarily is the most obvious choice for dramatic action or dramatic events, but what’s under the surface, where the real meaning of a piece lies,” Kushner said. “I’ve never met anybody more wide open to that, or more emotionally intelligent about human beings than she is.” While that’s surely a fine quality in any person, here’s the key: “She has this absolutely uncanny ability to translate that into music.”From left: Nya, Sharon D Clarke, Harper Miles and Nasia Thomas in the Roundabout Theater’s revival of “Caroline, or Change” at Studio 54.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis is the mystery of Jeanine Tesori — of any composer for the theater, really. Where does the music come from, and how does it work its magic? A nonverbal language with the power to move us, sometimes literally, music can be wed to words and characters in ways that feel definitive, clarifying. As Lindsay-Abaire put it: “I don’t know if pure is the right word, but something less diluted. You hear the characters’ emotions and know what’s going on inside those heads and hearts,” dramatic content that in nonmusical plays “you rely on the actors to communicate.”George Brant, with whom Tesori is adapting his play about a female drone pilot, “Grounded,” for the Metropolitan Opera, said that Tesori is “able to get at the guts of the piece and transform it into something that still feels like itself, but more.”The question of music’s storytelling potency is sharpened in Tesori’s case because, unlike Sondheim or many of her generational peers (Jason Robert Brown, Michael John LaChiusa, Adam Guettel), she doesn’t write lyrics. Instead, she has worked with playwrights to shape not only her show’s scripts but bracingly original songs as well, in idioms and character voices as wide-ranging as the musical genres she references.Looking at her list of collaborators, Lin-Manuel Miranda said: “It’s as if she’s made it a mission to bring every serious dramatist to swim in the musical theater pool. But the other side of that is she’s bending their skills to our art form, and innovating our art form with every at bat.“It’s how you know she’s the best,” he added “because she works with the best and makes them sing.”It’s not as if she has a cookie-cutter style, though. As Lindsay-Abaire said, “The fact that the lyrics are all so different — that Tony’s are Tony’s, Lisa’s are Lisa’s, mine are mine, is a testament to Jeanine embracing her collaborators and our voices. It’s not like: This is how Jeanine teaches all these playwrights to write lyrics.”For her part, Tesori — who recently turned 60 but retains a youthful bonhomie, with “Fun Home” wallpaper patterns tattooed on her forearm — has a firm grip on what her strengths are.“I’m not a lyricist at all, but I’ll say what my gift is: recognizing lyrics in the sea of words,” Tesori explained during a recent interview in her office at City Center, where she serves as a creative adviser. She immerses herself in her collaborators’ verbiage in various ways. She asks for what she calls “noodles,” which Kron described as “bits of lyric that didn’t make it into the lyric I built for her.” Tesori also has them read their lyrics aloud to her, sometimes “two or three times,” as Kron recalled, to glean intention from inflection.Then, Tesori said, her mind goes to work on fragments of material, in a process she compared to the sequence in “The Queen’s Gambit” when the lead character envisions complicated chess moves on the ceiling. “Things start clicking into place,” Tesori said, “and I think: Oh, there! There!”“Meryl Streep disappears into her characters. You sort of know that she’s there, but also you don’t. I like doing that too,” Tesori said. “I feel like my job is to get out of the way of how they sing.”An Rong Xu for The New York TimesHer facility with a wide range of musical styles can be traced to a diverse musical education. She started piano lessons at age 6 with a teacher, she said, who let her play any musical style. “He did not judge anything, and that was really the lesson,” she said. After a rebellious break from music during her teen years, and a brief flirtation with pre-med classes, she studied music at Barnard College and soon got work as a Broadway pit pianist and freelance music director.Most formative, though, was her partnership with Buryl Red, a Baptist choral arranger with whom she ran a music company for 25 years until his death in 2013. Assisting Red on countless recording sessions in Nashville and around the world, she absorbed a range of musical influences, in particular gospel, that have served her well in such scores as “Violet” and “Caroline, or Change.”This broad palette isn’t mere versatility for its own sake. Her colleagues talk about her rigor at winnowing their material, while her peers praise the results. The composer Stephen Schwartz hailed “her ability to always sound like Jeanine and yet to write very specifically for whatever character or milieu that she’s doing,” while Miranda said that she “serves character absolutely and rigorously.”Said LaChiusa: “I never hear the composer screaming, ‘Look at me!’ Instead, I hear, ‘Listen to these words,’ and ‘Feel this character’s joy, this character’s sorrow.’”Honing in on character may get closer to the heart of the matter. By comparison, Tesori recalled of a famous collaborator on the 2006 Shakespeare in the Park production of “Mother Courage,” for which she wrote music. “Meryl Streep disappears into her characters,” she said. “You sort of know that she’s there, but also you don’t. I like doing that too: I want them to be musicalized, not me. I feel like my job is to get out of the way of how they sing.”In the case of “Kimberly Akimbo,” Tesori gives the title character — a teenager with a disease that ages her prematurely — bittersweetly introspective songs, while the callow teenagers and needy adults around her sing in a range of prickly, searching pop and rock. And in the quasi-operatic “Caroline, or Change,” she breathes life not only into the Black and Jewish characters but also into several inanimate objects, from a beatific moon to an angry, mournful city bus.Tesori knows how to translate feeling into song so well that she was even brought in as a vocal producer on the new “West Side Story,” at the screenwriter Kushner’s recommendation. She coached performers on the Bernstein-Sondheim songs, which they recorded in a studio before a frame was shot, and she followed up on set to make sure they maintained consistency.“I love the treasure map of looking into a score as if you’re singing it into being,” she said of the film, though she could also have been describing the kind of information she encodes in her own work. “So you’re not singing ‘West Side Story,’ you’re actually expressing something a character needs in that moment. The tritone in ‘Maria’ is part of an expression, not a famous motif.”Searching for a pre-verbal language to express big feelings, especially unexpressed ones among family members, may be how her musical antennae were formed. Gesturing to the family struggles at the center of “Fun Home,” “Caroline” and now “Kimberly Akimbo,” Tesori said, “I love a household — the counterpoint of the attic, the living room, and the basement.” Growing up as one of four girls in a Sicilian American family on Long Island, she recalled, “There was beauty to it, and there was great chaos to it, and they were all happening at the same time, depending on which fader was up.”She remains tied to her Long Island roots, and photographs of her grandparents are prominently displayed in her office. Her grandmother’s ageless quality, she said, informed her work on the lead character of “Kimberly Akimbo,” while her immigrant grandfather’s thwarted career as a band composer and arranger — he had to pump gas to make ends meet — is part of what fuels the “urgency” she feels about making music.Though Tesori doesn’t typically originate projects, she is careful in choosing them. When David Henry Hwang pitched her the idea of “Soft Power” — a reverse “King and I,” in which a Chinese diplomat becomes an adviser to an American politician — she said she immediately knew: “This is so ambitious and worth failing at, worth spending the four or five years they all take, no matter what.”Victoria Clark, center, as the title character in “Kimberly Akimbo” at the Atlantic Theater Company.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHwang said she dug with complete commitment into both the show’s irony and its sincerity, and above all she “forced me to take my character seriously, and face my own trauma.” (Hwang was stabbed on a Brooklyn street in 2015 in what was possibly an anti-Asian hate crime.) The show, originally produced in Los Angeles in 2016 and at the Public Theater in 2018, is still aiming for Broadway.With Tazewell Thompson, she wrote the opera “Blue,” about the police killing of a young Black man, which premiered at the Glimmerglass Festival in the summer of 2019. Planned for 2020 stagings scotched by Covid, the opera has new 2022 dates at companies in Seattle, Pittsburgh and Toledo, Ohio, with more commitments to follow. Thompson joined Tesori’s other collaborators in marveling at her ability to make music speak emotionally.“It comes completely from her being in touch with the world, having her ears and eyes always open, watching, peering, getting involved,” Thompson said.That kind of openness can be draining, she said, citing the Sondheim song “Finishing the Hat” for the way her mind will tend to wander to her work. “I feel like I’m always chasing music; I think about it almost all the time,” she said with a note of desperation.While she maintains strong relationships — not only with her colleagues but also with her 24-year-old daughter, Siena, whom she co-parented with her ex-husband, the musical director Michael Rafter — she admitted she struggles with work-life balance and thinks about retiring all the time.“I find it a really hard life,” she admitted. “The loneliness of writing is very difficult. When students say, ‘I want to write for the theater,’ there’s a part of me that thinks, ‘Run!’ And there’s a part of me that thinks, ‘Stay.’”Making music has been a craft Jeanine Tesori has learned, clearly, but hearing the world as music may just be how she is wired.“Someone came to ‘Kimberly,’ this incredible woman, and she said, ‘Oh, I thought it was WON-dah-ful, it’s bee-YOO-tee-ful,’” Tesori said. The compliment was nice, sure, but “all I could hear was timbre of her voice. I started notating it in my head.” More

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      What We Forgot to Talk About in 2021

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherTaylor, Drake, Olivia, Adele, Billie, Lil Nas X, Sondheim, Kanye, Kacey: Popcast has covered them all in the past 12 months. In the second year of the coronavirus pandemic, pop music returned to something like normal, with big stars releasing albums and returning to the road (at least for now). There was quite a lot to talk about.On this week’s Popcast, a loose round table about some of the year’s musical high points that haven’t yet been discussed on the show: the global breakthrough of Maneskin, the ascendance of Jazmine Sullivan, the resilience of Kelly Clarkson, some left field TikTok high points and the musical stylings of Candiace Dillard of “The Real Housewives of Potomac.”Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterCaryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editorConnect 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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      J.D. Crowe, Banjo Virtuoso and Bluegrass Innovator, Dies at 84

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      Drawing on rock and R&B, Mr. Crowe recast the sound of bluegrass while helping launch the careers of some of the genre’s biggest stars.J.D. Crowe, a master banjo player and bandleader who expanded the sound of bluegrass while attracting some of the genre’s most prodigiously gifted musicians into his groups, died on Friday at his home in Nicholasville, Ky. He was 84.The death was confirmed by his friend Frank Godbey, who said Mr. Crowe had recently been hospitalized for pneumonia. Mr. Godbey’s wife, Marty Godbey, who died in 2010, was the author of “Crowe on the Banjo: The Music Life of J.D. Crowe” (2011).As the leader of the Kentucky Mountain Boys in the 1960s and J.D. Crowe & the New South in the ’70s, Mr. Crowe was among the first musicians to adapt rock and R&B to a bluegrass setting. Built around his impeccable tone and timing as a banjoist, the resulting hybrid was a harbinger of both the freewheeling “newgrass” movement of the ’70s and the bluegrass-aligned alternative country music that came after it.Mr. Crowe’s bands were renowned for their precision and soulfulness. The classic edition of the New South featured a who’s who of future bluegrass masters: Tony Rice, who died in December 2020, on lead vocals and guitar; Ricky Skaggs on mandolin and tenor vocals (Mr. Crowe sang baritone); and Jerry Douglas on dobro. Rounded out by Bobby Slone on bass guitar and fiddle, this lineup alone could be credited with ushering in a new era of progressive bluegrass with their 1975 album, called just “J.D. Crowe & the New South” but more popularly known by its catalog number, Rounder 0044.Mr. Crowe’s Kentucky Mountain Boys had covered material by the hippie country-rock band the Flying Burrito Brothers, but J.D. Crowe & the New South’s landmark album gave expression to a broader musical palette. It drew on everything from old-time country music to straight-ahead bluegrass and songs written by Fats Domino and Gordon Lightfoot.The 1975 album by Mr. Crowe’s band the New South changed not only how people thought about bluegrass but also their approach to playing it. Rounder 0044 changed not only how people thought about bluegrass but also their approach to playing it. Musically intrepid inheritors like Alison Krauss & Union Station and Nickel Creek would scarcely be imaginable without it.Ms. Krauss grew up listening to the album and kept a framed copy of its cover on the wall in her home, Bill Nowlin, whose Rounder label released the project, wrote in 2016 in the online publication Bluegrass Situation.Mr. Skaggs talked about the record’s impact in a 1999 interview with No Depression magazine. Referring to Bill Monroe and other bluegrass pioneers, he said that the album “had a lot of influence on kids that grew up during that time because, for a whole new generation, that was their Flatt & Scruggs and Monroe and the Stanley Brothers.”“Rounder 0044 was the transition,” Mr. Crowe said in a 2012 interview for the liner notes to a reissue of the New South’s 1977 album, “You Can Share My Blanket.” “All we did was we took tunes nobody was doing, and it was like they were new tunes as far as the bluegrass genre was concerned.”James Dee Crowe was born on Aug. 27, 1937, in Lexington, Ky., one of three children of Orval Dee and Bessie Lee (Nichols) Crowe. His parents were farmers.He had taken up the guitar as a boy before falling under the spell of Earl Scruggs’s dazzling three-finger banjo playing when, at about 12 or 13, he went to see Flatt and Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys perform in Lexington.“There was no other sound like that, so I dropped the guitar and got into the banjo,” he told No Depression.As a teenager Mr. Crowe played in bands led by bluegrass royalty like Mac Wiseman and Jimmy Martin, but he did not begin working in music full time until 1956, after rejoining Mr. Martin’s Sunny Mountain Boys. Mr. Crowe appeared regularly on the “Louisiana Hayride” broadcast with Mr. Martin, the self-proclaimed “King of Bluegrass Music.” He also made numerous recordings with him, including one of his signature songs, “You Don’t Know My Mind,” in 1960.Weary of touring, Mr. Crowe left Mr. Martin’s employ in 1961. He later formed the Kentucky Mountain Boys with the singer Red Allen and the mandolinist Doyle Lawson. That group, which also featured Mr. Slone, eventually settled into a regular gig at the Red Slipper Lounge at the Holiday Inn North in Lexington, where Mr. Crowe proceeded in earnest to incorporate country-rock into a bluegrass context.The formation of the New South, though, marked the real watershed of his career, attracting musicians with expansive sensibilities who regularly passed through the band’s ranks before moving on to other projects. Among the more notable of these was the singer Keith Whitley, a late-’70s arrival who, like Mr. Skaggs, would achieve considerable success in mainstream country music.Mr. Crowe started slowing down professionally in the ’80s, limiting himself to reunion concerts and selected recording projects like the six-album series he did with the Bluegrass Album Band, a bluegrass supergroup he founded with Mr. Rice.Mr. Crowe won a Grammy in 1983 for best country instrumental performance for his recording “Fireball.” He was inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Association Hall of Fame in 2003. Kentucky Educational Television aired the documentary “A Kentucky Treasure: The James Dee Crowe Story” in 2008.Mr. Crowe is survived by his wife of 48 years, Sheryl Moore Crowe; a son, David; a daughter, Stacey Crowe; and a granddaughter.Mr. Crowe’s musical catholicity gave the lie to the belief that bluegrass is only about cleaving to tradition.“So many groups try to keep the same sound, and that’s all well and good, if you can,” he said in 2012. “But for myself, I mean, how are you going to replace a Tony Rice and a Ricky Skaggs and a Jerry Douglas?“You’re not going to do that. If you’re trying to do that, you’re forcing somebody to do what they can’t do, really. Although they may try, it don’t come off. So I figured, well, the best thing is, hire people that has good voices, can sing good, pick good, and let them do their deal.” More

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      How a Pro Skateboarder Became an Apostle of Ancient Tuning

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      Duane Pitre was poised to become a street skating legend. Now he embraces just intonation.When he retired for the first time, Duane Pitre was 23.It was the winter of 1997, when money was starting to pour into professional skateboarding. Pitre was poised to become one of the sport’s lucrative stars as it transitioned from counterculture to commercial empire. He was an early member of Alien Workshop, the upstart equipment company that helped shape skating’s aesthetic.The company’s founders fell for Pitre’s lithe form and easy charisma. He effortlessly executed the tricks of street skating, a nascent urban approach, full of slides down handrails and grinds across picnic tables. He starred in seminal skate videos. Boards were printed with his name.Just as profits were rising, however, Pitre bought a cheap bass, realized his true love was making music, and bid skating farewell.“I was getting paid to do this thing I did not want to do,” Pitre, now 47, said recently on a call from his home outside of Ann Arbor, Mich. “There was no option for me to skateboard to just make my living. That’s not what it was about; it was about self-expression.”Pitre skating in Dayton, Ohio, in 1990.Mike HillPitre ended up playing in heavy rock bands, gravitating toward the stranger side of the genre until he became ensconced in experimental music two decades ago. During the last dozen years, he has emerged as an apostle of just intonation, an ancient tuning system tied to Indian and Chinese traditions but often ignored by Western composers. A proud autodidact, Pitre has moved among long-form electronic drones, mercurial acoustic improvisations and glistening string meditations, all employing just intonation.Released this fall, his pensive new album, “Omniscient Voices,” puts the piano in conversation with computer programs and electronics over five pieces that suggest damaged photos of exquisite horizons. Pitre has used the same traits that made him a street-skating phenom — ageless rebelliousness, intractable focus, unwavering restlessness — to inspire younger musicians also exploring just intonation.“Duane is like a shepherd for my generation,” the organist and composer Kali Malone, 27, said in an interview. She once spent a formative spring playing along with the composer Caterina Barbieri to “Feel Free,” Pitre’s 2012 album. (Malone’s own pieces in just intonation have introduced yet another group of artists to the system.)“Just intonation isn’t a genre,” Malone said, “but a tool you can use to make many types of music.”It’s no surprise that music was Pitre’s destiny. His parents reveled in New Orleans rock clubs; they named him after Duane Allman and indoctrinated him into the Beatles and Black Sabbath. Pitre bought new wave singles for his tiny plastic record player.His father thought the preteen Duane had a long future — perhaps a professional one — in football. But the opening skate scene in “Back to the Future” excited him so much that he cut grass for a whole summer to buy his first cheap board. And just as Marty McFly was pursued by a band of bullies in that 1985 film, Pitre and his friends were often lambasted with homophobic slurs while skating around New Orleans, long before skating’s ubiquity.“We were outcasts — bad kids,” Pitre said. But once he “found a way to run away in the streets,” he added, “I was hooked. I never played another sport.”When he was 15, Pitre earned his first sponsorship. Two years later, Alien Workshop issued his first official board, paying him two dollars for every one sold — enough for him to buy a Super Nintendo. When he was 20, he moved to San Diego to live in a skater house that resembled a frat.Its residents made cult-classic videos and did photo shoots that became the gospel of skateboarding’s ballooning community. But Chris Carter, a founder of Alien Workshop, recalls how Pitre began skipping shoots to play bass or study his indie rock obsessions, My Bloody Valentine and Dinosaur Jr.“I thought he would have been one of those legends that skates at a high level for 20 years,” Carter said in an interview. “He could have made a lot of money. But he was very honest about not wanting to get paid for something he didn’t want to do.”After Carter offered six months of retirement pay, Pitre hit the road with a series of bands. He bought a guitar pedal that allowed him to layer loops into drones. He moved to New York, which served as a de facto conservatory. A new friend was shocked, for example, that despite his aspirations to create experimental music, he didn’t know who Meredith Monk was.“All these ideas and concepts — that is what college should be,” Pitre said.In 2004, a friend Pitre had met through skating back in San Diego invited him to the studio of East Village Radio, where a mellow section of La Monte Young’s landmark “The Well-Tuned Piano” was playing. Pitre was dumbstruck: He had been using circuits to alter his sound, while Young used only tuning. The DJ knew only the name of the style: just intonation.“It felt like confusion, in the best sense,” Pitre said. “I began asking people what just intonation was, and they said it was nature’s tuning system. I didn’t want the New Age explanation. I wanted the science.”Pitre goes through his copy of “The Just Intonation Primer,” with which he taught himself the tuning system.Jarod Lew for The New York TimesHe immersed himself in the question, just as he had done with skating two decades earlier. He visited Young’s Dream House sound and light environment. He pored over rudimentary websites, read scholarly essays and ordered a spiral-bound workbook called “The Just Intonation Primer.” He tackled its mathematical models like a college student grappling with calculus and internalized just intonation’s axioms.In its simplest terms, just intonation means that the ratios between notes are whole numbers, rather than the irrational ratios that divide the octave in the familiar framework of equal temperament. For Pitre, the resulting sound — which felt exotic and disobedient, like a surrealist’s rendering of the world — was the draw. Its esoteric status lured him, too, since after skating he had resolved not to tie his creativity to commerce. Just intonation would never sell.Amid this self-education, Pitre found that just intonation samplers bored him because they were more concerned with mechanics than music. Before he released his first album in the system, he organized the 2009 compilation “The Harmonic Series” as a rebuttal. Its eight tracks showed the disparate ways that artists like the Deep Listening pioneer Pauline Oliveros or the resonator guitarist R. Keenan Lawler might wield just intonation.“I was trying to say two things,” recalled Pitre, a married father of two who still speaks with the boyish nonchalance (and sports the long hair) of his skating adolescence. “Here’s this music I think is awesome. And I was speaking to a version of myself that was two years younger, saying, ‘You can do this yourself.’”That ethos has guided Pitre’s diverse output. While the mix of harp, dulcimer, strings and electronics on “Feel Free” suggested a Renaissance recital at a tech summit, “Bayou Electric” added a Southern touch to just intonation through tidal guitar harmonies and recordings of Louisiana’s Four Mile Bayou, where Pitre’s grandmother was raised. “Omniscient Voices” has the meditative warmth of Brian Eno and Harold Budd’s “Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror” or Philip Glass’ softest études — perhaps if they were heard on warped vinyl.Likewise, Pitre’s second installment of “The Harmonic Series,” released in July, begins with Malone’s hovering organ and ends with Barbieri’s disorienting electronics. They both play with time and texture, as if tickling the mind through the ear. The six pieces — and just intonation in general — “allow us to rehear sound,” said Tashi Wada, a compilation contributor who admired Pitre as a skater before hearing his music.Experiencing younger musicians using just intonation in novel ways, Pitre said, compels him to keep exploring — in a way skating never could.“In high school math, I hated having to write down your work, because I would find my own ways to solve problems. Just intonation involved the same part of my brain,” he said. “It’s almost universally accepted that 12-tone equal temperament is the only way to tune, but that’s wrong. It felt important for people to know.” More

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      Adele’s Christmas Boost Gives ‘30’ a Fifth Straight Week at No. 1

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      The singer’s latest LP saw sales increase ahead of the holiday, allowing it to easily hold off this week’s No. 2, a 10-year-old Christmas album.It’s becoming tradition: As Christmas approached, people bought an Adele album.In its fifth week out — a period ending Dec. 23 — the singer’s latest LP, “30,” saw its sales activity jump 16 percent from the week prior, a boost driven by traditional sales, not streams.“30,” which holds at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, moved 180,500 copies as a full album for a total of 212,000 equivalent album units including streams (41 million, down 14 percent) and individual song downloads, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm.An album hasn’t had total sales this large in its fifth week since Adele’s previous LP, “25,” which was also released in the lead-up to the holiday season, back in 2015. (Some things, however, have changed: The singer’s fifth-week sales for “25” were still over a million last time around.)“30” also becomes the fourth album released this year to spend at least five weeks at No. 1, following releases by Morgan Wallen (10 weeks on top), Olivia Rodrigo (five) and Drake (five), according to Billboard.Also benefiting from the holiday season: Michael Bublé’s “Christmas,” which came out a decade ago, jumps to No. 2 on the album chart this week with 77,000 units. On the Hot 100, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” originally released in 1994, holds at No. 1 for a second straight week and its seventh total since finally hitting the top spot in 2019.Taylor Swift’s “Red (Taylor’s Version)” is steady at No. 3, totaling 76,000 units, while “Live Life Fast,” the new album from the Los Angeles rapper Roddy Ricch, debuts at No. 4 with 62,000, including 77 million streams. Ricch’s previous album, “Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial,” opened at No. 1 in 2019 and spent four total weeks on top. Rodrigo’s “Sour” rounds out the Top 5. More

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      A Trip Through Pop, Rap and Jazz’s Past, in 27 Boxed Sets

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      Collections from labels like Fania and Armabillion, icons including Ray Charles and J Dilla, and living artists such as Beverly Glenn-Copeland and Radiohead were welcome additions this year.In an era of abundance when every day brings a deluge of new music to consume, it may seem particularly futile to turn to the past. But this year’s resurrections and recontextualizations in boxed sets and reissues gathered up what’s been forgotten or overlooked — or in some cases, what’s been dissected ad nauseam but still commands attention — and put it back at center stage. As Taylor Swift proved this year, there’s no reason the old can’t be experienced as new, too.‘Almost Famous 20th Anniversary’(UMe; multiple configurations with deluxe editions starting at $169.98)Cameron Crowe’s 2000 film, “Almost Famous,” was his fond reminiscence about writing for Rolling Stone during the hard-partying, all-access 1970s. The expanded anniversary editions are overstuffed with familiar songs alongside a few live rarities. They also include a disc of mostly folksy soundtrack instrumentals by Nancy Wilson, from Heart, and the complete recordings of the film’s invented band, Stillwater — a Led Zeppelin/Bad Company knockoff stomping through songs written by Crowe, Wilson and Peter Frampton — along with, in boxed-set style, the demo versions. (A Stillwater EP, minus the demos, is also available separately.) Stillwater’s vintage style was meticulously reconstructed — booming drums, screaming lead guitar (from Mike McCready of Pearl Jam) — with hints of meta self-consciousness in the lyrics. “It was juvenile, it was something wild,” the band shouts in “You Had to Be There.” JON PARELESArmabillion Recordz(Armabillion.com; albums start at $30)One of a handful of obscurantist rap reissue labels that have emerged in recent years, Armabillion is based in Italy but specializes in limited-run vinyl pressings of undersung gangster rap classics from around the United States, especially the South and the Bay Area. This year’s slate of releases has been impressive, among them Gank Move’s dreamy, tough-talking “Come Into My World”; Coop MC’s slinky “Home of the Killers”; Ant Banks’s essential debut album “Sittin’ on Somethin’ Phat”; and the rowdy “Straight From tha Ramp!!!” by Tec-9 (of U.N.L.V.), an early release on Cash Money Records. JON CARAMANICALouis Armstrong, ‘The Complete Louis Armstrong Columbia and RCA Victor Studio Sessions 1946-1966’(Mosaic; seven CDs, $119)The period covered by this boxed set mostly fits within what’s considered to be Armstrong’s long midcareer lull, but when it comes to the creator of the modern jazz solo, even the mellow years can support a certain level of fascination. And this loving revisitation from the jazz archivalists at Mosaic spares no enthusiasm: The scholar Ricky Riccardi’s liner notes clock in at roughly 30,000 words, illustrated by 40 photographs, most of them never before seen. And the recordings — covering the full sweep of Armstrong’s studio dates for Columbia and RCA over a 20-year span — have been transferred directly from the originals and remastered. There are two discs of singles that include midsize- and large-ensemble performances, a rare duet with the German singer and film star Lotte Lenya on “Mack the Knife,” and even a promotional track, “Music to Shave By,” that Armstrong recorded on behalf of the Remington Company. Also included are his Columbia LPs from this era, plus outtakes from the sessions: “Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy”; “Satch Plays Fats” (that’s Fats Waller); and his musical-theater collaboration with Dave Brubeck, “The Real Ambassadors.” GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOPastor T.L. Barrett and the Youth for Christ Choir, ‘I Shall Wear a Crown’(Numero Group; five CDs, $35; five LPs, $90)Half a century ago, T.L. Barrett was far from the only pastor in Black America — or even on the South Side of Chicago — fusing gospel standards with funk. But good luck finding anyone who did it with more flavor, more hooks or more genuine frontman flair. “I Shall Wear a Crown” pulls together the four albums and various singles Barrett released throughout the 1970s, all with his Youth for Christ Choir joined by a crackling rhythm section. The end of the ’60s was a golden moment for youth choruses on wax, with the era’s each-one-teach-one activism shining through. (See also: the Voices of East Harlem; Sister Nancy Dupree’s classroom choir in Rochester, N.Y.; and the loose group of neighborhood kids whose voices are captured on James Brown’s “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud,” from 1968, possibly helping to set off the trend.) But Barrett’s music evolved through that moment, and he kept finding new ways to use the choir. By the mid-70s, he was dealing with synthesizers and crunchy electric guitar and cosmic slow-jam textures. This is the era that provided Kanye West with one of his most brilliant “Life of Pablo” samples, “Father Stretch My Hands,” a sultry, tantalizingly slow song in multiple parts. The box’s 24-page booklet features evocative and scholarly liner notes by Aadam Keeley and Aaron Cohen shining light on what has been, in many ways, a life of bridged contradictions and extraordinary achievement. RUSSONELLOThe Beach Boys, ‘Feel Flows: The Sunflower & Surf’s Up Sessions 1969-1971’(UMe; five CDs and hardcover book, $125)The Beach Boys revisit a less-heralded era in their history in “Feel Flows.”“Sunflower” (1970) and “Surf’s Up” (1971) were the Beach Boys’ most ambitious attempts to stay relevant in the 1970s while living up to Brian Wilson’s vision of merging complex music with mass popularity. “Sunflower” celebrated the joys of music and romance; “Surf’s Up” was as topical as the Beach Boys would ever be, worrying about environmental pollution, fatal student protests and the end of youthful innocence, with lyrics that sometimes reveled in literary conundrums. The boxed set includes both of the full albums and some complete outtakes, along with concert performances, alternate versions and stripped-down instrumental and a cappella tracks. The tracks are an education for aspiring producers, unveiling elaborate arrangements and savoring every earnest nonsense syllable of the band’s defining vocal harmonies. PARELESThe Beat Farmers, ‘Tales of the New West’(Blixa Sounds; two CDs, $19.99)The debut album from the San Diego band the Beat Farmers, released in 1985, is a dynamic and sturdy roots-rock gem, with flickers of the cowpunk sound that had been coursing through the region in the years just prior. The band’s best known song from this album, “Happy Boy,” scans as a novelty in retrospect, but the rest is full of savvy guitar work, slinky, yelpy singing and a rollicking rhythm section, peaking on the uproarious and blowsy “Lost Weekend.” The reissue’s bonus disc is an assured and easeful concert recording, “Live at the Spring Valley Inn, 1983.” CARAMANICAThe Beatles, ‘Let It Be (Super Deluxe)’(Capitol; five CDs, one Blu-ray audio disc and hardcover book, $140; five LPs and hardcover book, $200)An expanded boxed set for the Beatles’ “Let It Be” includes two discs of studio conversation.Anyone who didn’t get enough Beatles outtakes, dialogue and rehearsals in Peter Jackson’s documentary “Get Back” can try the expanded boxed set of “Let It Be,” which includes a new mix of the original album and singles (including the goopy orchestral arrangements), two discs of studio music and chatter, and another of the engineer Glyn Johns’s rough 1969 mixes from the album sessions. After making elaborate, groundbreaking studio albums, for “Let It Be” the Beatles dared themselves to record live in real time in front of a film crew — no pressure — joined only by the keyboardist (and unifier) Billy Preston. As in the documentary, the outtakes contrast Paul McCartney’s goal-oriented consistency with John Lennon’s casual restlessness. The find is the 1969 mixes: more open, more revealing, sounding even more live than the original album tracks. PARELESBush Tetras, ‘Rhythm and Paranoia: The Best of Bush Tetras’(Wharf Cat Records; three LPs, $98.98; two CDs, $29.98)With their most-loved songs scattered across various 7” singles and EPs, the delightfully prickly New York art-rockers Bush Tetras are the perfect candidates for a best-of collection like “Rhythm and Paranoia,” a chronologically sequenced triple album that puts their long, rich career into proper context. Thanks to underground hits like the walking-after-midnight anthem “Too Many Creeps” from 1980 and the groovy kiss-off “You Can’t Be Funky” the following year, the group was often associated most closely with the post-punk and no wave scenes. But the latter half of this set proves that for decades it continued to evolve in surprising yet intuitive new directions, as heard on the 1996 Fugazi-like wailer “Page 18” or the billowing blues-rock of “Heart Attack” from 2012. LINDSAY ZOLADZEva Cassidy, ‘Live at Blues Alley (25th Anniversary Edition)’(Blix Street Records; two LPs, $37.98)A new Eva Cassidy reissue presents her first solo album fully remastered, in the highest fidelity available.Though the vocalist Eva Cassidy didn’t write her own songs, and could sometimes slip into an almost exact approximation of Aretha Franklin or Bonnie Raitt’s phrasing, it never made sense to question her legitimacy or intent. Cassidy’s heart was right there, laid bare in her voice. When she saved up the money to record “Live at Blues Alley,” her first solo album, in January 1996, Cassidy wasn’t even a known figure on the small Washington, D.C., music scene. Just months after it came out, she died of cancer at age 33. It would be another couple of years before she broke through to a wider audience, thanks to a posthumous compilation CD, “Songbird” (drawn partly from the “Blues Alley” recordings), and the stream of cobbled-together releases that followed. This new reissue, pressed at 45 r.p.m. onto a pair of heavyweight LPs, presents the original document fully remastered, in the highest fidelity available. RUSSONELLOWhat to Know About ‘The Beatles: Get Back’Peter Jackson’s seven-plus hour documentary series, which explores the most contested period in the band’s history, is available on Disney Plus.Re-examining How the Beatles Ended: Think you know what happened? Jackson may change your mind.Yoko Ono’s Omnipresence: The performance artist is everywhere in the film. At first it’s unnerving, then dazzling.6 Big Moments: Don’t have time to watch the full documentary? Here’s a guide to its eye-opening scenes.‘Changüí: The Sound of Guantánamo’(Petaluma; three CDs and hardcover book, $63)When he realized there were very few recordings of local, rural changüí — music for all-night neighborhood parties in Guantánamo province, at Cuba’s eastern tip — the journalist Gianluca Tramontana began making his own with a hand-held stereo recorder, capturing the music live, acoustic and unadorned. This extensive boxed set, annotated with lyrics and musicology, offers Afro-Cuban music at its most elemental and kinetic: endlessly syncopated riffs picked on a tres (Cuban guitar) backed only by percussion and the plunked bass notes of a marímbula (a box with metal prongs), topped by singers who may well be improvising rhymes, answered by backup refrains. The lyrics offer history, advice, love, pride in the changüí tradition and up-to-the-minute commentary on what’s going on at the party or in the world. More important, the percussion and tres make the music eternally danceable. PARELESRay Charles, ‘True Genius’(Tangerine; six CDs and hardcover book, $105)“True Genius” collects decades of Ray Charles’s work.For me, and others, America’s greatest male singer was Ray Charles. His voice was grainy, earthy and wise; his emotional impact was unmistakable and complex, merging pain and strength, sorrow and humor, flirtation and heartache. Of course, he was no slouch as a pianist, either. This straightforward, career-spanning compilation covers his early years as he forges his fusion of gospel, swing, blues, country and pop, though for his pivotal 1950s Atlantic singles — “Hallelujah, I Love Her So,” “I’ve Got a Woman” and “What’d I Say” — it swaps in live versions instead of the studio classics. It moves through his decades as an interpreter, when he homed in on the soul within other people’s hits, and includes a rambunctious 1972 concert set from Stockholm and latter-day duets with admirers like Willie Nelson, Norah Jones and Billy Joel. PARELESJ Dilla, ‘ Welcome 2 Detroit — The 20th Anniversary Edition’(BBE Music; 12 7” singles for $129.99)A box of 7” singles includes instrumental versions and alternate mixes of J Dilla’s 2001 debut studio LP.By the time the tastemaking Detroit hip-hop producer J Dilla released his 2001 debut studio album, “Welcome 2 Detroit,” he was already somewhere in the realm of mythos. A member of the Soulquarians and the Ummah production collectives, he was known for music that was both luscious and thumping — he was wildly influential and essentially uncopyable. (He died in 2006.) “Welcome 2 Detroit” is a musically wide-ranging album, but never thrums with anything but his particular vibration, the J Dilla feel that exists somewhere just beneath the skin. This immaculately detailed boxed set features 7” singles of the album’s songs along with instrumental versions, alternate mixes and a book detailing the making of the album. CARAMANICAWillie Dunn, ‘Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies: The Willie Dunn Anthology’(Light in the Attic; two LPs, $35; MP3 download, $10)Willie Dunn (1941-2013) was a Canadian songwriter, filmmaker and Indigenous activist; this set offers just a sampling of his extensive recorded catalog. He emerged in the 1960s with songs rooted in folk and country, sometimes incorporating Indigenous instruments and melodies. His voice was a kindly but forthright baritone, with hints of Hank Williams, Johnny Cash and Gordon Lightfoot. Dunn was a cleareyed storyteller, and in songs like “The Ballad of Crowfoot” he chronicled individual lives, historical injustices and the power and majesty of nature. PARELESBob Dylan, ‘Springtime in New York: The Bootleg Series Vol. 16 (1980-1985)’(Columbia/Legacy; five CDs, hard-bound book and memorabilia, $140)The latest excavation of Bob Dylan’s archives is from the first half of the 1980s, when he let go of the certainties of his born-again phase and returned to thornier, more enigmatic songs that still grappled with morality, love, history and responsibility on the albums “Infidels” (1983) and “Empire Burlesque” (1985). He also tried 1980s-style production, which left those albums with overblown drum sounds and a dated electronic sheen. Two discs from the 1980 sessions and rehearsals for his 1980 “Shot of Love” are mostly throwaways, except for the murky, ominous “Yes Sir, No Sir.” But the songs from sessions and tours for “Infidels” and “Empire Burlesque” offer more. The set unveils a full-band version of “Blind Willie McTell” and a boisterous, bluesy rock song that only surfaced briefly on tour in 1984, “Enough Is Enough.” It finds more vulnerable, less gimmicky versions of familiar songs, and it details the evolution — and sometimes overnight rewrites — of the songs that became “Foot of Pride” and “Tight Connection to My Heart,” a close-up of Dylan’s constant tinkering and improving. PARELESBeverly Glenn-Copeland, ‘Keyboard Fantasies’ and ‘Keyboard Fantasies Reimagined’(Transgressive; LP, CD, cassette or download, from $6.99 to $27.99)This is the latest installment of the campaign to resurrect the work of Beverly Glenn-Copeland, the Canadian new age/electronic music producer and singer whose recordings were rediscovered a few years ago. “Keyboard Fantasies,” originally released in 1986 in a limited cassette run, is entrancing and almost uncannily soothing. “Welcome to you, both young and old/We are ever new, we are ever new,” Glenn-Copeland softly warbles, a beacon of safety and possibility. The original album, now released on CD and vinyl for the first time, was followed by a collection of remixes and reinterpretations by acolytes, most notably Kelsey Lu’s ecstatically elegiac take on “Ever New.” CARAMANICAGeorge Harrison, ‘All Things Must Pass (50th Anniversary Edition)’(Capitol/UMe; Uber Deluxe Box, $999.98; Super Deluxe Box with eight LPs, $199.98, or five CDs, $149.98; other configurations from $19.98 to $89.98)Seek out the discs featuring 42 previously unreleased demos from George Harrison’s solo debut, “All Things Must Pass.”Anyone who has watched “Get Back” knows how creatively stifled George Harrison was feeling in the final days of the Beatles. His first post-Fab Four solo album, the sprawling, tenderly spiritual masterwork “All Things Must Pass” from 1970, became a repository for all those pent-up ideas. The joy of creation is palpable throughout the 50th anniversary deluxe edition of the album, which features a meticulous and punchy new mix derived from the original tapes by Paul Hicks. The set’s most revelatory material is on the discs featuring 42 previously unreleased demos, which strip Harrison’s compositions down to their bare essentials and showcase the almost otherworldly outpouring of song-craft that accompanied his musical liberation. This season of retroactive Beatlemania is the perfect opportunity for a deep dive into Harrison’s long-gestating opus — consider it “Get Back,” Part 4. ZOLADZ‘It’s a Good, Good Feeling: The Latin Soul of Fania Records (The Singles)’(Craft Latino; four CDs, one 7” vinyl record, $63.98; two LPs, $29.98)While it was on its way to becoming New York salsa’s equivalent of Motown Records, Fania was also helping to boost the Latin-soul hybrid known as boogaloo. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Fania put out a stream of albums and singles with English-language lyrics, mixing funk, rock ’n’ roll and son rhythms; dollops of doo-wop vocals; and more than enough cowbell. This box culls together 89 such singles that Fania released between 1965 and 1975; most weren’t hits, but plenty were by hitmakers: Ray Barretto (whose smash “El Watusi” had presaged boogaloo), Joe Bataan, Willie Colón. Boogaloo could sometimes feel like a fusion of related but not directly compatible parts (“Everybody gather ’round,/I’m gonna introduce the Latin soul sound,” Joe Bataan sings, with something of a heavy hand, on “Latin Soul Square Dance”), but some of the most fun to be had here is on the covers of pop and soul hits sprinkled throughout, which embrace the task directly: Larry Harlow’s orchestra covering “Grazing in the Grass,” Harvey Averne’s take on “Stand,” Joe Bataan’s “Shaft.” The LP version of the box is abridged, including 28 tracks across two discs. RUSSONELLOThe KLF, ‘Solid State Logik 1’(Streaming services)In 1992, the KLF — the British Dada prankster dance-music anarchists who had become global hitmakers in the previous two years — fired machine-gun blanks at the audience at the BRIT Awards and announced their retirement from the music business. Shortly thereafter, they took their whole catalog out of print and, later, burned one million pounds in royalty payment cash. So it’s cause for excitement, and perhaps skepticism, that the group’s catalog began to trickle onto streaming services this year. Most crucial is the compilation “Solid State Logik 1,” which contains all the stratospheric, ornate, deeply ambitious hits: the spooky “What Time Is Love? (Live at Trancentral),” the ecstatic and triumphant “3 a.m. Eternal (Live at the S.S.L.)” and “Justified & Ancient,” with those Tammy Wynette vocals that still, three decades on, are disorienting in just the right way. Is the reissue series a scam? A prelude to a prank? Or a concession to permanence from a musical act that seemed content to live on only as a memory? CARAMANICANirvana, ‘Nevermind: 30th Anniversary (Super Deluxe Edition)’(Geffen; five CDs, one Blu-ray videodisc and hardcover book, $200)A 30th-anniversary edition of “Nevermind” features four concert recordings from 1991 and 1992.GeffenAs if Nirvana ever had to, it proves its punk bona fides yet again with the 30th-anniversary expansion of “Nevermind.” The newly remastered album adds a little additional clarity that brings out both the songs’ pop structures and the rasp and yowl of Kurt Cobain’s voice. It’s packaged with four live concert recordings of variable fidelity from 1991 and 1992 — Amsterdam (included as both audio and video), Melbourne and nearly mono-sounding sets from Del Mar, Calif., and Tokyo — that show Nirvana bashing the music out night after night, screaming and blaring, overloading with physical impact and probably spurring some wild mosh pits. Wherever the tour led, as Cobain sang, there was “no recess.” But the 20th-anniversary “Nevermind” box, in 2011, included a better-sounding 1991 concert, “Live at the Paramount,” and more rarities. PARELESOutkast, ‘ATLiens (25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition)’(Legacy Recordings/Sony Music; four LPs, $69.98)A sublimely sinuous Southern funk album full of jackhammer rhymes, “ATLiens,” the second Outkast album, from 1996, is perhaps the duo’s most overlooked from its pre-pop-breakthrough era — not the scrappy statement of purpose that preceded it (the 1994 debut, “Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik”) nor the psych-rock philosophy lesson that followed (“Aquemini,” from 1998). But it’s crucial to the Outkast worldview formation — it shows the duo both at ease with the languor of laid-back Southern production but also champing at the bit to incorporate small moments of explosion. This release includes the original album alongside, for the first time, the full set of instrumentals. CARAMANICA‘R&B in DC 1940-1960’(Bear Family; 16 CDs, $273.04)Probably the heavyweight champion of boxed sets this year (it weighs 10 pounds), “R&B in DC 1940-1960” collects nearly 500 singles recorded in the nation’s capital back when doo-wop, mambo, early rock ’n’ roll, jump blues and big-band jazz were first being lumped together in the pages of trade magazines into a category called “R&B.” It’s all contextualized engagingly in a 352-page book, full of closely researched history, images and song-by-song notes. You can tease out the presence of some major figures and themes: Marvin Gaye lingers in the backing vocals on at least one track; his mentor, Bo Diddley, also makes an appearance; the recordings of the Clovers and Ruth Brown, as the notes attest, played a role in keeping Atlantic Records afloat in the label’s fledgling days. But the point of this collection is to get you to listen more broadly, and more completely, to an entire musical and social moment: Jay Bruder, the researcher who compiled the collection, wisely included commercials, jingles and other radio-broadcast ephemera in this collection. These are the sounds of Washington in the midcentury, when it was home to one of the country’s most thriving Black middle classes and an incubator of musical talent to match. RUSSONELLORadiohead, ‘Kid A Mnesia’(XL; three CDs, $23; three LPs, $60)Radiohead dig out songs that didn’t make the cut for “Kid A” or “Amnesia” on a new box taking in both releases.Radiohead thoroughly dismantled its rock reflexes to make “Kid A” (2000) and “Amnesiac” (2001), two albums drawn almost entirely from the same sessions. Its former arena-rock guitars and anthemic choruses receded behind fragments, loops, electronic beats, orchestral experiments and ominous noises; disquiet and malaise floated free. “Kid A Mnesia” unites the two companion albums and adds a disc of alternate takes, stray instrumental tracks and songs Radiohead had not quite committed to disc: “Follow Me Around” and “If You Say the Word.” They’re not revelations, but they extend the mood. PARELESThe Replacements, ‘Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take out the Trash (Deluxe Edition)’(Rhino; four CDs, one LP, one 7,” $79.98)Snarling, thrashing and defiantly tuneful, the Replacements’ 1981 debut album, “Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash,” has always sounded like a power-pop LP stuffed into a blender and flicked on to high. But this comprehensive, 40th-anniversary deluxe edition is a sustained reminder of the craft and winning chemistry behind an album that was never quite as anarchically tossed-off as it seemed. Across 100 tracks — 67 of them previously unreleased — it becomes clear that the sturdy melodic core of Paul Westerberg’s songwriting and the ramshackle fury of Bob Stinson’s solos were present from the earliest days of the Minneapolis band’s existence. Some of the most fascinating tracks on this reissue, though, point to where the Replacements were headed on “Let It Be” from 1984 and beyond: A handful of Westerberg’s solo home demos, the best of which is the gut-wrenching “You’re Getting Married,” foreshadow the ragged-heart balladry of a ’Mats classic like “Answering Machine.” Nearly four hours of material is plenty to sift through, but a high percentage of this “Trash” is treasure. ZOLADZThe Rolling Stones, ‘Tattoo You’(Interscope; four CDs, picture disc and hardcover book, $150; five LPs and hardcover book, $198; two CDs, $20)Beyond the kick of “Start Me Up” and the unexpected tenderness (and Sonny Rollins saxophone solo) of “Waiting for a Friend,” “Tattoo You” (1981) was a second-tier Rolling Stones album: vigorous performances of merely passable material. With band members estranged, it was built largely by finishing lyrics and vocals atop outtakes from previous albums. Its 40th-anniversary expanded version includes nine previously unreleased songs that casually continue the album’s 1981 strategy, revisiting tracks from the vault; Mick Jagger sings some obviously anachronistic lyrics in songs like “It’s a Lie,” which mentions eBay. (More deluxe versions add a two-CD 1982 Wembley concert recording.) The new tracks offer familiar pleasures: hearing the band romp through every song. PARELESNina Simone, ‘The Montreux Years’(BMG; two LPs, $29.99; two CDs, $19.98)Between 1968 and 1990, Nina Simone played the Montreux Jazz Festival five times.The most arresting scene in Liz Garbus’s 2015 Netflix documentary “What Happened, Miss Simone?” is a performance from the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival, during which a weary but incandescent Nina Simone performs her interpretation of Janis Ian’s “Stars.” Simone’s reading is one of the most damning and deeply felt critiques of fame I have ever heard — and luckily it is featured on “Nina Simone: The Montreux Years,” a new and beautifully packaged two-album collection of live material. Between 1968 and 1990, Simone played the Swiss jazz festival five times; each performance was both a reflection of a specific moment in her career and a testament to her continued virtuosity. For all her ambivalence about jazz festivals and her noted preference for performing in classical music halls, Simone clearly had a special connection to Montreux and, as this collection attests, brought her best to its stage decade after decade. ZOLADZWadada Leo Smith’s Great Lakes Quartet, ‘The Chicago Symphonies’(TUM; four CDs, $71.99)The trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith turned 80 this month but continues to compose and perform prolifically. And his projects have only been growing grander in scale, while still centering his stark, epigrammatic style of playing and writing. Smith’s latest effort (it isn’t an archival recording) is “The Chicago Symphonies,” four extended works, carefully composed but minimalist in craft, written not for an orchestra but for a quartet: the Pulitzer Prize winner Henry Threadgill on alto saxophone, John Lindberg on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums. (The saxophonist Jonathon Haffner replaces Threadgill on the fourth and final symphony.) It’s the same group that was featured on Smith’s celebrated “Great Lakes Suite,” from 2014. This new collection of music is dedicated not to the natural beauty of the region, but to the lives of great Midwesterners, from politicians like Abe Lincoln and Barack Obama to Smith’s own colleagues in the avant-garde. The simpatico between Smith and Threadgill is an exciting and rarely documented thing, and it gives these already spellbinding compositions the allure of a privileged conversation. RUSSONELLOThe Who, ‘The Who Sell Out (Super Deluxe Box Set)’(UMe/Polydor; five CDs, two 7” singles, hardcover book, memorabilia, $139)A new boxed set pulls together the Who’s scattered trove of recordings from 1967-69.The Who tried multiple directions while writing and recording “The Who Sell Out,” amid tour dates and the general psychedelic ferment of 1967. Pete Townshend was coming up with character sketches, expanding songs toward mini-operas and layering voices and instruments ever more ingeniously. To hold together its hodgepodge of songs, “The Who Sell Out” was sequenced as a pirate radio show, including jingles and parody commercials. The boxed set pulls together the Who’s scattered trove of recordings from 1967-69. It expands the original album (in mono and stereo versions, plus non-album singles) with three discs of recordings from 1967-68 along with sketches that Townshend would mine for “Tommy” in 1969 and, newly unveiled, a dozen of Townshend’s increasingly ambitious demos, including a thoroughly unrelaxed “Relax” and a smoldering, baleful “I Can See for Miles” that fully maps out the album version, which would be one of the Who’s pinnacles. PARELES More