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      Mary Lattimore: Has Harp, Must Travel

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      As a child, she learned she could play her instrument almost anywhere. As an adult, her bittersweet music depends on doing exactly that.Mary Lattimore made her public harp debut in an Arby’s parking lot.Her mother, Lelia Hall Lattimore, thought they might be late for her teenage daughter’s recital the moment they left their small North Carolina town for the state’s largest city, Charlotte. When a tire blew, she knew they were doomed. As they fished the harp from the trunk to retrieve the spare, Lelia had an idea: Why didn’t Mary play right there?As Mary began to pluck 47 strings in her new floral-print dress, customers abandoned roast beef sandwiches. The tow-truck driver, Angel, marveled. Most customers had never heard a harp live, let alone in a fast-food parking lot.“I stepped out of my bratty teenager self and went for it. I was able to see the comedy, because playing the harp is fun,” Lattimore said by phone from her Los Angeles apartment, as her cat, Jenny, meowed to be let inside the studio where the harp lives. She announced the last word with a relish that suggested the Renaissance staple is rarely described as such. “I love playing for people who have never seen a harp, who think it’s a museum piece. I want people to feel like they can approach it.”During the last decade, Lattimore has been at the fore of a surprising but steady harp uprising, with upstarts like Brandee Younger re-energizing it in jazz and Sissi Rada slipping it inside techno. She delights in unfamiliar audiences who first see her instrument as a novelty. But Lattimore handles her harp like a solo guitarist, improvising around contemplative melodies with the help of pedals that warp her crystalline tone and seem to bend time.She has recorded with Kurt Vile, toured with Thurston Moore and taught Kesha how to hold the harp. More important, though, are Lattimore’s beguiling solo albums, bittersweet chronicles of her travels with an instrument she called “my friend.” Her latest anthology, “Collected Pieces II,” includes a hymn for an orphaned deer she encountered during an artist residency on a 20,000-acre Wyoming cattle ranch and a paean for a cluster of seaside Croatian pines.“Even if you’re just being quiet in a new place, there’s a sense of forward motion. You get addicted to that newness,” Lattimore said. “These songs are a way of remembering those places, a souvenir of my feelings.”Lattimore was born into a very different harp tradition. Her mother played in orchestras and entertained at weddings while teaching two dozen students. Mary insists that the harp’s vibrating body, pushed against her pregnant mother’s stomach, was her first influence.Lelia said she was a fastidious technician, “because if the note isn’t right, it’s wrong.” As the preteen Mary transitioned from piano rehearsals to harp recitals, her mother recognized that her daughter wasn’t motivated by such strictures. Mary loved the Cure and belonged to the R.E.M. fan club. The instrument’s precision induced so much anxiety that Mary took beta blockers before recitals. To shield their relationship, Lelia drove her daughter to lessons in nearby cities instead of being Mary’s teacher. “It was an adventure,” Lelia said in a phone interview, “our time together.”“It’s very vulnerable to improvise, especially on an instrument so big and rare. You’re showing your guts,” Lattimore said.Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York TimesThat link between motion and music stuck. Though Lattimore earned a scholarship to the prestigious Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., she envied the skateboarders beneath her rehearsal room window, the élan of their escapades. She studied abroad in Vienna and Milan, an aberration for anyone with access to Eastman’s resources.When Lattimore moved to Philadelphia after college, a vibrant network of young experimental musicians indoctrinated her in improvisation. She had always struggled to memorize elaborate classical pieces, so the idiom offered an escape hatch. She no longer memorized; she responded, her chops flourishing without charts.“It’s very vulnerable to improvise, especially on an instrument so big and rare. You’re showing your guts,” she said. “But those people taught me to trust my instincts.”While furtively writing her own material, Lattimore began touring and recording with rock bands. In 2014, she was anonymously nominated for a Pew Fellowship, an annual $60,000 prize for a dozen Philadelphia artists. The call to tell her she’d won, she said, remains “the greatest thing in my life.” Lattimore paused a string of minimum-wage jobs and plopped half the money into the bank. She turned her battered Volvo westward, she and her harp bound for a Los Angeles rental.Stopping in national parks and idiosyncratic towns, she wrote what became her 2016 album “At the Dam.” Lattimore recognized that being in motion shook loose strands of inspiration, moods she wanted to express with melody. She needed, then, to remain on the go.In January 2018, Lattimore relocated to California, soon landing a residency at the Headland Center for the Arts just west of the Golden Gate Bridge. Inside a studio built from redwoods, the ocean always audible, she composed her 2018 breakthrough, “Hundreds of Days,” and a duo record with Meg Baird, a songwriter and friend who had decamped from Philadelphia years earlier.“Mary had really passionate ideas about music, but she didn’t want them to involve tedium,” Baird said by phone. “She always wanted to place the harp into a context where it wasn’t treated like precious furniture.”Lattimore calls her harp “my giant 85-pound sculpture.”Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York TimesLattimore’s dual volumes of “Collected Pieces” testify to that dynamic. “It Was Late and We Watched the Motel Burn,” written after doing just that from a tour-van window, is vertiginous and unsettling, the melody constantly swallowing itself. “For Scott Kelly, Returned to Earth,” inspired by the astronaut (and composed when Lattimore’s jaw was wired shut after a fall), is delicate and empathetic, a tender transmission between altered realities.Lattimore tours so much she has churned through three used Volvo XC90s (the model that holds a harp) in seven years. After Covid-19 scuttled her itinerary, she longed for the daily invigoration of that travel, the surprises that shape her music. She found a temporary fix through collaborations.The guitarist Steve Gunn remembered her desperation to jam when he was recording his new album, “Other You,” in Los Angeles during lockdown. She hesitated to visit. When she finally arrived on the last day, they cut the instrumental “Sugar Kiss.” It sounds like a group hug during a cataclysm. “I don’t think she’d been out of her house, and we were all struggling,” Gunn said from Belgium. “You just want to be around Mary, so it was a nice way to step into hanging out.”Lattimore went on to record an album of discursive duets with her neighbor in Los Angeles, the fellow Philadelphia expatriate Paul Sukeena, and two luminous drones with the instrumental duo Growing. Their baptisms-by-volume had once coaxed her toward experimental music; making them now helped her survive isolation. “I lost myself during Covid, just dead inside,” she said. “These were the sparks I found.”Lattimore is slowly returning to motion. In September, she visited Croatia for her birthday. Rather than lug her harp, she took a keyboard, savoring Adriatic vistas while composing her first film score. A week after returning to Los Angeles, she drove to an artist residency in Marfa, Texas.The scores, the residencies, the keyboards: They are concessions to age, since she cannot haul what she dubbed “my giant 85-pound sculpture” around the world forever. Her parents have both endured hip replacements after decades of moving harps. But during the 14-hour haul from Marfa to California, she realized how much she had pined for the peripatetic thrills of touring — she and the harp, seeking the joys of the open road, en route to anywhere.“The moon is shining on the desert. There are no cars. You are just listening,” Lattimore said, her pitch rising. “I had missed that so much, even gas station bathrooms. I like who I am when I am traveling. You are drinking in something you need.” More

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      Self Esteem, a Pop Singer Who Wants Britain to ‘Prioritise Pleasure’

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      Rebecca Lucy Taylor is touching a nerve with brutally honest songs about not having it all figured out.LONDON — Rebecca Lucy Taylor — better known as Self Esteem — was onstage at a club here last Friday, performing “I’m Fine,” a pop song with a pounding beat about a sexual assault. The track includes a recording of a woman describing how she barks like a dog when approached by groups of men on the street: “There is nothing that terrifies a man more than a woman that appears completely deranged.” As strings soared, Taylor and her band started barking and howling along. Several women in the audience joined in.It was a moment that captured both the irreverence and sincerity of Self Esteem, a budding British pop star, whose second album, “Prioritise Pleasure,” is building her a fan base who say they feel seen by her music.For more than 15 years, Taylor, 35, has been working away in Britain’s music scene, first in the indie band Slow Club, which she said she left after years of finding her ideas stifled, then as Self Esteem, a name that “just accidentally become the exact thing I needed,” she said in an interview at an east London bar a week before the concert.If there’s a manifesto behind “Prioritise Pleasure,” it’s to encourage people to put themselves first.Suzie Howell for The New York TimesSlow Club toured internationally and had a cult fan base, but “Prioritise Pleasure” is bringing her much broader attention: magazine covers, TV performances and an onslaught of fans testifying on social media about how transformative they find her music. A number of particularly loyal ones have even been getting Self Esteem tattoos.“I have felt very alone most of my life, like ‘What is wrong with me?’” Taylor said, pointing to expectations for women to settle down and have children. Her recent success “makes me feel this overwhelming relief that I’m not a total weirdo.”If Taylor has a manifesto behind “Prioritise Pleasure,” it’s encouraging people to put themselves first without denying that they can also make mistakes. The “pleasure” mentioned in the album’s title can take many forms, she said, including what she was looking forward to doing that evening: going home, ordering take out and watching “Succession.”Self Esteem’s rise comes at a time when new attention is being paid to violence against women in Britain following the deaths of Sarah Everard, who was kidnapped and murdered by a police officer while walking home in March, and Sabina Nessa, who was killed while walking through a park in September. This month, there have been reports of women being injected with syringes at nightclubs, a variation of “spiking,” when drugs are dropped into someone’s drink.Jude Rogers, a music journalist who has written about “Prioritse Pleasure,” said Self Esteem’s music feels right for the moment. “We needed a woman to appear who was going to say, ‘Enough,’” Rogers said. Self Esteem is “expressing all the messiness, all the frustration and all the anger of being a woman,” in ambitious pop music,” she added.Taylor said she’s been concerned about her safety since she was a teenager, “which I guess is like the zeitgeist now.” She started writing the album in 2019, and decided to process a sexual assault she had survived through her music. “As someone who lives very free, I like to be sexual, I like to do what I want,” she said. “But suddenly it was taken from me and I had a decision to never enjoy myself in that way again, to never be the person I like to be, or turn it all into defiant euphoria.”The end of a toxic relationship also informed the album, but the record has a strong thread of empowerment, which Taylor said was a result of more positive experiences. “I finally hit this beautiful cross section of I’m older, the therapy’s kicked in a bit, and I care less,” she said. While making the record, she stopped worrying about other people’s expectations of her and her career.“I finally hit this beautiful cross section of I’m older, the therapy’s kicked in a bit, and I care less,” Taylor said. Suzie Howell for The New York TimesAll those changes led Taylor to write songs like “I Do This All The Time,” a largely spoken word track in which she lists her struggles, including everyday anxieties (“Old habits die for a couple of weeks, and then I start doing them again”) and sexist comments from old tour managers (“All you need to do, darling, is fit into that little dress of yours”).Johan Karlberg, a member of the group the Very Best who produced “Prioritise Pleasure,” believes Self Esteem’s success is less about the current cultural climate in Britain and more a response to Taylor’s great songs and her “brute honesty.”“People like to say they’re being honest in their songs and interviews, but really they very rarely are,” he said. “Rebecca is in everything, and people relate to that.”At her London concert last week, the relating was nearly deafening, as fans shouted along with their favorite lines (“Sexting you at the mental health club seems counterproductive” was particularly loud).One fan, Cat Carrigan, 30, said she’s drawn to a danceable Self Esteem track called “Moody” that’s both a tale of a relationship collapsing and an attempt to reclaim a common insult used against woman. “I’ve been called a moody cow many times in my life,” Carrigan said. “It’s not going to affect me anymore.”But Rubie Street, 29, said there something else that’s made her a fan. The songs “are banging tunes, aren’t they?” she said. “That always helps.” More

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      El Alfa, the King of Dembow, Dazzles at Madison Square Garden

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      The sold-out show by the Dominican artist was a watershed moment for the dembow movement.“Who said the Dominican Republic couldn’t go global?” El Alfa announced in Spanish from the stage halfway through his first concert at Madison Square Garden, as red and blue Dominican flags fluttered across the crowd of thousands. The 30-year-old performer, born Emanuel Herrera Batista, had good reason to celebrate: On Friday night, the global ambassador of dembow became the genre’s first artist to sell out the storied venue.It wasn’t just a personal success, but a watershed moment for the dembow scene he has spearheaded for over a decade — a street sound that contains the spiraling histories of the Caribbean. Dominican dembow is an Afro-diasporic music genre born in the Black and working-class neighborhoods outside of Santo Domingo in the late ’90s and early ’00s, reimagined from Jamaican dancehall riddims (from the Patois for “rhythm”), which form its foundation. But rather than lingering in a slow liquid haze, dembow producers crank the tempo up to lightning speed, stitching and alternating different riddims while rappers deliver breakneck, electric bars. Then, beatmakers chop up and duplicate hooks in the chorus, yielding supreme quotability and catchiness.Lyrically, dembow is a creative playground where artists are constantly inventing their own slang and vocabularies of becoming. The genre embraces the euphoria of everyday pleasures, like sex, dancing and partying. Unsurprisingly, it is often used as a scapegoat for Dominican social problems, a critique informed by racism and classism. Elites malign dembow as a breeding ground for crime, drugs and “sexual deviance,” characterizing it as pure vulgar expression — like the history of most music genres born out of struggle. The Dominican government regularly censors dembow songs it deems “explicit” and “obscene.” Also like many genres, dembow must contend with its patriarchal past and present, but it’s too simple, too narrow-minded to reduce it to plain raunch or misogyny. Dembow is also a gesture of defiance — a refusal to submit to colonial, “proper” ways of being, speaking and living.And honestly, it’s also just a lot of fun. El Alfa is a maximally charismatic performer, a comedian whose charm can transcend the stage and saturate an arena. Over the course of the night, he repeatedly demanded audience members scream if they were proud to be Dominican, conducted thousands of concertgoers sitting on different sides of the venue in a competition of volume and jokingly dedicated a song to parents who buy Louis Vuitton and Gucci for their children. When he brought out the merengue icon Fernandito Villalona, who strolled onstage in a shimmering silver jacket encrusted with red and blue rhinestones in the shape of the Dominican flag, El Alfa got on his knees in a gesture of deference and referred to Villalona as his father.The show was filled with wisecracking banter and playful antics, but it was above all a showcase of El Alfa’s artistry.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesUnder El Alfa’s command, the Garden, an already carnivalesque venue, became bacchanalian. At every turn, the artist reveled in excess and humor. He performed his laugh-out-loud summer hit “La Mamá de la Mamá” not once, but twice, a cabal of dancers in matching costumes gyrating behind him. Featured artists El Cherry Scom and CJ joined him onstage, a spectacle that ended in El Alfa climbing a monitor and the lime-haired Cherry taking his pants and shirt off, twerking passionately in his boxers in front of thousands. Before the show’s end, El Alfa claimed that he and his team had been fined for having too much fun and letting the show run over time.But focus too much on the wisecracking banter or the playful antics onstage, and you’ll miss the artistry. El Alfa has staggering control of his voice. On “Mueve La Cadera,” he sculpted it into percussive babbling; on “Tarzan,” it was ululating yells; on “Suave,” high-pitched baby talk. During his rendition of “Acuetate,” El Alfa had his D.J. cut out the track so he could spit the lyrics a cappella in double-time, effortlessly showing off his dexterity as a rapper. On “Sientate en Ese Deo,” his D.J. slowed the tempo so the lyrics could land with decelerated precision. It was a sublime display of El Alfa’s ability to stretch the boundaries of speech and language. For some, his voice might call to mind the falsettos of the Bee Gees; for others, the yelps of Atlanta rapper Young Thug. But let it be known: This is a distinctly Dominican way of speaking and manipulating language.Detractors often dismiss dembow for being repetitive, but that critique fails to recognize the creativity embedded in iteration. Repetition is part of why El Alfa can turn anything into a hook, and make listeners cackle in the process; quotable, recurring punch lines are an essential part of his brand. “La Mamá de la Mamá” is a song rooted in double entendre about oral sex, a gag that fully reveals itself once the chorus hits. When El Alfa performed it on Friday, the lyrics flashed onscreen in neon colors: “Dale cuchupla-pla-pla, cuchupla-pla-pla.” To an unsuspecting ear, this sounds like gibberish. I paused briefly and giggled to myself, wondering how I would translate the cleverness of this addictive, onomatopoeic hook into English. I realized it was futile, and that was precisely where the ingenuity bloomed.While the concert was a display of El Alfa’s agility and showmanship, it will go down as a celebration of a movement. A few minutes into the show, he set the tone for the evening, declaring, “This isn’t my success; it’s my country’s success.” He pointedly shared the spotlight, bringing out a parade of other Dominican artists (the pink-haired Kiko el Crazy, the playboy vocalist Mark B, the tough talking dembowsero Shelow Shaq) and a crew of non-Dominican collaborators who’ve helped him along the way (the Colombian pop star J Balvin, the New York radio personality Alex Sensation, the Puerto Rican reggaeton artist Farruko). Notably, none of the women who have helped push dembow forward were present. But the gesture still felt like a gleeful jab to those who said dembow would never travel beyond the borders of its birthplace. More

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      A BRIC in Flux Turns Out an Intimate, Focused JazzFest

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      Though it was operating on fewer cylinders because of the pandemic, for the first time in its seven-year history the event sold out all three nights of music in Brooklyn.As jazz festivals go, BRIC JazzFest is on the small but ambitious side, aspiring to a few ideas at once. It operates in Brooklyn with something close to Manhattan-scale resources, but like BRIC’s flagship music series, the Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival, it aims to serve a broad audience, not a particularly affluent one.To a greater degree than Celebrate Brooklyn! — a series of mostly free summertime performances in Prospect Park — JazzFest spotlights artists who live and work in the borough, though it brings in some of the best from out of town too. In the process, its organizers cut away at some of the hierarchical thinking that other jazz festivals, at various levels, often reinforce.After three nights of music this past weekend from across the borough’s varied landscape, it was in the closing moments that all these strands came together most effortlessly, in what might have been the festival’s most informal moment.The multi-instrumentalist Louis Cato was leading a jam session, smiling mirthfully from behind an electric bass, guiding a rotating band through deep-pocket covers of jazz standards and D’Angelo B-sides. At one point he followed Yahzarah — a vocalist and longtime veteran of the neo-soul scene, giving a bravura performance — from a coldly grooving cover of Queen’s “We Are the Champions” to a simmering vamp on James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.”It felt like a festival-size version of something that you might find happening at a small bar in Brooklyn — and that ought to happen at more of them. Whether it fit perfectly under the banner of a “jazz festival” felt both uncertain and unimportant. Here were pieces of popular culture coming together; what justified its place as the culminating act was the virtuosity of the players, and the way they seemed to have earned the crowd’s constant curiosity.The crowds had been good all weekend, including for strong sets by high-profile headliners like the vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant, who closed Thursday night, and the Sun Ra Arkestra, Friday’s finale. This was the first time in BRIC JazzFest’s seven-year history that it had sold out completely each night, putting some wind into the sails of an organization that has found itself deeply in flux.Much of BRIC’s top leadership has departed in recent months, leaving it in a period of transition as it looks to move beyond the coronavirus pandemic. Shortly before the festival, Lia Camille Crockett, BRIC’s director of performing arts, announced that she was taking a job running NPR’s live-events operation.But in an interview, she said that BRIC had allowed her to experiment during the pandemic in ways that paid off, and she expects the organization to ride out its current straits with a similar resourcefulness. “One of the things I’ve loved about working at BRIC is that it’s always been an environment where you can ask questions, and question why things have been done a certain way,” she said.“It was a year of experimentation,” she added. “Without saying, ‘We have a whole new manifesto,’ it was about taking opportunities where we could to experiment and turn certain things on their head.”Nick Hakim performed with Roy Nathanson, a saxophonist and poet two generations his senior he’d collaborated with earlier this year.Nate Palmer for The New York TimesAt Celebrate Brooklyn! this year, with attendance and sponsorships already expected to be lower than usual, there was extra room for “creative risk-taking,” Crockett said. During the pandemic, she and her team also introduced the idea of having a Brooklyn-based musician help book BRIC JazzFest, along with herself and the producer Brice Rosenbloom. At last year’s digital-only festival, the bassist and singer Meshell Ndegeocello came on board. This year, the artist-curator was the vocalist Madison McFerrin.In an interview, McFerrin said she had put a priority on keeping the curation close to home, mostly by booking musicians she knew personally from around the Brooklyn scene. She saw it as “an opportunity to just put my friends on,” which led her to think about the natural “range and extension of jazz,” as a way of making music.Getting an artist to open their own contacts list seems a solid way of ensuring that a festival has a cozy and coherent feel to it. And it paid off for McFerrin in a personal way. Her headlining set on Saturday, performed solo with a digital control station beside her, went awry at the start when her loops pedal malfunctioned.Midway through the set, she tried to get the audience to clap a fast and not-uncomplicated pattern as she led into “No Time to Lose,” a peppery original tune. Cato, a longtime friend of McFerrin’s, was standing in the crowd, and he saw what the moment needed. He leapt onstage and saddled up behind the drum set, guiding the crowd through the beat.McFerrin first came in contact with BRIC soon after moving to Brooklyn seven years ago, when an old friend approached her to create a short documentary about her life as an artist for BRIC’s online TV channel. In addition to presenting music, BRIC is the borough’s largest creator of public-access TV content; a provider of media literacy training and documentary resources to Brooklyn residents; and an arts education group active in public schools across the borough.The soul vocalist Nick Hakim also first interacted with BRIC through its documentary work, when the filmmaker Terence Nance made a short film about him for a BRIC series, “Brooklyn Is Masquerading as the World.”This year Hakim and Roy Nathanson, a saxophonist and poet two generations his senior, released a short and enchanted album of tunes they’d written together in Nathanson’s South Brooklyn home. I first saw them play some of these songs live in Nathanson’s driveway, during a little public concert he’d thrown for the neighborhood in May, around his 70th birthday, but Friday night marked the first time the songs had been presented in concert with a full band.The playing was as loose and unforced as it is on the album, and both audience and band seemed aware of the music’s value.Sasha Berliner, a rising young vibraphonist also based in Brooklyn, appeared on the gallery stage — located in the building’s amphitheater-style foyer — with a vigorous, groove-oriented new band. Parrying with the keyboardist Julius Rodriguez, who was on Rhodes, Berliner sounded fully in command, showing meaningful growth from the last time she’d played BRIC JazzFest, two years earlier.Stas Thee Boss performed an update on a ’90s indie hip-hop sound.Nate Palmer for The New York TimesThe gallery stage was burdened with tough acoustics and unforgivingly bright lighting (it’s in a glorified lobby, after all), but it boasted a constant, varied flow of acts that offered a sense of what a working musician’s life sounds like in Brooklyn these days, across a variety of scenes.Stas Thee Boss, an M.C. who moved to Brooklyn from the West Coast a few years ago, brought her group’s throbbing update on a ’90s indie hip-hop sound. The guitarist Yasser Tejeda led a quartet that was one-half percussion, blending rhythmic traditions from his home country, the Dominican Republic, that are rarely put together. Adam O’Farrill, a trumpeter who has lived in the borough almost his entire life, opened the festival on Thursday with a set of twisty new music from a forthcoming album with his quartet, Stranger Days.This year, operating on fewer cylinders because of the pandemic, BRIC JazzFest didn’t include a full week of workshops, film screenings and other free community programming, as it typically would. But with a smaller focus and a slightly more intimate feel, it actually widened the lens to show what’s already happening far outside its doors. More

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      Adele Is No. 1 Once Again, With ‘Easy on Me’

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      The singer’s long-awaited comeback single is No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart with 54 million streams and strong showings for downloads and radio play.After a six-year wait, new music by Adele was sure to be a hit. But how big of one, especially for a song like “Easy on Me” — a classic piano torch ballad that ignores virtually all contemporary pop standards — was unclear.Turns out it was a really big hit.The song reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart, with 54 million streams, 74,000 track downloads and 19,000 radio spins in the United States during its first full week out, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. Released at midnight on Oct. 15, British time — it landed simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic, so was available to American fans the previous evening — it broke Spotify’s record for the most streams on a single day, with 24 million clicks around the world.While Adele’s streaming numbers are big, they did not break records on the overall chart. When Drake’s single “Way 2 Sexy” came out last month, for example, it logged 67 million streams. But it had far fewer downloads than “Easy on Me,” and it was not nearly as popular on the radio; Billboard’s chart is a composite of all those measurements. (In a quirk that was a result of the unusual timing of the song’s release, it had opened on last week’s chart at No. 68, thanks to just a few hours of availability before the new period began last Friday. So officially, it climbed 67 spots to the top in its second week out.)Online, YouTube musicologists have been praising “Easy on Me” as a prime example of Adele’s vocal talent and old-fashioned songcraft, and the song’s almost total absence of percussion has led enterprising drummers to audition the beats they would add. (Good luck, guys!)As of Monday, the music video — which opens with Adele pushing a cassette tape into a car stereo and goes from wistful black-and-white to an all-the-drama color climax — has logged 112 million views on YouTube.“Easy on Me” is Adele’s fifth song to reach No. 1 on the Hot 100. Her next album, “30,” is due Nov. 19.On this week’s album charts, the Atlanta rapper Young Thug’s new release, “Punk,” opened at No. 1 with the equivalent of 90,000 sales in the United States, including 102 million streams and 12,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to MRC Data. “Punk,” which features appearances by J. Cole, Drake, Doja Cat, ASAP Rocky and others, marks Young Thug’s third time at No. 1, the last just six months ago, with the release of “Slime Language 2,” a compilation album from the rapper’s label, Young Stoner Life.Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy,” last week’s most popular album, falls to No. 2. A rerelease of “Faces,” a 2014 mixtape by the rapper Mac Miller, who died in 2018, is No. 3. Coldplay’s latest LP, “Music of the Spheres,” opens in fourth place, and “Let It Be,” the Beatles’ final studio album, originally released in 1970, is at No. 5 thanks to a deluxe reissue. More

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      Singer Ed Sheeran Tests Positive for Coronavirus

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      The singer Ed Sheeran announced Sunday on social media that he had tested positive for the coronavirus and would be canceling public appearances and working at home, in quarantine.It wasn’t immediately clear what appearances would be canceled or rescheduled, or whether Mr. Sheeran was sick with symptoms of Covid-19.The news came days before the Friday release of his new album, “=,” pronounced “equals.” The 14-song album includes his recently released single “Bad Habits.”And it comes just after Mr. Sheeran had been announced as the musical guest for “Saturday Night Live” on Nov. 6.The four-time Grammy winner took a break from work and social media in late 2019 after two years of touring in support of his best-selling album “÷” (or “divide”). More

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      Dee Pop, Drummer and Downtown New York Fixture, Dies at 65

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      Initially known for his tight and soulful playing with the celebrated post-punk band Bush Tetras, he later became an entrepreneur of avant-garde music.Dee Pop, a drummer who first found grimy rock stardom as a founding member of the underground New York band Bush Tetras during the no wave and post-punk scene of the late 1970s, and who later became an elder statesman of the city’s alternative music scene, died on Oct. 9 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 65.His brother, Tom Papadopoulos, said the cause was heart failure.Some 40 years ago, an avant-garde punk movement was rumbling from the underground scene below 14th Street. Bands like the Contortions, Liquid Liquid, D.N.A. and 8 Eyed Spy led the charge, playing nightly at venues like the Mudd Club, Tier 3 and CBGB. Amid the fray emerged the moment’s must-see band, Bush Tetras, who disbanded just four years later but left a profound impact on the scene.The female-fronted quartet, often clad in headbands and leopard-print scarves, played a danceable breed of post-punk rooted in jagged guitar hooks and funky rhythms. Key to the band’s dub-struck groove was their leather-jacketed drummer, Dee Pop, whose tight playing laced some soul into the nihilism of the no wave era.“The funk part of it,” Mr. Pop recently told The Village Sun, “became central to our sound. I guess I kind of destroyed no wave by putting a 4/4 beat to it. That’s what made the Bush Tetras a little more accessible.”The band’s other members were the vocalist Cynthia Sley, the guitarist Pat Place and the bassist Laura Kennedy (who died in 2011). The group’s “Too Many Creeps,” a punk anthem about the frustration of having to dodge being hassled by men on city streets, was released in 1980 and became a dance-floor hit. The rock critic Robert Christgau wrote at the time that it “summed up the Lower East Side circa 1980.”Thurston Moore, the singer and guitarist of Sonic Youth, said that in his 20s he admired what he described as the band’s abiding Downtown cool.“When Bush Tetras first started playing out I was extremely impressed,” Mr. Moore said in an email, “and very envious.” Bush Tetras gradually started performing beyond the underground scene, at venues like the Roseland Ballroom and Irving Plaza, and shared bills with bands including X, Bad Brains and Gang of Four. They were a supporting act for the Clash during the band’s storied 1981 run at Bond’s International Casino in Times Square, and the Clash’s drummer, Topper Headon, produced their EP, “Rituals.” But before the group could record a full album, they disbanded in 1983.“When I first left Bush Tetras in ’83, one reason was that I felt we’d gone as far as we could,” Mr. Pop told The Village Sun. “I was very dissatisfied and looked at all of my influences — my love for Béla Bartók or King Oliver or 1940s and ’50s R&B — and that wasn’t what Bush Tetras was about.”Indeed, Mr. Pop’s musicianship stood out as more than a gutsy punk-rock attitude.“He was a very versatile player, and that’s not something that can be said of many drummers who came out of the East Village post-punk scene,” Andy Schwartz, the editor and publisher of New York Rocker magazine, the scene’s bible at the time, said in a phone interview. “He could play blues, jazz, free jazz, post-punk. He never seemed to stop learning.”After Bush Tetras broke up, Mr. Pop drummed across genres.He first joined the Los Angeles punk band the Gun Club, then played with artists like Richard Lloyd and Jayne County. He was a member of Radio I-Ching, an experimental outfit that dabbled in blues and Americana and incorporated unusual stringed instruments like the lotar and the glissentar. He went on to jam with free-jazz luminaries like Roy Campbell Jr., Eddie Gale and William Parker.Mr. Pop performing with Bush Tetras at a 40th-anniversary show in New York in 2020. The band broke up in 1983 and reunited three decades later, after Mr. Pop had worked across genres with several other bands.Sherry RubelDee Pop was born Dimitri Constantin Papadopoulos on March 14, 1956, in the Forest Hills section of Queens. His father, Dino Papadopoulos, was a vascular surgeon; his mother, Gigi (Bakalis) Papadopoulos, was a homemaker and artist.She was also a jazz enthusiast and introduced him early on to drummers like Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich. While his friends at school listened to Jethro Tull, Dimitri favored John Coltrane and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. He graduated from St. Paul’s School on Long Island in 1974 and studied journalism at the University at Buffalo.In addition to his brother, he is survived by his mother; a sister, Tara Papadopoulos; a daughter, Nikki Ziolkowski; a son, Charlie Papadopoulos; and a granddaughter. Two marriages, to Elizabeth Vogdes and the musician known as Deerfrance, ended in divorce.In the late 1990s, Mr. Pop began hosting a weekly performance series that roamed the East Village showcasing live avant-garde music. He started it at a tiny coffeehouse called the Internet Cafe before moving on to CBGB, where he secured the club’s basement space on Sundays.“I wanted diversity,” he said of the series. “I wanted to challenge people.”After CBGB closed in 2006, Mr. Pop moved the series to Jimmy’s No. 43, and The Village Voice called him an “avant guardian.” In recent years he held shows at Troost, a bar near his apartment in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn.Around 2015, Bush Tetras reunited. The group recorded an EP, “Take the Fall,” in 2018, and then put out a single, “There Is a Hum,” on Third Man Records. A boxed set, “Rhythm and Paranoia: The Best of Bush Tetras,” is to be released next month on Wharf Cat Records.Mr. Pop died the night before a release party was held at the Howl! Happening arts space in the East Village. The gathering turned into a memorial.As video clips featuring Mr. Pop’s furious drumming played on a projector screen, Pat Place and Cynthia Sley stood up in front of the crowd, holding each other as they remembered their bandmate.“He lived to drum,” Ms. Sley said. “He loved the Bush Tetras.”She choked up.“Bush Tetras,” she added, “is a force that cannot be stopped.” More

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      Jay Black, Soaring Lead Singer of the Americans, Dies at 82

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      His majestic baritone was the key to hits like “Only in America,” “Come a Little Bit Closer” and his signature song, “Cara, Mia.”Jay Black, whose majestic voice on songs like “Cara, Mia” and “Only in America” made Jay and the Americans a potent force in pop music in the 1960s, died on Friday in Queens. He was 82.His son Jason Blatt said the cause was pneumonia that led to cardiac arrest. He also had dementia, his family said.Jay and the Americans began to thrive before the arrival of the Beatles in the United States in 1964. With Mr. Black as their lead singer, the group’s first major hit was “Only in America,” which peaked at No. 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1963. That was followed the next year by “Come a Little Bit Closer,” which rose to No. 3, and “Let’s Lock the Door (and Throw Away the Key),” which hit No. 11.In 1965, their version of “Some Enchanted Evening,” from the musical “South Pacific,” peaked at No. 13.Mr. Black — whose original name was David Blatt — was the second “Jay” to front the Americans. He replaced Jay Traynor in 1963, a year after the group’s first hit, “She Cried,” climbed to No. 5 on the chart.Mr. Black’s signature song was “Cara, Mia,” a romantic ballad that peaked at No. 4 in 1965. Mr. Black, who had an impressive vocal range, opened the song slowly, almost operatically, before the melody turned upbeat. Memorably, he held certain notes for long, extended beats.He said two singers had warned him that he was endangering his voice by stretching it to its limits: Frankie Valli of the Four Seasons and Frank Sinatra.“So you’re the ‘Cara, Mia’ guy?” Mr. Black recalled Sinatra saying in 1977 when they were filming “Contract on Cherry Street” (1977), a television movie in which Mr. Black had a rare acting role. In an interview with The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa., in 2010, Mr. Black said that Sinatra had advised him, “You better lower your key or you’re going to lose your voice.”That voice sustained him as a solo oldies act long after Jay and the Americans broke up in 1973. But in 2017, during one of his last performances, Mr. Black apologized to fans at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Conn., for struggling to reach his former vocal heights.“I’m not hitting any notes,” he said, explaining that he had not sung in more than a year. “I can’t sing.”David Blatt was born on Nov. 2, 1938, in Astoria, Queens, and grew up in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. His parents, Herman and Francis (Smith) Blatt, brought him up in the Orthodox Jewish tradition. David first sang publicly in the choir at Temple Beth-El.But he said he was thrown out of New Utrecht High School and three yeshivas.“I was a bad kid,” he told The Forward in 2014. “I was a wise guy. When I graduated from eighth grade, I was the class comedian. I was always a troublemaker.”Mr. Black began his singing career with two doo-wop groups, the Two Chaps and the Empires. Marty Kupersmith, who performs as Marty Sanders, had been in both groups with him before becoming one of the Americans; when Mr. Traynor left, he invited Mr. Black to replace him. Mr. Black was selling shoes at Thom McAn at the time.Although he had agreed to change his name to Jay, Mr. Blatt did not become Jay Black until he appeared on Mike Douglas’s talk show. He said that when Mr. Douglas asked him his last name, he misheard “Blatt” as “Black,” and from then on he was Jay Black.Mr. Black did not just have a stunning voice; he was also good-looking and could be as funny as a borscht belt comedian. But he was a heavy gambler, an addiction that started in high school and grew as he became more successful. He had also been a close friend of the mobster John Gotti since they were young men.Mr. Black in the mid-1960s. He was selling shoes at Thom McAn in 1963 when he was asked to replace the original “Jay” as lead singer of the Americans.Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images“I went to his trial,” Mr. Black told The New York Times in 1994. “I took some heat about it. I got death threats. But I love the family. I sang at this daughter’s wedding. I sang at his son’s wedding.”Mr. Black landed in bankruptcy court in 2005. He owed $500,000 in back taxes dating to 1993 because of his gambling addiction. Although he won a battle to continue to perform under his name the next year, he could not prevent the court from auctioning off the name “Jay and the Americans” to one of the group’s founding members, Sandy Yaguda (known professionally as Sandy Deanne).“Having an impostor group go out, that bothers me,” Mr. Black told Newsday after the court allowed him to keep his name. “I don’t know who’s going to be singing these songs. Even if someone does a great impersonation of me, it’s still not me.”Mr. Yaguda formed a new version of Jay and the Americans in late 2006, reuniting with two other original members, Mr. Sanders and Howie Kane, and adding a third “Jay”: Jay Reincke, whose given name is John.“We shared both wonderful and very contentious times,” the group said in a statement on Facebook after Mr. Black’s death, “and much like an ex-wife, we are so proud of the beautiful children we created. We’ll always remember The Voice.”In addition to his son Jason, Mr. Black is survived by two other sons, William and Beau; a daughter, Samantha; five grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; a sister, Gail Decker; and a brother, Norman Blatt. His marriages to Marsha Garbowitz, Kathy Izzo and Andi Francis ended in divorce. He died in a hospital.In February 1964, two days after the Beatles’ first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Jay and the Americans and the Righteous Brothers opened for them at their first concert in the United States, at the Washington Coliseum. When the fans loudly chanted “We want the Beatles!” while the Americans were performing, Mr. Black felt he had to react.“Jay, being who he is,” Mr. Yaguda told the Vinyl Dialogues blog in 2020, “went out and said, ‘Hey, man, I’m glad you all came out to see us tonight.’ And they all cracked up. That won them over, so they shut up and listened to us and, when we were done, gave us a big round of applause.” More