Music

As a founding member of the band Poco, he helped define a genre and establish the pedal steel guitar as an integral voice in West Coast rock.Rusty Young, a founding member of the popular country-rock group Poco and a key figure in establishing the pedal steel guitar as an integral voice in the West Coast rock of the late 1960s and ’70s, died on Wednesday at his home in Davisville, Mo. He was 75.His publicist, Mike Farley, said the cause was a heart attack.Mr. Young played steel guitar with Poco for more than a half-century. Along with other Los Angeles-based rock bands like the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, Poco was among the architects of the country-rock movement of the late ’60s, which incorporated traditional country instrumentation into predominantly rock arrangements. The Eagles and scores of other bands would follow in their wake.Formed in 1968, Poco originally included the singer-guitarists Jim Messina and Richie Furay — both formerly of Buffalo Springfield, another pioneering country-rock band from Los Angeles — along with Mr. Young, the drummer George Grantham and the bassist Randy Meisner, a future member of the Eagles. (Timothy B. Schmit, another future Eagle, replaced Mr. Meisner after he left the band in 1969.)Poco initially came together for a high-profile show at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, not long after Mr. Furay had invited Mr. Young to play pedal steel guitar on his composition “Kind Woman,” the closing track on Buffalo Springfield’s farewell album, “Last Time Around.” The music that Poco made generally employed twangier production and was more populist in orientation than that of Buffalo Springfield, a band that had at times gravitated toward experimentalism and obfuscation.Mr. Furay’s song “Pickin’ Up the Pieces,” the title track of Poco’s debut album in 1969, served as a statement of purpose:Well there’s just a little bit of magicIn the country music we’re singin’So let’s begin.We’re bringin’ you back down home where the folks are happySittin’ pickin’ and a-grinnin’Casually, you and meWe’ll pick up the pieces, uh-huh.Poco in 1973, clockwise from left: Paul Cotton, Mr. Young, Richie Furay, Timothy B. Schmit and George Grantham.Gijsbert Hanekroot/RedfernsAt once keening and lyrical, Mr. Young’s pedal steel work imbued the group’s music with its rustic signature sound and helped create a prominent place for the steel guitar among roots-conscious California rock bands.“I added color to Richie’s country-rock songs, and that was the whole idea, to use country-sounding instruments,” Mr. Young explained in a 2014 interview with Goldmine magazine, referring to Mr. Furay’s compositions.But Mr. Young, who also played banjo, Dobro and mandolin, was not averse to musical experimentation. “I pushed the envelope on steel guitar, playing it with a fuzz tone, because nobody was doing that,” he told Goldmine. He also played the pedal steel through a Leslie speaker, much as a Hammond B3 organist would, causing some listeners to assume he was indeed playing an organ.Mr. Young was not among Poco’s original singers or songwriters. But he emerged as one of the group’s frontmen, along with the newcomer Paul Cotton, after the departure of Mr. Messina in 1971 and Mr. Furay in 1973. Mr. Young would go on to write and sing the lead vocal on “Crazy Love,” the band’s biggest hit, which reached No. 1 on the Billboard adult contemporary chart (and No. 17 on the pop chart) in 1979.He also wrote and sang lead on “Rose of Cimarron,” another of Poco’s more enduring recordings from the ’70s, and orchestrated the 1989 reunion of the group’s original members for the album “Legacy,” which, like the 1978 platinum-selling “Legend,” yielded a pair of Top 40 singles.Norman Russell Young was born on Feb. 23, 1946, in Long Beach, Calif., one of three children of Norman John and Ruth (Stephenson) Young. His father, an electrician, and his mother, a typist, took him to country music bars, where he was captivated by the steel guitar players as a child.He grew up in Denver, where he began playing the lap steel guitar at age 6. As a teenager, he worked with local psychedelic and country bands.After moving to Los Angeles, but before joining Poco, he turned down an invitation to become a member of the Flying Burrito Brothers, which at the time featured Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman, formerly of the Byrds.Mr. Young performing at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles in 2018.Timothy Norris/WireImageAfter Mr. Cotton’s departure from Poco in 2010 over a financial dispute, Mr. Young became the group’s sole frontman. The band made its final album, “All Fired Up,” in 2013, the same year Mr. Young was inducted into the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame in St. Louis. He released his first solo album, “Waitin’ for the Sun,” in 2017, and performed sporadically with the most recent version of Poco until the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020.Mr. Young is survived by his wife of 17 years, Mary Brennan Young; a daughter, Sara; a son, Will; a sister, Corine; and three grandsons. His brother, Ron, died in 2002.Mr. Young’s emergence as a singer and songwriter in Poco in the late ’70s, after almost a decade as a supporting instrumentalist, was as opportune as it was fortuitous.“The band didn’t need another singer-songwriter when Richie and Jim were in the band,” he explained, referring to Mr. Furay and Mr. Messina, in his 2014 Goldmine interview. “My job was to play steel guitar and make the music part of it. So when my job changed, it opened up a whole lot of opportunity for me. So I liked the way things went.” More

WENN/Apega

Prior to this, Quavo seemingly dissed the ‘Icy Girl’ raptress in a snippet of an unreleased track in which the Migos rapper appeared to talk about the Bentley that he gave to Saweetie back in December 2020.

Apr 17, 2021

AceShowbiz –
Saweetie seemingly is clapping back at ex-boyfriend Quavo. The 27-year-old musician appeared to diss the Migos rapper in a new track which was included in her new EP “Pretty Summer Playlist: Season 1”. Titled “See Saw”, the song features Saweetie rapping about a man who hurts her.

“How you figure, ain’t the woman that you thought/ You was humpin’ thots, f**kin’ narcissist you just mad you got caught,” she spits her fiery bars. Meanwhile, Sacramento-based songstress Kendra Jae joins her in the hot new song, taking the vocals on the tune.

Prior to this, Quavo was accused of dissing the “Icy Girl” raptress in a snippet of an unreleased track. In the audio, which surfaced online earlier this month, the Athens-born artist rhymed, “Skrtttt Skrtttt takin back dat Bentley/ F**d dem h**s now I gotta act stingy/ new Huncho & Petro otw.” Fans believed that he was likely referring to the Bentley that he gave his then-girlfriend as a gift in December 2020.

  See also…

After the pair called it quits in February, words were Quavo took back the lavish car. “Quavo’s no dummy – the Bentley wasn’t in her name,” a source told MTO News at the time. “He’s not being petty or anything, but she’s on Twitter talking s**t. So he took back the car… He got that s**t.” However, the reports were later debunked as TMZ claimed that the 29-year-old emcee neither leased the car in his name nor ended the lease early.

While it did seem messy, the uglier part of their breakup was when a video surfaced online in March, featuring the then-couple having a physical altercation in an elevator. The “Best Friend” raptress seemingly lashed out at the “Congratulations” spitter as they grappled over a Call of Duty case.

Of the footage, Saweetie said that “this unfortunate incident happened a year ago.” She continued, “While we have reconciled since then and moved past this particular disagreement, there were simply too many other hurdles to overcome in our relationship and we have both since moved on. I kindly ask that everyone respect my privacy during this time.”

Quavo also released his own statement in which he denied physically abused the raptress. “We had an unfortunate situation almost a year ago that we both learned and moved on from,” he told TMZ. “I haven’t physically abused Saweetie and have real gratitude for what we did share overall.”

You can share this post!

Next article

Beyonce Looks Stunning in Gold Chain-Embellished White Plunging Suit For Date With Jay-Z

Related Posts More

Michelle Zauner, a musician who performs under the name Japanese Breakfast, is making her book debut with “Crying in H Mart.”After an hour of discussing her mother, the afterlife and the shamelessness sometimes required in producing art, Michelle Zauner adjusted her video camera to show her Bushwick apartment. Her coffee table, suddenly in view, was covered with Jolly Pong Cereal Snack, NongShim Shrimp Crackers, Lotte Malang Cow Milk Candies and other Asian junk food.“This whole time we’ve been talking,” she said, “you’ve been in front of these snacks.”These are her favorite selections from H Mart, the Korean-American supermarket chain that for her serves as both muse and refuge. Zauner, best known for her music project Japanese Breakfast, wrote about the “beautiful, holy place” and the death of her mother, Chongmi, in a 2018 essay for The New Yorker, “Crying in H Mart,” which led to a memoir by the same name that Knopf is publishing on Tuesday.In the essay, which is the first chapter of her book, she relayed her grief, her appetite and her fear that, after losing Chongmi to cancer in 2014, “am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?” The rest of the memoir explores her identity as a biracial Asian-American, the bonds that food can forge and her efforts to understand and remember her mother.Zauner at home in Brooklyn with a painting by her mother.Nathan Bajar for The New York TimesZauner’s parents met in Seoul in the early 1980s, when her father, Joel, moved there from the United States to sell cars to the American and Canadian military. Chongmi was working at the hotel where he stayed. They married after three months of dating and traveled through Japan, Germany and South Korea again before landing in Eugene, Ore., where Michelle Zauner grew up. In early drafts of the book, she said during our interview, she tried to imagine what it was like for her mother to marry so quickly, to face a language barrier with her husband, to uproot herself over and over. When she asked her father questions like “Do you remember how she was feeling?,” he answered with geographical facts and figures.As with many immigration stories, scarcity threaded its way through a lot of what Zauner found while writing the book: In their family, her father was so focused on providing that he couldn’t give her the emotional support she sought, while her mother viewed identity crises almost as a waste of energy. “I feel like she’d be moved by parts of the book,” Zauner said, “but I think there are parts she’d think, ‘I don’t know why you had to go on about this for the whole book when you’re just like an American kid.’”Zauner, 32, writes about their volatile relationship, contrasting her mother’s poised restraint with her need to express herself, her sense of urgency that “no one could possibly understand what I went through and I needed everyone to know.”After graduating from Bryn Mawr, she threw herself into the Philadelphia rock band Little Big League in 2011 before striking out on her own as Japanese Breakfast. Her first two solo albums, like her memoir, focused on grief: “Psychopomp,” in 2016, and “Soft Sounds From Another Planet,” in 2017. Her next one, “Jubilee,” is scheduled for release in June, and it is more joyful, influenced by Kate Bush, Björk and Randy Newman. In between these projects, she worked on video game soundtracks, directed music videos and crashed into the literary world, reflecting her maximalist and, yes, shameless approach to creativity.“The thing about Michelle is you just need to give her a little push in that direction — an affirmation — and suddenly she’s just flying,” said Daniel Torday, a novelist and the director of the creative writing program at Bryn Mawr, who has been a mentor to Zauner.For her the artistic process, whether it is in her music or her writing, often feels all-consuming and anxiety-producing, something she handles by working through it. “If I’m going to take the time to go in on something,” Zauner said, “I want to be terrified of it.”And there are terrifying parts she confronts when retracing the last few months of her mother’s life. It is not exactly the cancer — in the book, she describes the disease with polish, crushing Vicodin for her mother with a spoon and scattering its blue crumbs over scoops of ice cream “like narcotic sprinkles.” It is that Chongmi was dying just as their relationship was at its best, “a sort of renaissance period, where we were really getting to enjoy each other’s company and know each other as adults,” Zauner said.In 2014, she moved back home to help care for her. Chongmi died that October, two weeks after Michelle Zauner married Peter Bradley, a fellow musician. By Christmas, he joined her and her father in Eugene, navigating the first heavy moment of their new life together — “like a baptism of adulthood,” Bradley said.“Crying in H Mart” is out on April 20.She and her father haven’t been in contact for more than a year, save for an attempt at therapy over Zoom. After her mother died, “our grief couldn’t come together in this way where we could experience it together,” Zauner said. “He started wearing this big ruby in his ear and then got a big tattoo, lost 40 pounds, started dating this young woman, and it felt like kind of a second death.”In an essay for Harper’s Bazaar published earlier this month, she wrote about the pain of that experience, then searching for a way to make peace with him and his new relationship, which has since ended.Joel Zauner, in a phone interview, expressed sadness about their estrangement. He avoided reading “Crying in H Mart” for months (Michelle Zauner sent him an advance copy), but when he did, he wept throughout and was stung that he wasn’t included in the acknowledgments. The tattoo was done on the anniversary of Chongmi’s death, he said, and is of her name in Korean, with the Korean word for “sweetheart” underneath.“I’m not a perfect guy,” he said. “But I certainly deserve more than I was given in both the article and the book.”Today, Zauner feels ready to shake this period of loss and just tour, and there is still more she wants to unpack about being Korean, possibly by living there for a year. “I think there’s a big part of my sense of belonging that is missing because I don’t speak the language fluently,” she said, and she is determined to preserve the thread she has to the Korean side of her family.She became engrossed at one point with Emily Kim, who as Maangchi is known as “YouTube’s Korean Julia Child,” finding peace in the way she peeled Korean pears — “the Korean way,” Kim wrote in an email — using the knife to remove the skin in one long strip, the way Chongmi used to. In 2019, the two starred in a Vice video that explored the effects of migration on cuisine, and on Zauner’s 30th birthday, Kim made her dinner. “She’s a real Korean daughter,” Kim said.Zauner feels wary, however, about her work in any conjunction with the anti-Asian attacks in the past year. “I’m fearful of using this tragedy to try and promote anything I’ve created,” she said over email the day after the Atlanta shootings. “It’s a little hard to encapsulate my feelings on such a heavy thing with a few words.”Her belief system these days has become more nuanced than before. She is an atheist, “but then there has to be some smudging of the edges for me,” she said. “In some ways it is impossible for me to not feel like my mother was looking out for me because of the serendipitous, fateful way that things happened in my life.”Almost a year ago, when she finished writing “Crying in H Mart,” she posted a photo of herself in her living room with her eyes closed and a peaceful smile, holding the book’s draft in her hands, with the caption “Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.”There are instances when even though it goes against everything you believe, it’s important, Zauner said, to create an ambiguous space for things.“Like when I leave flowers on her grave, I know technically what I am doing is I’m leaving the flowers for myself. I’m creating a ritual and commemorating her with my time by doing this. But that is not enough for me to feel OK about it,” she said. “I need to kind of believe that she knows that they’re there.”Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. More

Instagram/WENN

The track titled ‘Been to War’ from Forest Whitaker-starring series ‘Godfather of Harlem’ has been made available for purchase, a week following the rapper’s tragic passing.

Apr 17, 2021

AceShowbiz –
A posthumous DMX song has been released featuring Swizz Beatz and French Montana.

The hip-hop legend tragically passed last Friday (09Apr21), following a stint in an intensive care unit after suffering a heart attack at his home on 2 April.

Marking one week since his passing, a new track, “Been to War”, from the Forest Whitaker-starring series “Godfather of Harlem”, has dropped.

Swizz had said in a touching tribute to his late friend upon hearing the news of his death, “My brother would take care of everybody before he would take care of himself.”

  See also…

“I’ve never seen a human like him – the closest thing to a prophet… there’s only one DMX.”

In a statement, the family of the “Party Up” hitmaker, real name Earl Simmons, said, “We are deeply saddened to announce today that our loved one, DMX, birth name of Earl Simmons, passed away at 50 years old at White Plains Hospital with his family by his side after being placed on life support for the past few days.”

“Earl was a warrior who fought till the very end. He loved his family with all of his heart and we cherish the times we spent with him.”

“Earl’s music inspired countless fans across the world and his iconic legacy will live on forever,” they added. “We appreciate all of the love and support during this incredibly difficult time.”

Before DMX died, his collaboration with Ian Paice and Steve Howe was also released. Titled “X Moves”, the rock/hip-hop hybrid also featured Parliament-Funkadelic star Bootsy Collins.

You can share this post!

Next article

Bad Bunny Leads 2021 Latin AMAs With Five Prizes

Related Posts More

Late last month, the TikTok influencer Addison Rae went on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and casually performed a suite of recent viral dance routines in a comedic skit. Critics reacted with cries of appropriation — the dances’ creators, many of them Black, were not credited — and with dismissals of Rae’s dancing ability.What the producers of the skit failed to acknowledge is how dance credits have become integral to TikTok, as they have been on apps where dance was previously popular, like Instagram and Dubsmash. Influencers like Rae and Charli D’Amelio might be the most well-known dancers on TikTok, but they are vessels for dances created by a range of others, from professional choreographers looking for a jolt of virality to teenagers working out new moves in their basement.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the ways dance has been central to the spread of TikTok, the relationship between Black choreographers and white influencers and a pocket history of dance credits on social media.GuestTaylor Lorenz, The New York Times technology reporter More

Facebook

The ‘YHLQMDLG’ star dominates the winners list of the Latin American Music Awards with five gongs including the coveted Artist of the Year and Album of the Year.

Apr 17, 2021

AceShowbiz –
Bad Bunny was the big winner at the Latin American Music Awards on Thursday night (15Apr21), picking up five trophies, including Artist of the Year and Album of the Year for “YHLQMDLG”.

He was also named Favorite Male Artist while Karol G and Nicki Minaj took home three awards apiece for their collaboration “Tusa”. There were also wins for Cardi B, Dua Lipa, Selena Gomez, and a double for Shakira.

  See also…

The Florida-based ceremony featured show-stopping performances from Camilo and Los Dos Carnales and Ozuna, who also accepted the Extraordinary Evolution Award.

The full list of winners is:

You can share this post!

Next article

‘Peaky Blinders’ Creator Leads Tributes to Late Helen McCrory

Related Posts More

Hear tracks by Andra Day, London Grammar, José González and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at [email protected] and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Paul McCartney featuring Phoebe Bridgers, ‘Seize the Day’Don’t take Paul McCartney’s enduring gifts — natural melody, succinctly surprising lyrics, sly chord progressions, tidy arrangements — for granted. Other songwriters don’t. Lest anyone has, the 78-year-old Sir Paul enlisted younger admirers (Beck, St. Vincent, Blood Orange, Anderson .Paak, Josh Homme, Dominic Fike) to rework the songs from his 2020 solo-in-the-studio album, “McCartney III,” as the new “McCartney III Imagined.” Phoebe Bridgers took on “Seize the Day,” a manifesto of unironic good intentions: “I’m OK with a sunny day when the world deserves to be bright.” She brings her own spirit of hushed discovery to the song, keeping McCartney’s march tempo but toning down his electric guitars. She ends her version with church bells, like a blessing. JON PARELESLucy Dacus, ‘Hot & Heavy’Since joining forces as boygenius, two-thirds of the band, Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker, have released searing solo albums that took their already strong songwriting to the next level. Now, it appears to be Lucy Dacus’s turn. “Hot & Heavy” begins in a synthesized glow, for a moment seeming like it might be a continuation of the stark sound she conjured on the recently released “Thumbs.” But it doesn’t take long for “Hot & Heavy” to kick into a gallop, coming alive with chiming guitars and gleaming pop-rock flourishes that recall “Full Moon Fever”-era Tom Petty. “You used to be so sweet,” Dacus sings on this tale of stinging nostalgia, “Now you’re a firecracker on a crowded street.” LINDSAY ZOLADZFiona Apple, ‘Love More’Ten years ago, Sharon Van Etten released her first great album, “Epic,” an enduringly wrenching account of a troubled relationship’s dissolution. To commemorate its anniversary, an impressive and eclectic array of artists — Lucinda Williams, Courtney Barnett, Shamir — contributed to a covers collection called “Epic Ten.” The ultimate co-sign, though, comes from the indomitable Fiona Apple, who offers her own interpretation of the album’s beautiful closing track, “Love More.” Van Etten’s version was a sparsely poignant dirge, buoyed by gentle waves of harmonium chords. Apple, instead, anchors hers to an almost chant-like rhythm accompanied by playfully layered backing vocal runs — though her delivery of the song’s verses provides the smoldering intensity these lyrics call for. “Chained to the wall of our room,” goes the opening line. Leave it to Fiona to fetch the bolt cutters. ZOLADZAndra Day, ‘Phone Dies’“We can feel these vibes until my phone dies,” Andra Day offers, casually pitting the promise of romance against limited battery life. In Anderson .Paak’s blithe, tricky production, a frisky Brazilian beat carries Day’s multitracked vocals through a maze of chromatic chords that gives the illusion of climbing higher and higher, all the way to a sudden, giggly end. PARELESTirzah, ‘Send Me’It’s been three years since the London artist and Mica Levi collaborator Tirzah released her hypnotic debut album “Devotion,” but the new single “Send Me” transports the listener right back to that singularly chill head space. “Send Me” is built from simple materials — a repeated guitar lick, a hi-hat loop and Tirzah’s sultry, Sade-like vocals — but combined they somehow create a dense, enveloping atmosphere. “Let me heal and now I’m sure, now I’m sure,” Tirzah sings, her words seeming to turn to vapor on the exhales. It’s a whole vibe. ZOLADZSaweetie and Drakeo the Ruler, ‘Risky’It’s only April, but Saweetie is already wishing you a very pretty summer. Her new single “Risky” is at once effortless and exuberant, patiently waiting for whenever the weather permits you to roll the windows down. Drakeo the Ruler’s murmuring flow provides a perfect counterpoint to Saweetie’s bombast (“All this ice drippin’ on my body like a runny nose”), while a minimalist beat provides plenty of space for her personality to shine like a freshly painted ride. ZOLADZMick Jagger with Dave Grohl, ‘Eazy Sleazy’For Mick Jagger, quarantine fatigue has curdled into sarcastic exasperation. “Eazy Sleazy” is a late-pandemic rant, a stomping, mocking checklist of sloppy rhymes and coronavirus-year phenomena, from “Cancel all the tours/football’s fake applause” to “TikTok stupid dance” to “Way too much TV” to wacky conspiracy theories. Dave Grohl, an accomplished student of classic rock, reconstituted the full Rolling Stones sound behind Jagger’s rhythm guitar, and every few lines there’s a scream tossed into the mix. The chorus looks forward to a “freaky” reopening, when “It’ll only be a memory you’re trying to remember to forget”; this song will be a throwaway souvenir. PARELESLondon Grammar, ‘Lord It’s a Feeling’Hannah Reid, London Grammar’s singer, plays a not-so-impartial observer in “Lord It’s a Feeling.” She stacks up the misdeeds of a friend’s callous, cheating lover — “I saw the way you laughed behind her back” — before revealing, “I can admit that I have been right here myself.” A decorous string orchestra backs her at first, as she sings in her purest tones. But when her own stake becomes clear, a beat kicks in, her voice hardens and the observer becomes the accuser. PARELESJosé González, ‘Visions’It’s a small world. José González, born in Sweden to Argentine parents, carries on a British tradition of folky, meditative singer-songwriters. “Visions,” built from vocal harmonies and acoustic-guitar picking, takes an eternal perspective on “sentient beings” who should “look at the magic of reality/while accepting the honesty that we can’t know for sure what’s next.” Accompanied by his guitar drone, distant electronics and bird song, he notes, as a kind of mantra, “We are here together.” PARELESLea Bertucci, ‘An Arc of the Horizon’Place is central to the music of Lea Bertucci, a multi-instrumentalist and sound artist whose recordings often spring from questions about how physical environments express themselves through sound. But her work isn’t meant to just document the sonic qualities of a place; through a process of layering and abstraction, Bertucci gives us something closer to the residue of an experience or a vanished memory. On her new self-released album, “A Visible Length of Light,” ambient recordings she captured in New York, Rio de Janeiro, California and Nebraska haunt tracks featuring lightly droning organ, bass clarinet, wood flute and saxophone. It’s not clear where the sounds on “An Arc of the Horizon” were captured, but instead the music — spatial more than melodic — becomes an environment of its own. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOWadada Leo Smith, Douglas R. Ewart and Mike Reed, ‘Super Moon Rising’Rustle, resonance and attentive listening are the coins of the realm when the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, the multi-reedist Douglas R. Ewart and the drummer Mike Reed come together. They’ve performed as a trio only rarely, but all three are improvisers and organizers with roots on the Chicago avant-garde and histories of involvement in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. “Super Moon Rising” is the centerpiece of their new album, “Sun Beans of Shimmering Light,” which connects to a long tradition of recordings by AACM-affiliated musicians that treat sparse and spacious free improvising as a style unto itself. RUSSONELLOSpirit of the Beehive, ‘Rapid & Complete Recovery’“Rapid & Complete Recovery” passes, briefly, as one of the milder, more approachable songs in Spirit of the Beehive’s catalog of dense, overloaded, compulsively morphing and often nerve-racking songs. It’s from the Philadelphia band’s new album, “Entertainment, Death,” and with its jazz-tinged opening bass vamp and acoustic-guitar syncopations it could pass for Laurel Canyon pop-folk — if not for its nagging high synthesizer tones, its cranked-up drums, its swerve into spoken words and the way instruments and vocals echo and melt at the end. “No limitations, you know what I’m after,” Zack Schwartz and Rivka Ravede calmly sing, perhaps as a partial explanation. PARELES More

In a coup, the venerable company has hired as its next music director the rare classical artist to have crossed into pop-culture celebrity.When Alexander Neef was named the next director of the mighty Paris Opera in 2019, he did not have a particular candidate in mind to succeed the company’s music director, who was leaving after a decade. “I felt I should consult with the musicians,” Neef said by phone recently, “and see who for them, what for them, how for them the future looked like.”One surprising name kept coming up in those conversations: the superstar conductor Gustavo Dudamel, the musical leader of the Los Angeles Philharmonic since 2009 and the rare classical artist to have crossed into pop-culture celebrity.He had made his Paris debut in 2017, with “La Bohème,” and hit it off. “I felt this connection with the house, the musicians, the choir, with the whole team,” Dudamel recalled in an interview on Thursday at the company’s ornate Palais Garnier theater. “I was here for one month and a half and I was feeling like I was at home.”Yet it still seemed an unlikely marriage, given Dudamel’s packed schedule and the fact that, even if that “Bohème” was a success, it had still been his only engagement with the company. Indeed, while he has dipped his toe into the operatic repertory in Los Angeles, at the Metropolitan Opera and elsewhere, he has been largely known as a symphonic conductor.“But I thought,” Neef recalled, “why not ask?”That ask eventually resulted in a coup for the company, which announced on Friday morning that Dudamel would be its next music director, starting in August for an initial term of six years, overlapping for much of that period with the Los Angeles position, where his current contract runs through the 2025-26 season.The appointment marks a turning point in the heady career of an artist who made his name as a wunderkind with orchestras in North and South America and is now, at 40, taking the reins at one of Europe’s most venerable opera companies, founded in 1669 as the Académie d’Opéra by Louis XIV.Dudamel said he had not required much convincing when Neef offered him the permanent position.“It’s a big and beautiful responsibility,” he said.Dudamel in the Palais Garnier, one of the Paris Opera’s theaters, on April 15. “I have been developing my opera career in the way that I wanted to,” Dudamel said. “I took my time.”Julien MignotDudamel — who was born in Venezuela in 1981 and was trained there by El Sistema, the free government-subsidized program that teaches music to children, including some in its poorest areas — occupies a unique position in music. He is sought by leading orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic and Vienna Philharmonic. But he also appeared in a Super Bowl halftime show; was the classical icon Trollzart in the animated film “Trolls World Tour”; is conductor of the score for Steven Spielberg’s upcoming film version of “West Side Story”; and inspired a messy-haired main character in the Amazon series “Mozart in the Jungle.” In 2019 he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.His renown will surely be a shot in the arm for the Paris Opera, which like other arts organizations is warily eyeing the need to reintroduce itself to its core audience after the long closures of the pandemic, at the same time as it aims to capture new operagoers. Handsomely subsidized by the French government, the company has expanded its audience in recent years, but still faces the pressure of roiling debates about racial representation and the relevance of expensive-to-produce classical art forms.“Our future is not validated by our history,” Neef said. “This Covid crisis has put us in a pressure cooker and reinforced and amplified the need to give people real artistic reasons for why we need to exist, why this has value.”He added that Dudamel was “already a very credible ambassador for that. What he’s done successfully is, he’s broken down barriers.”It is no longer the norm — especially outside German-speaking countries — for opera music directors to start as pianists and singer coaches and work their way up through the ranks, as Philippe Jordan, 46, Dudamel’s predecessor in Paris, did. While Dudamel lacks that upbringing in the nuances and logistical complexities of the art form, and his operatic appearances have been sporadic, he is not unknown at major houses. He made his Teatro alla Scala debut in 2006, when he was in his mid-20s, and had his first appearance with the Berlin State Opera the following year. He first conducted at the Vienna State Opera in 2016, and at the Met in 2018, with Verdi’s “Otello”; on Wednesday he finished a run of “Otello” in Barcelona.“I have been developing my opera career in the way that I wanted to do, and I feel very good about that,” he said. “I took my time.”Neef pointed out that Yannick Nézet-Séguin, 46, the Met’s music director since 2018, did not start there with an enormous repertory, either. “The question is not about quantity,” Neef said. “And these things are a little bit deceptive: When you look at the list of operas Gustavo has conducted, it’s from Mozart to John Adams. He’s been conducting opera as long as he’s been conducting symphonic music.”Asked which works he is most looking forward to tackling, Dudamel replied, “Everything.” In Paris this fall he is scheduled to conduct Puccini’s “Turandot” and Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.” In addition to mainstream repertory, he said he hoped to work with living composers from Europe as well as North and South America, including Adams, Thomas Adès and Gabriela Ortiz.He added that he is keen to conduct the Paris Opera Ballet, the company’s in-house dance company. Dudamel said his mentor, José Antonio Abreu, the founder of El Sistema, often took him to the ballet to learn about conducting.“It was part of my education,” he said. “Even for my way of seeing the music.”His appointment will involve significant travel between Paris and Los Angeles, but his commitment to the Philharmonic is one Dudamel said he has no intention of curtailing. “I will share my time between the two families,” he said.Chad Smith, the chief executive of the Philharmonic, said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, “With Paris as a place where Dudamel can delve more deeply into opera, it creates a perfect balance with his orchestral home in L.A.”What he will cut back on is guest conducting, a process he said he started a few years ago in order to shift his focus to longer-term projects.“The way we’re going to organize it is the way he works in L.A., too,” Neef said. “Long periods that hang together, rather than a lot of travel.”Neef added that Dudamel would be a charismatic and visible link between the company’s main stage productions and its educational endeavors. In Los Angeles, Dudamel has contributed to the Philharmonic’s robust educational outreach, especially the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, a program inspired by El Sistema that was founded in 2007.He also continues to also hold the post of music director of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, but after he criticized the Venezuelan government in 2017, the country canceled his planned international tour with that ensemble. While he has not been able to perform with the Simón Bolívar since then, he still works with it remotely and has sometimes met outside Venezuela with groups of its players; during the pandemic he has had sessions with them over Zoom.His appointment comes two months after the release of a report on discrimination and diversity at the Paris Opera. The report focused on changes to the repertory, school admissions process and racial and ethnic makeup of the ballet company. At the same time, opera companies around the world have been called on to make their staffs, artists and productions more representative.Dudamel said in the interview that he would press for that conversation to continue at the Paris Opera over the long term. “Sometimes we pretend to do changes,” he said, snapping his fingers to indicate overly fast decisions. “In that way, you cannot develop something that is strong for the future.”Neef said that alongside Ching-Lien Wu, the company’s recently appointed (and first female) chorus master, Dudamel’s hiring was part of an effort to change the face of the company’s executive ranks and how it thinks about diversity and equity.“It’s already what he lives and who he has been in L.A. and other places,” Neef said. “I think there’s great opportunity to be gained from that experience for us, to have someone with that experience at the table at the highest level.”The next step is for Dudamel to learn French. “I’m starting!” he said, before adding, “I’m very bad with languages.”One carrot will be the opportunity to finally read one of his favorite books — Rousseau’s “Confessions,” which he discovered as a teenager and brings with him everywhere — in the original. “I will try,” Dudamel said, smiling. More