Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares104 Views

      in Music

      David Briggs, a Music Force in Alabama and Nashville, Dies at 82

      by

      A first-call keyboardist, he worked with Elvis Presley and Dolly Parton, helped make Muscle Shoals a recording hub, and had a key role in redefining the sound of country.David Briggs, a keyboardist and studio operator who played a pivotal role in establishing Muscle Shoals, Ala., as a recording hub in the 1960s before helping to revitalize mainstream country music, died on Tuesday in Nashville. He was 82.His brother, John, said his death, in a hospice facility, was caused by complications of renal cancer.Mr. Briggs contributed to not just one but two major developments in popular music. As a member of the original rhythm section at Fame Recording Studios, he helped put the northern Alabama hamlet of Muscle Shoals on the musical map. He played on landmark R&B recordings like Arthur Alexander’s “You Better Move On” (1962), Jimmy Hughes’s “Steal Away” (1964) and the Tams’ “What Kind of Fool (Do You Think I Am)” (1963), all of which were Top 40 pop singles as well as R&B hits.The rhythm section at Fame, whose members also included Norbert Putnam on bass and Jerry Carrigan on drums, honed a down-home sound that, with its languid blend of country and soul, stood apart from the R&B coming out of Motown or Stax at the time. “You Better Move On” attracted the attention of the Rolling Stones, who released their version of the song in 1964. (The Beatles had previously performed Mr. Alexander’s “Soldier of Love” on the BBC.)Mr. Briggs’s other defining moment came when he, Mr. Putnam and Mr. Carrigan moved to Nashville in late 1964 and began infusing country recordings with the understated, groove-rich variant of the Nashville Sound that became known as “countrypolitan.”“We brought along a more blues and pop-rock thing than what Nashville was doing at the time,” Mr. Putnam said in an interview.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares83 Views

      in Music

      Lorde Returns With a Nostalgic Breakup Anthem, and 9 More New Songs

      by

      Hear tracks by Haim, Young Thug, Cazzu and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Lorde, ‘What Was That’In her first solo song in four years, after her boffo duet with Charli XCX, Lorde skips back past the guitar-picking, Laurel Canyon sound of her 2021 album, “Solar Power,” to the keyboards and pumping electronics of her 2017 “Melodrama.” She sings about coming to terms with a breakup and missing past pleasures with someone — kisses, MDMA, a perfect cigarette — but she might also be speaking to her pop audience: “Since I was 17, I gave you everything.” She brings tremulous drama to the vocals, but despite the synthetic firepower available to Lorde and her fellow producers — Daniel Nigro (Olivia Rodrigo) and Jim-E Stack (Bon Iver) — the track is oddly muted and rounded-off, even where it could explode. Maybe that choice will make more sense within a full album.Haim, ‘Down to Be Wrong’Keys left behind, door locked, plane boarded — Danielle Haim sings about a decisive breakup in “Down to Be Wrong” from Haim’s next album, “I Quit,” due June 20. As the song begins, with a chunky beat and a few guitar notes at a time, perhaps there’s a hint of hesitancy in her voice. But as more instruments kick in and the miles of distance increase, her voice gets rougher and her certainty only grows. “I didn’t think it would be so easy till I left it behind,” she realizes, and her sisters’ vocal harmonies fully agree.Jeff Goldblum and the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra featuring Ariana Grande, ‘I Don’t Know Why (I Just Do)’Of course Ariana Grande can sing an old jazz standard. She glides through a song from 1931 (by Fred Ahlert and Russ Turk) that has been recorded by the Andrews Sisters, Frank Sinatra and Kate Smith. Grande is one of the guest singers on Jeff Goldblum’s album with the vintage-style Mildred Snitzer Orchestra; Goldblum, her “Wicked” co-star, is on piano, playing a modest, leisurely solo. But the track is hers — a poised, guileless, gently escalating complaint about unrequited affection: “You never seem to want more romancing / The only time you hold me is when we’re dancing.”Ashley Monroe featuring Marty Stuart, ‘The Touch’Understatement, so rare in current country production, burnishes “The Touch,” a song that promises lasting love. “As long as we’re together, it’s more than enough,” Ashley Monroe sings over Marty Stuart’s lone acoustic guitar, which is virtually the only accompaniment for the first half of the track. Harmonies blossom and more guitars (and Shelby Lynne on bass) eventually join, but the mood stays pristine.Wisin and Kapo, ‘Luna’“Luna” hits a very sweet spot between Afrobeats and reggaeton as Wisin, from Puerto Rico, and Kapo, from Colombia, harmonize on a friendly flirtation: “Just you and me in this room on a trip to the moon.” The production (by Daramola, a Nigerian musician based in Miami, and Los Legendarios, from Puerto Rico) is an ever-changing matrix of percussion sounds, electronics and vocal harmonies arriving from all directions. It’s pure ear candy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 163 Shares90 Views

      in Music

      Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Loses Request to Remove All Hotel Assault Video From Trial

      by

      It is not yet clear how much surveillance footage of the music mogul beating his former girlfriend, Casandra Ventura, in 2016 will be presented to the jury.Lawyers for Sean Combs lost their bid to keep all footage of his 2016 hotel assault on his former girlfriend, Casandra Ventura, out of his racketeering and sex trafficking trial, which starts next month.At a hearing on Friday, Judge Arun Subramanian ruled that some footage surrounding the assault could be admitted, but it is not yet clear how much of it will be shown.The music mogul’s lawyers argued that the security footage, published by CNN last year, had been sped up, and that the events depicted in it were presented out of sequence. They did not dispute that the video showed their client beating, kicking and dragging Ms. Ventura, but they asserted that the way the footage had been presented was “deceptive” and not fit to be used as evidence.The government is not seeking to admit the entire CNN broadcast into the trial, but there is other footage of the incident, including files provided by CNN through a subpoena.Prosecutors said they were working to slow down some of the CNN footage based on the defense’s concerns. They also said there are two iPhone videos taken of the original footage that partially depict the incident, and the witness who took them will be testifying at the trial.The jury selection process in the case begins on Monday, and opening statements are scheduled for May 12.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 50 Shares90 Views

      in Music

      Shostakovich, Boston Symphony Style

      by

      Over two nights at Carnegie Hall, Andris Nelsons and the orchestra reveled in the composer’s sonic riches but played with emotional reserve.“A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.” At the start of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s all-Shostakovich concert at Carnegie Hall on Thursday, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma invoked this darkly cynical statement attributed to Stalin. Addressing the capacity crowd, which included Shostakovich’s son Maxim, Ma added: “We play Shostakovich so that no death is ever just a statistic.”Historians disagree on how Shostakovich, the Soviet Union’s most famous composer, felt about the political system that alternately boosted and threatened his career. But the juxtaposition of the individual and the collective, of a singular human experience set against the mass movements of history, drives much of the drama in his symphonic music.During the orchestra’s two-night visit to New York, the Boston players, led by their music director Andris Nelsons, gave bravura performances of Shostakovich — his 11th and 15th symphonies, as well as the Cello Concerto No. 1 — that reveled in the sonic riches of this contradiction-laden music. But there was also an emotional reserve, even primness, to much of the playing that exacerbated the music’s ambivalence and left a listener with more questions than answers.That is disappointing, given that Nelsons has made Shostakovich a central mission of his tenure in Boston. Last month, he and the orchestra capped a 10-year recording marathon of all the composer’s major works with the issue of a 19-disc box set, including Grammy-winning recordings.The quality of the music-making at Carnegie Hall was never in doubt. The Boston brass section was a marvel of cohesion, whether in the reverent chorale that opened the second movement of 15th Symphony on Wednesday or in the harrowing violence of the second movement of the 11th, performed on Thursday, which depicts the brutal repression of a peaceful protest in St. Petersburg in 1905.There were radiant solos on Wednesday by the principal cellist Blaise Déjardin and tartly virtuosic ones by the concertmaster, Nathan Cole. Shostakovich’s sarcastic humor was finely rendered in the first movement of the 15th with its cartoonish quotations of Rossini’s “William Tell” overture and in the militant jauntiness of the cello concerto’s first movement, in which the orchestra heckles the frenetic, hyperactive soloist.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 200 Shares111 Views

      in Music

      U.K. Folk Bands Use Centuries-Old Ditties to Discuss Prison Abolition, Trans Rights and the Gig Economy

      by

      Several rising British bands are using centuries-old ditties to discuss hot-button issues like prison abolition, trans rights and the gig economy.Think of English folk music and maybe thoughts come to mind of villagers lamenting lost loves or sailors bellowing tales of adventure at sea.But when the rising British folk band Shovel Dance Collective performs, its members want their listeners to think of more contemporary concerns.At the band’s shows, the singer Mataio Austin Dean sometimes introduces “The Merry Golden Tree,” a song about a badly treated cabin boy, as a tale of “being shafted by your boss” — a scenario many office workers might relate to.The group also performs “I Wish There Was No Prisons” and “A Hundred Stretches Hence”: probable 19th-century ditties that Alex McKenzie, who plays accordion and flute in the group, said could be thought of as pleas for prison abolition.Many folk songs “ring very true” today, McKenzie said: “There’s a very easy thread you can draw between what ordinary people were concerned about 100, 200 years ago, or whatever, and what we’re concerned with now.”Goblin Band performing at the Ivy House, a South London pub that regularly hosts folk nights.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares132 Views

      in Music

      Review: As New York’s Opera Scene Empties, Another Rises Upstate

      by

      R.B. Schlather’s vibrant staging of Handel’s “Giulio Cesare,” playing in the Hudson Valley, is a bright spot in a bleak landscape for Baroque work.New York City Opera had recently shuttered when the director R.B. Schlather started to present Handel operas in a white-box gallery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan about 10 years ago. Those spare, surreal stagings of “Alcina” and “Orlando” felt like an elegy for City Opera’s innovative productions, and for its devotion to Handel — most famously, a landmark 1960s “Giulio Cesare” starring Beverly Sills.Now, as Schlather’s vibrant vision for “Giulio Cesare” plays at Hudson Hall in Hudson, N.Y., the landscape for opera — especially Baroque opera — is even bleaker in New York City, two hours south by train.The Metropolitan Opera, whose 4,000-seat theater isn’t a natural fit for early music, does less than it used to, and it’s become more or less the only game in town. City Opera was revived in name, but as a wan shadow of its former self. The Brooklyn Academy of Music used to be a destination for revelatory Baroque stagings by the likes of Les Arts Florissants; no more. Lincoln Center, ditto. Carnegie Hall presents Harry Bicket’s English Concert in a single Handel performance a year — on May 4 it’s, yes, “Cesare” — but unstaged, in concert.Upstate, Schlather has been unfurling a series of Handel productions with the terrific period-instrument ensemble Ruckus; “Cesare,” running through May 2, comes on the heels of “Rodelinda” at Hudson Hall in 2023. It is a precious bastion of an ever rarer breed.His directorial style in dealing with this composer’s works has gotten clearer with experience. “Alcina” and “Orlando” were always quirky, often thrilling and sometimes bewildering. But this substantially yet intelligently trimmed “Cesare” — with intermission, it’s just under three hours — is a stylishly straightforward account of a story of vengeance and lust set amid Julius Caesar’s campaign to conquer both Egypt and Cleopatra. Hudson Hall has a proscenium, but Schlather’s set pushes the action downstage in front of it with two angled walls painted iridescent black. Under Masha Tsimring’s stark, shadow-throwing lighting, those walls twinkle like a starry sky.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares73 Views

      in Music

      Yale Will Teach a Course on Bad Bunny’s Cultural Impact

      by

      With a new fall offering, Yale becomes the latest university to offer a course on the cultural impact of the Puerto Rican star.Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga are among a handful of living pop artists who have amassed enough cultural clout to result in college classes being taught about them. At 31, the global superstar Bad Bunny is about to have (at least) his third, as Yale University plans to offer a course about him this fall.The Yale course, “Bad Bunny: Musical Aesthetics and Politics,” was conceived by Albert Laguna, an associate professor of American studies and ethnicity, race and migration. The Yale Daily News was the first to report on the new course, saying that Professor Laguna was inspired to create the class by Bad Bunny’s latest album, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” which the artist has described as his “most Puerto Rican album ever.”Bad Bunny was raised in the coastal town of Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, and has risen over the past decade to become a megastar of reggaeton and Latin trap, helping launch Spanish-language music into the contemporary pop mainstream. He has since netted three chart-topping Billboard albums, headlined at Coachella and become one of the most streamed artists in the world. But his new album, which was recorded in Puerto Rico, is a soulful ode to his roots and homeland, where he was born as Benito Martínez Ocasio.The Yale course intends to use the album to study the Puerto Rican diaspora, Caribbean politics and culture, colonialism and musical genres that Bad Bunny has experimented with, such as salsa, bomba and plena.In a phone interview, Professor Laguna described an experience with Bad Bunny’s new album during a trip to New Orleans, which inspired him to design the class.“I was walking around New Orleans listening to it, connecting with the Caribbean feel of the city in neighborhoods like the French Quarter, which can feel a bit like San Juan, and I just became struck by everything this album is doing,” Professor Laguna said. “You have all these creative ways he’s addressing Puerto Rico’s colonial past and present in it and the current challenges the island faces. It’s all over the album. And he’s engaging these issues in music that’s joyful.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      Juilliard Plans $550 Million Drive to Go Tuition Free

      by

      The goal is to make the school’s programs more accessible and to ease the burden on graduates pursuing careers in the arts.The Juilliard School, one of the world’s most prestigious conservatories, plans to go tuition free for all of its students, the school announced on Thursday, and has begun a $550 million fund-raising drive to finance the effort.The tuition-free policy is meant to make Juilliard accessible to a broader range of students and to ease the burden on graduates hoping to pursue careers in the arts, where salaries can be meager. The fund-raising campaign will be one of the largest in Juilliard’s 120-year history.“If a student can get into Juilliard — and it’s hard to get into Juilliard — it can’t be about the money,” said Damian Woetzel, the school’s president. “Money can’t be the determining factor of having the opportunity to come to Juilliard, to be in New York City at Lincoln Center, and to fulfill that dream that empowers art itself.”Juilliard officials did not provide a timeline for putting the new policy in place, saying only that it would be a multiyear effort. The school said it has received about $180 million in early commitments, including a pledge of $130 million from Juilliard’s board.Woetzel, who has made affordability a priority since becoming Juilliard’s president in 2018, said the school would push “as fast as we possibly can” to make the tuition-free policy a reality. He said he was confident that Juilliard could meet its fund-raising target, though he acknowledged it would be challenging.“I am optimistic, even as I am realistic that it’s going to take a tremendous amount of energy and work,” he said. “I think this is a worthy goal, and I think people will understand that.”Juilliard’s tuition, for both undergraduates and graduate students, is $55,500 per year. More than 95 percent of students receive some financial aid. This school year, 29 percent of all Juilliard students pay no tuition. That number is expected to rise to 40 percent for the new school year in the fall.Juilliard already offers some tuition-free programs; since last fall, for example, it has not charged tuition for its graduate acting track. School officials said they now want to extend that policy across Juilliard’s music, dance and drama divisions, which collectively serve some 900 students.The cost of attending Juilliard has at times been a point of contention between administrators and students. In 2021, students led protests against a planned tuition increase, demanding that the school freeze its tuition.Juilliard would not be the only conservatory to go tuition free: The renowned Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, which is much smaller than Juilliard, with about 160 students, has not charged tuition since 1928, four years after it opened its doors. More