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      Peter G. Davis, Music Critic of Wide Knowledge and Wit, Dies at 84

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPeter G. Davis, Music Critic of Wide Knowledge and Wit, Dies at 84He wrote with passion and bite about classical music, and especially opera, over a 50-year career at The Times and New York magazine.Peter G. Davis in 1990 on a visit to Sissinghurst Castle Garden in England. As a student years earlier he toured  Europe’s summer music festivals.Credit…Scott ParrisFeb. 19, 2021, 2:43 p.m. ETPeter G. Davis, who for over 30 years held sway as one of America’s leading classical music critics with crisp, witty prose and an encyclopedic memory of countless performances and performers, died on Feb. 13. He was 84.His death was confirmed by his husband, Scott Parris.First as a critic at The New York Times and later at New York magazine, Mr. Davis wrote precise, sharply opinionated reviews of all forms of classical music, though his great love was opera and the voice, an attachment he developed in his early teens.He presided over the field during boon years in New York in the 1960s and ’70s, when performances were plentiful and tickets relatively cheap, and when the ups and downs of a performer’s career provided fodder for cocktail parties and after-concert dinners, not to mention the notebooks of writers like Mr. Davis, who often delivered five or more reviews a week.He wrote those reviews with a knowing, deadpan, at times world-weary tone. During a 1976 concert by the Russian violinist Vladimir Spivakov, an activist protesting the treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union threw a paint bomb at the stage, splattering Mr. Spivakov and his accompanist. Mr. Davis wrote, “Terrorists must be extremely insensitive to music, for tossing paint at a violinist playing Bach’s ‘Chaconne’ is simply poor timing.”He maintained faith in the traditions of classical music not for the sake of perpetuating the past but for their intrinsic power, and he looked askance at those who tried to update them just to be trendy.In a 1977 review of the Bronx Opera’s staging of “Fra Diavolo,” by the 19th-century French composer Daniel Francois Auber, he decried what he saw as a “refusal to believe in the piece by treating it as an embarrassment, a work that needs a maximum of directorial gimmicks if the audience is to remain interested.”He could be equally dismissive of new music and composers who he thought were overhyped. The minimalist composer Philip Glass and Beverly Sills (early on “a dependable, hard-working but not especially remarkable soprano” who became a star, he felt, only after her talents had peaked) were regular targets.In a review of a performance of Mr. Glass’s work at Carnegie Hall in 2002, he wrote, “It was pretty much business as usual: the same simple-minded syncopations and jigging ostinatos, the same inane little tunes on their way to nowhere, the same clumsily managed orchestral climaxes.”Which is not to say that Mr. Davis was a reactionary — he championed young composers and upstart regional opera companies. His great strength as a critic was his pragmatism, his commitment to assess the performance in front of him on its own terms while casting a skeptical eye at gimmickry.“He was a connoisseur of vocal music of unimpeachable authority,” said Justin Davidson, a former classical music critic at Newsday who now writes about classical music and architecture for New York magazine. “He had a sense that the things he cared about mattered, that they were not niche, not just entertainment, but that they cut to the heart of what American culture was.”Peter Graffam Davis was born on March 3, 1936, in Concord, Mass., outside Boston, and grew up in nearby Lincoln. His father, E. Russell Davis, was a vice president at the Bank of Boston. His mother, Susan (Graffam) Davis, was a homemaker.Mr. Parris, whom he married in 2009, is his only immediate survivor.Mr. Davis fell in love with opera as a teenager, building a record collection at home and attending performances in Boston. During the months before his junior year at Harvard, he took a tour of Europe’s summer music festivals — Strauss in Munich, Mozart in Salzburg, Wagner in Bayreuth.He encountered European opera at a hinge point. It was still defined by longstanding traditions and had yet to fully emerge from the destruction of World War II, but poking out of the wreckage was a new generation of performers: the French soprano Régine Crespin, the Austrian soprano Leonie Rysanek, the Italian tenors Franco Corelli and Giuseppe di Stefano. Mr. Davis got to see them up close.Mr. Davis’s 1997 book is exhaustive, exhilarating and often withering history of opera in America.He graduated from Harvard in 1958 with a bachelor’s degree in music. After spending a year at a conservatory in Stuttgart, Germany, he moved to New York to complete a master’s degree in composition at Columbia University.Mr. Davis wrote a number of musical works of his own in the early 1960s, including an opera, “Zoe,” and a pair of Gilbert and Sullivan-esque operettas. But he decided that his future lay not in writing music but in writing about it. He became the classical music editor for both High Fidelity and Musical America magazines, as well as the New York music correspondent for The Times of London.He began writing freelance articles for The New York Times in 1967, and in 1974 was hired as the Sunday music editor, a job that allowed him to supplement his near-daily output of reviews — whether of recordings, concerts or innumerable debut recitals — with articles he commissioned from other writers. “He had a superb memory,” said Alex Ross, the classical music critic for The New Yorker. “Anything you threw at him, he was able to speak about precisely and intelligently.”Mr. Davis moved to New York magazine in 1981. There he could pick and choose his reviews as well as occasionally stand back to survey the classical music landscape.Increasingly, he didn’t like what he saw.As early as 1980, Mr. Davis was lamenting the future of opera singing, blaming an emphasis on “pleasing appearance and facile adaptability” over talent and hard work and a star system that pushed promising but immature vocalists past their physical limits.The diminished position of classical music in American culture that he documented did not spare critics, and in 2007 New York magazine let him go. He went back to freelancing for The Times and wrote regularly for Opera News and Musical America.For all his thousands of reviews, Mr. Davis seemed most proud of his book “The American Opera Singer” (1997), an exhaustive, exhilarating and often withering history in which he praised the versatility of contemporary American performers while taking many of them to task for being superficial workhorses.“I can’t think of a music critic who cares more deeply about the state of opera in America,” the critic Terry Teachout wrote in his review of the book for The Times. “Anyone who wants to know what is wrong with American singing will find the answers here.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Rupert Neve, the Father of Modern Studio Recording, Dies at 94

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRupert Neve, the Father of Modern Studio Recording, Dies at 94His equipment became the industry standard and influenced the sound of groups like Nirvana, Fleetwood Mac, the Grateful Dead, Santana, Chicago and the Who.Rupert Neve in 2009 at a mixing console at the Magic Shop recording studio in New York City. His revolutionary Neve 8028 console (not shown here) had a huge impact on the music industry.Credit…Joshua ThomasFeb. 19, 2021, 2:43 p.m. ETWhen the Seattle grunge band Nirvana recorded their breakthrough album, “Nevermind,” at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, Calif., in 1991, they used a massive mixing console created by a British engineer named Rupert Neve.The Neve 8028 console had by then become a studio staple, hailed by many as the most superior console of its kind in its manipulating and combining instrumental and vocal signals and as responsible in great part for the audio quality of albums by groups like Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd.For Dave Grohl, Nirvana’s drummer and later the leader of Foo Fighters, the console “was like the coolest toy in the world,” he told NPR in 2013 when his documentary film about the California studio, “Sound City,” was released. “And what you get when you record on a Neve desk is this really big, warm representation of whatever comes into it.”He added, “What’s going to come out the other end is this bigger, better version of you.”In 2011, long after forming Foo Fighters, Mr. Grohl purchased the console as Sound City was closing, took it to his garage and used it to record the band’s album “Wasting Light.”Mr. Neve’s innovative, largely analog equipment has been used to record pop, rock, jazz and rap — genres distinct from his preferred one: English cathedral music, with its organs and choirs.After his death last Friday, the influential hip-hop engineer Gimel Keaton, known as Young Guru, tweeted: “Please understand that this man was one of a kind. There is nothing close to him in the engineering world. RIP to the KING!!!”Mr. Neve (pronounced Neeve) died in a hospice facility in San Marcos, Tex., near his home in Wimberley, a Hill Country town that he and his wife, Evelyn, moved to in 1994. He was 94. The causes were pneumonia and heart failure, according to his company, Rupert Neve Designs.Arthur Rupert Neve was born on July 31, 1926, in Newton Abbott, in southwestern England. He spent most of his childhood near Buenos Aires, where his parents, Arthur Osmond and Doris (Dence) Neve, were missionaries with the British and Foreign Bible Society.Rupert developed a facility with technology as a boy taking apart and repairing shortwave radios. It accelerated during World War II, when he served in the Royal Corps of Signals, which gave communications support to the British Army.After the war, working out of an old U.S. Army ambulance, he started a business recording, on 78 r.p.m. acetate discs, brass bands and choirs as well as public addresses, like those by Winston Churchill and Queen Elizabeth II when she was a princess.His future father-in-law was unimpressed. When Mr. Neve spoke to him about marrying his daughter, Evelyn Collier, the older man couldn’t imagine recording as a way of making a living.“He’d never heard of it,” Mr. Neve told Tape Op, a recording magazine, in 2001. “To him a recorder was a gentleman who sat in a courtroom and wrote down the proceedings.”During the 1950s, Mr. Neve found work at a company that designed and manufactured transformers. He also started his own business making hi-fi equipment.With his expanding knowledge of electronics, he recognized that mixing consoles performed better with transistors than with vacuum tubes, which were cumbersome and required very high voltage.He delivered his first custom-made transistor console to Phillips Studios in London in 1964, and its success led to thousands more orders over the years — bought by, among others, Abbey Road Studios in London (in the post-Beatles years), the Power Station in Manhattan and the AIR Studios, both in London and on the Caribbean island of Montserrat, founded by George Martin, the Beatles’ producer.The singer-songwriter Billy Crockett bought a Neve console about eight years ago for his Blue Rock Artist Ranch & Studio, which is also in Wimberley. He is quick to extol its “warm, open, transparent” sound.“It’s all about his transformers,” he said in a phone interview, referring to the components that Mr. Neve designed that connect microphone signals to the console and the console to a recording medium like vinyl or a CD. “They provide something intangible that makes the mix fit together. So when people get poetic about analog, it’s how the sound comes through the transformers.”Mr. Neve received a Technical Grammy Award in 1997. In a 2014 interview with the Recording Academy, which sponsors the Grammys, he said he was pleased with the loyalty that his consoles had fostered.Mr. Neve in 2013 with the musician Dave Grohl at a screening of “Sound City,” Mr. Grohl’s documentary film about the famed recording studio in Los Angeles. The film was being shown at the SXSW Music, Film + Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. Mr. Neve’s pioneering mixing console was at the heart of Sound City.Credit…Michael Buckner/Getty Images for SXSW“I’m proudest of the fact that people are still using designs of mine which started many years ago and which, in many ways, have not been superseded since,” he said. “Some of those old consoles are really hard to beat in terms of both recording quality and the effects that people will get when they make recordings.”In addition to his wife, Mr. Neve is survived by his daughters, Evelyn Neve, who is known as Mary, and Ann Yates; his sons, David, John and Stephen; nine grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.Mr. Neve was more aware of the engineers who handled his consoles than of the singers and bands whose albums benefited from his audio wizardry.That preference was borne out when rock stars approached him after the screening of Mr. Grohl’s “Sound City” documentary at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin in 2013.“They all wanted to take pictures with him,” Josh Thomas, the general manager of Rupert Neve Designs, said in a phone interview. “And after each picture, he asked me, ‘Why is he important?’”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Bad Bunny Tops 2021 Premio Lo Nuestro Awards With Seven Prizes

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      WENN

      The ‘YHLQMDLG’ star dominates this year’s Premio Lo Nuestro Awards by taking home a total of seven gongs including Artist of the Year and Album of the Year.

      Feb 20, 2021
      AceShowbiz – Bad Bunny led the winners at the 2021 Premio Lo Nuestro Awards on Thursday night (18Feb21), taking home all seven gongs he had been nominated for.
      The Puerto Rican rapper was named Artist of the Year, as well as winning the Album of the Year prize, and awards for Urban – Male Artist of the Year, Urban – Song of the Year, Urban – Album of the Year, and Urban/Trap – Song of the Year for “Vete”.
      Maluma had led the pack going into the awards, with 14 nominations, but only emerged with two gongs – for Song of the Year and Pop/Ballad – Song of the Year for “ADMV”.

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      Camilo, who had received 10 nominations, was presented with four gongs – including for New Artist Male and Pop – Artist of the Year, as well as Pop – Album of the Year for his record “Por Primera Vez”.
      Other notable winners at the ceremony, which was conducted in Miami, Florida, included Nicki Minaj, Travis Scott, and Dua Lipa, who all earned their first Premio Lo Nuestro awards – Nicki for “Tusa” with Karol G, Travis for Video of the Year for “TKN” with Rosalia, and Dua for ‘Crossover’ Collaboration of the Year for “Un Dia”, with Bad Bunny, J Balvin, and Tainy.
      The full list of winners at the 2021 Premio Lo Nuestro Awards is as follows:
      Premio Lo Nuestro Artist of the Year – Bad Bunny
      Album of the Year – “YHLQMDLG”, Bad Bunny
      Song of the Year – “Tusa”, Karol G and Nicki Minaj
      New Artist Female – Nicki Nicole
      New Artist Male – Camilo
      Remix of the Year – “La Jeepeta”, Nio Garcia, Anuel, Myke Towers, Brray and Juanka
      ‘Crossover’ Collaboration of the Year – “Un Dia (One Day) “, J Balvin, Dua Lipa, Bad Bunny ft. Tainy
      Video of the Year – “TKN”, Rosalia and Travis Scott
      Pop – Artist of the Year – Camilo
      Pop – Song of the Year – “ADMV”, Maluma
      Pop – Collaboration of the Year – “Si Me Dices Que Si”, Reik, Farruko and Camilo
      Pop – Group or Duo of the Year – CNCO
      Pop – Album of the Year – “Por Primera Vez”, Camilo
      Pop/Ballad – Song of the Year – “ADMV”, Maluma
      Urban – Female Artist of the Year – Karol G
      Urban – Male Artist of the Year – Bad Bunny
      Urban – Song of the Year – “La Dificil”, Bad Bunny
      Urban – Collaboration of the Year – “Tusa”, Karol G and Nicki Minaj
      Urban – Album of the Year – “YHLQMDLG”, Bad Bunny
      Urban/Pop – Song of the Year – “Si Me Dices Que Si”, Reik, Farruko and Camilo
      Urban/Trap – Song of the Year – “Vete”, Bad Bunny
      Tropical – Artist of the Year – Romeo Santos
      Tropical – Song of the Year – “La Mejor Version De Mi”, Natti Natasha and Romeo Santos
      Tropical – Collaboration of the Year – “Nuestro Amor”, Alex Bueno and Romeo Santos
      Regional Mexican – Artist of the Year – Christian Nodal
      Regional Mexican – Song of the Year – “Yo Ya No Vuelvo Contigo (En Vivo) “, Lenin Ramirez ft. Grupo Firme
      Regional Mexican – Collaboration of the Year – “Yo Ya No Vuelvo Contigo (En Vivo) “, Lenin Ramirez ft. Grupo Firme
      Regional Mexican – Group or Duo of the Year – Grupo Firme
      Regional Mexican – Sierrena Song of the Year – “El Guero”, Marca MP
      Regional Mexican – Banda Song of the Year – “Yo Ya No Vuelvo Contigo (En Vivo) “, Lenin Ramirez ft. Grupo Firme
      Regional Mexican – Norteno Song of the Year – “El Envidioso”, Los Dos Carnales
      Regional Mexican – Mariachi/Ranchera Song of the Year – “Se Me Olvido”, Christian Nodal
      Regional Mexican – Cumbia Song of the Year – “Tu Y Yo”, Raymix and Paulina Rubio
      Regional Mexican – Album of the Year – “En Vivo Desde Anaheim, CA”, Grupo Firme

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      To Express the Sound of a Country’s Soul, He Invented New Instruments

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      The imbaluna, one of the invented instruments by Joaquín Orellana on view at the Americas Society.Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York TimesSkip to contentSkip to site indexTo Express the Sound of a Country’s Soul, He Invented New InstrumentsThe Guatemalan composer, inventor and writer Joaquín Orellana’s creations are the subject of the Americas Society exhibition “The Spine of Music.”The imbaluna, one of the invented instruments by Joaquín Orellana on view at the Americas Society.Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyFeb. 19, 2021, 12:48 p.m. ETIn a short story, the Guatemalan composer, inventor and writer Joaquín Orellana imagines a musician who, dissatisfied with the instruments of Western civilization, sets out to create the sound of hunger. Possessed with a desire to express his people’s suffering, he progressively starves himself, then records his altered, raving voice. In his delirium, he sees sheet music staves come alive with anguished and violent cries — the sound of hunger.Orellana, 90, is one of his country’s most respected composers and the subject of a captivating exhibition at the Americas Society, “The Spine of Music,” which showcases instruments — sculptural, Surrealist and darkly sensuous — he has invented. Like the protagonist of his story, Orellana seeks to express the suffering of a country traumatized by genocide and civil war, while largely shunning the materials of Western music.Orellana with the herroím, one of his “útiles sonoros,” or sound tools.Credit…via Studio of Joaquín OrellanaMost composers write music for instruments that already exist. One exception was Wagner, who created a tuba-horn hybrid for his “Ring” cycle. The experimentalist composer Harry Partch invented instruments adapted to his unorthodox tuning system. In a video interview from Guatemala City, Orellana spoke of his process as one of liberating the musical imagination from preconceived forms.“The composer is imbued with his social reality,” he said. “The composer is a kind of filter, and his social sensibility is integrated into that filter.” When musical ideas flood the composer’s imagination, he added, “in that auditory mind there are the concepts and images of a social context, a sociopolitical reality; and the music is inevitably beholden to these things.”Orellana began experimenting with the materials of sound production in the 1970s. He had studied violin and composition at the National Conservatory in Guatemala City, then won a two-year fellowship at the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales in Buenos Aires. That center was a magnet for innovative composers from across the subcontinent, with a state-of-the-art electronic music studio that fired Orellana’s imagination.Sebastian Zubieta, the Americas Society music director, playing Orellana’s sinusoido pequeño.Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York TimesCredit…Victor Llorente for The New York TimesHe didn’t have comparable technical resources when he returned to Guatemala. And he felt alienated from a music scene centered on folkloric traditions expressed through the national instrument, the marimba.Still, the marimba fascinated Orellana. It had most likely come over on the slave routes from West Africa; embraced by the rural population in Guatemala, it had come to resonate with his country’s hopes, pain and injustices. So he pried it apart and twisted it into new forms.Orellana calls his inventions “útiles sonoros,” or sound tools. “By means of the sound tools,” he said, “the marimba extends into acoustic and physical space as in a kind of Big Bang.”The imbaluna, a portmanteau of “marimba” and the Spanish word for moon.Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York TimesThe first sound tool to greet visitors to the Americas Society gallery is the skeletal imbaluna, with a crescent-shaped marimba keyboard backed by spiky resonators. (The names of Orellana’s inventions are often poetic portmanteaus, this one of “marimba” and the Spanish word for moon.)The circumar is shaped like a large kettle with marimba keys suspended perpendicular to the floor. For the sinusoido, he strung marimba keys on a frame shaped like a warped roller coaster. Both are played by running a mallet along the inside in continuous motion — an action that requires full engagement of the performer’s arm and torso and produces tinkling rushes of sound. Sebastián Zubieta, the Americas Society music director, said that in Mr. Orellana’s creations, “it’s the gesture that shapes it.”These instruments — and others shaped similarly, using metal chimes or bamboo canes — can sound uncannily like electronic music. Zubieta said it was no accident that sounds created on a circular or sinusoid instrument resemble those created through electronic looping and sequencing. “It’s like an old tape piece,” he said. “It’s a low-tech solution to an avant-garde desire.”The herroím.Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York TimesThe cirlum pequeño.Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York TimesThe periomin.Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York TimesThe prehimulinho.Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York TimesThe ingenuity of Orellana’s inventions often hovers between playfulness and cruelty. The periomin is a kind of rocking coat rack that, when set in motion, makes wind chimes swing back and forth along strings of plastic beads, sounding like a glassy waterfall. The pinzafer is a large iron sheet, shaped like a lobster tail and suspended from an iron frame. Running a bow, strung with piano wire, through a serrated cutout produces a dark, metallic moan. Drawing a bow (this one strung with acrylic) over the tubarc, a metal chime fixed on a rectangular frame, produces a whistle sharp enough to make teeth fizz.In his compositions, Orellana often uses his inventions alongside choral singing, taped environmental sounds and Western instruments. In 2017, he wrote “Symphony From the Third World” for Documenta 14 in Athens; he flooded the stage with adult and children’s choirs, a symphony orchestra and his sound tools. It was a rejoinder to Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony, subtitled “From the New World.”An instrument called the CF A.Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York TimesFor the Americas Society exhibition, he composed a new piece exclusively for his creations. Titled “Puntos y efluvios” (“Outpours and Dots”), it was intended to be performed by four percussionists inside the gallery, and would have invited audience members to participate at certain moments with screams, howls and cries in a language Orellana invented.Because of pandemic limitations, Zubieta recorded each part by himself; the edited piece, with its pinprick tinkles and squalls of booming rushes, now haunts the gallery at regular intervals. An accompanying video alternates between shots of the performer engaged in the music’s ritualistic gestures and images of Orellana’s graphic score — which, with rhythmic squiggles, dot clusters and choreographic diagrams, harks back to the vision in his short story of sheet music staves melting away.Zubieta playing the lenguatón.Credit…Victor Llorente for The New York TimesLooking back on his career, Orellana said, “Making music for me was never a determinate process, but rather a way to free myself from obsessions: the obsession to manifest sound and a certain compulsive need to get it out of me.”“I’ve come to the conclusion,” he added, “that what I’m trying to do is liberate sound.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Prince Markie Dee, Founding Member of Rap Trio Fat Boys, Dies at 52

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPrince Markie Dee, Founding Member of Rap Trio Fat Boys, Dies at 52The group’s lighthearted rhymes and winning comedic approach helped speed hip-hop’s absorption into pop culture.From left: Prince Markie Dee, the Human Beat Box and Kool Rock-Ski of Fat Boys. “Wipeout,” the group’s collaboration with the Beach Boys, was their biggest hit.Credit…David Corio/Redferns, via Getty ImagesJon Caramanica and Feb. 19, 2021Prince Markie Dee, who as a member of the trio Fat Boys released some of hip-hop’s most commercially successful albums of the 1980s and helped speed the genre’s absorption into pop culture, died on Thursday in Miami. He was 52.His death was confirmed by Rock the Bells, a SiriusXM station where he had been a host. No cause was given.In the mid-1980s, Fat Boys were among hip-hop’s best known groups; their 1987 album “Crushin’” went platinum and featured a collaboration with the Beach Boys, “Wipeout,” that was their biggest hit, reaching No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100. That year, the group starred in a full-length comedy, “Disorderlies.”Hip-hop was just beginning to become accepted into the mainstream of American pop culture, and the group’s lighthearted rhymes, accessible dance routines and winning comedic approach made them effective ambassadors on hits including “Jailhouse Rap,” “Stick ’Em” and “Can You Feel It.” Some of their songs were about food and played on their image as harmless heavyweights.Prince Markie Dee was born Mark Anthony Morales on Feb. 19, 1968. He formed the Disco 3 in the early 1980s along with Darren (the Human Beat Box) Robinson and Damon (Kool Rock Ski) Wimbley, friends from the East New York section of Brooklyn. They won a 1983 talent show at Radio City Music Hall and were signed to a management contract by the show’s promoter, who suggested they change their name to Fat Boys.Their size became their gimmick, their calling card and their accelerator. Their manager once organized a promotional contest in which fans could guess the group’s collective weight.The group released seven full length albums; in addition to their platinum “Crushin’,” three went gold. In 1984, Fat Boys appeared on the Fresh Fest tour, the first hip-hop arena tour. Four years later, the group recorded a new version of “The Twist” with Chubby Checker. The trio also appeared in the films “Krush Groove” and “Knights of the City” before breaking up in the early 1990s. Mr. Robinson died in 1995 at age 28 after he fell off a chair while rapping for friends and lost consciousness.Mark Anthony Morales also hosted “The Prince Markie Dee Show” on LL Cool J’s Rock the Bells channel on SiriusXM radio.Credit…Robin Marchant/Getty ImagesPrince Markie Dee released a pair of solo albums in the 1990s, the first of which spawned the hit single “Typical Reasons (Swing My Way).” At the same time, he was beginning to work as a songwriter and producer for Uptown Records, collaborating with Father MC and Mary J. Blige. He helped write and produce Ms. Blige’s 1992 breakout hit “Real Love” and worked on her debut album, “What’s the 411?” He also worked on songs and remixes for Destiny’s Child, Mariah Carey and others.Information about survivors was not immediately available.Later in his career, Mr. Morales was a radio personality at WMIB-FM and WEDR-FM in Miami and on SiriusXM. But he was best known for being one of the Fat Boys when the group’s songs were seemingly everywhere.“I would be walking and all of a sudden I would hear music ricochet off the walls,” the rapper Fat Joe wrote on Instagram, recalling how Fat Boys’ beatboxing — “huh huh huh ha huh” — was “the first song they would play at the block party to summon you to appear.”He called Mr. Morales “a great guy, a legend and pioneer.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Scrapped Plans for London Concert Hall Sour Mood for U.K. Musicians

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyScrapped Plans for London Concert Hall Sour Mood for U.K. MusiciansThe decision comes as classical musicians struggle to deal with the impact of the pandemic and Britain’s departure from the European Union.A computer-generated rendering of the proposed London Center for Music, by the architects Diller Scofidio & Renfro. London authorities announced Thursday that the project would not go ahead.Credit…Diller Scofidio + RenfroFeb. 19, 2021, 11:11 a.m. ETLONDON — Back in 2017, London music fans had high hopes for a reinvigoration of the city’s classical music scene.That year, Simon Rattle, one of the world’s most acclaimed conductors, became the music director of the London Symphony Orchestra, and Diller Scofidio & Renfro, the architects behind the High Line in New York, were appointed to design a world-class 2,000-seat concert hall in the city.Now, the situation couldn’t be more different.On Thursday, just weeks after Rattle announced he would leave London in 2023 to take the reins at the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich, London officials announced that plans for the new hall had been scrapped. Rattle had been the driving force behind the project.In a news release announcing the decision, the City of London Corporation, the local government body overseeing the proposal, did not mention Rattle’s departure; the new hall would not go ahead because of the “unprecedented circumstances” caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the release said.The announcement was not unexpected. Few private funders came forward for the project, and Britain’s government was reluctant to back the project, which critics had decried as elitist, after years of cuts to basic services.But some musical experts say the news is still a blow to Britain’s classical musicians, already suffering from a pandemic-induced shutdown of their work, and Brexit, which has raised fears about their ability to to perform abroad.“It’s a further confirmation of the parochialization of British music and the arts,” said Jasper Parrott, a co-founder of HarrisonParrott, a classical music agency, in a telephone interview.The mood among musicians was low, Parrott said, especially because of changes to the rules governing European tours that came about because of Brexit. Before Britain left the European Union, classical musicians and singers could work in most European countries without needing visas or work permits, and many took last-minute bookings, jumping on low-cost flights to make concerts at short notice.Classical musicians now require costly and time-consuming visas to work in some European countries, Parrott said. Changes to haulage rules also make it harder for orchestras to tour, he added: Trucks carrying their equipment are limited to two stops on the continent before they must return to Britain.Deborah Annetts, the chief executive of the Incorporated Society of Musicians, said on Tuesday during a parliamentary inquiry into the new rules that she had been “inundated with personal testimony from musicians as to the work that they have lost, or are going to lose, in Europe as a result of the new visa and work permit arrangements.”A British musician who wanted to play a concert in Spain would have to pay 600 pounds, or about $840, for a work permit, she said, adding that this would make such a trip unviable for many. She called upon the government to negotiate deals with European countries so cultural workers could move around more easily.Parrott said he expected many British classical musicians would retrain for other careers, or move outside Britain for work, if the rules were not changed.High profile departures like Rattle’s have only contributed to the impression of a sector in decline. On Jan. 22, Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, a young Lithuanian conductor seen as a rising star, announced she would leave her post as music director of the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra at the end of the 2021-22 season. “This is a deeply personal decision, reflecting my desire to step away from the organizational and administrative responsibilities of being a music director,” she said in a statement at the time.Manuel Brug, a music critic for Die Welt, the German newspaper, said in a telephone interview that, viewed from the continent, classical music in Britain seemed in a bad way, “with all this horrible news.”The new London concert hall “was always a dream, but at least it was a dream,” he said.Given recent developments, many British musicians and singers may have to consider moving to Europe if they wanted to succeed, he said.Yet not all were downbeat about the future. British musicians could cope with the impact of the coronavirus, or Brexit — but not both at the same time, unless the government stepped in to help, said Paul Carey Jones, a Welsh bass baritone who has campaigned for the interests of freelance musicians during the pandemic.“British artists are some of the best trained, most talented and most innovative and creative,” he said. “But what we’re almost completely lacking is support from the current government. So we need them to grasp the urgency of the situation.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Dawn Richard Honors New Orleans Second Lines, and 7 More New Songs

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe PlaylistDawn Richard Honors New Orleans Second Lines, and 7 More New SongsHear tracks by 24kGoldn, Amythyst Kiah, Lil Yachty and others.Dawn Richard’s new single “Bussifame” is a preview of her April album “Second Line.” Credit…Alexander Le’JoJon Pareles, Jon Caramanica and Feb. 19, 2021, 10:53 a.m. ETEvery 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 theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Dawn Richard, ‘Bussifame’[embedded content]Dawn Richard gives “Bussifame” four syllables — as in “Bust it for me” — when she chants it in her new single, a preview of her April album “Second Line.” The video, released on Mardi Gras, opens with someone dancing to a (sadly uncredited) New Orleans brass band’s second-line beat. Then the track itself begins, with Richard and her dancers wearing pointy, futuristic costumes outside the giant graffiti on a derelict former Holiday Inn. “Feet move with the beat/Bussifame, second line,” she chants, huskily, in an electronic track that’s closer to house than to second line, but just keeps adding levels of perky syncopation. JON PARELESAmythyst Kiah, ‘Black Myself’“Black Myself” starts out as a blunt catalog of stereotyping and discrimination — “You better lock the doors as I walk by/’Cause I’m Black myself — before affirming Black solidarity and self-determination in its final verse. The song was already a bluesy stomp when Amythyst Kiah first recorded it with the folky all-star alliance Our Native Daughters; now she revisits it with a fuller studio production, reinforcing its distorted guitar with more effects, more layers and a bigger beat, adding extra clout. PARELESMichael Wimberly, featuring Theresa Thomason, ‘Madiba’Over a stuttering bass line, plinking balafon and wah-wah-drenched guitar, the gospel vocalist Theresa Thomason offers an unflinching tribute to Nelson Mandela, lingering on the struggles he endured and vowing to carry his legacy forward. “Always looking left, always looking right/Always defending the people’s truth/We’ll never forget you,” she sings. The song comes from “Afrofuturism,” the latest album by the percussionist and multi-instrumentalist Michael Wimberly, who recorded it with a diverse group of musicians from across the world. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO24kGoldn, ‘3, 2, 1’24kGoldn’s version of hip-hop is, in essence, pop-punk coated with just the faintest layer of R&B — which is to say, exceedingly pop. His latest single, which arrives while “Mood,” his recent No. 1 with Iann Dior, is still at No. 5 on the Hot 100, is taut, angsty and extremely efficient, a fait accompli of hybrid pop. JON CARAMANICALil Yachty featuring Kodak Black, ‘Hit Bout It’Lil Yachty, KrispyLife Kidd, RMC Mike, Babyface Ray, Rio Da Yung OG, DC2Trill and Icewear Vezzo, ‘Royal Rumble’Three or so years ago, you would not have pegged Lil Yachty as destined to be one of hip-hop’s more versatile talents. And yet here he is, fast rapping over a nervous beat on “Hit Bout It,” a strong duet with the fresh-out-of-jail Kodak Black. That comes less than two weeks after “Royal Rumble,” a posse cut of (mostly) great Michigan rappers full of the non sequitur tough talk that’s been defining that scene for the last couple of years, and which Yachty has an affinity (if not quite aptitude) for. Focus instead on great verses from the stalwart Icewear Vezzo and the up-and-comer Babyface Ray. CARAMANICAMahalia featuring Rico Nasty, ‘Jealous’A sample of flamenco guitar curls through the insinuating, two-chord track of “Jealous” as the English singer Mahalia and the Maryland rapper-singer Rico Nasty casually demolish male pride. “Im’a do what I want to baby/I won’t be stuck without you baby,” they nonchalantly explain, as Mahalia flaunts her wardrobe, her car, her “crew” and her indifference. “Unless you got that heart then you can’t come my way,” she sings, staccato and unconcerned. PARELESChris Pattishall, ‘Taurus’For his debut album, the rising pianist Chris Pattishall reached back 75 years to revisit Mary Lou Williams’s 12-part “Zodiac Suite.” The result is neither overly nostalgic nor newfangled and gimmicky. Pattishall’s “Zodiac” is a startling achievement precisely because of how deeply — and personally — this old material seems to resonate with him. Pattishall has said that he is particularly drawn to Williams because of the way she seemed to hopscotch between atmospheres and registers within individual compositions, without sacrificing a sense of narrative. That’s borne out on his album’s very first track, “Taurus” (Williams’s own star sign), which starts with a passage of ruminative piano before a quick acceleration, with Pattishall leading his quintet into a swirling, bluesy refrain. RUSSONELLOAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Don Letts, Mad Professor Team With Times on Carnival Story

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeBake: Maximalist BrowniesListen: To Pink SweatsGrow: RosesUnwind: With Ambience VideosAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTimes InsiderBreaking Down the Sounds of Carnival, on Your PhoneThe pandemic has dampened the celebrations worldwide. But a Times special project, which includes an interactive music mixing feature, lets readers get into a party mood.The Notting Hill Carnival in 2019. Although parties over the past year have been canceled, a Times project seeks to keep the Carnival spirit alive this winter. Credit…Peter Summers/Getty ImagesFeb. 19, 2021Updated 10:48 a.m. ETTimes Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.The world could definitely use a party. Unfortunately, because of the coronavirus pandemic, cities around the globe have canceled or curtailed what is annually their biggest bash, Carnival.These celebrations, many of them pre-Lenten, trace back hundreds of years to the Caribbean islands, and the tradition has continued with the Caribbean diaspora in cities like New York (the West Indian American Day Parade), Toronto (Caribana) and London (Notting Hill Carnival).In the chill of February, readers of The New York Times can get a flavor of the sensory richness of these blowouts with Carnival in Winter, a special online package of multimedia experiences about the festivals produced by the Narrative Projects department.Carnival is all about history, community, costumes, food — and music. To immerse readers into the sonic experience, Narrative Projects teamed with the Graphics department and the R.& D. department to create a special effect on Instagram that puts you inside a classic Carnival song. The effect, through the Instagram Spark feature that can be downloaded on phones, uses augmented reality, which lays a computer-generated image or animation over a user’s view of the real world. (Click here from your phone.)In this case, you can hear a Carnival anthem broken down into four musical tracks — and you can “see” the tracks through Carnival-inspired 3-D animations and manipulate the music by moving in your physical space. The effect turns your phone — and living room —  into a virtual mixing board.Picking just one song to represent the music of Carnival — which incorporates soca, calypso, reggae, dub, house and more — is a near impossible task. So, as one of the editors on the project, I reached out to an expert.Don Letts at the Roxy in London in 1977. Recently, he suggested the song that was used in The Times’s interactive feature on Carnival music. Credit…Erica Echenberg/Redferns, via Getty ImagseDon Letts, a 65-year-old filmmaker, broadcaster and musical matchmaker, is an icon of the British music scene. In the 1970s as the D.J. at the Roxy in London, he introduced the club’s punk clientele to reggae, the rising sound from Jamaica, his parents’ homeland. Between his friendship with Bob Marley and his close ties to the fledgling punk scene (he later formed the band Big Audio Dynamite with Mick Jones of the Clash), Letts earned the nickname “The Rebel Dread” for bucking convention and orchestrating cultural collisions that changed the course of popular music.He also has been a regular at the Notting Hill Carnival for over 40 years. In 2009, he directed a documentary, “Carnival!,” on the history and politics of the festival.Asked to name a “typical” Carnival anthem, Mr. Letts at first dismissed the task as impossible. Upon reflection, though, he directed us toward an old friend, the producer Mad Professor, and his 2005 track “Elaine the Osaka Dancer” — “A strange title, I know,” said Mr. Letts — which was written for a performer, Panafricanist, on the Mad Professor’s label. Mad Professor, whose name is Neil Fraser, is himself a well-known name in British music history. He pioneered the emergence of the British dub sound and collaborated with performers like Sade and Massive Attack.Mr. Letts chose “Elaine” because, as he put it: “At Carnival you can stand on a street corner and hear a float going past with steel pans, along with the sound of a Jamaican sound system right around the corner. This song perfectly captures that sound: the collision of calypso and soca with the bass-heavy rhythms of reggae.”If you’re reading this article on a desktop computer or tablet, you can view the AR experience on Instagram by opening your camera on your device and point to this QR code. For those reading on their phones, the link in the story above will call up the effect. Credit… Mad Professor agreed to license the song, so we asked him to break it down into individual instrumental tracks or “stems,” each of which would then be manipulated by the user of the Instagram effect.This process proved to be slightly more analog — and painstaking — than anticipated. At one point, when asked for a progress report, Mad Professor relayed that he was “baking the tapes” — which might sound (or did to me, anyway) like a bit of music producer slang. In fact, it’s a literal description of the process in which analog master tapes are restored by exposing them to a high temperature for hours, reducing humidity that can affect the quality of the tapes.Once the tapes were baked and the stems were procured, our graphics and R. & D. team built the Instagram effect. With the effect, the user can play with the drums, bass, horns and steel pan tracks while seeing commentary from Letts on why each element is crucial to a Carnival song.It’s not the same thing as dancing to steel pans on a simmering street in London’s Notting Hill in the heat of summer. But in a year when Carnival has been canceled nearly everywhere, we hope it gets you as close to that feeling as possible.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More