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As a member of one of the most popular groups in jazz, he was a star. But as a Black musician in an otherwise all-white ensemble, he sometimes confronted racism. More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe PlaylistTaylor Swift’s Ode to Moving On, and 9 More New SongsHear tracks by Barry Gibb and Dolly Parton, Rhye, Tim Berne and others.Taylor Swift’s “It’s Time to Go” is a bonus track from the sessions that yielded her quarantine albums.Credit…Beth GarrabrantJon Pareles, Giovanni Russonello and Jan. 8, 2021Every 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.Taylor Swift, ‘It’s Time to Go’[embedded content]Of course Taylor Swift had even more songs recorded during the 2020 quarantine that has already yielded her albums “Folklore” and “Evermore,” which now gets a bonus track. “It’s Time to Go” — terse lines set against an insistent one-note guitar and four chords — maps romantic and workplace setbacks against her own struggle to hold onto her multiplatinum catalog: “He’s got my past frozen behind glass/But I’ve got me.” It’s advice, rationalization, a way to move on: “Sometimes giving up is the strong thing,” she sings. JON PARELESCeleste, ‘Love Is Back’Celeste — who, at least in Britain, has been on the verge of a breakout moment for the past few years — rang in 2021 with a performance of her new single “Love Is Back” on Jools Holland’s annual New Year’s Eve show. Amid rhythmic blasts of brass, the 26-year-old soul singer croons coolly for much of the song before a dazzling grand finale showcases the strength of her smoky voice, which recalls both Amy Winehouse and Billie Holiday. With a debut album, “Not Your Muse,” slated for release on Feb. 26, this could finally be Celeste’s year. LINDSAY ZOLADZSaweetie featuring Doja Cat, ‘Best Friend’The gender warfare in pop hip-hop continues with “Best Friend,” particularly in its video version, which opens by mocking “toxic masculinity” and “another fake woke misogynist” — a bare-chested guest guy — while Saweetie and Doja Cat lounge in bikinis. A twangy two-bar loop accompanies the two women as they flatly declare financial independence and, eventually, find each other. PARELESRhye, ‘Come in Closer’Ideas waft up and ripple away throughout “Come in Closer” the smoothly elusive new single from the breathy, androgynous-voiced Canadian singer and songwriter Michael Milosh, who records as Rhye. Hardly anything is stable; not the beat, not the chord changes, not the vocal melodies or instrumental countermelodies, not an arrangement that moves from churchy organ to a string-laden R&B march to eerie a cappella vocal harmonies. The only constant is yearning: “How I’d love for you to come home with me” is the song’s closest thing to a refrain. PARELESVirgil Abloh featuring serpentwithfeet, ‘Delicate Limbs’Virgil Abloh is best known as a designer; no wonder “Delicate Limbs” begins with fashion-conscious lyrics: “Those gray pants you love might bring you luck, but if they ever fray you can call on me.” But “Delicate Limbs” even more clearly ties in with the catalog of Abloh’s collaborator, serpentwithfeet, a.k.a. the singer and songwriter Josiah Wise. It’s an incantatory enigma, wandering among electronic drones, jazzy drum crescendos and cinematic orchestration, building extraordinary drama. PARELESBarry Gibb featuring Dolly Parton, ‘Words’Viewers of the recent HBO documentary “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” will recall that it was not Dolly Parton nor Kenny Rogers who wrote their mammoth 1983 hit “Islands in the Stream,” but, actually, the Brothers Gibb. So Parton is a natural choice for a duet partner on Barry Gibb’s moving and delicately crafted new album “Greenfields — The Gibb Brothers’ Songbook Vol. 1,” on which the last surviving Bee Gee adds a little twang to some of the group’s standards and collaborates with country artists like Miranda Lambert and fellow Aussie cowboy Keith Urban. Parton joins him for a piano-driven, gently elegiac rendition of the 1968 hit “Words.” On the original single and often in concert, this was the rare Bee Gees song that Barry Gibb sang solo. Reimagining it as a duet, and especially with a voice as warm as Parton’s, makes “Words” feel less like a confession of regret and more like a prelude to reconciliation. ZOLADZSun June, ‘Everything I Had’“Everything I had, I want it back,” Sun June’s Laura Colwell sings on the Austin band’s latest single — certainly a relatable refrain for these times. It’s also a fittingly wistful sentiment for a band that playfully describes its sound as “regret pop,” blending the melodic flutter of Colwell’s voice with dreamy tempos that invite contemplation. (Its second album, “Somewhere,” will be out on Feb. 5.) The lyrics, though, conjure a certain restlessness, as Colwell considers moving all the way to Los Angeles before settling on a new apartment three doors down from where she used to live — presumably just far enough to stare longingly at the old one. ZOLADZJohn Fogerty, ‘Weeping in the Promised Land’“Weeping in the Promised Land” is John Fogerty’s memento of 2020: pandemic, disinformation, economic crisis, Black Lives Matter. In a quasi-hymn, with bedrock piano chords and a swelling choir, he surveys the devastation overseen by a “pharaoh” who keeps “a-preaching, but he never had a plan.” It doesn’t foresee redemption. PARELESScience Friction, ‘Heavy Mental’[embedded content]The alto saxophonist Tim Berne and the trumpeter Herb Robertson circle each other like fighters getting acquainted in the first round at the start of this itchy, low-fi recording, which Berne captured at 55 Bar in Greenwich Village 17 years ago. He’s been releasing recordings from the vault on Bandcamp, and this one — which he found on a CD-R lying on his studio floor, and posted Christmas Day — is especially raw and lively. The guitarist Marc Ducret joins after a minute, adding his own wiry lines and helping outline the track’s central melodic phrase before Tom Rainey’s drums and Craig Taborn’s keyboards enter and the quintet wriggles into a long, tumbling jam. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOMiguel Zenón and Luis Perdomo, ‘Alma Adentro (Live)’At the Jazz Gallery this fall, the alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón and the pianist Luis Perdomo recorded a concert of boleros (or romantic songs, from a range of Latin American traditions), and the set was so understatedly good that after streaming it on Zenón’s Facebook page, the pair decided to release it as an album. This track is a ruminative lament, written by the Puerto Rican singer and polymath Sylvia Rexach for her brother, who had died in an accident; it was the title track — and the most tender moment — on Zenón’s big band album a decade ago. On the new version, as Perdomo alone carries its downward-spiraling chord progression, the pair spends nearly 10 minutes wandering into and away from the song’s wistful melody, as if reliving a distant memory. RUSSONELLOAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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The next studio album by James Hetfield and his bandmates is described as ‘the heaviest’ and ‘the coolest’ album that the rock band will have ever made.

Jan 8, 2021
AceShowbiz – Metallica always want to make the “best record” they’ve ever produced.
The heavy metal group – who formed in 1981 – can’t imagine ever giving up making music because they love the “creative process” and always strive to make each new album better than the last.
Asked if they’ve thought about their plans for their next album yet, drummer Lars Ulrich told Classic Rock magazine, “It’s going to be the best album we’ve ever done! Insert the rest of the cliches – it’s the heaviest thing, the coolest…”
“But all kidding aside, if it wasn’t because we thought that the best record was still ahead of us, then why keep doing it? In Metallica we love the creative process, and it’s hard for me to imagine that we’ll ever stop making records.”

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The drummer insisted the group – which also includes James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett, and Robert Trujillo – never compare their albums to their previous efforts, and he wouldn’t want to change anything about their back catalogue because each record represents a period in time for the band.
“I don’t think like that at all. Each record to me is a picture of a time period. 1988, …And Justice for All, that was what we did and we made all those choices, and I’m happy accepting it,” he said. “Sometimes I think why did we do that and what were we thinking, without necessarily wanting to change it.”
“But of the ones that we’ve done, it’s with Hardwired that I have the fewest bewildered questions about the choices we made.”
With the coronavirus pandemic keeping the band off the road, Lars has kept his skills sharp by playing along to their most recent studio album, 2016’s “Hardwired… To Self Destruct”, as well as Rage Against the Machine’s self-titled 1992 LP.
“Another record I’ve played along to is Rage Against the Machine, that first album (’92),” he added. “That has been the soundtrack to this pandemic for me. I’m just blasting those songs, and they sound more relevant and more contemporary than they ever have.”

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Ariel Pink Denies Storming the Capitol Despite Attending Pro-Trump White House Rally

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The Canadian hitmaker previously criticized the Recording Academy after he nabbed zero nod at the upcoming event despite his record-breaking and critically-acclaimed album ‘After Hours’.

Jan 8, 2021
AceShowbiz – The tension between The Weeknd and the Recording Academy seemingly continues to heat up. According to interim Grammy chief Harvey Mason Jr., the “After Hours” artist has yet to be asked to be included in the line-up of the performers at the award-giving event, which is set to be held on March 14.
In an interview with Variety, Harvey was asked if The Weeknd, who was snubbed at the award event despite his successful “Blinding Lights” track, would be more involved at the upcoming event. To that, Harvey responded, “Not that I’m aware of.”
During the interview, Harvey also addressed the delay due to rising coronavirus cases in the United States, especially in Los Angeles. “Doing it on January 31st, with the numbers and what was happening in L.A., just didn’t feel like the right move,” he explained.
“We felt, from what we’re hearing from government offices and health-care experts, that the next two weeks are going to be extreme here in L.A., and after that, we’ll see some improvement in the numbers. Obviously, we’re not going to be free of Covid and I don’t think the vaccine is going to be widely available by March 14, but we think there will be better circumstances once we get past these next two weeks,” he went on saying.

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Grammy Awards announced on Tuesday, January 5 that the show, which will be hosted by Trevor Noah, will be pushed back. “The deteriorating COVID situation in Los Angeles, with hospital services being overwhelmed, ICUs having reached capacity, and new guidance from state and local governments have all led us to conclude that postponing our show was the right thing to do,” read a statement signed by interim Grammy chief Harvey Mason jr., CBS Executive VP Jack Sussman and the show’s executive producer, Ben Winston.
Back to The Weeknd, the Canadian hitmaker criticized the Recording Academy after he nabbed zero nod despite his record-breaking year on the charts and critical and commercial acclaim with the album “After Hours” and hits like “Blinding Lights”. “The Grammys remain corrupt. You owe me, my fans and the industry transparency…,” he demanded on November 24, 2020 after the nominations were announced.
In response to the criticism, Harvey said in a statement, “We understand that The Weeknd is disappointed at not being nominated. I was surprised and can empathize with what he’s feeling. His music this year was excellent, and his contributions to the music community and broader world are worthy of everyone’s admiration.”
Shutting down speculations that the snub had something to do with The Weeknd headlining the Super Bowl, Harvey clarified, “To be clear, voting in all categories ended well before The Weeknd’s performance at the Super Bowl was announced, so in no way could it have affected the nomination process.”

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Raven Goodwin Celebrates Hattie McDaniel in Casting Announcement for New Biopic

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#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyShakespeare, Swing and Louis Armstrong. So What Went Wrong?Three theaters are exploring “Swingin’ the Dream,” which tanked on Broadway in 1939, but opens a window on the racial and artistic dynamics of its time. More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s PickJazmine Sullivan Ponders Love and Materialism on ‘Heaux Tales’The singer and songwriter’s first album in five years is also her bleakest.Spoken-word “tales” from six women are followed by songs that flesh them out as character studies on Jazmine Sullivan’s “Heaux Tales.”Credit…Myesha Evon GardnerJan. 7, 2021Updated 12:55 p.m. ETHeaux TalesNYT Critic’s PickJazmine Sullivan has never prettified romance. In her songs, love nearly always leads to pain: rejection, infidelity, heartbreak, violence. She opened her 2008 debut album, “Fearless,” with “Bust Your Windows,” taking revenge on a cheating boyfriend, and a few songs later, the singer ends ongoing domestic abuse with murder. Her narrators don’t spare anyone who wrongs them; they don’t forgive their own failings either.Sullivan’s music carries the churchy, high-stakes emotionality and down-to-earth detail of vintage Southern soul into the everyday situations and electronic soundscapes of hip-hop. And in case no one noticed before, her fourth and bleakest album, “Heaux Tales” — arriving five years after “Reality Show” — makes clear that her stories were never meant to be hers alone.“Heaux Tales” is schematic, a successor to didactic concept albums like “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” and the visual version of Beyoncé’s “Lemonade.” Spoken-word “tales” from six women — confessions and hard-earned observations — are followed by songs that flesh them out as character studies. (Although the spoken-word tracks get some accompaniment from electronic beats and gospel organ, the songs alone stand up far better to repeated listening.)“Heaux” is a Frenchified version of “ho,” placing a longtime insult at an analytical distance. In the songs on “Heaux Tales,” Sullivan looks behind dismissive stereotypes — party girl, avenger, sex addict, gold digger, cheater, castoff — to show complicated human longings behind them.Sullivan released “Pick Up Your Feelings” in November in two versions: as the album’s audio track and as a live version. It’s a cutting, unforgiving farewell to a cheating lover, by no means the first in her catalog. “I deserve so much more than you gave to me/Now I’m saving me,” she declares to someone she’s caught “double dippin’.”The live version, with Sullivan accompanied only by electric guitar and backup singers, matches virtuosity to vehemence as she switches among long swoops, cascading runs, quick jazzy syllables and wide leaps. The album track, with drums, retro-sounding strings and disorienting studio-reversed piano chords, is more dismissive and colder in its fury; Sullivan flings short phrases like a knife-thrower.But the righteous anger of a breakup is one of the album’s easier stances. Other songs venture into trickier, more ambivalent territory. In “Lost One” the singer is the betrayer; it’s a confession of pure despair, moaned in Sullivan’s low register over a hollowly echoing guitar, as she watches the one she cheated on have rebound affairs and begs, “Try not to love no one.”She also embraces female desire as compulsion and challenge. In “Put It Down,” Sullivan sings in crisp, near-rap cadences about letting lust override all her better judgment, while in “On It,” she and Ari Lennox coo over a slow-swaying groove as they tease a lover to “prove why you deserve it,” adding some hints on technique.And with some spoken-word goading, Sullivan ponders the ways sex can turn into a material transaction — being a “heaux” — in “Pricetags,” “The Other Side” and “Girl Like Me.” In “Pricetags,” the singer’s simple greed is answered by Anderson .Paak with comic, escalating exasperation. “The Other Side” has a more sympathetic narrator. She’s broke and struggling, with her voice yearning and sailing upward as she sings, “I got dreams to buy expensive things”; then, over a brisker beat, she reveals her plan to “move to Atlanta” and “find me a rapper” who can afford all her imagined luxuries.Sullivan ties the album’s themes together in its finale, “Girl Like Me.” Joined by H.E.R., with their voices overlapping over a handful of syncopated, descending guitar chords, the singer is wounded and adrift. Her boyfriend moved on with no explanation, leaving her insecure about her body and wondering what he wanted: “What you asked I would have given.” She’s sure “It ain’t right how these hos be winning,” then reconsiders: “That’s what you wanted, that’s what you get/A ho I’ll be.”It’s not a happy ending, much less a role model’s advice. It’s just a way for one scarred character, on an album full of them, to persevere.Jazmine Sullivan“Heaux Tales”(RCA) AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySuzi Analogue Wants Black Women in Experimental Music to Never CompromiseShe couldn’t find a label that understood her work, so she started her own. Now she’s doubling down on her mission to provide a home for others who want to create with total freedom.In the mainstream music industry, “There’s not a lot of room to find your own creative direction,” Suzi Analogue said.Credit…Rose Marie Cromwell for The New York TimesJan. 6, 2021The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 put renewed pressure on the music industry to scrutinize its long-troubled relationship with race. It’s a business that has relied on Black talent onstage without investing in Black executives behind the scenes; a space where Black artists have been nudged into specific genres and ways of creating; a place where women and L.G.B.T. people of color have been even further marginalized.None of this was news for Suzi Analogue. The 33-year-old Miami-based producer and label owner born Maya Shipman has spent most of her career carving out her own path — and offering alternatives to others looking to avoid being put in a box.Chatting from her multimedia studio filled with wide-screen monitors, tape decks and keyboards in the Faena Forum, where she’s an artist-in-residence, it didn’t take long for Analogue to articulate the core of her mission: “Access to capital is a must for Black music in the future, especially for creative and cultural organizers who happen to be women, who happen to be queer,” she said in the first of two lengthy video interviews. (She happens to be both.) In this vast, sunlit space, Analogue creates electronic dance music that centers high-speed drums and obscure audio samples — an idiosyncratic sound that’s equally of-the-moment and forward-looking.“Listening to her music makes me feel like I’m in Tokyo for the first time,” said the producer Ringgo Ancheta, a noted figure in the underground beat scene known as Mndsgn. “It has that same glamour to it, like a raw glamour. It’s like if Sun Ra was a woman who dropped acid a lot and went to raves.”Because she makes distinctive music in spaces historically reserved for white men, Analogue still flies beneath the mainstream radar, despite a stacked résumé — a decade-long list of critically acclaimed mixtapes and collaborative albums. Through Never Normal Records, the imprint she created in 2013, she not only releases her own hard-to-describe work, but is also providing a platform for other like-minded artists to do the same.In the mainstream industry, “There’s not a lot of room to find your own creative direction,” Analogue said. “People will say, ‘Oh, we don’t know how to market that.’ That’s a blanketed term for discrimination and racism in the music business.”Analogue’s interest in music started early and originated in several regions on the East Coast. Her family relocated from Baltimore to Quincy, Mass., when she was a toddler, and after her parents split, she and her mother moved to Prince George, Va., 30 minutes south of Richmond. Her father is from the Bronx; in the summer months, she’d visit him there and was exposed to hip-hop culture firsthand. “So growing up, it was nothing to hear music from everywhere,” she said.In elementary school, she made friends with the military kids who had moved to Prince George from countries like Japan or Germany, and they introduced her to their local music. As a second-grader, she and a few other girls bonded over a shared love of the R&B trio TLC and “started a little music group and sang at our class assembly at the end of the year,” Analogue said. “I think we sang Boyz II Men. But it was me, I was putting it together.”Even as a child, she knew she didn’t want to be just a singer or just a producer: “I think I always felt like I had a mind to do more, like ‘I don’t want to just sing somebody’s song, I’ll sing my own song.’” During the day, she sang R&B and opera; at night, she listened to local rap on FM radio.“It could be jungle, gabber, ghetto house, trap, everything,” Analogue said. “This is all Black music, Black heritage, Black culture, and Black traditions.”Credit…Rose Marie Cromwell for The New York TimesAnalogue was a preteen when two other Virginia residents, Missy Elliott and Timbaland, started making waves. Other early influences included locals like Teddy Riley (who moved to Virginia Beach from Harlem) and Pharrell Williams; they all made progressive R&B, and thrived commercially despite living outside of the major cities known as funnels to the industry.After high school, Analogue went to Temple University in Philadelphia; enticed by the community there that had grown out of the website and message board Okayplayer, she wanted to connect with more like-minded creators away from the South. She started making beats after friends gave her music production software, and later adopted an artist name that’s a nod to RZA’s alter ego, Bobby Digital.“They knew I made songs mostly for school and church,” Analogue said. “I just would make what I could with downloading. I remember I downloaded speeches, like Malcolm X speeches from Napster. And I’d try to put a little jazz sample with it.”That was her first foray into the patchwork production style she’s known for today. Analogue created a Myspace account and started sharing her music online, which caught the attention of Glenn Boothe (known as Knxwledge), then an upstart in Philly who’d become one of the most popular beatmakers in underground music. The two became fast friends. “We were just trying to find our own waves,” Analogue said. “I secretly got my own apartment, because being an only child, I couldn’t do the dorm thing. It was good because I was able to have the crib where people could come through and lab out.”Ancheta was living in southern New Jersey; he traveled to Philadelphia to make music with Knxwledge and Analogue in a collective named Klipmode after chatting with her online. “Suzi’s music had these crazy chord progressions,” Ancheta said. “Everything had this weird blend with organic textures; there was something a little loose and off about it.”Analogue’s sound has always had a global flavor and appealed to listeners overseas — its offbeat time signatures and stacked drums are well suited for dance floors in West or East Africa — and in her early 20s she released work on international labels. But she has never connected with the industry at home.“I never tried to get a major U.S. deal when I started releasing tracks, for many reasons, but a big one was that the music I was making was being valued more outside of the country it came from,” Analogue said. “Some sniffed around but I just couldn’t get serious about waiting around for them to ‘get it.’”She started Never Normal Records out of necessity: “I would say many of my musical male counterparts did receive help to release music before I did. When I saw it happen, I would just continue to build what I was working on.” As a result, her label is a safe space for musicians to buck industry notions of what their work is supposed to be. Acts like the multidisciplinary artist Khx05 and the electronic music producer No Eyes have free rein to be themselves.“It could be jungle, gabber, ghetto house, trap, everything. This is all Black music, Black heritage, Black culture, and Black traditions,” Analogue said. Despite those Black roots in many strains of dance music, Analogue said she has faced discrimination in the genre. “Electronic music is severely whitewashed,” she said. “Everyone who is not white is treated like an anomaly.”The biases extend beyond color lines. “As women, we all go through it,” said the experimental producer Jennifer Hernandez, who records as JWords and released her “Sín Sénal” EP last year on Analogue’s label. “In the beginning, I’d be on these bills and all these guys were a little uncomfortable,” she said.While her label has helped her profile rise, Analogue knows her work is far from done. This year, she’s starting a project that unites producers from the African diaspora with beatmakers in Africa to make new tracks. She’s also planning to release new music and visual art from other unconventional Black creators while teaching music education workshops in Ghana as a cultural diplomat for the U.S. Department of State.“Music has always been about the people,” she said. “It’s always been an instrument of connection.” As a Black woman, Analogue added, she knows exactly how it feels “to feel like there’s no place for me. I want to show other artists that there will always be a place for you.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPamela Z Manipulates Voices in a Virtual Tour of Times Square“Times3” is the latest work by a veteran composer, vocalist, multimedia artist and “wild virtuoso.”“Times3,” a collaboration between Pamela Z (photographed here in San Francisco) and the theater artist Geoff Sobelle, is part of a pandemic edition of the Prototype festival of music theater.Credit…Andres Gonzalez for The New York TimesJan. 7, 2021The composer, vocalist and multimedia artist Pamela Z was supposed to have a good 2020. She started the year in Italy, as a recipient of the prestigious Rome Prize, working on a new performance piece that was to have its debut in June at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.The piece, “Simultaneous,” was to capitalize on the strengths Ms. Z, 64, has developed over a long and celebrated career. It would deploy her classically trained voice, her subtle (and sometimes humorous) layers of projected images and her skills as a live manipulator of media — especially her theatrical use of gesture controllers, wireless devices that let her physical movements affect sound.“I consider my instrument really to be the combination of my voice and the electronics,” she said in a phone interview from her home in San Francisco. “As a performer, I’m not just singing and then putting some effects on that. And I’m not just making electronic sounds. I’m actually simultaneously singing and speaking, and, in real time, sampling and processing and treating my voice to create these layers of sound that I consider to be a composition.”Ms. Z performing in San Francisco in 2015.Credit…Charles SmithWhen the pandemic hit, it cut her Rome residency short and indefinitely delayed her MoMA premiere. That was a blow not just for Ms. Z, but also for fans of experimental art in New York. While her music has lately been heard in the city as part of the Resonant Bodies Festival and the flutist Claire Chase’s ambitious “Density 2036” project, her more conceptual work as an installation artist and multimedia creator is not shown often enough here.The Prototype festival this month will offer something of a corrective, presenting “Times3,” a streaming soundscape collaboration between Ms. Z and the theater artist Geoff Sobelle. It comes as part of a pandemic overhaul to this annual festival of new opera and wide-ranging music theater; five of the six presentations in this year’s edition, which runs Friday to Jan. 16, will exist only online. (“Times3” is free; attendees need only register online beforehand, starting Jan. 9, to receive a link and password for the audio.)“Times3” gives listeners something of a crash course in Ms. Z’s ever-evolving practice. “I haven’t jettisoned anything, I’m just adding things,” she said. “At one time it would have been accurate to call myself a musician. Now it’s only a fragment of what my work encompasses.”Ms. Z was still finishing up the final version of “Times3,” alternately titled “Times x Times x Times,” in the days ahead of its premiere. The half-hour or so piece, a meditation on the past, present and future of Times Square, is built from interviews that Mr. Sobelle conducted with scholars and theorists who hold vivid perspectives on the neighborhood. The musical form it takes is Ms. Z’s responsibility.“I tend to work with everything from full sentences to short phrases to just individual words, even syllables and phonemes,” Ms. Z said, describing her editing process using the audio program Pro Tools. “And I’m just capturing all those little pieces and naming them so I can use them as building blocks, to structure the piece.”It’s a process familiar to Ms. Z, since some of her earlier work — including 2019’s “Louder Warmer Denser,” for Ms. Chase — has involved post-produced fragments of interviews. And the way Ms. Z layers her own voice, during live performances, has also prepared the composer for some of the challenges of “Times3.”You can hear that facility for editing in her other recent projects. A concert livestreamed from her home studio and presented by Mills College — featuring, in her description, “voice, real-time electronic processing, sampled sounds, wireless gesture controllers and interactive videos” — is technically startling and fluidly soulful; at one point, Ms. Z uses looping to build her own backup choir.[embedded content]The performance includes some pieces heard on her album “A Delay Is Better,” released on the Starkland label in 2004; that album also gives an effective overview of her work. A track like “Badagada” demonstrates her love of traditional operatic singing as well as of Minimalism and live electronic manipulation, while “Pop Titles ‘You’” works as a clever found-poem in sound. “Geekspeak,” which lets speakers other than Ms. Z attempt to define the essence of geekery, approaches interviewing and sound editing as forms of storytelling and art-making.Born in Buffalo, N.Y., and raised in Colorado, Ms. Z studied vocal music and education. Initially, she pursued more traditional voice-and-guitar singer-songwriter work — with “a bit of classical music bizarrely laced in,” she said in an email — before committing to a more experimental approach. In the 1980s, she moved to San Francisco, where she still lives, creating solo performances as well as fulfilling an increasing number of commissions — including chamber music, dance scores and dramatic pieces — from groups like the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, the Kronos Quartet and Eighth Blackbird.Her “Times3” partner, Mr. Sobelle, worked with Jecca Barry, a director of the Prototype festival, on past productions. The festival’s organizers recommended that he and Ms. Z do a piece about Times Square. Mr. Sobelle was keen to partner with her; he said that he had been aware of her work “a little bit, from a friend who suggested that I take a look, at another moment, just to see a wild virtuoso.”And when Ms. Z watched the eight-millimeter short film that had opened Mr. Sobelle’s 2005 stage work “All Wear Bowlers” — “a beautiful, poetic piece that was styled after silent films,” she said — she was sold on the collaboration.After discussions with Prototype, the two artists decided not to make listeners venture to Times Square to access the audio. Instead, by using interviews with people familiar with the area, they decided to create what the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti might have called a Times Square of the mind.“There’s a landscape architect; there’s somebody who’s a theater stage manager, who’s stage-managed a lot of shows on Broadway,” Ms. Z said. “We interviewed some historians, people who knew about the Indigenous people who lived on that land. And we interviewed a person who has all kinds of theories about what would happen if there were no longer humans — and what changes would occur.”Mr. Sobelle conducted the interviews, then furnished Ms. Z with the raw sound files, as well as notes about ways the transcripts might be layered to produce dramatic resonance.In this way, “Times3” is closely related to the most current version of “Simultaneous,” broadcast last month by Deutschland Radio. In that 44-minute piece, the thematic focus is on the contemporary culture of multitasking, and Ms. Z’s jaundiced view of it.For source material, she interviewed and recorded her fellow Rome Prize recipients on the topic, preparing for the live performances at MoMA. Instead of waiting for those appearances to be rescheduled, she created a purely audio iteration for the German radio station.At the start of the radio version, fans of Ms. Z might find themselves impatient for her voice. But the narrative rhythm of her editing has humor, which makes the build toward her full bel canto-infused technique worth the wait. Her first noticeable vocal contributions come in scintillating, refracted shards around the 22nd minute. From there, her vocalizations grow more prominent. (Make sure to catch a lovely song in the second half.)“Times3” audiences can expect a similar structure. “You’ll hear my voice because I have some actual singing parts,” she said. “Also because Geoff insisted on interviewing me.”Mr. Sobelle said he was impressed with what Ms. Z was “able to cobble together out of strange pieces of material.” Though he was disinclined to offer audiences the equivalent of liner notes for “Times3,” or anything that would suggest an experimental work needs special explanation, he did say that “it’s not like a piece of journalism or like a historical document.”“Even though we’re speaking to academics and journalists and architects and city planners and people like that,” he added, “she’s looking for musicality. It’s very much an art piece.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More