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      Jessica Pratt’s Timeless Folk Music Is Evolving. Slowly.

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      The singer and songwriter has a delicate, vintage aesthetic that matches her cautious approach to her work. Her fourth album, “Here in the Pitch,” is out Friday.Jessica Pratt’s new album, “Here in the Pitch,” begins with a vintage drum beat, a gently strummed guitar and a lot of vibey room tone — the kind that recalls a wood-paneled studio from 60 years ago. “The chances of a lifetime might be hiding their tricks up my sleeve,” she sings on “Life Is,” in an enchanting melody that rises and falls with ease. “Time is time is time again.”Pratt is 37, and over three albums since 2012, she has become known for seemingly bending time. “A friend of a friend was stunned to find out that Jessica is a modern artist,” Matt McDermott, Pratt’s partner and collaborator, said over the phone. “He was convinced that she was a lost private press folk artist from the ’60s or ’70s.”“The fact that she’s hung around a lot of record stores and is very into the texture and atmospherics of older music means that her stuff appears somewhat anachronistic,” McDermott added, amused. “There’s that boomer saying, ‘They don’t make songs like they used to,’ but Jessica’s music argues that you actually can.”“If you feel like you’re always fighting against yourself in order to achieve your goals, you are conscious of time passing because everything feels very belabored, artistically,” Pratt said.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesOn a rainy March day in New York, Pratt strolled in the Queens Museum and discussed how “Here in the Pitch,” due Friday, has roots in the history lurking beneath another city: Los Angeles, her home since 2013.“If you want to get metaphysical about it, it’s layers of human experience that may still be reverberating,” she said, thinking about the prehistoric ooze that burbles under Wilshire Boulevard. “That is absolutely the lens through which I see my reality every day, as swimming through these unseen layers of history and energy.”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

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      A Brief Tour of Pop Music’s Caffeine Addiction

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      Hear songs by Sabrina Carpenter, Squeeze, SZA and more.Sabrina Carpenter’s perky bop “Espresso” is … a bit addictive. (We’re sorry.)Valerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDear listeners,A few weeks ago in our Friday feature the Playlist, I recommended a bubbly new single by the pop artist Sabrina Carpenter and made a bold prediction: “Get ready to hear this one everywhere.” Even more quickly than I imagined, the prophecy has come true. Last week, “Espresso” debuted at No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it Carpenter’s highest charting hit yet. More important, it has taken over the nation’s psyche. You can hardly go anywhere these days without hearing someone quoting the song’s infectious hook “That’s that me espresso” or wondering aloud, “what is a ‘me espresso?’”That’s a profound philosophical question for another day. Today, we are simply honoring the absurdist joy of “Espresso” with a playlist of songs about caffeinated beverages.Coffee has been a consistently evocative theme throughout pop musical history, so this mix travels from 1940 right up to the present moment. That trusty beverage is often used to describe a sophisticated kind of romance (as it does on Otis Redding’s swooning ballad “Cigarettes and Coffee”) or perhaps the idle hours waiting around for said romance to occur (see Peggy Lee’s sultry take on the 1948 standard “Black Coffee”). Chappell Roan tries to use it as a shield against romance on a track from her 2023 album “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” reasoning with a former flame, “I’ll meet you for coffee, ’cause if we have wine/You’ll say that you want me, I know that’s a lie.”In “Espresso,” Carpenter uses the caffeine metaphor to suggest how restless she makes a guy she has wrapped around her finger: “Say you can’t sleep? Baby, I know.” Also, crucially, she understands that “espresso” rhymes with “I guess so.” That’s poetry.It’s time for the percolator,LindsayListen along while you read.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

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      In the Battle of Drake vs. Kendrick Lamar, AI Is Playing Spoiler

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      A rap beef between hip-hop’s two dominant stars has left fans wondering whether new tracks are real or fakes.For the past month, an all-out brawl has consumed hip-hop, with some of the genre’s top artists trading barbs in rapidly released tracks. The dispute, which began in late March with a perceived dig at Drake by Future and Metro Boomin, has roped in J. Cole, Rick Ross and even the estate of Tupac Shakur.At issue: Who is the current holder of hip-hop’s crown — Drake or Kendrick Lamar — with a whole lot of rumors, personal attacks and inside jokes adding fuel to the fire.Rap battles aren’t new, but this time, fans are grappling with a very 2024 question: Which of the diss songs are real?When a diss track in a high-profile conflict gets released, the splintered rap media ecosystem — including magazines, blogs, Instagram pages, YouTube channels, podcasts and livestreams — often erupts immediately. Journalists spread the word, critics dissect every line, and fans rush to crown a winner, round by round. But when a Drake response called “Push Ups” appeared online, fans wondered whether it was made by him or was perhaps the work of generative artificial intelligence.They had reason to be skeptical. Last year, “Heart on My Sleeve,” a song impersonating Drake and the Weeknd, was posted by a musical creator called Ghostwriter, and in many ways served as a harbinger of the impact this technology may have on the industry.A track like “Heart on My Sleeve” requires a fair amount of musical know-how to produce. The beats and raps are typically generated by a musician, then put through an open-source deepfake filter to transform the vocals into a well-known artist’s. It is that last step, imitating another artist’s vocals, that has caused the most consternation.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

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      Gerstein’s ‘Music in Time of War’ Pairs Debussy and Komitas

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      Kirill Gerstein’s immense recording project “Music in Time of War” surveys works by artists who witnessed World War I and the Armenian genocide.Kirill Gerstein, a Soviet-born pianist whose parents sold their only proper asset — a garage — so that they could afford plane tickets to the United States for their son’s education, approaches music in a way that recalls something his countryman, the conductor Kirill Petrenko, once told him: “I sacrificed so much in my life to not do things by default.”The career of Gerstein, 44, is filled with moments that defy a belief in doing things “by default.” There was the time when he devoted a significant portion of his $300,000 Gilmore Artist Award to commissioning new piano music from composers across jazz and classical music, placing Chick Corea and Brad Mehldau alongside Oliver Knussen and Alexander Goehr. Or there was the time, in 2017, when Gerstein championed a new, shockingly modest critical edition of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 rather than the grandiose, more recognizable version. Or when, as many streamed performances during the pandemic, he instead organized a series of free, online seminars that featured musicians alongside luminaries from the wider arts scene.Now comes Gerstein’s latest project, “Music in Time of War,” a recording that is expansive in its program and packaging: a 141-minute double album of works by Claude Debussy and the Armenian composer and ethnomusicologist Komitas Vardapet, accompanied by a 174-page book of conversations, essays and photographs that situate the music deep in its historical context.The album — which beyond solo piano pieces also includes works for piano and soprano (with Ruzan Mantashyan), and piano duo (with Katia Skanavi and Thomas Adès) — was released in mid-April. Its timing came at a poignant midpoint for both composers: March 25, the anniversary of Debussy’s death, and April 24, the date Armenia commemorates as the beginning of the 1915 genocide in which up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed by the Ottoman Empire. That led to post-traumatic stress disorder for Komitas, who while living in Constantinople (now Istanbul) was deported to Anatolia and brutalized by a guard before being released, then eventually suffered a nervous breakdown.What began as a goal in Gerstein’s “self-development program” — to record Debussy’s Études (1915) — quickly accumulated connections owing to the collection’s composition during one of history’s darkest moments. “Our understanding of a piece of music cannot be divorced from the historical and cultural setting in which it was created and received,” Gerstein, who lives in Berlin, writes in the foreword for his new album’s book.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

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      Sting on Setting His Music to Dance in Message in a Bottle

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      In “Message in a Bottle,” a dance show opening at City Center, Sting’s songbook helps tell the story of a family fleeing conflict.When the choreographer Kate Prince set out several years ago to create a dance show based on the music of Sting, she was unsure what story she might be able to tell using his varied songbook.Then she saw photos of young Syrian refugees taking desperate risks to reach safety in Europe, and she had an idea. She would use some of Sting’s and the Police’s most affecting music, songs like “Desert Rose” and “Every Breath You Take,” to tell the story of a family displaced by war.The result is “Message in a Bottle,” which premiered in London in 2020 and comes to New York City Center in Manhattan for a two-week run beginning on Tuesday. In the nearly two-hour show, featuring Prince’s dance company, ZooNation, she draws on freestyle dance, salsa, Lindy Hop, street dance and other styles to bring to life 27 songs.“People get married to my songs, people play my songs at funerals,” Sting said. “I’m always happy that they have a function. And here the function is to tell an important, worthy, wonderful story.”In a recent interview at City Center, Prince, Sting and the composer and arranger Alex Lacamoire discussed the refugee crisis, the challenge of setting Sting’s music to dance and the role of art in times of conflict. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.A scene from “Message in a Bottle,” which had its premiere in London in 2020. Sting said he is “always happy” that his songs have a function “and here the function is to tell an important, worthy, wonderful story.”Helen MaybanksWe 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

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      Student Orchestra Shouts ‘Mambo!’ and Meets Gustavo Dudamel

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      Our photographer followed 95 young musicians for six days as they prepared to perform with Dudamel, the next music director of the New York Philharmonic.The student musicians, dressed in jeans, T-shirts and hooded sweatshirts, were rehearsing an excerpt from “West Side Story” in a high school auditorium one recent afternoon. Then, as the trumpets blared and the timpani went wild, a voice broke out from the conductor’s podium.“Oy yo yo yo yo yo yo,” said the superstar maestro Gustavo Dudamel, who was leading the rehearsal. “You are not dancing together.”Dudamel, the New York Philharmonic’s next music director, paused for a moment, telling the students they needed a more precise rhythm and sound. Then he put his hands in his pockets and swaggered around the stage.Dudamel, the next music director of the New York Philharmonic, guided the youth ensemble, telling the students they needed a more precise rhythm and sound.James Estrin/The New York Times“This is cool, really cool music,” he said, eliciting laughter from the students. “We need something that goes with the nature of the body.”The students, part of a 95-member youth ensemble nominated by schools and arts programs and assembled by the New York Philharmonic, were at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan for six days last week. They were preparing for a concert on Friday with Dudamel, who has vowed to expand the Philharmonic’s presence in schools and in the community when he takes over in 2026.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

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      Taylor Swift Debuts at No. 1 on Billboard 200 With ‘Tortured Poets Department’

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      Only the Beatles have more No. 1 LPs now: The pop superstar reigns atop the Billboard 200 for the 14th time with the equivalent of 2.6 million album sales.There was never any doubt that Taylor Swift’s latest release, “The Tortured Poets Department,” was going to be big. The question was just how big.And the answer is, gigantic.“The Tortured Poets Department,” Swift’s 11th studio album, opens at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 album chart with historic numbers, including huge results in streaming and vinyl sales. It is Swift’s 14th chart-topping title, tying her with Jay-Z for the second-most No. 1 albums by any act in the 68-year history of Billboard’s flagship album chart; only the Beatles, with 19, have more.In its first week out, “Tortured Poets” had the equivalent of 2.6 million album sales in the United States, according to Luminate, which tracks the data behind Billboard’s charts. That is the biggest overall first-week take for any album since Adele’s “25” in 2015, which opened with nearly 3.5 million, driven by in-store CD sales.The “equivalent” figure is a composite, based on a formula used by Luminate and Billboard to reconcile the various ways listeners now buy and consume music. And in each way, “Tortured Poets” was a smash.It sold 1.9 million copies in traditional album sales, including 859,000 for vinyl alone, which blew away Swift’s own previous record of 693,000 LPs, set just six months ago. Advance sales through Swift’s website — begun the day Swift announced the album, at the Grammy Awards — were key. She offered an array of tinted vinyl variants and CDs, some in “deluxe” versions advertised with autographs or on-brand trinkets like engraved bookmarks that went for as much as $50 apiece. According to Billboard, 1.4 million copies of the album were sold on its first day, many preordered over the last two months.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

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      Jazz Saved the Bassist Luke Stewart. Now He’s Working to Rescue Others.

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      Stewart’s many projects — Silt Trio, Irreversible Entanglements, Blacks’ Myths and others — make strong statements and foster community. A new LP is out Friday.On a Sunday afternoon in March, Luke Stewart — a bassist and composer who has gradually emerged as a galvanic force in the contemporary jazz vanguard — stood at the corner of Pine and Broadway, in Manhattan’s Financial District, running down some local history. He pointed across the street, where the American Stock Exchange sat next to Trinity Church, and noted our proximity to the former site of New York’s municipal slave market.“You see this pattern really all over the world,” Stewart said, “where literally people are taken from the auction block, where we started, right down here to be saved in the church and sold, and then sent off to wherever they’re going.”Stewart is wont to drop deep knowledge, whether he’s pointing out the sites of bygone jazz lofts in NoHo or spontaneously unpacking a Ravel score at the New School, where he is an adjunct professor. Sitting in the university’s performing-arts library, he traced the arcs of the notes with his fingers, posing rhetorical questions in his deep, faintly drawly voice: “What kind of emotion did the composer want?” “What was going on then?” “What is classical music, anyway?”Stewart, 37, chuckled at the increasing loftiness of his inquiries, but his point was serious: always dig deeper — an ethos he seems eager to pass on to listeners. Introducing an interdisciplinary performance earlier in the month under his platform Union of Universal Unity, he urged the audience to “Leave here changed.”Onstage, in each of his many projects, the tall, goateed bassist is a riveting presence. On Friday, he’ll release “Unknown Rivers,” the third album by his group Silt Trio — featuring Warren Crudup III (known as Trae) and Chad Taylor trading off on drums, as well as the tenor saxophonist Brian Settles — which makes a persuasive case for Stewart as both a composer of concise, memorable themes and a speaker-rattling powerhouse on his instrument.Stewart onstage at the HSA Theater Harlem School of the Arts in Manhattan in 2022.Jeenah Moon 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