Music

The Atlanta rapper Lil Baby scored his first No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart this week, with the omnipresent Latin pop star Bad Bunny starting close behind him.Lil Baby’s “My Turn,” with appearances by Lil Wayne, Lil Uzi Vert, Future and others, had the equivalent of 197,000 sales in the United States, according to Nielsen. The vast majority of that activity came from streaming — with 262 million clicks, “My Turn” had the biggest streaming week in six months, since Post Malone’s “Hollywood’s Bleeding” notched 365 million in September.Lil Baby’s rise has been quick. In four years, he has released seven full-length collections — landing three others in the Top 5 — and racked up more than 12 billion streams around the world.Still, the 25-year-old has kept a relatively low profile, avoiding the Paris fashion shows and sometimes rolling up to a Chick-fil-A all alone.“I just ain’t into it,” he said of the celebrity life in a recent interview with The New York Times. “I’m low-key bigger than the people who do that.”Also this week, Bad Bunny — a hyper-connected Puerto Rican singer and rapper, who performed on Cardi B’s No. 1 hit “I Like It” and was last seen onstage at the Super Bowl with Jennifer Lopez and Shakira — landed at No. 2 with his latest album, the surprise release “YHLQMDLG.” (The title stands for “Yo hago lo que me da la gana,” or “I do what I want.”) It had the equivalent of 179,000 sales, including 201 million streams.Last week’s top seller, “Map of the Soul: 7” by the K-pop sensation BTS, fell to No. 3. James Taylor’s “American Standard” opened at No. 4, and Roddy Ricch’s “Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial” holds at No. 5. More

The pianist McCoy Tyner’s impact on music is usually explained through his relationship to John Coltrane, a childhood friend who became his boss in one of the most significant ensembles in American history. But the story of Mr. Tyner, who died on Friday, is also the story of a bandleader and composer whose granite style remained intact even as he tracked the music’s developments, from bebop into free jazz.By the time he left Coltrane’s group in 1965, Mr. Tyner’s piano had become one of the distinctive forces in jazz: His pot-stirring left hand pounded heavy bass notes, then topped them off with roving stacks of harmony. His right hand’s brisk, zipping phrases made it just as recognizable as the left, if not quite as iconic.The Coltrane quartet modeled a new kind of ancient thinking about music: as a collective ritual, one that lived by a pledge of mutual independence as well as support. “It is all a matter of giving the soloist more freedom to explore harmonically,” Mr. Tyner said in 1963, when the quartet was in its prime. “Nevertheless, there is a foundation and a point of return. We all know where we are working from.”From the early 1960s forward, Mr. Tyner also was one of jazz’s most respected bandleaders. He led groups large and small, and penned enough memorable tunes to fill more than one songbook. His influence is written deeply into the generations that have followed him, and into the language of pianists from Mulgrew Miller to Geri Allen. But let’s start with Mr. Tyner’s own output. Below are 11 memorable recordings, from his work as an accompanist and a bandleader.John Coltrane, ‘My Favorite Things’ (1961)At age 21, Mr. Tyner joined the quartet of his longtime friend John Coltrane, a kind of elder-brother figure from his adolescent years in Philadelphia. Coltrane by then had nearly exhausted his fascination with corkscrewing harmonic changes, and the group found its identity in a more rooted, incantatory sound, influenced by music traditions from across the globe. With “My Favorite Things,” it also found itself a hit. All of a sudden, Mr. Tyner’s piano was on airwaves across the world, sparring with the drums of Elvin Jones to conjure the special locomotive power that would eventually define the band. Mr. Tyner’s playing on this track is disciplined and neatly contained, but you can easily spot the signature shadings of his harmonies and his trilling ostinatos.McCoy Tyner Trio, ‘Effendi’ (1961)This Tyner original comes from his debut album, “Inception,” released on the then-new Impulse! label, which would become a clearinghouse for the musicians in Coltrane’s orbit. On “Effendi,” named for the noblemen of the Ottoman Empire, Mr. Tyner tags back and forth between a pattern of dancing chords in the right hand and a series of responding melodies in the left, played in unison with Art Davis’s bass. It’s in tune with the hard bop that was lush on the vine in New York then, played by pianists like Elmo Hope and Sonny Clark. But there is a seriousness and a minor-key harmonic language that belong specifically to Mr. Tyner.McCoy Tyner Trio, ‘Reaching Fourth’ (1963)Mr. Tyner often spoke of the influence of Bud Powell, the bebop piano pioneer, whom he used to follow around as a young musician in Philadelphia. On “Reaching Fourth,” Mr. Tyner joins up with the drummer Roy Haynes, a veteran of Powell’s ensembles, and the young bassist Henry Grimes, who was on his way to a prominent career in the avant-garde. You can hear Powell’s dashing, bouncing style metabolized inside a music with almost no harmonic movement.McCoy Tyner, ‘’Round Midnight’ (1963)For anyone trying to neatly file Mr. Tyner’s music under “Disposition: Intense,” this is the rejoinder. “Nights of Ballads and Blues” was an album clearly designed to show Mr. Tyner’s gentle side, but he refuses to let the gimmick win. That he can turn a tune as taciturn and eerily beautiful as “’Round Midnight” into a pillowy, Red Garland-like ballad without letting go of its power shows the sensitivity of Mr. Tyner’s ear.Wayne Shorter, ‘Juju’ (1965)From the time he hit the scene alongside Coltrane, Mr. Tyner was sought by some of the finest young bandleaders, particularly on the Blue Note Records roster. The saxophonist Wayne Shorter was himself a Coltrane acolyte, and he didn’t shy from that affiliation when he made back-to-back albums with Coltrane’s own side musicians. Of course, Mr. Shorter was possessed of his own voice, and on “Juju” his saxophone cast a different shadow on the polyrhythmic structures built by Mr. Tyner and Jones.John Coltrane, ‘Resolution’ (1965)On “A Love Supreme,” Coltrane’s magnum opus, the quartet drives its modal approach to a devotional extreme. In the left hand, Mr. Tyner stacked intervals of harmonic fourths, creating the feeling of openness he talked about in that 1963 interview. But in his right hand he worked with a sharp incisor, sculpting shapely phrases with a harmonic specificity of their own. As the musician Sami Linna has pointed out, Mr. Tyner’s right-hand clusters allowed him to imply the harmonic clarity that his left hand eschewed. Rather than unfurling long, droning phrases or centrifugal eruptions, as Coltrane often did, he insisted on compact and lyrical melodies, articulated with a crystalline touch.McCoy Tyner, ‘Passion Dance’ (1967)The first of seven albums Mr. Tyner would eventually record for Blue Note, “The Real McCoy” is his best-remembered LP. Each of its five original tunes has become more or less a standard. On “Passion Dance,” the album’s hot-blooded opening track, and “Contemplation,” the deep-breathing ballad that follows, Mr. Tyner doubles the melodies with Joe Henderson’s tenor saxophone, while Jones builds a prism of bursting rhythms all around them.McCoy Tyner, ‘Presence’ (1973)Throughout the 1970s Mr. Tyner continued to expand his ambitions as a composer, while his piano playing made more room for the influence of the avant-garde. On the lengthy live album “Enlightenment,” a highlight from his fruitful years on the Milestone label, his familiar air of focus and intention is preserved — but it’s pervaded by a sense of mutiny and discontent, one that’s reflective of the age. There’s more than one breath-stopping moment on “Presence,” which Mr. Tyner begins and ends with passages of startling polyphony, freely improvising in gusts and riptides, flinging out lines at hyperspeed with only a distant correspondence to one another.McCoy Tyner, ‘Malika’ (1974)“Asante” is among both the most traditional and the most experimental albums of Mr. Tyner’s career. With an expanded ensemble — percussion, guitar, bass, reeds and voice — he summons a dreamy but vigilant journey. Sometimes he sinks into the kind of syncopated six-beat groove that he and Jones had made into an idiom of its own with the Coltrane quartet. Elsewhere he sticks to a simpler, hypnotic cadence. Throughout, the point is to achieve a full spectrum of sound: This seven-piece band has all the richness and variety of a natural habitat.McCoy Tyner Big Band, ‘Blues on the Corner’ (1993)In the late 1980s and ’90s, one of Mr. Tyner’s main vessels was his large ensemble, a 15-piece band for which he wrote new works and rearranged items from his back catalog. This reworked version of the Tyner classic “Blues on the Corner” appears on “Journey,” one of three albums that won him Grammys over a span of four years.McCoy Tyner, ‘Walk Spirit, Talk Spirit’ (2007)The name says it all: This marching, upbeat declaration of a tune — which debuted three decades earlier, on “Enlightenment” — embodies the unity between movement and liberation that’s at the core of Mr. Tyner’s music. More

ALMATY, Kazakhstan — On a recent Friday night, Mitya Koksharov was dancing exuberantly to techno music in a crowded former sauna. The spindly young man in dark-rimmed glasses bent his leg and fell dramatically to the floor — a vogueing move known as a dip, invented decades ago in New York’s underground L.G.B.T. ballroom scene. When he landed and ostentatiously stretched out his arms, the crowd around him screamed in delight.It was the kind of dancing you might expect to see at a party in Brooklyn, not in an authoritarian former Soviet republic, but this was no ordinary Kazakh dance floor: It was Zvuk (“sound,” in Russian), a regular techno event with a uniquely progressive bent here in Kazakhstan’s largest city.Koksharov said later that it was the only party in the city where he felt comfortable dancing like this. “This is the only place where I feel like myself,” he said.Zvuk is the brainchild of Nazira Kassenova, a 28-year-old Kazakh D.J. who performs as Nazira. She was behind the decks that night, spinning her characteristic blend of hard-charging techno to the approximately 200 attendees.Nazira, a fast-rising star in the world of electronic music, performs at some of Europe’s biggest clubs, including Berghain in Berlin and De School in Amsterdam. She has also played a central role in a growing underground techno scene in Kazakhstan that offers a counterpoint to the country’s repressive political and social climate.“I wanted to create a space where people can be a freak — be free, gay, straight, rich, poor, undress if they want to undress,” she said, before correcting herself. “Wait, nobody undresses in Kazakhstan.”Political opposition and freedom of speech are severely repressed in this oil-rich Central Asian country. After 30 years in office, the country’s longtime president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, stepped aside last year. His handpicked successor, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, won the election to succeed him last summer, in a vote that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe denounced as unfair.Kazakh society remains deeply conservative and, for some minority groups, oppressive. The country is ranked 158th out of the 180 countries on the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index. L.G.B.T. people regularly face the threat of violence, and Human Rights Watch has denounced the country’s widespread domestic-violence problem.But when two demonstrators were imprisoned for 15 days after unfurling a protest banner at the Almaty marathon last spring, there was a groundswell of public opposition to the government, on social media and in illegal street protests that have continued through the fall and winter. A meeting by a nascent opposition political party in late February was disrupted when the police arrested party leaders and would-be delegates.In an interview, Amir Shaikezhanov, the co-founder Kok.team, an L.G.B.T. rights organization (the name refers to the Kazakh word for light blue, a color associated with L.G.B.T. people in the country), said Kazakhstan seemed to have reached a “turning point.” The desire for reform was especially strong among younger Kazakhs, he added, who have been reared on Western pop culture — and, in some cases, on electronic music.“Techno is unbiased music. It is the kind of music that brings people together,” he said, pointing out that Zvuk is the only party in Kazakhstan where L.G.B.T. and other liberal-minded people openly dance together. “I’m not sure if Nazira understands what kind of impact she has just by being here.”Sitting in a cafe in the center of Almaty, a city of over 1.8 million people nestled below the towering Tian Shan mountain range, Nazira said she wanted Zvuk to be a kind of utopian “microcosm” for Kazakhs, “so that when they go back outside afterward, there’s a small shift.”Born to what she called a “superconservative” family in the southern city of Taraz, Nazira originally intended to become a molecular biologist, she said. But while studying on a scholarship at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, she visited influential dance venues like the Sub Club in Glasgow and became enamored of the ways electronic music broke down barriers between club-goers.“It is music that goes into your soul,” she said.After moving back to Almaty in 2014, she began D.J.ing and organizing parties that replicated the feelings of freedom she had experienced in European clubs. Until recently, Zvuk had no regular venue. One edition took place in a bunker, another in a club that was forced to close after neighbors saw two men kissing outside. The party is now organized by a collective made up of Nazira and five others, and often takes place at Bult, a former sauna that’s run by a lesbian couple.In recent years, Nazira’s international DJ career has become what she describes as a “Cinderella story.”In 2015, Mat Schulz, the artistic director of Unsound, a popular electronic music festival in Poland, saw Nazira play a set at a small party in Almaty. “Nazira was like a beacon,” he said in an email, describing her D.J. sets as “fluid and wide-ranging” and praising her blend of classic techno and rarely heard Eastern European tracks.After his visit to Almaty, Schulz invited Nazira to play the main stage at Unsound in 2017, and the dance-music magazine Mixmag selected her as one of the 15 breakthrough D.J.s for 2019. She has appeared on Boiler Room, the popular dance-music broadcasting platform, and at many of the world’s best-known techno clubs, including Tresor in Berlin, Nitsa in Barcelona and Bassiani in Tbilisi, Georgia.Nazira said she was inspired by the way Bassiani had become the center of a broad movement for civil liberties in the country. But Kazakhstan is far less permissive and liberal than Georgia, Nazira said.“I stay positive, because if I compare it to five years ago when I started doing parties, it is a huge change,” she said. “And if we keep going, in five years it’s going to happen.”Around 2 a.m. at Zvuk, the crowd surrounded Nazira’s turntables and began chanting her name as she finished up her set. Sitting upstairs in the club’s bar, Mutali Moskeu, 24, said that Nazira had played a “crucial” role in establishing an expanding electronic-music scene in Almaty, in part by organizing workshops to teach people how to D.J. themselves. Two years ago, he attended such an event, he said, and has since started his own party, called Groovchick.Another attendee, Zhangir Mukhametkhana, 21, a language-school employee, said that Kazakhstan’s Communist past had made it especially difficult for the country’s residents to let themselves go.“Zvuk is a place where I can engage with other people and realize I’m not the only one who doesn’t like what’s happening in our country,” he said. “Nazira created this atmosphere in this city that shows that things can be different.” More