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    In the Age of the Algorithm, Roots Music Is Rising

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    Billy Strings and Chris Thile were singing an old song called “Rabbit in a Log” at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. Clouds of weedy smoke rolled up to the stage from below, and thunder echoed from the surrounding mountain peaks as the crowd of 7,000 nodded blissfully and trance-bopped in Dead-show fashion.Listen to this article, read by Eric Jason MartinThe song, also known as “Feast Here Tonight,” is about extracting a rabbit from a hollow log when you don’t have a dog (you’ll need to fashion a brier snare), cooking it over an open fire and finding a place to lay your weary bones for the night. So it’s about the techniques and outlook of the hobo, redolent of atavistic physical competence and the unforgiving facts of life. Like a lot of old-timey music heard in our disorienting present, it sounds like equipment for living, shaped and road-tested by hard times. Bill Monroe, the main force behind the merger of Scottish fiddle tunes with blues and gospel that came to be called bluegrass, recorded the song in the 1930s, but its roots extend back to earlier folk traditions in the South.It carries a considerable payload of history, and it also offers an occasion to shred. Billy Strings, who is already regarded at age 32 as an all-time great flat picker, grimaced in concentration as he laid down dense, twisting skeins of guitar notes. Thile, who is known as a wizard of the mandolin able to play anything with anybody, was all smiles and seemed to do everything without effort: impossibly swift runs, chordal washes, daring harmonic touches. Billy Strings told me later that his immediate reaction to hearing Thile warm up on mandolin backstage was “I better get some coffee.”But Billy Strings was the main attraction. Born William Lee Apostol, he is one of the biggest names in the world of roots music and still getting bigger. He consistently sells out arenas, and it seems just a matter of time before he moves up to stadiums. He has been wildly successful in attracting fans of all ages, including devotees of jam bands, heavy metal and other genres beyond the roots-music scene. He told me, “I’ll throw in some diminished runs for metalheads; you know, put some horns on it,” referring to the devil-horns finger gesture favored by fans of heavy metal, who lap up the ominous minor sound of diminished chords.Billy Strings, whose marquee turn with Thile opened the Telluride festival last June, was one of a cohort of youngish, proven-yet-still-rising stars who converged there that also included Molly Tuttle, Charley Crockett and Sierra Ferrell. They are all big fish in the expanding pond of the roots-music scene who have been testing the vaster waters of the mainstream — showing up all over late-night TV, movie soundtracks and music awards shows. Endlessly in demand as guest stars on other artists’ songs, they are both generating and riding the cultural momentum as American popular music makes one of its regular cyclical swings back toward acoustic instruments and natural voices, the values of community and craft and a heightened sense of connection to the soulful experience and hard-won wisdom of those who lived in the past. Like crafting and sewing and other embodied competences also making a comeback, music handmade by flesh-and-blood humans on instruments made of wood and metal has acquired special added meaning. It offers a strong contrast to the disembodied digital reality that more and more of us inhabit more and more of the time.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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      These Fans Love ‘Pride & Prejudice’ a Billion Times Over

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      “Ladies and gentlemen,” a voice announced over speakers, “please welcome world-renowned pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet!”A roar erupted from hundreds of people dressed in their Regency-inspired finest: tailcoats and dresses with puffed shoulders, costume jewelry and ringlet-curled hair. They crowded around a small Steinway piano to the side of a makeshift stage, whose backdrop was like a billboard: a purple expanse with the image of Keira Knightley in a bonnet and the text “Pride & Prejudice: Twentieth Anniversary.”Roger Kisby for The New York TimesIt was a Comic Con for the Jane Austen set, an enormous party thrown by Focus Features for one of its most beloved films, Joe Wright’s 2005 adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice.” Inside the Viennese Ballroom at the Langham Huntington in Pasadena, Calif., fans of the movie recently gathered for the rare opportunity to hear Thibaudet perform Dario Marianelli’s soundtrack.Thibaudet, dressed in custom Vivienne Westwood designed for the occasion, took his seat at the piano and began to play “Dawn,” the tone-setting theme from the start of the film, in which a freely repeating note gives way to an instantly endearing melody over gentle waves of arpeggios. A hush swept through the room, and people held up their phones to record. Two friends held each other and cried; one took a video as the other wiped away her tears.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 7-Song, 130-Minute Jam Band Primer

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      Listen to noodling tracks by Dave Matthews Band, Grateful Dead, Goose and more.Dave MatthewsAmy Harris/Invision, via Associated PressDear listeners,It has become a joke among a few friends and colleagues that I am the newspaper’s jam band correspondent. I have written (and Popcasted!) about the Grateful Dead, Phish’s wizard-like lighting director and, last month, Goose. I do these stories because I like this music, and in some cases love it. Now, it is time for me to make my case. If you’ve ever found yourself even a little jam-band curious, then this one is for you.A jam band borrows the grammar the Grateful Dead set more than a half-century ago: concerts with ever-shifting set lists; songs with ample room for extensive improvisation; eclectic musical roots encompassing bluegrass, gospel, jazz and rock (Southern, prog, classic, indie); fans who treasure live recordings over studio albums; and an ethos that is laid-back and, though sometimes serious, rarely self-serious.Roll your eyes if you must. But jam bands aren’t going anywhere. Goose and the virtuosic guitarist Billy Strings are on the cusp of mainstream moments. Suddenly, somehow, the Dead became a little bit cool. Jam bands might be perfectly suited to our era, in which an artist’s best bet is developing intimate relationships with core groups of passionate fans who will pay for tickets, merch and subscriptions.What follows is a 101-level syllabus. Live tracks only, of course. If you get confused, listen to the music play.We play bebop in the band,MarcListen 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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      25 Ways to Get in on Dance Music’s Renaissance

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      Dance music is experiencing another boom period, and this time the music is traveling faster and farther than ever, thanks to new streaming platforms and more fans getting access to making (and vibing to) an even broader slate of sounds. Here’s how to get involved.5 Ways to Club AnywhereBoiler RoomWhat began in 2010 as a single livestream called Boiler Room, with a webcam taped to a D.J. booth, has become not just a global proving ground but a rite of passage, and a catchall term for a format that’s changed the course of dance music.Start here: Kaytranda’s devilishly chaotic, often hilarious 2013 Montreal session; a fun hour of soulful dance music that foreshadows big things to come for the artist and the format alike.The Lot RadioStarted in 2016 on a triangle-shaped patch of gravel in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the Lot has drawn a wide range of top-tier talent to D.J. inside its sticker-covered booth (or as Charli XCX did last summer, dance on top of it).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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      Mac Gayden, Stellar Nashville Guitarist and Songwriter, Dies at 83

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      Heard on Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde” among other albums, he also sang and was a writer of the perennial “Everlasting Love.”Mac Gayden, the co-writer of the pop evergreen “Everlasting Love” and an innovative guitarist who recorded with Bob Dylan and helped establish Nashville as a recording hub for artists working outside the bounds of country music, died on Wednesday at his home in Nashville. He was 83.His cousin Tommye Maddox Working said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.Strangely enough, Mr. Gayden’s most illustrious achievement — his percussive electric guitar work on “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” a track on Mr. Dylan’s 1966 opus, “Blonde on Blonde,” most of which was recorded in Nashville — went uncredited for decades. It was only recently, when a new generation of researchers discovered the omission, that he received his due.Mr. Gayden, who was self-taught, had a knack for inventing just the right rhythm or mood for an arrangement. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, when Nashville was just beginning to break out of its conventional country bubble, he had a particular affinity for collaborating with cultural outsiders, among them Linda Ronstadt and the Pointer Sisters.“Mac Gayden was a genius, genius, genius — the best guitar player I ever heard,” Bob Johnston, the producer of “Blonde on Blonde,” was quoted as saying in “Dylan, Cash and the Nashville Cats: A New Music City,” a 2015 exhibition at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville.Mr. Gayden in 2015 at the opening of the exhibition “Dylan, Cash and the Nashville Cats: A New Music City” at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville.Jason Davis/Getty Images for Country Music Hall of Fame and MuseumOn J.J. Cale’s 1971 Top 40 single “Crazy Mama,” Mr. Gayden played bluesy slide guitar with a wah-wah pedal, creating an uncanny sound later employed to droll effect on the Steve Miller Band’s chart-topping 1973 pop hit “The Joker.” Decades later, the steel guitarist Robert Randolph, a Pentecostal-bred star in jam-band circles, adopted the technique as well.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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      Rare Beatles Audition Tape Surfaces in a Vancouver Record Shop

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      The recording appears to be from the band’s 1962 audition for Decca Records, which notably rejected the group.The tape sat unremarkably on a shelf behind the counter, collecting dust for five, maybe 10 years — so much time that Rob Frith says he lost track.Frith, 69, could not seem to recall how it had found its way to Neptoon Records, his store in Vancouver, British Columbia, which in its 44 years has become a repository for tens of thousands of vinyl records and other musical relics.The label on the cardboard box said it was a Beatles demo tape, but, having heard enough bootleg recordings over the decades, Frith was skeptical until he enlisted a disc jockey friend, Larry Hennessey, to load it onto his vintage tape player a few weeks ago.It was just before midnight on March 11 when they pushed play on the mystery tape. From the opening guitar riff and the intonation of a 21-year-old John Lennon, Frith said he could not believe his ears as he listened to the Beatles performing a cover of the Motown hit “Money (That’s What I Want).”“Right away, we’re all kind of looking at each other,” Frith said. “It seems like the Beatles are in the room. That’s how clear it is.”Frith said the tape appeared to be a professionally edited recording of the Beatles’ New Year’s Day 1962 audition for Decca Records in London, a session that notably ended with the band’s rejection.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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      J.B. Moore, Producer of Seminal Hip-Hop Records, Dies at 81

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      He was a magazine ad salesman when he and a colleague, Robert Ford, teamed with Kurtis Blow and helped break rap music into the mainstream.J.B. Moore, an advertising man from suburban Long Island who wrote the lyrics to one of rap’s first hits — Kurtis Blow’s 1979 novelty song, “Christmas Rappin’” — and with a partner, Robert Ford, produced that rapper’s albums as he became a breakout star in the early 1980s, died on March 13 in Manhattan. He was 81.His friend Seth Glassman said the cause of his death, in a nursing home, was pancreatic cancer.Mr. Moore and Mr. Ford, known as Rocky, were unlikely music impresarios. They met at Billboard magazine in the 1970s, where Mr. Moore was an advertising salesman who wrote occasional jazz reviews, and where Mr. Ford was a reporter and critic and one of the first journalists at a mainstream publication to expose the musical fusion created by DJs and MCs that was then emerging from New York City block parties and Black discos.Mr. Ford “was a Black guy from the middle of Hollis, Queens,” Mr. Moore recalled in a 2001 oral history for the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle. “I was a white guy from the North Shore of Long Island.” Still, he said, “our record collections were virtually identical.”The two friends’ careers took a turn in the late summer of 1979, when Mr. Ford, who had a child on the way, told Mr. Moore of his idea to try to scrape up money with a Christmas song. He was inspired by a Billboard colleague who had written a holiday tune for Perry Como decades earlier and was still getting paid for it.Mr. Moore and Mr. Ford came up with the idea for “Christmas Rappin’” in 1979, inspired by a colleague who had written a holiday tune for Perry Como decades earlier and was still getting paid for it.Mercury RecordsMr. Moore liked the idea. “Christmas records are perennials, and therefore you get royalties ad infinitum on them,” he said in the oral history.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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      Larry Appelbaum, Who Found Jazz Treasure in the Archives, Dies at 67

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      He helped turn the Library of Congress into a leading center for research on the history of jazz, and made some surprising discoveries of his own.Larry Appelbaum, a music archivist who over a long career at the Library of Congress helped make it a leading center for research into the history of jazz, discovering a number of important recordings along the way, died on Feb. 21 in Washington. He was 67.His death, in a hospital, was from complications of pneumonia, his brother Howard said.Mr. Appelbaum specialized in one of the Library of Congress’s most complex tasks: the preservation of recorded speech and music, often involving its transfer from one format to another. As part of that effort, he acquired and processed collections of old recordings, a job that offered no end of drudge work, but also the opportunity for serendipitous finds.His biggest discovery came in 2005, when the library received a large collection of jazz recordings — fragile acetate tapes made by Voice of America at Carnegie Hall in 1957.“There was literally a truck filled with tapes that came to us,” he recalled in an interview for the D.C. Jazz Festival.As he flipped through them, he found one labeled, in pencil, “Thelonious Monk Quartet,” with a few track listings. Interesting, he thought, but not necessarily momentous.“It was only when I put the tape on the machine and started to listen to it that I thought, ‘That’s John Coltrane,’” he said.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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      Jam Like a King: Charles Releases a Playlist

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      King Charles III showcased 17 artists, mostly from Commonwealth countries, in a personal playlist. Beyoncé, Bob Marley and Diana Ross made the cut.King Charles III, a classical music fan who has studied the cello, piano and trumpet, released an eclectic playlist on Monday featuring 17 artists, including Beyoncé, Bob Marley and Grace Jones.Music “has that remarkable ability to bring happy memories flooding back from the deepest recesses of our memory, to comfort us in times of sadness, and to take us to distant places,” Charles said in a podcast on Apple Music, “The King’s Music Room,” released in conjunction with the playlist.Charles, who as the British monarch is head of the Commonwealth, a club of 56 nations that were mostly part of the British Empire, put out the playlist to mark Commonwealth Day, celebrated on the second Monday in March with events across member countries.The king, 76, may have had some help in choosing the songs from Errollyn Wallen, a Belize-born artist who was last year appointed Master of the King’s Music. The honorary role was created during the reign of King Charles I in the 17th century.In 2008, Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, played the bongo drums at Bob Marley’s former home, now a museum, in Kingston, Jamaica.Anwar Hussein/WireImageHere are some of the king’s song choices.Beyoncé, “Crazy in Love”While the playlist primarily featured artists from the Commonwealth, he included a few from outside the group, citing a personal connection to their music. Beyoncé made the cut.Charles and Beyoncé at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 2003.Anwar Hussein/WireImageDaddy Lumba, “Mpempem Do Me”In the podcast, recorded at Buckingham Palace, the king recalled a 2018 visit to Ghana, a Commonwealth nation, where he danced to the music of Ghanaian singer Daddy Lumba.Miriam Makeba, “The Click Song”The South African singer Miriam Makeba, widely known as “Mama Africa,” was a prominent opponent of apartheid. “I shan’t try too much to pronounce the title, as it requires a great deal of practice,” Charles said of her 1960s hit “Qongqothwane,” known in English as “The Click Song.”Diana Ross, “Upside Down”“When I was much younger, it was absolutely impossible not to get up and dance when it was played,” King Charles said of Ms. Ross’s 1980 song. “So, I wonder if I can still just manage it?”Kylie Minogue, “The Loco-Motion”Ms. Minogue came to St. James’s Palace to perform this song in 2012. “This is music for dancing,” Charles said of the Australian singer’s rendition of the song, written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin. “It has that infectious energy which makes it, I find, incredibly hard to sit still.”Kylie Minogue met Charles and Camilla at St James’s Palace in London in 2012.Pool photo by Carl Court More