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      Chucky Thompson, Hitmaking Producer, Is Dead at 53

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      He brought a range of musical influences to bear on the tracks he helped create for Mary J. Blige, the Notorious B.I.G. and many others.“My mind is always on ‘Record,’” the producer Chucky Thompson once told an interviewer, explaining how he was able to bring such a wide range of musical influences to the hits he helped create for Mary J. Blige, the Notorious B.I.G., Nas and other stars.For any particular track, he might draw on the soul records his parents used to play, or his time as a conga player in Chuck Brown’s go-go band, or some other style in his mental archive, as he sought to realize the vision the performer was after, or perhaps take him or her in a whole different direction.Mr. Thompson helped forge the hip-hop and R&B sound of the 1990s while in his mid-20s. He showed his versatility with his work on Ms. Blige’s second album, “My Life,” and the Notorious B.I.G.’s debut, “Ready to Die,” both released in 1994. The next year he was a producer on almost all the tracks on Faith Evans’s debut, “Faith,” another hit.In this period he was working for Bad Boy Entertainment, the influential label Sean “Diddy” Combs founded in 1993, as part of the producing team known as the Hitmen. But he continued to produce for a range of artists after the Hitmen dissolved later in the 1990s. If he — unlike some other producers in those years — defied categorization, that was deliberate.“In my brain, as a producer, I never wanted a sound,” he said in a 2013 video interview with Rahaman Kilpatrick. “That’s why you hear me on so many different records.”Mr. Thompson died on Aug. 9 in a hospital in the Los Angeles area. He was 53.His publicist, Tamar Juda, said the cause was Covid-19.Mr. Thompson was different from many of his contemporaries in that he was a multi-instrumentalist, often contributing guitar, piano, trombone or other flourishes to the tracks he produced. To get a particular effect for the 2002 Nas track “One Mic,” he flipped a guitar over and banged on the back of it.“He’s a true musician and doesn’t like to program heavily — just like me,” Mr. Combs told Billboard in 1995, when that publication included Mr. Thompson in an article on “the next crop of hotshot producers.” “Chucky has so many melodies in his head and produces from the heart.”Carl Edward Thompson Jr. was born on July 12, 1968, in Washington to Carl and Charlotte Thompson. In the 2013 interview, he said that his mother recognized his innate musical ability early.“She used to sit me in the kitchen and — you know how kids would just be banging and making noise? I was actually on beat with it,” he said. “She knew from there that something was different.”At 16 he was touring with Mr. Brown and his band, the Soul Searchers, playing the funk variant known as go-go, which was popular in and around Washington. It was a time when traditional live performances by bands were losing ground to D.J.s, who could keep the music constant rather than breaking between songs and thus keep people on the dance floor. Mr. Brown had his young conga player try to compensate.“He decided, ‘I’ll put a percussion break in between songs,’” Mr. Thompson told Rolling Stone in June. “So we would finish a song, then I’d do a percussion break, and I’d do a call and response — ask the crowd, ‘Y’all tired yet?’”The year 1994 was a big one for Mr. Thompson. Among the albums he worked on that year was the Notorious B.I.G.’s debut, “Ready to Die.”Bad Boy AristaThat same year, he co-produced much of Mary J. Blige’s “My Life,” the Grammy-nominated follow-up to her successful debut, “What’s the 4-1-1?,” with Ms. Blige and Sean Combs.Uptown RecordsBy the early 1990s he was in New York trying to market himself as a producer, and Mr. Combs and Ms. Blige were looking for material for the follow-up to her successful first album, “What’s the 4-1-1?” (1992).“She picked my song out of a ton of tracks from new and previous producers,” Mr. Thompson said in an interview with the website StupidDope.com in June. “I was truly honored. That track was ‘Be With You,’ and at that time it was very different for her and her sound. I felt at that moment we were onto something that would be special.”He ended up co-producing much of the album with Ms. Blige and Mr. Combs. Ms. Blige had a tough hip-hop image that defied female-singer stereotypes, and some people didn’t care for it. Mr. Thompson took that reaction into account as he helped her create the songs for her second album.“I didn’t like people throwing stones at something they didn’t understand,” he told Rolling Stone. “So I was like, on this record, people are gonna know you’re a singer. You’re the real deal.”“My Life,” full of confessional songs exploring Ms. Blige’s personal struggles, received a Grammy nomination for best R&B album and helped establish her as a star. In June, Amazon Prime unveiled a documentary about her career and the record, “Mary J. Blige’s My Life.”Over the years Mr. Thompson also produced for Usher, Raheem DeVaughn, Total and many others. He produced some of the final tracks for his early mentor, Mr. Brown, who died in 2012 at 75.Mr. Thompson’s survivors include five children, Ashley, Emille, Myles, Quincey and Trey Thompson. More

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      The Music That Inspires the Watchmakers

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      Lots of artisans rely on music for inspiration, distraction and just a bit of fun.Music and watchmaking have a deep connection. Consider the “tick tock” of traditional timepieces, the minute repeater complication (a function besides the telling of time) that chimes the time on demand and the tunes played by many a pocket watch.Some watchmakers, though, say music also plays an important role in their ateliers — as inspiration, distraction and sometimes just for fun.Below, six industry professionals talk about what’s on their playlists.UrwerkFelix BaumgartnerWatchmaker at Urwerk, in GenevaThe Rolling Stones have played an important role at Urwerk since its founding in 1997, uniting Martin Frei, who designs the wildly futuristic watches, and Mr. Baumgartner, who makes them.For example, Mr. Baumgartner wrote in a email, in 2002, “we had finished the design of our new watch, the UR-103, but had barely enough money to put it into production.“We had to make a decision. Urwerk was clinically dead. It made no sense to continue,” the 46-year-old watchmaker added. “We took a break, turned on the music, the famous ‘Time Is On My Side,’ on maximum volume. We looked at each other and we knew. We found faith. We had to go to the end.”Ulysse CamusDenis FlageolletWatchmaker at De Bethune, in L’Auberson, SwitzerlandMr. Flageollet’s exposure to music began long before 2002, when he co-founded De Bethune, a brand dedicated to combining watchmaking’s heritage with new technologies.He was 7 in 1969, when Woodstock captured the world’s attention. “I couldn’t understand what was going on but I heard so much about it that I knew it was something big,” Mr. Flageollet, now 59, wrote in an email. “My elders introduced me to Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Who and their music never left me.”Later, he added, “I discovered the Montreux Jazz Festival, which introduced me to many artists with very different styles such as Leonard Cohen, Miles Davis, Prince, David Bowie.”Kross StudioMarco TedeschiWatch designer at Kross Studio, in Gland, SwitzerlandNot all creative types in the watch world lean toward rock, though. Recently the founder and chief executive of Kross Studio has been listening to the music from the 1996 movie “Space Jam.”The reason: He is creating a tourbillon watch housed in a sculptural wood and aluminum basketball — a homage to LeBron James, star of the new movie “Space Jam: A New Legacy.”It is just one of the projects that Kross has undertaken since Mr. Tedeschi, formerly with Hublot, established the business a year ago and signed partnerships with Warner Bros. (which produced and released both “Space Jam” movies) and Lucasfilms (its visual effects division worked on “A New Legacy”) to create themed collector sets that retail for five to six figures.“I played the soundtrack through again and again,” he said, referring to the original movie.As for his own taste, Mr. Tedeschi, 36, has an iTunes library of more than 30,000 listings: “I like French music from the ’80s, George Clinton, Motown singers — that type of music is the base of my musical culture. My father played Otis Redding a lot as I was growing up.”via ZenithAlexandra MouginWatch analyst at Zenith, in Le Locle, SwitzerlandMs. Mougin, 44, repairs some of Zenith’s most complicated watches.“When I’m setting the hammers of my minute repeater,” she wrote, referring to the watch complication that strikes the hours, quarters and minutes on request, “I have to listen to the ‘music’ played by the gongs of this watch. My mind is silent, and I’m totally concentrated, with only the music played by my watch piercing this silence.”And when she is starting a restoration, she wrote, “My mind has to be clear, not clogged up with worries or questions. That’s when I mentally conjure up ‘The Funeral’ by Ennio Morricone. Admittedly it’s quite sad, but so powerful. It helps me reconnect with essentials.”She also will imagine the New Orleans classic “Iko Iko”; “Elle est d’ailleurs,” sung by Pierre Bachelet; and “Ça va ça va,” performed by Claudio Capéo.via Kari VoutilainenKari VoutilainenWatchmaker at Voutilainen, in St.-Sulpice, SwitzerlandA variety of music entertains Mr. Voutilainen, 59, and his 10-member workshop team. They tune into local radio stations in Switzerland’s Val de Travers that might be playing “jazz, classical, popular music,” the independent watchmaker said. “It’s background music, creating a relaxing mood.”And when it’s not so relaxing? “It’s a common decision when it’s time to change the station,” Mr. Voutilainen said.Personally, “I listen to everything, to classical, to jazz, to Louis Armstrong. I’m not difficult,” he said, adding that he also likes “Italian pop music, like Zucchero. I do also like the Canadian singer Garou; you can hear the passion when he’s singing.”Johann SautyEric GiroudWatch designer at Through the Looking Glass, in Confignon, SwitzerlandDifferent music fits different projects, Mr. Giroud, 59, wrote in an email. “In the research of ideas or concept I will listen to soft and introspective music,” like Debussy’s piano concertos or Nils Frahm, he wrote. “When sketching I listen to music more rhythmic and almost disturbing in order to leave my zone of comfort (Nick Drake, Isaac Hayes, etc.)”And creating 2-D or 3-D drawings? “Titles arranged by Claus Ogerman, for example, or Kruder & Dorfmeister,” he said, referring to the German arranger and composer and the modern Austrian remix specialists.Music is so important to his creations that “every year I make a compilation of the music that had accompanied me during the year in the form of a CD that serves as a greeting card,” he wrote.Just this creative watchmaker’s way of spreading the inspiration of music. 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      Billie Eilish, 21st-Century Pop Paragon, Hits No. 1 With Big Vinyl Sales

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      “Happier Than Ever” debuted at the top of the Billboard 200 with 54 percent of its total from physical formats.Billie Eilish emerged a few years ago as the embodiment of the new-model pop star — flooding the internet with content, designing merch items herself and accumulating boatloads of fans through social media.But in some ways her mode of success is thoroughly traditional. “Happier Than Ever,” the seven-time Grammy winner’s second studio album, opens at No. 1 on the latest Billboard album chart with decent streaming traffic but extraordinary sales of vinyl, CDs and even cassettes. It had 114 million streams — far exceeded by other recent chart-toppers by J. Cole, Olivia Rodrigo and Morgan Wallen, among others — but sold 153,000 copies as a complete package.Altogether, “Happier Than Ever,” Eilish’s second No. 1 album, had the equivalent of 238,000 sales in the United States, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm. It was the fifth-best opening for an album this year — beaten by Cole, Rodrigo, Wallen and Taylor Swift.Released in an array of boxed sets and retail-exclusive variants, “Happier Than Ever” made 54 percent of its total sales in the United States on physical formats, including 73,000 vinyl LPs, 46,000 CDs and nearly 10,000 on cassette. It had the second-highest weekly vinyl haul since at least 1991, when SoundScan, MRC Data’s predecessor, first began keeping accurate data on music sales. (Only Swift’s recent LP release of “Evermore,” which sold 102,000 copies after months of preorders, had more.)How unusual is that? Well, last year streaming made up 83 percent of recorded music revenues in the United States, and physical formats just 9 percent, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. But CD and LP sales are far more lucrative than streams, and offer a big chart boost. Indeed, “Happier Than Ever” would have taken No. 1 this week on vinyl sales alone.Also this week, “Welcome 2 America,” an unearthed Prince album recorded in 2010, opens at No. 4, with the equivalent of 54,000 sales. The Kid Laroi’s “____ Love,” last week’s top seller, falls to No. 2, Rodrigo’s “Sour” is No. 3 and Doja Cat’s “Planet Her” is in fifth place. More

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      Aaliyah’s Music Will Finally Be Streaming. What Took So Long?

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      Twenty years after one of the most celebrated stars of ’90s R&B died in a plane crash, her songs — like “Try Again” and “If Your Girl Only Knew” — will be widely available.For years, it has been one of music’s most conspicuous, and puzzling, absences: The majority of the catalog of Aaliyah, the groundbreaking R&B singer of the 1990s and early 2000s, has been absent from digital services — rendering the work of one of the most influential pop stars in recent decades largely invisible, and depriving her of a proper legacy. The singer, whose full name was Aaliyah Haughton, died in a plane crash in 2001 at age 22.But on Thursday came a surprise announcement that her music will soon arrive on streaming platforms, starting with her second album, “One in a Million” (1996), on Aug. 20.Fans, including Cardi B, celebrated online. But the return of Aaliyah’s music remains fraught, with a battle still playing out between her estate and the music impresario who signed her as a teenager and retains control of the bulk of her catalog. Here’s an overview of her long unavailability on the services that dominate music consumption today.What music is coming out now?Blackground Records, founded by the producer Barry Hankerson — Aaliyah’s uncle — said it would be rereleasing 17 albums from its catalog over the next two months, on streaming services as well as on CD and vinyl. They include the bulk of Aaliyah’s output — her studio albums “One in a Million” and “Aaliyah,” along with the “Romeo Must Die” soundtrack and two posthumous collections — plus albums by Timbaland, Toni Braxton, JoJo and Tank.The releases, being made through a distribution deal with the independent music company Empire, will introduce a new generation to Aaliyah’s work. In the 1990s, she stood out as a powerful voice in the emerging sound of hip-hop: a forthright young woman — she was just 15 when she released her first album, “Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number” (1994) — who sang like a street-smart angel over some of the most innovative backing tracks of the time.“Where most divas insist on being the center of the song,” Kelefa Sanneh of The New York Times wrote in an appreciation in 2001, “she knew how to disappear into the music, how to match her voice to the bass line — it was sometimes difficult to tell one from the other.”Who is Barry Hankerson?Hankerson is an elusive, powerful and divisive figure in the music business. He was once married to Gladys Knight, and later discovered and managed R. Kelly. He built Blackground into one of the most successful Black music companies of its time, but clashed with artists. Braxton, JoJo and others have sued the label, with Braxton accusing Hankerson of “fraud, deception, and double-dealing,” according to a 2016 article on the music site Complex titled “The Inexplicable Online Absence of Aaliyah’s Best Music.”In 1991, Hankerson introduced his 12-year-old niece to Kelly, who was twice her age. Kelly, then an emerging singer, songwriter and producer, would become the primary force shaping Aaliyah’s early career, writing and producing much of her material and making Aaliyah part of his entourage.It later emerged that Kelly had secretly married Aaliyah in 1994, when she was 15 and he was 27. In the criminal case Kelly now faces in Brooklyn — which is set to begin jury selection next week — prosecutors have alleged that Kelly bribed an Illinois government employee at the time to obtain a fake ID for Aaliyah that gave her age as 18. Their marriage was annulled.After Hankerson moved the distribution of Blackground releases from the Jive label to Atlantic in the mid-90s, Aaliyah began working with two young songwriter-producers from Virginia: Timbaland and Missy Elliott. Their first collaboration, “One in a Million” (1996), went double platinum and spawned the hit singles “If Your Girl Only Knew” and “The One I Gave My Heart To.”Clockwise from top left: “Aaliyah,” “One in a Million,” “Ultimate Aaliyah” and “I Care 4 U,” albums that will be available in physical and digital versions.What happened to Aaliyah’s music?By the time Aaliyah died, she seemed well on her way to a major career. But as the music business evolved in the digital age, and Blackground’s output slowed down, her music largely disappeared.Aside from the album “Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number,” which remained part of the Jive catalog through Sony Music, and a handful of other tracks, most of Aaliyah’s songs have been unavailable for streaming. Used CDs and LPs of her work trade for eye-popping prices.Her influence has persisted, although sometimes it is more imagined than real. Last month, the singer Normani released a song, “Wild Side,” with Cardi B, that contained what many fans thought was a sample of an Aaliyah drum break. (Billboard said it is not, although Hankerson has said it would have his blessing anyway.) And interest in her story was spurred by the 2019 documentary “Surviving R. Kelly,” which delved deeply into their relationship.Although the streaming catalog has nearly reached the “celestial jukebox” level of completion that has long been predicted, there are still some other notable absences. De La Soul’s early work, including its classic 1989 debut “3 Feet High and Rising,” is not online, apparently because of problems in clearing samples. (The new owners of that music have pledged to make it available, although no concrete plans have been revealed.)Why is the music becoming available now?Exactly what led to the current release of Aaliyah’s music is unclear.According to a new article in Billboard, Hankerson began seeking a new deal for her music about a year ago, after Aaliyah’s estate made a cryptic announcement that “communication has commenced” between the estate and “various record labels” about finally getting her music online. “More updates to come,” it said.But the estate does not control Aaliyah’s recordings; Hankerson does, through his ownership of the Blackground label. For months, fans have followed more mysterious statements from the estate, including one in January, around what would have been Aaliyah’s 42nd birthday, that “these matters are not within our control.”When Blackground announced its rerelease plans, the estate responded with yet another confusing statement, saying that for 20 years it has been “enduring shadowy tactics of deception in connection with unauthorized projects targeted to tarnish,” yet expressing “forgiveness” and a desire to move on.A more direct explanation of what has been going on behind the scenes came from a lawyer for the estate, Paul V. LiCalsi, who said: “For almost 20 years, Blackground has failed to account to the estate with any regularity in accordance with her recording contracts. In addition, the estate was not made aware of the impending release of the catalog until after the deal was complete and plans were in place.”Billboard quoted a representative for Blackground in response, saying that the estate “will receive everything that it is entitled to” and that a royalty payment had been made earlier this year.For fans, the behind-the-scenes battling may matter less than the music finally becoming available online.“Baby Girl is coming to Spotify,” the service announced on Twitter, with a picture of Aaliyah. “We’ve been waiting a long time for this.” More

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      How Do You Capture Four Decades of Hip-Hop? Very Broadly.

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      “The Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap,” a 129-song boxed set, has a very challenging (and maybe impossible) goal: pinning down a constantly evolving genre.In 1990, hip-hop was in the throes of an identity crisis. That summer, MC Hammer released “U Can’t Touch This,” his flashy, breakout single that, thanks to the flamboyant fashion and quick footwork in its video, became a pop music phenomenon. Hot on its heels a few months later was Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby,” which sampled “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie and became the first hip-hop single to top the Billboard Hot 100.While wildly popular in the pop mainstream, both songs were — in differing but related ways — derided in hip-hop, kept at arm’s length. Rap music, then still barely over a decade old, had only just begun to reckon with attention from outside the genre’s walls. These hits — including one from a white rapper, no less — were different, nigh unprecedented phenomena.And yet here they are, back to back in the middle of Disc 5 of “The Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap,” a 129-song collection and boxed set due out Aug. 20 that acts as a foundation, primer and master narrative of the genre’s growth from 1979 to 2013. They come right after “The Humpty Dance” by Digital Underground and “Me So Horny” by 2 Live Crew — different sorts of breakouts by bug-eyed humorists from opposite ends of the country — and just before Brand Nubian’s strident “All for One,” which arrives like a mean sentry striving to restore order.In 2021, with hip-hop the dominant musical force in popular culture globally, there’s little to debate: MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice’s blockbuster songs are eruptions and intrusions that in retrospect sound inevitable. Hip-hop long ago reconciled with its pop ambitions, and then became the very core of pop music itself. Along the way, it became a very wide tent.MC Hammer’s 1990 smash “U Can’t Touch This” was a conundrum for rap at the time of its release. Today, it has a place in hip-hop history.Tim Roney/Getty ImagesTo properly anthologize the genre in full is to reckon with its contradictions, its competing narratives and its inconsistencies. By this measure, the “Anthology” is an impressive work of scholarship, design and logistics. It is, of course, unavoidably flawed too, the point of departure for a shadow collection of exclusions, alternate histories and near-misses.Released on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, the “Anthology” is part of the African American Legacy Recordings series, co-produced with the National Museum of African American History and Culture. To select the songs, an advisory committee of around 40 artists, industry figures, journalists and academics compiled an overarching list of approximately 900 options. From there, a 10-person executive committee met in November 2014 to winnow it down. Some adjustments were later made for logistical reasons. (In 2017, the Smithsonian raised around $370,000 via Kickstarter to help fund production, research and licensing for the box.)“I’m envious of what the rock world does,” said Chuck D of Public Enemy, a member of the executive committee, referring to how rock ’n’ roll consistently takes stock of, and celebrates, its own history. “I was interested and jump-started this idea because I got tired of us not being treated like the royalty that the genre is.” (Chuck D said he abstained from the actual final vote — “I ran out of the room.”)Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” and “Bring the Noise” are both included in the “Anthology.”Jack Mitchell; The National Museum of African American History and CultureDwandalyn R. Reece, the museum’s associate director for curatorial affairs and curator of music and performing arts, said she expects, but would love to avoid, the inevitable. “I know people will look at the anthology as a canon, but that was not our intention,” she said. “This is a story, not the definitive story. What I hope for the anthology is that it starts a dialogue.”Whether or not it constitutes a canon — “I eschew the concept of canon,” said Cheryl L. Keyes, the chair of U.C.L.A.’s department of African American Studies and a member of the executive committee — the collection is a tour led with intention through hip-hop’s many phases, regions and ideologies.The producer 9th Wonder, also a member of the executive committee, framed the conversation around selection in terms of standards, which is to say, “songs supposed to be known by the next generation coming up,” he explained. “We’re basically creating a foundation for something that doesn’t exist. It exists in barbershops, it exists in your house with your friends, but on paper and concrete, a lot of stuff really doesn’t exist.”Beginning in the late 1970s, “The Smithsonian Anthology” takes in hip-hop’s earliest recordings (Sugarhill Gang, the Treacherous Three, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, etc.). It covers party music (Sir Mix-A-Lot, Ludacris, Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz) and gangster rap (Geto Boys, Schoolly-D, Ice-T). There’s a sprinkling of white rappers — Beastie Boys, Vanilla Ice, House of Pain, Eminem, Macklemore.The “Anthology” does a sturdy job of capturing the history of women in hip-hop — too often in the past considered primarily in relationship to men — from the Sequence and Salt-N-Pepa to Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown all the way up to Missy Elliott, Lauryn Hill and Nicki Minaj. “They are fully represented and represented in the most respectable way,” Keyes said. “They’re not there to tantalize the male fancy.”The “Anthology” gives space to the phenomenon that was Vanilla Ice.Mick Hutson/Redferns, via Getty ImagesAnd career artists like Lil’ Kim get their due.Gie Knaeps/Getty ImagesIt’s reassuring to see early tracks by the Port Arthur, Texas, duo UGK (“Pocket Full of Stones”) and the Memphis duo Eightball & MJG (“Comin’ Out Hard”) alongside their temporal peers from New York — too often the history of Southern rap has been told out of step with, and siloed off from, the rest of the genre. And it’s striking to reflect on how thoroughly some innovations, edgy in their day, are either forgotten, or so completely absorbed into the genre — take, say, the melodic lightness of Nelly on “Country Grammar (Hot [Expletive])” — as to be unremarkable.The collection stops in 2013 — the final song is by Drake, in his way the harbinger of a new era. But it’s also a convenient moment to put a cap on reflection. Hip-hop is now almost fully decentralized; the genre is splintered sonically and thematically. Perhaps most tellingly, hip-hop is actually more tolerant now: more understanding of its intra-genre quarrels, more available to different participants, more open to sonic invention and revision. It’s hard to police a genre’s borders when the genre is the whole world.So the “Anthology” captures hip-hop in its period of birth, its myriad growth spurts, its tugs of war, and finally, its full expansion into pop music. To quarrel over whether hip-hop should be given institutional treatment now would be quaint — in just 40 years, it has become bedrock. A collection like this — a position statement like this — is a relic of an era in which hip-hop had to fight to be taken seriously by institutions, whether they were museums, political bodies, technology companies or other creative industries.Perhaps the most old-fashioned idea about the “Anthology” is its format — a heavy physical box, loaded with images and essays, and nine CDs in an era where CD players are increasingly rare. A less imaginative approach could have begun and ended with, say, a curated playlist on Spotify or Apple Music (in those environments, at least, no licensing fees would be required).To select the songs, an advisory committee of around 40 artists, industry figures, journalists and academics compiled an overarching list of approximately 900 options. A 10-person executive committee winnowed it down further.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThe heft is intentional, though. “We want the next generation to learn about it, but we want them to learn about it the way we want them to learn about it,” 9th Wonder said.But it comes with liabilities, as well. Some songs picked by the committee weren’t able to be licensed for inclusion on the set. There are no songs with Jay-Z as the lead artist — he only appears as a guest on Foxy Brown’s “I’ll Be.” Gaps like that underscore the inherent incompleteness of any project of this scale, which triggers an endless shoulda-coulda exercise: Is the best representation of Lil Wayne truly his grotesque Robin Thicke collaboration “Tie My Hands”? Cypress Hill’s “Insane in the Brain” over “How I Could Just Kill a Man”? Some artists (Nicki Minaj, Outkast, Eminem) are represented by their most pop-oriented successes, at times leaving more meaningful work behind.“When it comes to putting hip-hop in the canon, you’re damned if you’re do, you’re damned if you don’t,” 9th Wonder added.Proportionately, and perhaps inevitably, the “Anthology” is perhaps overindexed on the genre’s earliest years. Hip-hop grew widely in the 1990s and 2000s, making it harder to capture in a small sampling of songs. The ninth and most contemporary disc skews more issues-oriented than perhaps the genre itself was in that time span — of all the groupings, it feels the most prescriptive.The “Anthology” does a solid job of capturing the history of women in hip-hop — too often in the past considered primarily in relationship to men — including Missy Elliott.Myrna Suarez/ImageDirect, via Getty ImagesAnd there are the parts of hip-hop’s recorded legacy that fall outside of the scope of this project. There are no recordings of live jams or battles from the late 1970s or early 1980s, no tracks from the crucial mixtapes of the 1990s. That the project ends in the early 2010s means that it doesn’t have to reckon with a genre that has splintered widely across the internet, with plenty of micromovements leaving barely any physical trail at all.Finally, there is also the tricky dance of assembling history with the benefit of new knowledge. “Planet Rock,” by Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force, is undoubtedly a foundational track of the genre. But in the mid-2010s, Bambaataa was accused of child sexual abuse by multiple men. The “Anthology” also includes “Get Like Me,” a David Banner song that features the singer Chris Brown, who in 2009 pleaded guilty to assaulting Rihanna.“We’re not the judge and the jury,” Keyes said. “There’s always personal drama in people’s lives, but it really has nothing to do with their art.”That tension underscores one still-developing difference between how historical narratives can be told by institutions with the benefit of temporal distance and a wide lens and how they are written online, in real time.For that reason, among others, the “Anthology” already feels ancient. The internet is both ahistoric and also full of looking-back lists. The assessments that take place there are finicky and ever-mutating. There is hardly ever a long view, and histories are never stable.Hip-hop thrives in this space. It moves quickly and nonlinearly. It can be made casually and on the cheap, and disseminated widely. It is iterative, taking elements established elsewhere and stacking its innovations atop them, rarely staying still for long. There are slivers of the genre that aren’t in conversation with each other, which might not even be recognizable as related if heard side by side.That’s a direct result, though, of the debates — now reconciled — captured on the “Anthology.” Pop ambition? Accepted. Melodic flexibility? Encouraged. Widespread regional participation? Demanded. Now that the quarreling is mostly settled, where the genre will go is boundless. Forty years from now, it will be bigger than any one box can hold. More

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      Jazz Musicians Unite With One Goal: Celebrating Frank Kimbrough

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      The underrecognized pianist died suddenly last December. On Friday, his peers and former students will release a tribute album featuring nearly 60 of his pieces.A couple of months ago, as the long, lean era of pandemic stillness was just beginning to open to new possibilities, some of the finest jazz musicians in New York could be found shuffling in and out of a Lower East Side recording studio as if through a revolving door. At one point, several of them — including the saxophonist Donny McCaslin, the trumpeter Ron Horton and the pianist Craig Taborn — delved into a wistful composition titled “Regeneration,” giving it all the supple dynamism of a banner rippling in the breeze.Along one wall of the studio was a framed photograph of the song’s composer, the pianist Frank Kimbrough, who died suddenly at the end of last year, at 64. His sly smile in the portrait, conveying a benevolent skepticism, felt well suited to the project underway: an elaborate tribute featuring nearly 60 of his pieces interpreted by more than 65 of his associates, including former students and distinguished peers. Amounting to more than five and a half hours of music, this ambitious release is available on Friday digitally and on streaming services from Newvelle Records, which usually focuses exclusively on premium vinyl.Within a musical landscape defined by relationships, Kimbrough operated as both a connector and an outlier. “He just had a 360 view of things, and a completely open mind on the scene,” said the alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, who took part in the sessions. “The folks who knew him really loved him,” he added, “but even among musicians, there are a lot of people who don’t know his name.”Ron Horton, left, and Michael Blake. “Frank was modest about his composing,” Horton said.Anna YatskevichA grand gesture on behalf of an underrecognized figure, “Kimbrough” looks from one angle like the culmination of a lifetime’s accumulated good will. As a pianist, Kimbrough was prolific and widely admired but best known for a lasting tenure with the Maria Schneider Orchestra; his precise, perceptive accompaniment helped shape that ensemble’s expressive sound, up to and including “Data Lords,” the most critically acclaimed jazz album of 2020. As an educator, Kimbrough left behind a deep legacy of mentorship, most recently in the prestigious Jazz Studies program at the Juilliard School.Elan Mehler, a pianist who studied with him during an earlier stint at New York University, co-founded Newvelle about six years ago, and invited Kimbrough to record its inaugural release. That album, “Meantime,” paired him with a handful of younger players like the trumpeter Riley Mulherkar, who had just completed a masters at Juilliard. Fittingly, all of the proceeds from “Kimbrough” will go toward the Frank Kimbrough Jazz Scholarship there, established by his widow, the singer Maryanne de Prophetis.Mehler conceived the tribute with an intergenerational ideal in mind, arranging his rotating cast so that barely any tracks have the same personnel. “I had multiple spreadsheets, color-coded by musician,” he said during a break in the session. “I’ve never fallen as deeply into anything as I fell into this project. I’d be up until two, three in the morning just putting bands together and then playing the songs with headphones on the keyboard, and changing it, flipping it around, and then falling asleep and dreaming about it.”In addition to Mehler and Taborn, the pianists on the new set include Fred Hersch, who knew Kimbrough as a contemporary, and Isaiah J. Thompson, who had him as an instructor — along with an honor roll of others, like Gary Versace, Helen Sung, Dan Tepfer, Elio Villafranca and Jacob Sacks. Like everyone involved in the project, they donated their services, creating not only a stirring homage but also a snapshot of a uniquely transitional time.Elan Mehler is a pianist who studied with Kimbrough and the co-founder of Newvelle Records, the label releasing “Kimbrough.”Cody O’Loughlin for The New York Times“If it wasn’t this moment where everybody’s ready to finally play music again, but not yet touring, this wouldn’t have been able to happen,” Mehler said. “Just the fact that everybody’s in the same city is crazy.”As a compendium of Kimbrough’s music, the Newvelle release also stakes a serious claim for his legacy as a composer — something that took even Mehler somewhat by surprise. When he first started mapping out the project, he consulted with de Prophetis about material. They asked Horton, an experienced archivist, to assemble a book of Kimbrough compositions. He ended up compiling more than 90 of them.“Frank was modest about his composing,” Horton said during a session break. “But those of us who knew him, going back 40 years, knew he was very special as a composer.”Moments earlier, Horton had demonstrated the point while recording a ballad titled “Noumena,” with a hymnlike calm that spiraled into agitated abstraction. The guitarist Ben Monder imparted a barbed edge with his pedal effects, as Horton and McCaslin jostled around the melody. Their performance was a vibrant extrapolation of Kimbrough’s original design — charged with a spirit of freedom, as he’d meant it to be.Kimbrough took his stewardship of the jazz tradition seriously: his final and most ambitious release, in 2018, was “Monk’s Dreams: The Complete Compositions of Thelonious Sphere Monk.” (It was issued as a six-CD boxed set, for which I wrote liner notes.) What Kimbrough prized most highly as a musician was a sense of unfolding mystery and slippery lyricism — qualities he associated with Monk and a few other personal touchstones, like the drummer Paul Motian, the keyboardist Annette Peacock and the pianists Andrew Hill and Paul Bley.For a period starting in the early 1990s, Kimbrough performed and recorded extensively with the Jazz Composers Collective, founded by the bassist Ben Allison. Though it was created to spotlight new music by its members, the collective had its most visible success story in the Herbie Nichols Project — a repertory group and reclamation project focused on another of Kimbrough’s piano heroes, featuring Horton and Allison, among others.From left, Dave Douglas, Joe Lovano and and Craig Taborn. Some musicians who played at the sessions were rekindling fruitful associations. Others were meeting for the first time.Anna YatskevichThe pianist Helen Sung in the studio.Anna YatskevichThe saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins.Anna YatskevichSpeaking in a studio hallway before he joined Horton and others for a raucous take on “TMI,” Allison marveled at the impromptu community that had formed around Kimbrough: “Elan’s organizing the sessions, but it’s his musicality and what he did as an artist that coalesces other musicians like moths around a flame,” he said. “And for the decades that I knew him and worked with him, we talked a lot about that: how to bring people together around an idea.”The saxophonist Joe Lovano — who recorded a moving “Elegy for P.M.” in a first-time encounter with Taborn and Monder — raised a similar point in reference to Kimbrough’s compositions. “Each one is an idea,” Lovano said, “and has a sound.” Another of the pieces he played was “727,” with Taborn, the trumpeter Dave Douglas, the bassist John Hébert and the drummer Clarence Penn. On the page, this piece involved minimal instruction; in the hands of these musicians, it bloomed.“What’s there in the song, it’s the essential information,” reflected Taborn after the take, describing Kimbrough as a composer attuned to the intuition of seasoned improvisers. “It’s clearly reductive of a larger scheme. He’s asking, ‘What’s the thing that needs to be here that makes this phrase happen?’ And then everything else is stripped away.”Lovano and Donny McCaslin. “Each one is an idea,” Lovano said, of Kimbrough’s compositions, “and has a sound.”Anna YatskevichWhat’s remarkable about “Kimbrough” is how fully the songs are realized, almost invariably in a first take, by unexpected groupings of musicians. Among the many highlights are a gently drifting “A&J,” with Alexa Tarantino on alto saxophone, Tepfer on piano, Rufus Reid on bass and Matt Wilson on drums; “Quiet as It’s Kept,” featuring Mulherkar and the pianist Samora Pinderhughes; “Eventualities,” with its collegial sparring between McCaslin and Wilkins; and an authoritative read on “Quickening” by Kimbrough’s piano protégé Micah Thomas, with Allison and the drummer Jeff Williams.Some of these musicians were rekindling fruitful associations for the first time in years. Others were meeting for the first time on the studio floor. After such a long period of isolation, apart from any semblance of a living scene, those connections felt all the more sustaining and vital. “Hearing everybody come together around this music is very gratifying,” Allison, who knew Kimbrough as well as anyone involved, said in a studio hallway.Public recognition had never come easily to Kimbrough, who loathed artistic compromise as much as he did musical cliché. What would he have thought about so many musicians coming together in his honor? Allison flinched, as if the question had knocked the wind out of him. He fell silent for more than 15 seconds before he could form a choked reply: “I’m sure he’d love it.” More

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      The Enduring Appeal of Italian Composers’ Dramatic ‘Library Music’

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      Compositions made from the 1960s through the ’80s to soundtrack films and ads have found new homes on hip-hop tracks and compilations. New artists have been inspired, too.One day in the summer of 2011, Lorenzo Fabrizi rode with a friend to an abandoned warehouse far outside of Rome. The custodian of the building, who said he had bought it for around $100, let them inside to look at its contents: 10,000 vinyl LPs, by Fabrizi’s estimate. They were welcome to take as many they wanted, the owner said; he was brewing beer in the space and had no use for them. More

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      Taylor Swift’s ‘Evermore’ Vaults to No. 1 With a Vinyl Bump

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      Taking advantage of a Billboard chart tweak in how the sales of physical albums are counted, the singer-songwriter’s six-month-old album returned to the top.On the Friday before Memorial Day, Taylor Swift noted on social media that the vinyl version of her nearly six-month-old album “Evermore” was finally available. Pictured in her post lying in the grass with her LP, Swift informed her fans, “You can get it at your fav indie record store, Target, Walmart & Amazon.”To those following the ever-changing target that is Billboard’s chart rules, it was a signal to look out for the next No. 1.Indeed, “Evermore” returns to the top slot on the magazine’s latest chart, rising 73 spots to notch its fourth time at No. 1. In the most recent week, “Evermore” had the equivalent of 202,000 sales in the United States. Of those, 192,000 were for copies sold as a complete package, including 102,000 vinyl LPs, according to MRC Data, Billboard’s tracking arm.It set a record for weekly vinyl sales — at least since 1991, when the charts first came to be informed by hard data (rather than record store surveys, which were fuzzy at best, and often manipulated). Over the last 30 years, the album with the best weekly vinyl sales was “Lazaretto” by Jack White, one of the format’s most zealous champions, which moved 40,000 copies in its opening week in 2014.How did Swift do it? The intimate, indie-folk-esque “Evermore” — Swift’s second surprise release during the pandemic — is certainly a hit, and marked an important moment in her career and creative development. (Her first quarantine release, “Folklore,” won the Grammy for album of the year.)But “Evermore” also benefited from a recent tweak to Billboard’s rules over how it counts the sale of vinyl records on its charts.Vinyl versions of new albums are often delayed by months, the result of production bottlenecks in the small network of pressing plants. When fans order LPs from an artist’s website, they are often sent a digital copy while waiting for the physical one to arrive. Until October, the first version to reach a fan — in those cases, the digital download — was what was counted on the chart. Now, the sale is counted when the version they ordered is shipped.When announced, that rule looked as though it might upset the marketing plans of artists who sell significant amounts of vinyl. But with “Evermore,” Swift was essentially able to amass nearly six months of pre-orders, which were counted in full once the LP was released.According to Billboard, about 71 percent of the current week’s album sales for “Evermore” came from “web-based sellers,” including Swift’s online store. In addition to the vinyl sales, 69,000 copies of “Evermore” were sold on CD, some newly autographed by Swift. (The album had just 12.4 million streams, the least for a No. 1 album since AC/DC’s “Power Up,” which opened in November with 7.8 million.)The return of “Evermore” to No. 1 robbed Olivia Rodrigo’s debut, “Sour,” of a second week at the top after a blockbuster opening. “Sour” had the equivalent of 186,000 sales, down just 37 percent from its first week, and lands in second place.Also this week, J. Cole’s “The Off-Season” is No. 3, Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” is No. 4 and Moneybagg Yo’s “A Gangsta’s Pain” is No. 5.DMX’s posthumous release, “Exodus,” opened at No. 8. More