Bars and Nightclubs

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    Billy Jones, Baby’s All Right Owner and NYC Nightlife Impresario, Dies at 45

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    He opened Baby’s All Right and three other nightclubs, a restaurant and a record store in a dozen years, helping the city maintain its cultural verve.As a recent college graduate in the early 2000s, Billy Jones lived with his parents in Richmond, Va., but his fantasy life was elsewhere: in Williamsburg, the Brooklyn neighborhood that had become the world capital of indie rock. The closest he could get was visiting his local Barnes & Noble, where he would read magazines covering New York’s music scene.Then one day in 2002, he made the leap: He was leaving home, he told his father. He and the high school friends who made up his band, Other Passengers, had decided to try to make it big in New York.In Williamsburg, Mr. Jones began working as a barista, with dreams of indie-rock stardom. It wasn’t so far-fetched. At a cafe down the block, another barista, Kyp Malone, would soon gain renown as a singer and guitarist with the group TV on the Radio.There was passion in the moans of Mr. Jones’s singing, but he did not become a rock star. In time, the Williamsburg concert venues that had launched some of his peers — clubs like 285 Kent, Glasslands, Death by Audio — all closed. Rents in the neighborhood had skyrocketed. Aspiring young musicians left.And instead of achieving his own dreams, Mr. Jones wound up doing something else: He made it possible for other people to keep dreaming.In 2013, he and a friend, Zachary Mexico, opened Baby’s All Right, a club at 146 Broadway in Williamsburg. It became, as The New York Times wrote in 2015, the “nightlife preserver” of the neighborhood. It was a small enough venue to offer major acts an indie spirit that they could no longer find elsewhere in New York City, yet big enough to make unproven musicians feel that they had made 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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      Rigmor Newman, Behind-the-Scenes Fixture of the Jazz World, Dies at 86

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      She was a concert promoter, a nightclub impresario and the producer of an award-winning 1992 film about the Nicholas Brothers dance duo.Rigmor Newman, who began her career in Sweden as a singer and beauty queen and went on to become a fixture in the U.S. jazz world as a concert and film producer as well as a talent manager, died on April 26 in the Bronx. She was 86.Her daughter, Annie Newman, said she died in a hospital from complications of Parkinson’s disease. Her death was not widely reported at the time.Ms. Newman, who sang at the Nobel Prize banquet in Stockholm in 1957, arrived in New York in the early 1960s after marrying Joe Newman, a standout trumpeter in the Count Basie and Lionel Hampton orchestras.She later managed the Nicholas Brothers, a gravity-defying dance duo that dazzled cinema audiences starting in the late 1930s, and became heroes to many Black Americans. Harold Nicholas of the Nicholas Brothers became her second husband.Among her many professional incarnations, Ms. Newman served as the executive director of Jazz Interactions, a nonprofit organization promoting jazz throughout the New York metropolitan area, which Joe Newman helped found in the early 1960s.Ms. Newman appeared with the trumpeter Joe Newman, whom she married, on the cover of his 1960 album “Counting Five in Sweden.” Given the racial climate of the day, the image was a symbolic triumph.World Pacific RecordsWe 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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      Shane Doyle, Founder of a Storied East Village Venue, Dies at 73

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      An Irish expatriate, he created Sin-é, a bare-bones cafe that became an unlikely magnet for stars like Sinead O’Connor, Bono of U2 and Iggy Pop.Shane Doyle, the Irish expatriate who founded Sin-é, a matchbox of a cafe and music venue in New York City that in the 1990s became a retreat for the likes of Sinead O’Connor and Shane MacGowan of the Pogues and a springboard for the shooting-star career of Jeff Buckley, died on April 22 in Manhattan. He was 73.The cause of his death, in a hospital, was septic shock after a series of unsuccessful lung surgeries, his wife, Mimi Fisher, said.Mr. Doyle opened Sin-é (pronounced shih-NAY) in 1989 at 122 St. Marks Place in the East Village, in an era when that neighborhood was still known for beer-soaked punk clubs, outsider art galleries and squatters in abandoned tenements who would soon be immortalized by the hit Broadway musical “Rent.”“Sin-é” means “that’s it” in the Irish language, and that pretty well summed it up. With sparse décor and secondhand wood furniture, the venue (a cafe by day) was about the size of an East Village living room, as Ms. Fisher put it. There was no stage and, in the early days, no P.A. system, which forced guitar-based solo acts to stand against a wall and strum behind a microphone stand, looking more like indoor buskers than marquee toppers.“I remember people coming in from other countries and going, ‘Where’s the rest of it?,’” Tom Clark, a singer-songwriter who had a weekly gig there, said in an interview.Nor did Sin-é have a liquor license, although it did sell beer on the sly, and food options were limited. Mr. Doyle would occasionally whip up a pot of Irish stew in his apartment on East Seventh Street and lug it over for patrons. (He also owned a nearby bar called Anseo — Irish for “here.”)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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      Dance Music Is Booming Again. What’s Different This Time? A Lot.

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      In late February, just after midnight, a cavernous warehouse in the Brooklyn Navy Yard thumped with the Ibiza-based D.J. and producer Solomun’s dramatic, synth-heavy house music as red light strobed over a sea of raucous 20- and 30-somethings. Two days earlier, he had been at the 20,000-capacity Sphere in Las Vegas opening for Anyma, an Italian American electronic music star whose run of New Year’s Eve shows sold out in under 24 hours, grossing $21 million in ticket sales.Just before 2 a.m. a few weeks later, the London-based D.J. and radio host Moxie was shaking Brooklyn’s Public Records with a classic ’90s house track, smiling ear to ear as she watched over the sweaty 200-capacity nightclub. On a more frigid March night, Zeemuffin, a Brooklyn-based D.J. originally from Pakistan, was onstage at the Bushwick venue Elsewhere, headlining “Azadi” (“freedom” in Urdu), a bill that featured a wide array of global dance music sounds — Chicago house, Jersey club, Baltimore house, dancehall, the Baile funk of Brazil, the gqom of South Africa — while a sold-out crowd went wild.Zeemuffin at Elsewhere in Brooklyn.Zeemuffin (real name: Zainab Hasnain DiStasio) took a trip back to Pakistan around the top of the year to D.J. a club in Karachi where the near pandemonium at her set bordered on ecstasy. “Never in my whole life — and I’m from there — have I experienced anything like this” in the city, she recalled. She described a crowd of “queer people, trans people, Black people, white people, Asian people, all in one space,” and sighed. “It was unbelievable.”Over the past four years, scenes like these are increasingly playing out all over the world, as dance music experiences yet another boom period. Festival lineups are jam-packed with D.J.s, while some of the biggest names in pop music (including Beyoncé, Drake and Charli XCX) have made dance music-inspired or adjacent albums. It’s usually at this point — when a newspaper sees fit to write about it — that the comedown starts.This moment, however, is different.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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      Hamilton Leithauser, an Indie-Rock Hero in a Very Fancy Room

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      Even by Manhattan real estate standards, Café Carlyle is an intimate venue. The storied Upper East Side cabaret is just 988 square feet and seats 90 patrons, which means a performer can hear an audience member’s cutlery, not to mention their whispers.When Hamilton Leithauser first played there in 2018, that cozy ambience posed an unexpected challenge: He had to be not just a performer, but also an entertainer. That meant talking to the audience, something he hadn’t been inclined to do when onstage as the frontman of the indie-rock doyens the Walkmen, who relied on reverberating guitars and clever wordplay to catapult to the forefront of the early 2000s New York music scene.“People are right in front of you, and you want to talk to them between songs,” he said in a recent video interview. “I really wanted to let people in on what I was actually singing about, because I spend so much time on my words.” He’s been a fixture ever since.Leithauser returns to the Carlyle this month for the seventh go-round of what’s become an annual residency (he missed a year during the Covid-19 pandemic), playing a slate of 15 shows from March 6-29. This time, he has a new album, “This Side of the Island,” to trot out too. Compared to his last few solo releases, “This Side of the Island” sounds a bit more frenetic and urgent, which he is aware will bring an interesting dimension to the snug confines of the Carlyle, which was bought by Rosewood Hotels & Resorts in 2001 for $130 million and regularly hosts artists like Isaac Mizrahi and John Pizzarelli.“That room doesn’t see that much of that kind of music,” he said of his new songs. “I’ve got to do my own thing. I’m not ready to grow up fully, you know?”For the record, Leithauser, 46, is married to Anna Stumpf, an audio executive with whom he occasionally performs, and is the father to two daughters. Still, the sentiment stands: Leithauser has built a successful career largely by following his own instincts.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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      New Season of ‘The White Lotus’ Brings a Tourism Boom in Thailand

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      Crowds of visitors descended on Maui and Sicily after the HBO show’s first two seasons. Is the tropical resort island of Koh Samui ready for Season 3?When the third season of the hit HBO series “The White Lotus” debuts on Sunday, viewers will be transported to the tropical island of Koh Samui, Thailand. And if previous seasons are any indication, many of them will soon be booking vacations there, too.The show, which takes place at a different fictional White Lotus luxury resort each season, centers on a group of wealthy tourists, their interpersonal dramas and the inevitable tension with staff and locals, all against a backdrop of paradise skewed.Members of the “White Lotus” cast this season include Lalisa Manobal, right, who performs as Lisa with the K-pop group Blackpink.Fabio Lovino/HBO, via Associated PressThe travel industry has been anticipating the new season almost as much as fans have. Partly thanks to the so-called “White Lotus” effect, Koh Samui and Thailand have already emerged as top destinations. Koh Samui was one of the New York Times 52 Places to Go in 2025, and Thailand was Travel+Leisure’s 2025 destination of the year.With a wave of tourists set to wash ashore, the roughly 68,000 residents of Koh Samui are about to get a lot more familiar with the “White Lotus” effect.On the pristine white sand of Chaweng Beach one recent evening, Tey, 46, a local carpenter who declined to give his last name, said he didn’t really know much about the series. But then came a flash of recognition.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