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    At the Kennedy Center, an Ode to the Arts, and a Gentle Jab at Biden’s Age

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    Billy Crystal, Renée Fleming, Queen Latifah, Barry Gibb and Dionne Warwick are honored; Robert De Niro joked that Crystal is just a few years younger than the president.Rarely is the president of the United States, nestled in his box, the center of attention at the Kennedy Center Honors, the annual awards ceremony that brings a carousel of celebrities, musicians and actors to the stage to pay tribute to lifetime achievements in the arts.But such was the case on Sunday night, when Robert De Niro, celebrating Billy Crystal’s career, marveled at all the honoree had packed into his career.“You’re only 75,” Mr. De Niro said. “That means you’re just about six years away from being the perfect age to be president.”As President Biden grinned, waved and ruefully shook his finger at Mr. De Niro from the presidential box, members of the audience leaped to their feet with applause — some to gawk at Mr. Biden’s reaction from the front row of the balcony.Billy Crystal attending the Kennedy Center Honors. Robert De Niro noted that Mr. Crystal is nearing the age of the president.Paul Morigi/Getty ImagesIt was the only suggestion of politics in an apolitical, if quintessentially Washington event that sees throngs of dignitaries and politicians gather each year to pay tribute to the arts.On Sunday, the Kennedy Center honored artists who not only revolutionized their genres but transcended them: Billy Crystal, the actor and comedian; Barry Gibb, the musician and songwriter who rose to fame as the eldest member of the Bee Gees; Renée Fleming, the opera singer; Queen Latifah, the rapper, singer and actress; and Dionne Warwick, the singer.Ms. Warwick, who has performed five times at the Kennedy Center and previously appeared at the honors gala to perform tributes to two separate honorees, said her reaction to learning that she would be honored was: “Finally, it’s here!”“It’s a privilege to wear this,” she said, gesturing to the signature rainbow medallion given to each honoree.Missy Elliott, performing at the Kennedy Center. She spoke of Queen Latifah, recalling that for her, Ms. Latifah’s “Ladies First” anthem “was saying, ‘You will respect me.’”Gail Schulman/CBSOne of the quirks of these Honors is that the cast of musicians, actors and singers paying tribute to the honorees are kept secret from the attendees, and even the honorees themselves. On Sunday, a nonstop series of bold-lettered names descended on the stage, including Missy Elliott, Jay Leno, Meg Ryan and Lin-Manuel Miranda.The evening blazed through a Broadway-style medley toasting to Mr. Crystal by Mr. Miranda; a showstopping rendition of “Alfie” by Cynthia Erivo, the Tony and Grammy-award winning singer and actress; tributes to Queen Latifah by Kerry Washington and Rev. Stef and Jubilation, the choir Queen Latifah’s mother had belonged to. It was capped by a stirring rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” by Tituss Burgess, Christine Baranski and Susan Graham, and a medley of Bee Gees songs by Ariana DeBose.The honorees Dionne Warwick and Renée Fleming.Paul Morigi/Getty ImagesFor Mr. Crystal, the Kennedy Center conjured the Lower East Side onstage, projecting a likeness of Katz’s Delicatessen as a backdrop for Ms. Ryan, Mr. Crystal’s most famous co-star, in their famous scene together.“This scene really came naturally to me,” Ms. Ryan said, to laughter. “I’ve actually never been around anyone who made faking an orgasm easier.”For Mr. Gibb, musicians including Barbra Streisand, Dolly Parton and Paul McCartney on Sunday reflected on his extensive list of songs — more than 1,000, with tracks in different genres, like “Islands in the Stream” and “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” and the Bee Gees hits that made him and his brothers famous.“He taught us how to walk,” Lionel Richie said in a prerecorded video interview, as the famous guitar hook in “Stayin’ Alive” pulsed through the theater.“Kindness and understanding — we seem to be losing that,” Mr. Gibb said. “And we need to grab it back as quickly as possible.”Ms. Fleming, the soprano known as “the people’s diva,” said that she was grateful for the opportunity to highlight the arts.Barry Gibb and Queen Latifah, who were also honored.Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press“Artists really can change hearts and minds and we’re allowed to wrestle with difficult problems and life and death,” Ms. Fleming said. “Because I’m in the opera world, we all die in opera.”But she allowed ahead of the show that she was experiencing a strange reverse form of stage fright. Performing on the world’s biggest stages may be second nature to her, but, she said, “The thing that scares me is sitting in the box!”Queen Latifah, for her part, appeared prepared to soak up the experience. At the State Department dinner on Saturday night, she told attendees how she would “never forget” the moment. And she appeared visibly moved when Ms. Elliott regaled members of the audience on Sunday with the memory of Queen Latifah on television declaring “Ladies first” in her feminist anthem of the same name, at a time when “we kept hearing, ‘It’s a man’s world.’”“She was saying, ‘You will respect me,’” Ms. Elliott said. “‘I will be a leader. I will be a provider. I will be an inspiration to many.’”The show will be broadcast on CBS on Dec. 27. More

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      Taylor Swift’s Ode to Moving On, and 9 More New Songs

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe PlaylistTaylor Swift’s Ode to Moving On, and 9 More New SongsHear tracks by Barry Gibb and Dolly Parton, Rhye, Tim Berne and others.Taylor Swift’s “It’s Time to Go” is a bonus track from the sessions that yielded her quarantine albums.Credit…Beth GarrabrantJon Pareles, Giovanni Russonello and Jan. 8, 2021Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Taylor Swift, ‘It’s Time to Go’[embedded content]Of course Taylor Swift had even more songs recorded during the 2020 quarantine that has already yielded her albums “Folklore” and “Evermore,” which now gets a bonus track. “It’s Time to Go” — terse lines set against an insistent one-note guitar and four chords — maps romantic and workplace setbacks against her own struggle to hold onto her multiplatinum catalog: “He’s got my past frozen behind glass/But I’ve got me.” It’s advice, rationalization, a way to move on: “Sometimes giving up is the strong thing,” she sings. JON PARELESCeleste, ‘Love Is Back’Celeste — who, at least in Britain, has been on the verge of a breakout moment for the past few years — rang in 2021 with a performance of her new single “Love Is Back” on Jools Holland’s annual New Year’s Eve show. Amid rhythmic blasts of brass, the 26-year-old soul singer croons coolly for much of the song before a dazzling grand finale showcases the strength of her smoky voice, which recalls both Amy Winehouse and Billie Holiday. With a debut album, “Not Your Muse,” slated for release on Feb. 26, this could finally be Celeste’s year. LINDSAY ZOLADZSaweetie featuring Doja Cat, ‘Best Friend’The gender warfare in pop hip-hop continues with “Best Friend,” particularly in its video version, which opens by mocking “toxic masculinity” and “another fake woke misogynist” — a bare-chested guest guy — while Saweetie and Doja Cat lounge in bikinis. A twangy two-bar loop accompanies the two women as they flatly declare financial independence and, eventually, find each other. PARELESRhye, ‘Come in Closer’Ideas waft up and ripple away throughout “Come in Closer” the smoothly elusive new single from the breathy, androgynous-voiced Canadian singer and songwriter Michael Milosh, who records as Rhye. Hardly anything is stable; not the beat, not the chord changes, not the vocal melodies or instrumental countermelodies, not an arrangement that moves from churchy organ to a string-laden R&B march to eerie a cappella vocal harmonies. The only constant is yearning: “How I’d love for you to come home with me” is the song’s closest thing to a refrain. PARELESVirgil Abloh featuring serpentwithfeet, ‘Delicate Limbs’Virgil Abloh is best known as a designer; no wonder “Delicate Limbs” begins with fashion-conscious lyrics: “Those gray pants you love might bring you luck, but if they ever fray you can call on me.” But “Delicate Limbs” even more clearly ties in with the catalog of Abloh’s collaborator, serpentwithfeet, a.k.a. the singer and songwriter Josiah Wise. It’s an incantatory enigma, wandering among electronic drones, jazzy drum crescendos and cinematic orchestration, building extraordinary drama. PARELESBarry Gibb featuring Dolly Parton, ‘Words’Viewers of the recent HBO documentary “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” will recall that it was not Dolly Parton nor Kenny Rogers who wrote their mammoth 1983 hit “Islands in the Stream,” but, actually, the Brothers Gibb. So Parton is a natural choice for a duet partner on Barry Gibb’s moving and delicately crafted new album “Greenfields — The Gibb Brothers’ Songbook Vol. 1,” on which the last surviving Bee Gee adds a little twang to some of the group’s standards and collaborates with country artists like Miranda Lambert and fellow Aussie cowboy Keith Urban. Parton joins him for a piano-driven, gently elegiac rendition of the 1968 hit “Words.” On the original single and often in concert, this was the rare Bee Gees song that Barry Gibb sang solo. Reimagining it as a duet, and especially with a voice as warm as Parton’s, makes “Words” feel less like a confession of regret and more like a prelude to reconciliation. ZOLADZSun June, ‘Everything I Had’“Everything I had, I want it back,” Sun June’s Laura Colwell sings on the Austin band’s latest single — certainly a relatable refrain for these times. It’s also a fittingly wistful sentiment for a band that playfully describes its sound as “regret pop,” blending the melodic flutter of Colwell’s voice with dreamy tempos that invite contemplation. (Its second album, “Somewhere,” will be out on Feb. 5.) The lyrics, though, conjure a certain restlessness, as Colwell considers moving all the way to Los Angeles before settling on a new apartment three doors down from where she used to live — presumably just far enough to stare longingly at the old one. ZOLADZJohn Fogerty, ‘Weeping in the Promised Land’“Weeping in the Promised Land” is John Fogerty’s memento of 2020: pandemic, disinformation, economic crisis, Black Lives Matter. In a quasi-hymn, with bedrock piano chords and a swelling choir, he surveys the devastation overseen by a “pharaoh” who keeps “a-preaching, but he never had a plan.” It doesn’t foresee redemption. PARELESScience Friction, ‘Heavy Mental’[embedded content]The alto saxophonist Tim Berne and the trumpeter Herb Robertson circle each other like fighters getting acquainted in the first round at the start of this itchy, low-fi recording, which Berne captured at 55 Bar in Greenwich Village 17 years ago. He’s been releasing recordings from the vault on Bandcamp, and this one — which he found on a CD-R lying on his studio floor, and posted Christmas Day — is especially raw and lively. The guitarist Marc Ducret joins after a minute, adding his own wiry lines and helping outline the track’s central melodic phrase before Tom Rainey’s drums and Craig Taborn’s keyboards enter and the quintet wriggles into a long, tumbling jam. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOMiguel Zenón and Luis Perdomo, ‘Alma Adentro (Live)’At the Jazz Gallery this fall, the alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón and the pianist Luis Perdomo recorded a concert of boleros (or romantic songs, from a range of Latin American traditions), and the set was so understatedly good that after streaming it on Zenón’s Facebook page, the pair decided to release it as an album. This track is a ruminative lament, written by the Puerto Rican singer and polymath Sylvia Rexach for her brother, who had died in an accident; it was the title track — and the most tender moment — on Zenón’s big band album a decade ago. On the new version, as Perdomo alone carries its downward-spiraling chord progression, the pair spends nearly 10 minutes wandering into and away from the song’s wistful melody, as if reliving a distant memory. RUSSONELLOAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How the Bee Gees Stayed Alive

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookHow the Bee Gees Stayed AliveThe HBO documentary “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” traces the decades-long arc of a band that mastered a rare pop skill: adaptation.Maurice, Barry and Robin Gibb in “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” a documentary that explores the group’s long and winding career.Credit…HBO MaxDec. 14, 2020, 1:16 p.m. ETDiscovered, embraced, disbanded, reunited, ignored, reinvented, hailed, scorned, disguised, recognized — the Bee Gees’ long career was filled with improbable ups and downs. Most bands are lucky to get one Top 10 hitmaking streak. The Bee Gees — the brothers Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb — had at least two, singing heartache ballads in the late 1960s and re-emerging in the mid-1970s as the multiplatinum pop face of disco.“The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” an HBO documentary directed by Frank Marshall, moves sympathetically and efficiently through the group’s decades of making music. It traces the ways artistic instincts, family dynamics, business considerations, cultural shifts and sheer coincidence can shape memorable songs.In the documentary, abundant archival footage — a cavalcade of flashy fashions from 1960s frills to 1980s cool — coalesces around 2019 interviews with the last surviving member of the Bee Gees, Barry Gibb, who is grizzled and thoughtful but by no means retired. The documentary shows him performing as a headliner at the 2017 Glastonbury Festival, and he has an album due in 2021, “Greenfields,” that revisits the Bee Gees catalog with country musicians. The documentary also features the Bee Gees’ studio collaborators and, cannily, members of other bands of siblings: Oasis and the Jonas Brothers.The Bee Gees were prolific and often masterly songwriters, and they sang three-part harmony as only siblings can. Many of their songs are credited to all three brothers. “The only way I can describe how we work at it is to become one mind,” Maurice Gibb says in a clip from a 1999 interview.They started performing together before they were teenagers, in the late 1950s, looking to R&B vocal groups like the Mills Brothers and then, like countless others, to the Beatles. And like the Beatles, they soaked up all sorts of music: rock, country, gospel, vintage pop.But nearly from the beginning of their recording career, the Bee Gees clearly had something of their own. Barry and Robin Gibb, who traded off lead vocals, each brought a tremulous drama to their melodies, a striking mixture of eagerness and hesitancy. In an era of brash frontmen, they could sound like they were painfully shy yet simply unable to hold back.From 1967 to 1970, the Bee Gees released a string of hit ballads including “Massachusetts,” “To Love Somebody,” “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You,” “I Started a Joke” and “Words.” With melancholy lyrics, delicately blended voices and careful, often Baroque-tinged productions, their songs offered yearning and solace in psychedelically turbulent times. Around the hits, their albums — notably “Odessa” — floated larger musical and poetic concepts and more eccentric productions.In 1969, egos boiled over. Robin quit the Bee Gees to try a solo career, and he and Barry sniped at each other via interviews for over a year as Maurice played go-between. They regrouped — in part to support their manager, Robert Stigwood, as he started his own company — and came up with more hits: “Lonely Days” and “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.”But by 1974, the Bee Gees’ fortunes had waned. They had drinking and drug problems; their scattershot albums weren’t selling. Their label was “about to drop us,” Barry Gibb recalls in the documentary. “We had to adopt a new sound. We had to adopt a new attitude.”The Bee Gees were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — but not until 1997.Credit…Ed Caraeff/HBO, via Getty ImagesLuckily Stigwood also managed Eric Clapton, who suggested that they record where he had, at Criteria Studios in Miami. There, in 1975, some alchemical combination of sunny skies, close collaboration with their backing band, the stirrings of disco culture and a producer close to American R&B — Arif Mardin — led to the Bee Gees picking up their tempo and finding a brisk, guitar-scrubbing groove they would use in a new song, “Jive Talkin’.” In the documentary, Gibb connects it to the clicking rhythm he heard driving across a bridge to the studio each day.Because the Bee Gees had fallen so far out of fashion, their label sent “Jive Talkin’” to radio stations without identifying the group. With a blank label, the song became a radio hit; the Bee Gees were back.There was another breakthrough at the Criteria sessions. Barry Gibb was ad-libbing some backup vocals at the end of “Nights on Broadway” when he happened upon a sound he hadn’t fully realized he could make: a bright, piercing falsetto, androgynous and insistent, linking the Bee Gees to a longtime falsetto tradition in Black American music. It was a voice — a whole new sonic persona for Gibb, not shy at all — that would leap out of club and radio speakers in “You Should Be Dancing” and in songs the Bee Gees wrote for “Saturday Night Fever.”When they wrote those songs, the Bee Gees were at the Château d’Hérouville, a dumpy old French estate where Elton John had recorded the album “Honky Chateau.” During the sessions there, the band’s drummer, Dennis Bryon, was called away for a family emergency; to keep working, Albhy Galuten, a co-producer, made a tape loop from two bars of “Night Fever,” slowed it down and ran it as the Gibbs brothers wrote “Stayin’ Alive.” The mechanical feel of the loop gave the song something mysterious and tenacious; it stayed in the finished song, and has spawned innumerable looped drumbeats ever since.The 1977 “Saturday Night Fever” album, a two-LP anthology of disco hits and Bee Gees songs, became a record-setting blockbuster. Although disco had emerged from Black music and Black and gay clubs — as the documentary takes pains to point out — the Bee Gees, smiling in their silvery suits, became disco’s pop figureheads. In the late 1970s, the Gibb brothers’ music was everywhere: their own hits; songs for their younger brother, Andy; songs written for others. In 1979 they toured stadiums. They didn’t realize an anti-disco backlash was building.For a directorial flourish, Miller intercuts a euphoric July 1979 Bee Gees concert in Oakland with an event that happened two days later: “Disco Demolition Night,” promoted by Steve Dahl, a rock disc jockey who had popularized the obnoxious slogan “Disco Sucks.” Between games of a Chicago White Sox doubleheader at Comiskey Park, Dahl exploded a pile of disco records, which set off a hugely destructive crowd rampage. In the documentary, Vince Lawrence, who worked as an usher at Comiskey Park that night and later became a house-music producer, describes the event in hindsight as “a racist, homophobic book-burning.”The Bee Gees finished their tour amid bomb threats; radio stations pivoted away from dance music and shunned the Bee Gees. “We’re just a pop group, we’re not a political force,” a defensive Barry Gibb says in television footage from the time. “We’re just making music, and I don’t think there’s any reason to chalk us off because we existed in the ’70s and we would like to exist in the ’80s.”Avoiding the spotlight, the Gibb brothers persisted as songwriters and producers. The longtime Bee Gees sound — tuneful midtempo ballads, vocal high harmonies, distinctive chord progressions — comes through unmistakably in songs they wrote for others, including Barbra Streisand’s “Woman in Love,” Dionne Warwick’s “Heartbreaker” and the Kenny Rogers-Dolly Parton duet “Islands in the Stream.” Even in post-disco purgatory, the Bee Gees were still hitmakers. And as disco and the backlash receded (and dance music never went away), the Bee Gees returned more modestly, making albums every few years and garnering the respect they deserved. Yes, they got into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — but not until 1997.Maurice Gibb died in 2003, Robin Gibb in 2012; that vocal blend is extinct. In the documentary, Barry Gibb understands exactly what his brothers and his band accomplished. “We never really had a category. We just had periods and we managed to fit into different eras,” he reflects. “We didn’t always connect. But we stayed around.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More